Alan Jacobs's Blog

My friend Edward Mendelson knows more about Auden than anyone ever has, and probably more than anyone ever will. Certainly he knows far more about Auden than I do. Keep that in mind through what follows.

Some years ago Mendelson wrote an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness and charity, an essay that contains this passage:

Auden’s sense of his divided motives was inseparable from his idiosyncratic Christianity. He had no literal belief in miracles or deities and thought that all religious statements about God must be false in a literal sense but might be true in metaphoric ones. He felt himself commanded to an absolute obligation — which he knew he could never fulfill — to love his neighbor as himself, and he alluded to that commandment in a late haiku: “He has never seen God / but, once or twice, he believes / he has heard Him.” He took communion every Sunday and valued ancient liturgy, not for its magic or beauty, but because its timeless language and ritual was a “link between the dead and the unborn,” a stay against the complacent egoism that favors whatever is contemporary with ourselves.

I think that Mendelson is wholly wrong about all this and I shall now explain why I think so. In making my case I will refer only briefly to the poems, in which Auden might be telling a story — a poet could write For the Time Being without believing that Jesus is the Incarnate Word, though I cannot imagine why one would — or playing a part. Instead, I will focus on public writings (some of them given as addresses or even sermons) in which he speaks in propria persona.

Let’s start with the haiku that Mendelson quotes, which certainly seems to contradict the view that “all religious statements about God must be false in a literal sense”: I see no reason to think that the haiku is an “allusion” to the commandment to love your neighbor. Rather, it means what it straightforwardly says: it is a report that Auden believes that he has “once or twice” heard the voice of God — a God he refers to with a personal pronoun.

And we have reason from other statements by Auden to conclude that he did not believe that “God” is a mere nom de convenance for the “absolute obligation” to love your neighbor. In 1966 he wrote,

Some modern theologians who have realised most clearly the death of Zeus seem to me in danger of depriving the True God of the one quality which he shares with the Zeus concept (and all polytheism), Personality, and presenting us with a crypto-platonic or Buddhist to theion which may be the subject of man’s concern but can show no concern for men. I can see clearly enough what leads Tillich, for example, to speak of God as the “Ground of Being,” but if I try to pray ”O Thou Ground, have mercy upon me”, I start to giggle.

Note the key assumptions of this passage: That there is a “True God” and that ie would be a “mistake” to depersonalize that God — to turn Him into, for instance, an “absolute obligation.” It would seem, then, that for Auden it was a personal God who has “concern for men” or nothing.

Somewhat later he wrote,

The Gospels put the command to love God before the command to love our neighbor, not because it is more important, but because until we know who God is and how He loves us, we cannot grasp who our neighbor is or how we are to love him. The Word was made Flesh so that we might know, and the first thing which Christ forces us to realise is that the True God and the love he bears us are not at all what we expected or want: indeed, we thoroughly dislike both.

Emphasis mine. The love of God necessarily precedes the love of neighbor. I do not see how statements such as these can be reconciled with Mendelson’s view that Auden “had no literal belief in … deities” and that when he spoke of the love of God he meant it merely as a metaphor for the love of one’s neighbor. Moreover, given Auden’s starkly realistic portrayal of what it is actually like to perceive the love of God — as the author of Hebrews says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” — it is difficult to see why he would go to the trouble of invoking, describing, and commending such a God if he did not believe that God exists.

So how could Mendelson come to the conclusion he does? I think perhaps this passage, also from 1966, might shed some light on the subject:

At all times, the Gospel is a stumbling-block to the Jew and a foolishness to the Greek in each of us, but the particular element which scandalises varies from one age to another. To the Gnostics of the Third Century and to the liberal humanists of the Eighteenth, the scandal was the Cross. The former said: “Jesus was the Christ; therefore he cannot really have been crucified”. The latter said: “Jesus was crucified; therefore he cannot have been the Christ”. Today, we find Good Friday easy to accept: what scandalises us is Easter. Modern man finds a “happy ending”, a final victory of Love over the Prince of this world, very hard to swallow.

Again, in earlier centuries, believers were inclined to imagine that God was, in a human sense, nearer to them, more like them, than he really is and, consequently, were in danger of falling into idolatry and magical practices. Today, our characteristic religious experience is of God’s “otherness”, his distance from and unlikeness to ourselves, so that the temptation for us is atheism. For many of us, I think, Simone Weil’s remark holds good: “We have to believe in a God who is like the True God in everything except that he does not exist, for we have not reached the point where God exists”.

That line by Weil is one he returned to:

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians will do well to be extremely reticent on this subject [the love of one’s neighbor]. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn’t one, either in faith or morals. Where faith is concerned, very few of us have the right to say more than — to vary a saying of Simone Weil’s — I believe in a God who is like the True God in everything except that he does not exist, for I have not yet reached the point where God exists. As for loving and forgiving our enemies, the less we say about that the better. Our lack of faith and love are facts we have to acknowledge, but we shall not improve either by a morbid and essentially narcissistic moaning over our deficiencies. Let us rather ask, with caution and humor — given our time and place and talents, what, if our faith and love were perfect, would we be glad to find it obvious to do?

Now, what are we to make of these statements? Do they support Mendelson’s view?

In the first passage Auden writes in general terms of “our” experience, by which he clearly means that of the modern person “today,” as opposed to figures from the third or eighteenth centuries. He does not explicitly say that this is his own experience, but I think the whole tone of the passage strongly suggests that he knows whereof he speaks.He expressly identifies this experience as a “temptation,” and of course temptations are to be resisted and if possible overcome.In the second passage the “lack of faith and love” is likewise described as a deficiency, a shortcoming — to be sure, not one to moan about: As he writes elsewhere, “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.” But being blunt means acknowledging one’s deficiencies, admitting that one has succumbed to temptation. Everything about these passage indicates that it would be good to have strong faith in God and love of God and one’s neighbor.The slight amendment, in the second passage, of Weil’s provocative statement is noteworthy: Weil writes “we have not reached the point where God exists,” to which Auden adds one word: He imagines someone saying “I have not yet reached the point where God exists.” But to say “not yet” is to name faith as one’s goal, as the desired destination: it is hope for faith — and I would say that hope for faith holds already a modicum of faith itself. And I think Auden is acknowledging this in his late haiku, in which he says that he believes that he has heard God, as though to say: “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.”

I said earlier that I wouldn’t say much about the poems, but here I do want to bring one of them in: “Friday’s Child.” Now, we know that Auden believed that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person who “was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” There’s a funny story Mendelson has told about a lecture that Joseph Campbell gave at Smith College, when Auden was teaching there, in which he spoke of the oneness of Jesus and the Buddha, each of whom had spears thrust at him (though in the case of the Buddha they were transformed into flowers). Auden shouted from the back of the room, “ON GOOD FRIDAY THE SPEARS WERE REAL.”

So let us posit that Jesus was crucified. What then? The poet puts the question straightforwardly in “Friday’s Child”: “Now, did He really break the seal / And rise again?” And his answer: “We dare not say.” The word “we” is the key here: We moderns? “We the inconstant ones”? We poets? I am inclined to the last explanation, for Auden often wrote that poetry “lacks the Indicative Mood. All its statements are in the subjunctive.” (See also.) It is not to be used for factual declaration. And after all, we may assume that Auden, a regular churchgoer, did say, in that environment, “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures.”

But the point of the poem, even in the subjunctive mood, is not simply to answer the question. What matters is what Auden then goes on to say, in the poem’s conclusion:

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

(Re: “saving the appearances,” see this.) The poet may not “dare” declare a historical fact, but he declares this: That on that cross everything was gained, or everything was lost. If Jesus of Nazareth perished as a mere animal there, then we are left alone with the wreckage of our lives. I do not know whether Auden would have agreed with the Dostoevskian idea that if there is no God then everything is permitted: I am inclined to think that even without God a decent case can be made that, on prudential and practical grounds, one should not become Pol Pot, or Jeffrey Epstein, or Mark Zuckerberg — or for that matter Aunt Norris from Mansfield Park — and perhaps Auden would have felt the same way. But in any case there can be in such conditions no “absolute obligation,” because there is no one and nothing to oblige us absolutely.

But if He did “break the seal / And rise again,” then there is One who can oblige us absolutely, love us unconditionally, and offer us forgiveness when we fall short. Did Auden believe in such a One? As I have indicated, I think he did. More precisely: He repeatedly affirmed such belief in public when he did not need to do so, and wrote powerful poems that vividly imagine a world in which through Jesus Christ we ordinary sinners can be reconciled to God and to one another. (See especially the last two poems of the “Horae Canonicae.”) If he believed in no deity, what appearances was he saving by writing in this way? 

Did he believe all this with unwavering faith? Certainly not. Often, it seems, his affirmations were more aspirational than full of conviction. (I know the feeling.) But the aspiration was real: he perceived his small faith and small love as deficiencies, felt himself tempted to acquiesce in faithlessness and lovelessness, and earnestly desired a deeper faith and a greater love. He regularly received Communion not, I think, for the reasons given by Mendelson but because he understood that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” And so also he prayed

That we, too, may come to the picnic
With nothing to hide, join the dance
As it moves in perichoresis,
Turns about the abiding tree.

P.S. For a relatively complete treatment of Auden’s theology, see my essay on the subject in Auden in Context — which will be paywalled for many of you. But there’s a preprint version here. 

I don’t mean to compare myself in any serious way with a major thinker like Rowan Williams, but in his new book, Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, he is working on exactly the same problem that I have been working on in recent years: how to restore (or create!) a sense of a common humanity. But he is trying to do so in a very different way than I do, procedurally and conceptually.

Rowan — as almost everyone seems to call him, and which, as will be seen, it is helpful to me to call him here; besides, he’s a friend — Rowan is a philosophical theologian, and this is largely a work of philosophical theology. I am a literary scholar and an essayist, and my approach arises from the preferences that accompany that role. Rowan has a long history of reading Wittgenstein and thinking in a Wittgensteinian way, and I don’t do that at all. For him, unpacking the philosophical implications of a particular vocabulary is important, and while I do that, I do it in a wholly different manner, often with ironic humor. I am much more wayfaring in my thinking, in the manner that is characteristic of the essay as a form. And while Rowan occasionally employs literary illustrations of his points, I habitually, you might even say compulsively, do so.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two of us, on this subject anyway, involves the term “solidarity” itself. It is a term which I have made a point of avoiding. I simply have not felt that it could be rescued from a series of contexts that have turned it into a cliché. But Rowan thinks it’s essential. To be sure, he goes into some detail to demonstrate how the term can be abused — but all by way of making it useful again.

How does he do this? As he says, looking back in the books’s conclusion to its opening pages,

This book began with a question about what it is that prompts people to reach for the language of ‘solidarity’ rather than just ‘support’ or even ‘sympathy’ to express serious moral concern for some other group. The various texts, writers and arguments we have discussed here converge at least on this: serious moral concern for the other is regularly bound up with a sense of belonging in a shared situation, in which what confronts the other is intelligibly similar to what confronts the self. I recognize the fragility of the other as like my own; I understand that the jeopardy of another might be mine. It therefore becomes important to examine and understand the ways in which human beings have educated themselves not to recognize this shared jeopardy, the strategies adopted by various groups designed to minimize recognizability, even where this entails educating people not to trust their own immediate perceptions.

Rowan is highly indebted to the work of Joanna Bourke, and especially Bourke’s contention that we have a natural instinct to emphasize with other people, and indeed with non-human creatures, especially when they suffer (but also, I would add, when we see anything in them that looks like pleasure or delight). Bourke argues that the systems and structures of modernity train us to mistrust and then suppress those instincts. The work of social and economic domination cannot be done as long as our faculties of empathy and our inclination towards solidarity are functioning as they were meant to function — or at least, that’s how I, as a Christian, would put it.

And so, in what is really in many ways the heart of Rowan’s argument, the history of the term “solidarity” that links it with labor movements becomes essential. The solidarity of labor is based on the idea that if we have a common work, then we have a common cause. In a way, Rowan is reversing that: He’s saying that if we have a common problem — the failure to acknowledge the full humanity of others — and if we have all, in one way or another, undergone the discipline of suppressing our instincts for solidarity, then we need to engage in the common labor of restoring those instincts to their proper place. That is, solidarity in this broad, moral, philosophical, and theological sense calls for work. So Rowan seeks to conceptualize and formulate the kind of work that we need to do.

Thus much what Rowan does here is the terminological and conceptual excavation that lays the groundwork for this common labor of restoring solidarity. The book takes a curious and fascinating turn when he comes around to playing his thematic melody in a theological key — much of the book is only indirectly theological — and leans heavily on the work of Charles Williams, especially his concept of “co-inherence.”

Williams points to a narrative from second-century North Africa in which Felicitas, the enslaved companion of an aristocratic young woman named Perpetua, condemned to death as a Christian along with her mistress, is mocked by some of her fellow-prisoners as she endures a painful childbirth in prison before execution. How will she face the even worse tortures of the arena? Her reply is that in her martyrdom, ‘another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I shall suffer for him’. Williams broadens out the focus of this poignant narrative to unite it with texts from Clement of Alexandria and the fourth-century Desert Fathers5 about giving our lives for one another and ‘putting one’s soul in the place of the neighbour’s’ so as to suffer for the neighbour as the neighbour would — ‘to become, if it were possible, a double man’. More simply, there is the well-known saying of St Antony the Great that ‘your life and your death are with your neighbour’.

(Note to self: I should write at some point on Auden’s use of the idea of the “double man,” which he pretends to take from Montaigne when his debt is actually to C. Williams.) I found this use of C. Williams somewhat startling, at first. Now, Rowan does not uncritically support his namesake. He sees some significant problems in the original articulation of co-inherence, but he thinks the concept is well worth reclaiming and developing. I find Rowan’s argument here very persuasive, and I’m probably going to go back to re-read The Descent of the Dove and He Came Down From Heaven.

Solidarity is a fascinating book that I will return to often. In addition to the reclamation of C. Williams, I also was quite taken with his exposition of Józef Tischner’s idea of a “solidarity without enemies”:

A solidarity without enemies does not mean, then, a universalism beyond conflict. Each community, like each person, brings a history to the encounter with the stranger and does not simply abandon that specific narrative. Each community, like each person, acknowledges that they are still in the process of learning and that part of such learning is learning how to survive the wounds inflicted on the self by the hunger for control and possession. But the horizon within which we all work is not the hope of a straightforward consensus any more than it is the hope for the unqualified victory of one party, licensing it to forget its own history of learning, risk, misrecognition, self-challenge. It is rather, as we have repeatedly seen, the horizon of shared labour, the creation of meaning by the discovery of how we work together to sustain the world. Tischner’s very remarkable aphorism, ‘Work is a particular form of interpersonal conversation that serves to sustain and develop human life’ (or, more briefly, ‘Work is a conversation in the service of life’) opens up the idea of labour as a constant adjustment of meaning under the pressure of making practical sense of communal life, each material element in the technical/constructive process making and demanding an adjustment of the imagined whole and being itself qualified and changed by that imagined whole.

The whole section on Tischner is excerpted here.

And one more quotation, this one on the ways that solidarity among humans should not pre-empt solidarity with the non-human Creation:

It is perhaps a stretch of the imagination to speak about a ‘conversation of labour’ with the non-human environment. But this is not nonsense: learning the intelligible patterns of the embodied life around us, learning what threatens it or enhances it, is at the very least analogous to conversation, analogous to the process by which we create an identity that is new, in which we and other material substances or agencies may find a co-operative mode of living together. A solidarity that does not extend to the whole organic world is still bound to a ‘tribalism of the human’, an assumption that human good is in the last analysis separable from the well-being of the whole finite order. That illusion has been fostered by some religious language, undoubtedly; but it is also profoundly at odds with any coherent understanding of the relation of creation to creator, and we have noted some of the ways in which this perspective has surfaced in accounts of the solidaristic vision.

Rowan is just invaluable. Everything he writes places me more deeply in his debt. This book adds many tools to my intellectual toolbox, and I want to learn to use them well. 

P.S. My own work on humanism is chiefly found in my book Breaking Bread with the Dead and in several essays, especially:

“A Humanism of the Abyss”“Yesterday’s Men”“Up From Darkness”

Sean Keilen’s Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts may be the best book about liberal education that I’ve ever read.

Keilen maintains throughout the book a double focus. Focus one is Shakespeare’s portrayal of scholars in three plays, and the lessons those characters must learn about the relationship between scholarship and life.

The first play considered is Love’s Labor’s Lost, in which we see four young men declare themselves emancipated from non-scholarly concerns – from politics, from marriage, from society altogether – and withdraw into a purely scholarly world. During the course of the play, they learn some difficult lessons about their own humanity. Keilen: “Love’s Labours Lost is a sustained reflection on obscure motives and intractable states of mind that lead scholars to believe they are, or must become, different from and better than everybody else – even though, as Shakespeare’s suggests repeatedly, this alienating belief is vain and foolish and exposes them to mockery.” 

To be sure, our young men remain works in progress. Though they all find that renouncing the company of women is harder than they expected, they do not end by marrying – the play itself calls attention to this: “Our wooing does not end like an old play: / Jack has not Jill.” But they have gained the humility that puts them on a properly human footing — so that they might someday grow into persons worthy of marriage.

The second play features that formidable scholar of the University of Wittenberg, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Keilen’s argument here is a distinctive and fascinating one, and it centers on this passage — Hamlet’s response to the ghost who has appeared to him and cried “Remember me!” 

Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory 
I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!

Keilen argues that here Hamlet refers specifically to his commonplace book, in which he has “copied” the teachings of old books that now seem to him but “saws” — like the clichés that Polonius later spouts to Laertes. Hamlet here proves himself to be a poor student, even if he received high marks from his professors, because he has not understood his studies as source of wisdom. By renouncing what he has learned as irrelevant to the challenge he faces, Hamlet leaves himself dependent on his own internal resources — and those prove to be insufficient. He needed a better guide than his own whirling mind.  

The third scholar that Keilen treats is Prospero in The Tempest, who is, Auden and I would say, both scholar and artist – a person of manifest intellectual power who does not know, when we meet him, how to exercise that power wisely and effectively. He doesn’t know how to exercise his power wisely because he doesn’t know himself. He’s not aware of how subject he is to his own passions, his own resentments, his own desires. And eventually he has to cast aside his powers: they are poor teachers. By a harder road he must travel to learn who he really is. 

Auden understood this well, thus the words he gives to Prospero, speaking to Ariel, in The Sea and the Mirror: 

Those three plays are one focus of Keilen’s book. But what is Focus Two?

Throughout the course of the book, Keilen puts an interesting question to his fellow professors of literature: What do these plays teach us about the benefits and the costs of the professionalization of our scholarship? There was a time when scholars of literature didn’t work in universities, didn’t have professional standards of criticism, didn’t have disciplinary guidelines and structures, didn’t have the system of (perverse) incentives that we now have. There’s no question that through professionalization literary studies gained a certain rigor, imitative of (if not actually equivalent to) the rigor of the Naturwissenschaften. But what price did we pay for that rigor?

Keilen believes that Shakespeare is the ideal guide to help us answer this question, first because of the abiding and generous humanity that radiates through all his work and draws so many people to his plays: 

In a nutshell, the book is for people who find the touchstone of their own humanity in Shakespeare’s works, along with new modes of experience, new ways of understanding themselves and others, and the possibility of transcending their cultural biases. It gave Johnson pause that Shakespeare “makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked.” But in my opinion, that is the heart of his wisdom and its appeal: the nonjudgmental portrayal of human life, in all its ugliness and beauty, which close reading and listening, like close acting and directing, elucidates. Shakespeare invites his audience, no matter who they are, to empathize with both the just and the unjust in his works. We do not have to leave behind the characteristics that contribute to our individual identities (age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, religion) when we come to Shakespeare, but to read Shakespeare’s plays or watch them in performance is to be seen and recognized by those works of art for who we all are: proud, passionate beings who not only suffer but also cause suffering, and who therefore deserve censure as well as pity. 

But it also matters that Shakeapeare was a playwright — a writer whose work is intrinsically and necessarily collaborative. 

Keilen himself had, by his own testimony, a conventional typical professional career until he began working with a theatrical company in Santa Cruz, California. That experience led him to deploy his learning not for the approval of his disciplinary peers, but rather in service to a communal endeavor pursued by people who were not scholars and have no interest in being scholars — by the university’s definition of “scholar” — but do have a great interest in reading, discussing, and staging Shakespeare’s plays.

I also wrote Shakespeare’s Scholars for the audience I have the privilege of knowing as a scholar, dramaturg, and community educator in Northern California. The Saturday Shakespeare Club is a group of people from different walks of life who care about the future of higher education, because their experiences as undergraduates in small colleges at UC Santa Cruz were formative for them; or because they settled here and worked at the university; or because, without being affiliated with the campus at all, they cherish it as a cultural institution that enriches their lives through public programming. The club’s members have been attending professional productions of Shakespeare’s plays at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a local theater festival, for a very long time, in some cases for decades. Their knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare’s art changes and grows with each new production, and as they pass through life’s stages together, their bond of friendship deepens. Shakespeare’s capacity to respond to their existential concerns and to create a world for them to explore together — what Woolf, in an early essay about the common reader, called “a living place” — is one of the main reasons why they believe that higher education and the theater are intrinsically good things. This book is for them and for people like them everywhere: for people who love books and believe that Shakespeare’s works and the liberal arts matter to the ways we might live.

Keilen testifies that this experience reoriented his priorities and ultimately helped him to realize that what Shakespeare’s scholars needed to learn – the vital necessity of humility, wisdom, and self-knowledge – was not being taught within our profession. And so his book is a kind of plea for members of this quite rapidly shrinking profession to turn their gaze outward and spend less time seeking the approval of their disciplinary peers, and more time putting their knowledge in the service of the communities in which they live.

This is a wonderfully encouraging thing for me to hear. Among other things, it helps me to see that my own instinct – which has always been toward public-facing scholarship – is sound. When I was early in my career at Wheaton College, a distinguished poet and critic who visited campus told me that if I stayed at Wheaton and taught only undergraduates, there would never be any meaningful connection between my teaching and my scholarship, that I needed to have graduate students in order to forge that connection. I decided almost immediately — my late colleague and friend Roger Lundin was instrumental in helping me to this decision — that I would not accept that severance. I would find a way to connect the unconnectable. What that meant, in the long run, was that a great deal of my writing had to be more public-facing. I could, I discovered, take what I learned from teaching my bright and eager undergraduates and apply it to my scholarly writing – not all of it, but a good bit of it. Looking back, I am amazed and grateful that I even had that instinct, still more than I determined to follow it — since at the time I made that decision, I had neither humility nor wisdom nor self-knowledge. (Not that I’ve made a lot of progress in any of those arenas in the intervening forty years, but, you know, it is what it is and I yam what I yam.) 

The subtitle of Keilen’s book is slyly misleading, because in an “Envoi” at the end he brings in a fourth scholar: Marina, daughter of Pericles and Thaisa, from Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Marina has been forced into prostitution, but — in a move worthy of Scheherazade but notably different — uses her time with clients to teach them virtue. (Says one visitor to the brothel, “But to have divinity preached there! Did you ever / dream of such a thing?”) She can’t escape the need to work for a living, but she can, as Keilen puts it, “transform the conditions where she works.” She says to a servant in the brothel,

If that thy master would gain by me,
Proclaim I can sing, weave, sew, and dance,
With other virtues which I’ll keep from boast;
And I will undertake all these to teach.
I doubt not but this populous city will
Yield many scholars.

It is noteworthy that Marina confines her boasting to familiar feminine skills: about the deeper things of the mind and spirit, the matters she is most devoted to, she is shrewdly reticent. But for Keilen the key point is this: “The success of Marina’s pedagogy locates the true home of the humanities in the populous city, not the academic grove. It also underscores why it is essential to define the purpose of literary education as human flourishing and the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues.”

Keilen implicitly treats Marina’s situation as a kind of allegory of the life that we academics have made for ourselves, or allowed to be made. We have, in a sense, prostituted ourselves to standards of scholarly productivity and achievement that have nothing to do with “human flourishing and the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues.” And so what we need to do is transform our understanding of our own work, to make it into something that matters to us and to the members of our community who are not scholars. It is because she does this so beautifully that Keilen says Marina is “the humblest and the wisest of all [Shakespeare’s] scholars.”

As I reported in January, Arsenal broke me. It was the loss at home to Man Utd. that did it. I didn’t feel that I cut my ties to the club so much as that my ties were cut, in some involuntary yet definitive way. I still don’t fully understand it, but it has a lot to do with being a senior citizen, I suspect: I was getting a real I’m-too-old-for-this-shit vibe. 

In the March update to that post I said that being clubless was great, but since then it has come to seem less great: footy is not nearly as compelling, I have discovered, when you have no rooting interest. I need to find someone to support! — but I don’t believe it will be Arsenal, even though I expect they’ll be even better next year. For one thing, it just seems wrong for me to celebrate now, given my hopping off the bandwagon in January; but for another and more important thing, I genuinely don’t feel it, at least not for myself. 

It certainly pleases me, though, that a certain Middle-Eastern oil-and-patriarchy regime didn’t win yet another title. I am happy for the longsuffering Gunners supporters — well, most of them anyway: my favorite Arsenal fan, my son, said right after the match, “Somewhere in Heaven Osama bin Laden is smiling,” and I replied, “And somewhere in Hell Piers Morgan is too.” I am happy for the players, who have been through the wringer themselves even as they put their fans through the wringer. 

I am delighted for Gunnersaurus. 

And there is one person I am as happy for as I am for my son: Wrighty. 

It says so much that when the good news came down Wrighty headed not for the broadcast booth or the podcast microphone but for the Emirates, where all the supporters were gathered. My friend Adam Roberts — a Southampton supporter, so this has been a bitter day for him — has said to me that Wrighty is a genuine national treasure, and he really is. Party hearty, Wrighty. You’ve earned it. 

And one more thing. Few things are more likely to bring tears to my eyes than to hear Wrighty talk about his love for his dear friend, the late David Rocastle. See that jersey he’s wearing? The name on the back is ROCASTLE and the number is Rocky’s number 7. 

This is a very strange essay. Alex Rosenberg writes that narrative history “fails to explain anything because it attributes causal responsibility for the historical record to factors that contemporary neuroscience reveals to be fictions — convenient ones, but fictions nonetheless.” 

The causal factors narrative history invokes, such as the beliefs and desires that are supposed to drive human actions, rely on a scientifically unwarranted theory of mind. It‘s one that breeds emotions such as anger, shame, jealousy, retribution, and vengeance, and has wreaked havoc throughout recorded history.

But Rosenberg illustrates this point by pointing to works of narrative history that, he says, have been enormously consequential in shaping people’s thoughts and actions: they have “changed the world in profound ways.” That is, he “attributes causal responsibility” to these works of narrative history: he says of one work that it “provoked political activity and significant change in the values, especially among people of the Left, who found themselves surrendering illusions and forsaking commitments that had been among their most cherished.” So, in Rosenberg’s view, historical narratives offer unjustifiable accounts of the world, except in the case of his historical narrative, which attributes causal power accurately. One wonders how he alone manages to escape the curse of meaning-imposition that lies upon all other stories. 

And there’s something else odd here. His two prime examples of world-changing historical narratives are Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I’m not sure I’d call either of those “historical narratives” in any straightforward sense, though both of them have historical elements. But I’ll waive the point with regard to Mein Kampf.

Not with regard to The Gulag Archipelago, though. I think everything Rosenberg says about it in this essay is wrong. 

Let’s start with this: 

… what we can’t deny is that “The Gulag Archipelago” had a profound effect on people everywhere and on late 20th-century events. 

Again: Everybody else’s attempts to say what did or did not have profound effects is the result of a bad theory of mind, but Rosenberg alone is exempt from this critique. But let’s resume, and look at what he says this “profound effect” was:  

The reason is obvious: It moved people. It had an enormous impact on people’s emotions and motivations. 

Rosenberg’s consistent emphasis is on The Gulag Archipelago as a generator of emotions. And certainly many people did respond emotionally to it. But what Solzhenitsyn’s book primarily did was to inform people.

People inside and outside the Soviet Union knew, of course, that the regime sent people to prison, and that some of those people did not come back. What they did not know — until Solzhenitsyn informed them — was just how vast the Soviet prison system was, and how systematic. They did not know the policies and procedures, the laws which the system claimed to enforce and to which it appealed; they did not know how the system moved a person from arrest to interrogation to trial to conviction; they did not know where those convicted were sent or why; they did not know why the prisoners who never never returned never returned, whether they were formally executed, or died of malnutrition or exposure, or were beaten to death, or died of untreated illness, or indeed simply lived on, beyond the knowledge of outsiders to the system, in one camp or a series of camps; they did not know why some prisoners were released. 

Solzhenitsyn called his book An Experiment in Literary Investigation: an experiment because he followed no pre-existing generic form; literary because he writes as artfully as he can, stylistically and organizationally; investigation because this is not a story but rather a forensic analysis, a gathering, sorting, and deploying of vast tracts of information, taken from Solzhenitsyn’s own experience, yes, but that of many others: “Material for this book was given me in reports, memoirs, and letters by 227 witnesses.” Photographs of some of them are scattered throughout the three volumes. 

Though there are narrative portions of the text — a series of chapters describes the progress of a typical zek through the belly of the beast — it is largely, as I say, forensic: Solzhenitsyn is saying to the Gulag, You say you are the Law, you say you merely follow and enforce the Law; very well; I shall use the language and the procedures of law to expose you. 

And the accumulation of this evidence leads not to a story but to a thesis: 

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. 

Evildoing on a human scale has what Solzhenitsyn calls a “threshold magnitude,” a maximum extension. But ideology allows the human to break through that threshold, to become, in this one abysmal sense, trans-human: when he “crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.” 

Solzhenitsyn does not say Listen to my tale. He says, I, a witness, have amassed the evidence: look upon it, if you dare. 

This is my Week of Complaining, I think. I complain laughingly — laughing to keep from crying, to be sure, laughing bitterly, but hey, I’m laughing. Give me some credit. 

All teachers, I think, are shaped by our experiences as students. We remember what we liked, what we hated, and what confused us, and we determine our policies and procedures accordingly. 

When I was a student, nothing frustrated me more than professors’ varying attitudes towards deadlines. Only a very few of those I knew were strict about deadlines; almost everyone gave some leeway — but it was often impossible to tell how much. Some would give a few extra hours; others a couple of days; and some clearly followed the get-it-to-me-when-you’re-done rule, though they never, as far as I could tell, openly admitted it. 

Similarly, there were widely differing attitudes towards formal extension of deadlines — you could never know in advance whether a request for extension would be granted, and in any case, the extension just created a new deadline which you didn’t know a given professor’s attitude towards. If you asked for 24 hours but took 48, would the prof be okay with that? Who knew? You had to roll the dice, which offended my sense of what a teacher’s responsibilities are. Either you have deadlines or you don’t, I would think, and you owe it to us to say what the real rules are. Stop playing games! 

Meanwhile, I would bust my hump to get an essay or exam in on time, letting it go with regret for its shortcomings — only to discover that classmates who blithely ignored deadlines got all the time they needed to polish their work to a fine gloss. (I mean, if they were into that sort of thing.) This didn’t seem fair — though I noticed that those who got into the habit of acquiring extensions were just kicking cans down the road, and would find themselves late in the term standing confusedly in the middle of a roadful of cans. I didn’t (and still don’t) think professors who readily granted extensions were doing their students any favors. 

When I became a teacher, I soon discovered that I was as inconsistent as my own teachers had been. It took me a while to establish clear procedures, and then longer still to learn the discipline of following them. My rules are these: 

One: My deadline is absolute to the minute. If I tell you to email me an essay by 11:59pm and you send one to me at 12:01am, you get a zero. 

Two: No extensions will be granted unless I get an official letter from a doctor or counselor or other appropriate figure of authority, and if the extension is granted, then that deadline becomes absolute. 

Three: If the deadline is rapidly approaching and you see that you won’t be able to finish your essay or exam, turn in what you have. Then, later, we can sit down and discuss the situation and agree on how to proceed. 

I am of course aware that this policy, while I believe to be admirably clear and straightforward, is rather different than what most professors do, and the consequences for messing it up are significant. So I

highlight these rules on my syllabus and my FAQ page; explain them (and my reasons for them) in class during the first week of the term; by email and in class, remind students of them one week before an essay or exam is due; by email, remind them again 24 hours before an exam is due. 

All of which brings me to this week: Here at the end of the semester, two students missed a deadline and then told me that they hadn’t realized what my policy is. 

On 6 January of this year I submitted the complete text of my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to the editors at Oxford University Press, including the editor of the Spiritual Lives series, my friend Timothy Larsen. Tim promptly returned to me a list of queries and corrections, which I responded to, also promptly. It was now late January. 

Then we had to wait for the response of the “clearance reader,” a role I admit I do not understand. But eventually I was told that the cleaned-up and corrected typescript had been sent to Newgen, a production company that OUP works with.

When I heard this my heart dropped into my shoes. When I published The Year of Our Lord 1943 with OUP-USA, I had a nightmarish experience with Newgen: I kept making corrections only to have the original errors restored; communications were maddeningly unclear, with pasted-in answers to questions I did not ask; someone at Newgen had written an MS Word macro that queried every sentence that had quotation marks but no footnote, which increased my workload roughly tenfold; and so on. I could continue for quite a while. I will just say this: If I had known that OUP-UK also uses Newgen, I honestly don’t think I’d have agreed to write the book. For some reason it didn’t occur to me to ask. 

On 16 April I finally got an email: “I am writing to introduce myself as the Project Manager from Newgen KnowledgeWorks, one of the partner production companies of Oxford University Press” etc. etc. The message included a PDF describing the Production Process, with an arrow reading YOU ARE HERE near the top of the page. I replied that day. 

On 12 May I got another email from the same person: “I am writing to introduce myself as the Project Manager from Newgen KnowledgeWorks, one of the partner production companies of Oxford University Press” etc. etc. I also received again the PDF describing the Production Process, but with no arrow. Apparently we are now Nowhere. (Also, I do not for a moment believe that these emails came from a human being.) 

It’s like Groundhog Day, but for book publishing. I’m expecting to get the same message again around 7 June. And whether anyone will ever see this book … well, don’t get your hopes up. 

One season into ST:DS9 and am trying to decide whether to continue. The season concluded with the straightforward message that (a) Science is Good, (b) Traditional Religion is Evil (not merely intolerant but murderous), and (c) Revisionist Religion is … Not Great But Acceptable, Whatever, We Can Sorta Work With It.  

And the show seems to promise more of the same. Also: it’s not exactly subtle to have your representative of Traditional Religion played by an actor (Louise Fletcher) known only for playing one of the most monstrous characters in the history of cinema.

I once wrote that Philip Pullman created an imaginary world so that people he hated would have a place to be evil in — I could also have said as much about The Handmaid’s Tale — and I suspect that this will be the old familiar story. 

I’m just so tired of it: the same beats over and over and over again. After half a century of this crap I just want a different critique of religion. I’m not asking for friends, just for more interesting and reflective haters. 

Religion and the Right to Be Left Alone – Avatans Kumar:

Some of these faiths teach that spiritual experiences transcend sectarian boundaries and aren’t limited to one faith. Key Hindu beliefs illustrate this idea: Hinduism holds that many paths access one underlying Truth. The Rig Veda, Hinduism’s oldest text, concisely reflects this with the aphorism “Truth is one, but the wise call it by many names.”

At the heart of proselytizing is exclusivity. There is a belief within proselytizing traditions that their faith alone has access to spiritual experiences in this life and beyond. Such exclusivism has led to violence. Over the half-millennium following Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and the Edict of Milan in 313, Christian leaders and followers actively destroyed sites and traditions of paganism as they expanded across Europe. 

One problem with Kumar’s contrast between peaceable many-paths religions and violent exclusivist religions: It doesn’t account for the persistent violence of Hindus against Muslims, especially in India. Nor does it account for most violence of people-group against people-group throughout history. I think the full evidence strongly indicates that the trigger for ethnic violence is not the religious exclusivism of one party but mere difference. It’s sad but true: to many humans, otherness is intrinsically offensive. 

In any event, the history of religious violence is not relevant to Kumar’s argument, because no one is advocating coercion in religion. His key claim is that the mere attempt to persuade people to change their religion is a human-rights violation. 

I have some questions about this. 

Kumar begins his essay with a reference to J.D. Vance’s hope that his wife Usha will eventually become a Christian. Does Kumar believe that the expression of such a hope should be criminalized?In Kumar’s preferred regime, would it be illegal to publish a book called Why Christianity Is True, or one defending the claim that there is no god but God and Mohammed is His prophet? Would it be illegal to make and defend such claims at Speaker’s Corner? For many people, their political convictions are more fundamental to their identity than any religious beliefs. Should they also be protected from persuasion? If not, why not? Though Kumar seems to be concerned only about members of one religion trying to convert people of another religion, according to his argument would it not also be a human-rights violation for an atheist to try to convince a religious believer to abandon that belief? Presumably the atheist bus campaign of 2008 would for Kumar be a violation of human rights, and the people who created it subject to prosecution. 

Last night one of my students sent me this screenshot with the message “You were right, Dr. Jacobs!” 

I’ve never used Canvas, because I despise it even when it’s working as designed. Some of my students tell me that I’m the only professor they have ever had who does not use it, which makes me sad: the ed-tech value-extraction machine deserves and should receive more hostility. But universities that deploy these big platforms should realize that our data — that of professors and students — as only as safe as the companies’ security practices are sound. And companies like Instructure are so deeply embedded in American university life now that they think they can’t be rejected — no matter how gross their failure to maintain security. An exploit like this is therefore easily predictable. 

Every university function that is on the internet is a security vulnerability. (Just look at how many online systems we have!) But every university function outsourced to a giant company whose tools are used by many universities is a far greater vulnerability, because there is so much money to be made from exploiting all that data. Locally owned and managed data is a smaller and less appealing target for hackers.   

Also predictable, however, is the refusal of universities to reconsider their dependence on these “services.” We use one such ed-tech tool — Lord knows how much Baylor paid for it — to record our activities for our annual reports to department chairs and deans. We once did this by writing up the reports in Microsoft Word, but somebody in authority at Baylor thought that was Stone Age behavior, so we got a new giant web app. Entering the data into it is difficult and slow, and then what is the app supposed to do? Spit everything out … as a Word document. But the formatting is always so terrible that we — you guessed it — we have to open it up in Word and fix the formatting. So couldn’t we then just go back to writing the reports in Word right from the start, to save time, energy, and frustration? Of course not. Baylor paid for the tool so we must use it. The sunk-cost fallacy has never been better illustrated. 

I don’t know whether Baylor will ever learn from these situations — my experience on the university-wide Technology and Learning Committee suggests that no one even thinks of saying No to the ed-tech snake-oil salesmen, because our aspirant peer institutions have already bought the snake oil. But even if we could work up the resourcefulness to ditch the completely superfluous crapware, I don’t see how we could get rid of Canvas. 

Because the primary function of Canvas is to make it possible to manage, without administrative assistance, classes with fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred students. Whatever Canvas costs, it doesn’t cost as much as several additional faculty and/or administrative employees would cost. This kind of ransomware attack could happen every moth, and every Baylor student’s personal data could be bought and sold on the dark-web marketplace, and I don’t believe even that would cause the university to sack Instructure. We’ll cut faculty, cut assistance for faculty, cut anything any everything except Canvas. Well … we’ll still hire more deans.

Eventually there will be no faculty at all in American universities, just deans, IT guys, and AI instruction in Canvas. This is called The Pursuit of Excellence.