Coudal Partners, “History of the Earth in 24 Hours”, via The Daily Dish
Perspective
3 01 2012Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: earth, history, humans, life, science
Categories : Blog theft
Where was I?
29 12 2011No work, not enough work, too much work, work.
That’s been the last six months. Nowhere near enough money, even with too much work (really blew it on this last freelance job—shoulda charged double), but now things to be evening out: three courses for the spring, half-time admin work for a local-international organization.
I have some idea of what I’ll be doing with the teaching, no clue on what exactly I need to do with the admin work, but hey, I’ve gone from clueless to clue-full before.
~~~
Hey, I’ve got some a few new readers! HI!
Thanks for poking your head through my window! I’ll try not to slam it down on your noggin’. . . .
(And yes, I’ll return the favor and check out your blogs as well, now that I have the time to do so.)
~~~
I really hate not knowing things.
The problem, of course, is that the more I learn, the more I learn what I don’t know. Frustrating, that.
And embarrassing. Before I embarked on my jaunt through the European medieval period, I knew nothing about this history. Nothing.
Oh, something about the break with the Eastern Church in the 11th century, and Luther in the 1500s, but I couldn’t have told you the difference between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, or between the various emperors and the pope.
Yeah, it was bad.
So now I’m learning stuff (yay!), but I’m running up against the parameters that I had initially set for this project. It was conceived as an investigation of intellectual history, with not much room for social (writ large) history, but I’m too much of a materialist to dismiss the conditions (see below) under which these ideas were generated and spread.
This is a very long way of thanking petefrombaltimore for his suggestions in reading.
Yes, a project like this can sprawl out over any boundaries set—hence my initial attempts at capturing only intellectual history—but sometimes the most interesting bits are discovered in the spillage.
Anyway, I just finished Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment and am now on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation; I may then mix in some close-up histories, as well as tackling some of the primary sources.
Can’t say I’ve yet gotten anything solid on the late-margins of modernity by poking around in the early margins, but I am still poking along.
~~~
Got my first round of applause for teaching in. . . ever?
It was for my bioethics course, a class which was terrible the first time I taught it (at another university), pretty good the first time I taught it here, and now, well, good. I’ll continue to tweak it as I go along, but I’ve got a solid set-up which should hold for at least another few semesters.
It’s much easier to keep teaching the same thing over and over—all that prep work is already done—but I get antsy. I don’t think there’s a perfect syllabus or course (see: not a Platonist), so after a certain number of repetitions I overhaul the course to try to capture something missing from the previous go-around.
It’s not always better, and almost always requires adjustment, but it keeps me thinking.
Anyway, the applause.
It was common at UW-Madison to applaud professors at the end of the semester. Most of my classes were large lectures, so the performative aspect of teaching was more apparent than in seminars, but classes were similarly large at Minnesota, and I don’t recall the students applauding professors there.
It’s nice, both to applaud and be applauded. I liked that I could show my appreciation for a good professor (or lack thereof with tepid clapping); it seemed to signal that there was something more going on in that lecture hall than a contractual transmission of information from instructor to user.
The best professors gave us knowledge far and beyond that necessary for a good grade: they gave us an appreciation for the wonder of knowing.
I don’t know if that’s what my students were applauding. I work hard to tamp down my urge to overwhelm them with my words—as the person who constructs the syllabus and leads the discussions, I already have great, if indirect, influence on how they approach the subject—but on this last day of class I gave them a concentrated shot of my approach to bioethics.
I started with a truncated version of the epistemology/ontology/practical lecture, zeroing in on the significance of being (or Being, if you please) in one’s understanding of practical ethics. I then moved on to Hannah Arendt’s distinction between human nature and the human condition, namely, that while we cannot with any certainty know our nature, we can approach our condition.
And the most basic of our conditions are that we are biological beings, we are social beings, and we are mortal beings. We may be more than this, I noted (spiritual, philosophical, etc.), but we are damned-near-incontestably conditioned by our biology, our relationships to others, and the fact that we are born and will some day die.
This matters to bioethics, I argued, because any ethics which does not take account of these conditions cannot be of any practical worth.
(You might think that this would be so obvious as to be banal, but it is not.)
I can’t tell you that consequentialism or deontological ethics or casuistry or any other way is the correct approach, I said. We need standards to keep us from justification-by-convenience, to force a critical appraisal of our actions, but, pace our conditions, we have to allow deviation from those standards: the rules are to serve the human, not the human, the rules.
Finally, I said, circling back around, this is where I center my ethics, on the matter of human being. What makes us who we are, and what we could become? It’s not that our abilities have to be unique among species, but we should think about ourselves, as humans, in how we approach one another.
We don’t have to be heroes, I observed. It’s not about pulling someone out of a burning car or tackling the bad guy or dodging bullets; it’s about recognizing one another as humans.
And then I told the story of a group of people in a small town in Wisconsin who decided to hold a funeral for an unknown woman who had been found, murdered, in their town. She wasn’t one of their own, and would never know what had been done for her, but through the donations of the funeral home and money raised for a plot and marker, and in the service at the cemetery, these people did in fact claim her as one of their own.
There was nothing heroic in this ordinary act of burying the dead, but by taking care of this dead woman’s body, they recognized her as one of them; they demonstrated their humanity in their recognition of her humanity.
We can take care of one another, I said. Our ethics ought to be centered on how we take care of one another.
They seemed to like that. I didn’t expect the applause—I thought I had gone too far—but even if I had, they didn’t seem to mind.
It was nice.
~~~
As a coda, I’ve consolidated my earwig approach to teaching (“I want this stuff to bother you for the rest of your lives”) into a line stolen and adapted from Serenity:
I aim to trouble you.
It’s not me, really, who can do this, but I can bring the trouble of politics and theory and ethics to my students, and hope that it disturbs them a good long time.
Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: applause, being, bioethics, history, medieval period, money, petefrombaltimore, Politics, teaching, work
Categories : Stray bits
The politics of contempt
7 09 2011Can I steal from myself? ‘Cause I’m gonna steal from myself.
I’ve been yelping and hectoring and despairing and whatevering for the past year on the battlefield that is American politics, on the Republicans’ scorched-earth tactics, and on President Obama’s unwillingness to open the hose on these arsonists.
There is more to be said on this.
My attention is wavering, however, so I’ll let James Fallows (here, here, here, and here) and TNC run a few legs of this race, and, for now, simply steal the comment I posted at TNC’s joint:
I think this [destructiveness] goes back even further—at least to FDR—but it took a different form then than it does now.
My hypothesis: that the sense of the illegitimacy of any kind of left (center-left on outwards) government used to be on the fringes of the polity, but has since edged into some of the main streams of the Republican party.
There were certainly (loud) mutterings that Roosevelt was a communist, but I don’t know that these came from the Republican leadership. The Eisenhower administration was, of course, attacked by McCarthy, and Kennedy was hardly universally mourned; still, even if the GOP leadership thought that all liberals and Democrats (a phrase that only in the late 80s became redundant) were axiomatically illegitimate, they didn’t say so in public.
The attack on the legitimacy of the government emerged as an open campaign theme in the 1980s; the attack on the legitimacy of Democrats to lead government blew open in the 1990s, culminating, of course, with the impeachment of Clinton. These lines crossed and fused in the 2000s, apparent in the various campaigns, and then going nuclear—with the eventual blessing of the GOP leadership—with the election of Obama.
Again, this is just an hypothesis, and I’d guess that a full exploration of this hunch would reveal all sorts of exceptions and wrinkles and significant subdynamics (such as the movement of white southern Democrats into the GOP); I’d also caution that I think this phenomenon has until recently been confined to the national level.
I’ll let this be for awhile—other things on my mind—but the full flowering of this discourse of delegitimization is nothing less than an expression of contempt for democracy itself.
That bears watching.
Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: campaigns, contempt, delegitimization, Democrats, history, Politics, Republicans
Categories : Politics
History is an angel being blown backwards
6 06 2011Finally finished Richard Evans’s The Third Reich at War. Yes, I already knew the ending, but still, so, so satisfying.
Not everything about it satisfied. The Nazis grew ever more fanatical as the Reich’s prospects worsened, and so many—tens of thousands—of people were killed by the SS as the Allies pushed the Eastern and Western fronts ever closer together. And the Soviet soldiers, pfft, they raped their way west—gang-raped their way west. American and British forces also abused and raped civilians, but like nothing on the scale of the Red Army.
Given what the Germans had done on their march into the USSR, what the Red Army did was hardly a surprise. Still.
And too many Nazis escaped, either through subterfuge and help from an anti-communist official in the Vatican or because they were useful to the victors or by killing themselves. They—Hitler, Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Borman, among too many others—escaped judgment by a shot to the head or a literal poison pill. They got to control their own deaths, just as they controlled the deaths of tens of millions of people.
They did not get what was coming to them.
Two further thoughts: One, while I have mentioned that I am under all circumstances opposed to the death penalty, I am not in any way exercised by the penalties imposed on those brought to trial. However problematic the juridical underpinnings of a victor-imposed war tribunal, I think it was better to have had the various trials than not; is no justice to be preferred to rough justice? (This is a real question, actually, tho’ I ask it only rhetorically, here.)
That my desire to have kept these anti-human genocidaires alive for the sole purpose of tormenting them—forcing them to live in a fallen world, a world where Germans are not the Master Race and Jews and Slavs and leftists and every so-called inferior would be in a position to look down with contempt and derision upon the Leader and his ilk—does point to my less-that-exalted moral position regarding the death penalty and these men. As with the suicides, the death penalty seems too easy a way out.
Second, I felt a great and unexpected rage at those alt-historians and pundits (Niall Ferguson and Pat Buchanan, for example) who spin out fantasies of woulda-coulda-shoulda and call it scholarship. I enjoy alt-history—Robert Harris’s Fatherland is a fine weekend read, and I’ve got Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America on my shelves—but I don’t treat it as anything other than what it is: fiction.
Even reading Ian Kershaw’s first volume of his biography of Hitler I find myself annoyed by his asides of but for this and had this judge not or if only the police had: Hitler wasn’t sent back to Austria to serve in the imperial army and he was allowed to enlist in the Kaiser’s force and the judge didn’t deport him after the beer hall putsch, etc. Again, the woulda-coulda-shouldas get us nowhere beyond dismay, exasperation, and not a little bit of unreflective smugness: We know better.
Maybe time does not constrain us in other quantum realities the way it does so here, in this reality of the 21st century, but since we do live within time, pretending that we can overcome the winds which blow us into the future is just that, pretending—or pretense, if you call it scholarship.
It’s also cheap, intellectually and morally. It’s one thing for, say, military tacticians to say if you had done X rather than Y in this battle, that might have opened up possibilities for Z—to say, in other words, that something limited can be learned about a specific event—but it’s quite another to assert with authority that had the British not joined the battle against the Hapsburgs and Ottomans and Hohenzollerns, say, that Imperial Germany would have imposed a cautious authoritarian rule over Europe, contained or otherwise short-circuited the Bolshevik Revolution, allowed the British to keep its empire, stymied the rise of the Americans, and oh, by the way, prevented the rise of Hitler, the Nazis, and the conflagration of WWII.
It’s quite another, in other words, to spin a whole counter-history which makes it seem as if the abattoir that was Europe in the first half of the twentieth century was, oopsie, all a big mistake, one which could be erased by hopscotching back to 1914 Britain and whispering in the King’s ear. History is made of chalk; let’s erase and start over.
The problem is precisely that history is made of chalk: There is nothing indelible in what happens, and we remember only because we remember. We have to chalk and re-chalk and re-chalk again the contours of our deeds if they are to remain visible to us amidst those blowing winds.
Six million Jews and however many thousands of Roma and hundreds of thousands if not millions of Slavs were murdered by members of the Third Reich, millions more soldiers killed and were killed in turn, and hundreds of thousands of innocent and not-so-innocent civilians died because Hitler and the Nazis and a fair proportion of the German population thought it only right that they should run riot over Europe and the world.
These are the facts, tethered to us only by intersubjective agreement that they be treated as facts.
Treat them as pieces in your game of counter-factual what-if and whoops, you loosen the tether and allow the pieces to be scattered, lost. You allow all those people to be scattered, lost, again.
Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: death penalty, history, Hitler, justice, Niall Ferguson, Richard Evans, suicide, The Third Reich at War, war crimes, what-if
Categories : Musing
If I had a rocket launcher
22 05 2011The invasion of Poland was almost unbearable.
I knew it was awful, but awful only in a general way; the opening didn’t linger on the atrocities, but the details—the killing of 55 Polish prisoners here, the burning of village after village there, the many smug justifications for murder—knit the details of death into the whole cloth of invasion and mass murder.
If I didn’t know how it all ended, I told a friend, I don’t think I could read it.
I’m on the last book of Richard Evans’s trilogy of the Third Reich, finally cracking it open after it sat on my desk for a few weeks.
I raced through The Coming of the Third Reich (useful for its doleful portrayal of the Weimar Republic) and read with fascination The Third Reich in Power, but The Third Reich at War, well, the premonitions of the first two books are borne out in the last. It will get worse, much worse, before it ends; it cannot be said to get better.
Reading about genocide and slaughter has never been fun, but I used to be able to do so without flinching. I remember reading in high school Anne Nelson’s dispatches in Mother Jones about the Salvadoran death squads; I close my eyes, and I can still conjure up the accompanying photo of bloody heads on bench. College was apartheid and nuclear war, and grad school, human rights abuses generally.
The University of Minnesota maintained an archive of human rights material in its law school library. I’d trudge over there from my West Bank (yes, that’s what it was called) office and read reports of the massacre at the finca San Francisco, of soldiers smashing babies’ heads and slicing up their mothers. Reports of torture in Nicaragua and disappearances in Argentina and killing after killing after killing in Guatemala.
It was awful, but I could take it, and since I could take it, I felt a kind of duty to do so. There was nothing I could do, hunched over these documents in the back corner of the library, but to read them, to read as many of them as I could.
I no longer have the compulsion, or the arrogance, or frankly, even the stomach, any more to do so. I still think the reading matters, the knowledge matters, even if I can’t precisely say why, but it is so hard, almost too hard, to keep reading. To read is to conjure these lives, these men and women and children, and watch them murdered all over again.
It was like that with the footage of the airplanes hitting the World Trade Center, and of the two towers collapsing into themselves. It seemed important to watch, to see, to know what I could, but after that, it just seemed obscene, as if the replays were killing people all over again.
I know that’s not how it works—I am aware of at least a few laws of physics—but the necessity of witness is found precisely in the knowledge of what is witnessed, that is, in the knowledge of the killing of over 2500 people. I don’t want that knowledge dulled or forgotten.
Maybe that’s why it’s so difficult now to read of atrocity: the outrage has been so stretched and worn that in too many places the bare horror is all that remains. The outrage is still there—reading (again) of the T4 extermination program, I raged against the ideology of rassenhygiene and “lives not worth living”—but it no longer protects as it once did. Its use as a buffer is gone; the horror gets close.
Still, the knowledge matters, so I read what I can when I can. It is the least, the very least, I can do.
Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: Anne Nelson, Central America, death squads, genocide, history, horror, killing, knowledge, outrage, Third Reich, World Trade Center
Categories : Musing
Negation—wha. . .what?
18 05 2011Perhaps I should not have used the term “negation”.
It carries a philosophical load—which is fine, and not unrelated to my use of it—but I wanted (also) to emphasize the more prosaic, i.e., practical, aspects of negation, as in: to negate, to eliminate as an option or consideration.
The germ theory of disease negated theories of miasma, Lavoisier’s experiments with oxygen negated phlogiston, industrial production of beakers and test tubes negated the need for scientists to blow their own glassware (which further negated the need for the knowledge of blowing glassware), fuel injection will likely negate carburetors, etc.
So negation could mean “overturn” (as with germs > miasmas or oxygen > phlogiston) or “leave behind” (as with glass-blowing and carburetors), that is, to negate may be to disprove or it could mean to render irrelevant or trivial.
Now, these practical effects may reverberate ontologically, such that the negation of the practical may serve to negate an entire way of thinking or being, or simply to serve as a signal of the instability of that way of thinking/being. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its discussion of paradigm shifts rendering previous modes of scientific practice inert, lays out a version of global negation, while current questions of the role of cyber-technologies signal uncertainty over what counts as “real”.
John Donne’s “An Anatomy of the World” (1611) is often quoted—hell, I quoted it a while back—to exemplify the agonized confusion over the discoveries of the natural philosophers:
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and relation:
Natural philosophy took for itself the name science, and modernity marched on. The laments for the old world died with those who once lived in it.
William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” clearly echoes this lament, with the opening
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
The times they are a-changin’, indeed.
History is not a line, or rather, history only holds the line, such that events may loosen or smash that hold and the contents of that history scatter.
Some of those pieces are lost and even of those which are found, the meaning of the piece, precisely because it has been scattered, can only be guessed at. It is shard of pottery uncovered in the desert, hinting at something which once was, now gone.
But not everything is lost: it could be hiding in that proverbial plain sight. I’m much taken with the notion of the palimpsest—that is, of a kind of tablet which has been inscribed then scrubbed clean to be reinscribed—largely because I think that the previous inscriptions are still there, that, like words which have been erased from a page, the impression lingers.
Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology decries the transformation of the Rhine from a river in a landscape into a “water power supplier”, that is, it is no longer itself but a source of reserve power for a hydroelectric plant. Perhaps it could be understood as that river in a landscape, he muses, but “In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.”
Those who complain that Manhattan has turned into a theme park and that Times Square has lost all its gritty reality have not a little bit in common with Herr Heidegger.
I have a great deal of sympathy for this feeling, but even more skepticism for such sympathy; as I’ve mentioned more times than you probably care to read, we’re never who we’ve been.
So, again, I’m not taking the side of the past against the present, not least because I have no basis for such a taking of sides. Again, I simply want to trace the history of modern history.
I can’t raise all the inscriptions on the palimpsest, but maybe I can see some of what has been left behind.
Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: history, John Donne, Martin Heidegger, modern thought, negation, ontology, science, Thomas Kuhn, thoughtlessness, William Butler Yeats
Categories : Modern thought(less)
Thousands are sailing
17 03 2011I am many things (yeah, yeah!), among them, Irish.
And German and probably Swedish and French and possibly Polish and likely a smattering of other northern and western European tribes.
Nationality wasn’t much on my radar growing up, probably because the area in which I grew up was so dominated by Germans and, to a (much) lesser extent, Irish; the one group which stood out were the Dutch, who in their enclaves were (in)famously insular. I don’t know what it was like not to be a part of the ethnic majority—although, not being Catholic, my Irish bona fides were sometimes called into question. (But my grandfather was! I’d protest. Shees.)
Anyway, St. Patrick’s day wasn’t a big deal there. Sure, we wore green and when we old enough we used the day as an excuse to down a few, but, really, any celebration was a kind of sentimental feint toward history.
I’ve since lived in three Irish-saturated cities: Montreal, Bostonish (okay, Somerville), and New York. St. Paddy’s is done up in these joints.
Since I’m rather “eh” on parades and my heavy-drinking days are well in the past, the most I may do is wear green when I teach tonight, and really, probably not even that. Some of my ancestors may have come from Eire, but any sense of Irishness I may have is constructed, not inborn; I’m an American, full stop.
And that’s fine: One of the delights of being an American is the ability to construct and deconstruct and reconstruct identities. If I want to follow a family line back to County Cork and bring that connection to the 20th or 21st century, then let’s raise a pint and drink to the Auld Sod.
I did in fact go through an Irish-intense period some years ago, laying claim to the 19th century immigrants (Hoy and Ducey and the lot) who left before or maybe were just born before (my recollections of my mom’s genealogical research are fuzzy) before the great calamity, the Famine. And I still get sniffy about the British in Ireland and am quick to note that food was exported from Ireland while people were dying in the streets and the fields.
Still, leave it to the Pogues to strip me of the romance:
We celebrate the land that made us refugees.
I don’t know if that line is original to the Pogues or they swiped it, but it’s a right proper astringent to the mythification of Irish history—although, given the hold of myth and mist on the Irish-American imagination, probably not enough.
Not even for me: Even my heart jumps at that kick of the drums.
Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: America, Famine, history, identity, Ireland, life, memory, mythification, Pogues, St. Patrick's Day
Categories : Musing
I’m a rocket man
14 12 2010I try to be good, get off the computer for a few hours, and what happens? I miss an entire conversation on science.
Well, goddammit.
(Actually, given that a large portion of the thread was given over to name-calling and trollist cavils, I guess I didn’t miss that much. Still.)
So, science. I am for it.
I am an epistemological nihilist, it’s true, so this support is caveated with the usual cracks and abyssals, but I’m also quite willing to hop right over those chasms to walk among the ruins that compose our human life—and one of our more spectacular ruins is science.
Yes, ‘our’. ‘Our’ because science truly is a human endeavor (even as its dogmatists assert that science can take us outside of ourselves), and as such, there to be claimed by all of us. And it is important to claim it, both against the dogmatists and against those who find nothing of worth in curiosity and rigor, or in experimentation, skepticism, and discovery.
I can only respond to those opposed to discovery with questions and fiction—as we do not inhabit the same world, argument is stillborn—but to the dogmatists and, it must be said, to those who favor curiosity and thus oppose science because they believe science poisons curiosity, I can offer history and reason and ruin.
To offer the whole of that argument is to offer a book; instead, here is the abstract:
We humans have sought to know, and in seeking, have sought to make sense of what we have found. How we make sense has varied—through recourse to myths, common sense, measurement, extrapolation, generalization, systematization, reflection, etc.—and what we make of the sense we make has varied as well. Sometimes we call it truth or religion or wickedness or allegory or interpretation; sometimes we call it science. Sometimes this science is the means, sometimes it is the end, sometimes it is both. In early modern times [in Europe], in the period now known as the Scientific Revolution, science was thought to reveal truths about God, as it also was by those scientists working under the Abbasids; that it also brought technological advance and political and economic gain helped to preserve it against those who argued that a thirst for knowledge was itself corrosive of the faith.
Yet even throughout much of the modern period science was understood as, if no longer an appendage of natural philosophy, as nonetheless a part of a constellation of knowledge which included the arts, literature, and humanities; its practitioners are all a part of the learned class.
This collegiality faded, and now science is understood primarily as comprising the natural sciences and its methods; to the extent some social sciences adopt those methods, they may or may not be admitted to the realm as sciences, albeit as its lesser, ‘softer’, version. That science has a history is barely acknowledged, and it is unclear if scientists (or their learned critics) would consider them as ‘intellectuals’ rather than (mere) technicians, experimentalists, and lab directors.
This separation (and, often, contempt) is lamentable all around. [Natural] science is more than its tools and methods, involves more [hermeneutic] interpretation than the experimentalists may admit of, and requires greater curiosity than its skeptics may allow. But if we want to know, if we humans truly seek a human science (and, again, I would argue there is no other), then we have to prevent science from sliding all the way into scientism. Some think it’s already so technics-shriveled, that it is already mere methodological fetishism; I disagree.
This saving gesture doesn’t require that artists now refer to themselves as scientists or that neurobiologists become novelists. No, this reclamation project (another ruin) would gather the curious back together, to see if we exiles from one another would have anything to say to one another, to see what we could see.
I don’t believe this every day—yesterday, for example, I had no patience for this.
But some days, some days I think we humans could do this. Some days, this is my something more.
Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: arts, history, humanities, humannes, knowledge, life, science, something more
Categories : Musing
Everything! Everything! Everything!
25 05 2010Blows my mind how little I know. That is most excellent.
I’m not kidding: However much I wish I knew, mm, everything, that there is so much more out there to discover keeps me keepin’ on.
Consider my medieval Euro-history project: I recently finished Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind (which is about the transition from the pagan to the Christian era), and man! what a jumble early Christian history is!
I did know that it took awhile for Christianity to gel as an institutional movement, but thought that after the Council of Nicaea in 325 everything was all sewn up until the Great Schism of 1054, and even then, it wasn’t until Luther and Calvin that the [western] Christian fabric was truly rent.
Only I didn’t know what the Council of Nicaea actually accomplished (something to do with the Trinity, maybe? And that Nicene Creed, right?), didn’t know that very little was settled at Nicaea, that the splits between the Eastern and Western churches were evident within a century of Christ’s death, and never knew, frankly, how the Copts fit into all this.
Well.
I still don’t know, frankly, but slowly, slowly, this is all seeping in.
This is how I learn something new.
My approach is to read promiscuously, trusting that with enough exposure I’ll be able to piece together a particular phenomenon. And I don’t need to dive into deep scholarship at the outset either; solid popular books (like Freeman’s) give me the chance to train my sights, as well as offer a decent bib I can crib. I do prefer that what I read be, you know, good, but even the junk can sometimes be useful, if only as a kind of astringent for my thoughts.
Anyway, that’s how this political theorist began her work with genetics: Snatching every book with the word ‘gene’ in the title and gulping them down, then more slowly working my way toward what, for my purposes, were the most important (or delectable, to continue the metaphor) platters on the table.
I’m still in the gorge phase of my research, slurping up commentary on how orthodoxy was invented and how intertwined it all was with empire; how faith, political power, and obedience to god and man never quite fit together; how misogyny was built into early belief; how anti-Judaism became anti-semitism; and how time itself was changed.
And that’s just the beginning.
A colleague asked where I was going with all of this. I don’t know, I told him. I know there’s something there, but I don’t yet know what it is.
Now that, my friends, is one of the best feelings in the world.
Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: Christianity, history, learning, life, medieval period, something more, thinking
Categories : Musing
AbsurdBeats 
No comment
6 04 2010Declaration by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell:
Two words, buddy. . . .
*UPDATE* TNC has a graceful follow-up to this story, in response to the Guv’s recognition that, oh, yeah, slavery was kind of big, bad deal, wasn’t it?
(h/t: Huffington Post)
Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: Civil War, Confederacy, history, race, slavery
Categories : No comment