Time is a bastard

5 04 2010

I can’t think big without thinking small.

Okay, so not strictly true—I can aggrandize with the best of ’em—but I do have to gather enough nails before I can be confident of a structure holding.

So in attempting to come to terms with medieval thought-modernity-post-modernity, I want to make sure I get the timelines right, even if, in the end, it’s really not about the dates at all.

It’s a litt. . . a lot embarrassing how poor is my knowledge of any pre-twentieth century history. I picked up bits here and there as a background to understanding certain contemporary conflicts, but I had no sense of how this tied into that—hell, I had only the thinnest sense of this and near-none of that, much less of any ties.

I am therefore now engaged in the process of infilling 500 or so years of European history, beginning around 1200 and heading into the 1700s.

Lotta shit happened; who knew?

I don’t want to go too far back into medieval times, because, again, I’m interested in the transition, but the 13th century seems a reasonable spot into which I can row my boat: It’s  in this century that the  papacy achieves its greatest power (only to see it begin to decline as kings begin to accrue and guard their increasing territorial power), as well as the century of the Inquisition.

Perhaps I could have begun with the First Crusade (Pope Urban II, 1095), or even further back with the split between the eastern and western Christianity (1054). Or I could have gone the other way, and begun with the first Black Death pandemic in 1347.

But the 13th century seems right: that monarchs began to assert themselves against the claims of the Vatican augured the beginnings of the nation-state (not to arrive fully until the dissolution of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires in the early 1900s), which carries its own moral and political claims. It was also during the 1200s that the earlier re-discovery by Christians of classical texts became integrated into various university curricula; Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, published late in the century, is the apotheosis of Aristotelian Christianity.

Can I tell you that before I began this project I knew almost none of this?

I swore after I took my prelims, and then again after I finished my dissertation, that I was done learning.

Hah. And I thought I was so smart. . . .


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It’s getting better all the time

4 04 2010

I blame Rod Dreher.

No, he didn’t start it—well, maybe he did—but he certainly propelled my thinking back a thousand years or so.

Mr. Dreher, you see, is an American old-school conservative: He’s skeptical of modernity even as he admittedly eats of its fruits; skeptical of government (that’s the American part) even as he decries a culture which, in his view, corrodes human dignity; and a believer in community and roots even as he’s repeatedly moved his family around the country.

I say this not to damn him, not least because he is honest about his contradictions, but to locate, if not the then at least a, source of my current trajectory.

You see, I became interested in one of his contradictions, and took off from there.

Dreher has written (not terribly thoughtfully, for the most part) on Islam and the violence currently associated with it. He then contrasts this to contemporary Christianity, and to the relative lack of similar violence. There are all kinds of commentary one could offer on his views and contrasts, but what squiggled into my brain was his unquestioning acceptance of a main tenet of modernity—why would this professed anti-modern base his critique on a pillar of modern thought?

Time: The notion that there is a forward and a back-ward, and that forward is better than back.

This notion of the forward movement of time, the accretion of knowledge, the betterment of the status of the world, has explicitly informed progressive thought within modernity, but it runs underneath almost all of modern Anglo-American and European thought.

(Disclaimer: I’m not talking about the whole world in my discussion of modernity, or of all forms of modernity—there are forms of modern art and architecture, for example, which are distinct from that of  political theory—but of the set of ideas which emerged out of Europe and which greatly informed European philosophy and political institutions. These ideas have of course also found a home across the globe (not least in the United States), but in attempting to trace the ideas back to there source, I’m confining myself to the United Kingdom and the continent. Finally, I make no claim that these ideas in and of themselves are unique to Europe, but that there particular shape and constellation is historically specific. That is all.)

Okay. So, what got to me about Dreher’s contentions regarding Islam was that Christianity today was ‘better’ in some objective (or at least, intersubjective) way than Islam, that is, that even those who are not Christian would see that Christianity is better for the world than Islam.

I’m neither Christian nor Muslim, so theoretically I could simply dismiss such claims about the relative merits of these religions as a kind of fan jockeying of a sport I don’t follow—except that, contrary to Franklin Foer, religion has been a far greater force in the world than soccer.

In any case, even if it is the case that currently there is less violence associated with Christianity than with Islam, it wasn’t always so: The history of Christian Europe was until very recently a history of warring Europe.

I’ll leave that for another day. What is key is the general formula:  that at time t x was strongly associated with y, and that if at time t+1 x is no longer strongly associated with y it is not to say that x will never again associate with y.

To put it more colloquially, just because it ain’t now doesn’t mean it won’t ever be. That Christianity is no longer warring doesn’t mean it won’t ever war.

To believe otherwise is to believe that the past, being the past, has been overcome, never to return; the future is all—a thoroughly modern notion.

Again, as I’m not a fan of either team, I’m not about to engage in Christian-Muslim chest-bumping. More to the point, shit’s too complex for that.

Besides, that’s not what I’m interested in. In thinking about time, I got to thinking about what else characterizes modernity, and thus what might be post-modern, and oh, are we really post-modern? no I don’t think so even though I once took it for granted (which goes to show the risks of taking things for granted) and maybe where we are is at the edges of modernity and who knows if there’s more modernity beyond this or whether these are the fraying edges and hm how would one know maybe it would make sense to look at that last transition into modernity and what came before that?  the Renaissance but was that the beginning of modernity or the end of what came before that? hmm oh yeah the medieval period and Aquinas and . . .  uh. . .  shit: I don’t know anything about the medieval period.

So that’s why I’m mucking about the past, trying to make sense of those currents within the old regime which led, eventually (although certainly not ineluctably) to the new.

It’s a tricky business, not least because I’m looking at the old through the lens of the new; even talking about ‘looking back’ is a modern sensibility.

So be it: Here is where I stand; I can do no other.

Well, okay, I can crouch, and turn around, and try not to take my stance for granted or to think that my peering into the past will in fact bring me into the past.

But I can still look.

~~~

My starter reading list, on either side and in the midst of.

  • A Splendid Exchange, William J. Bernstein
  • God’s Crucible, David Levering Lewis
  • Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, Uta Ranke-Heinemann
  • Aristotle’s Children, Richard E. Rubenstein,
  • A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchester
  • Sea of Faith, Stephen O’Shea
  • The Science of Liberty, Timothy Ferris
  • Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
  • The Scientific Revolution, Stephen Shapin
  • Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer
  • Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris

Suggestions welcome.


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Categories : Modern thought(less), Musing

And pickles are just pickles

29 11 2009

Russ & Daughters makes great pickles. Sour, with a corona of heat around the edge of each bite.

That’s a pickle.

Russ & Daughters is one of the remnants of the late 19th/early 20th centuries still living in the early 21st: they and Katz’s Deli (packed with tourists as I sidled by) are among the few outposts of the great Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side, each nailed into a corner on Houston.

They’re both north of the Williamsburg Bridge, and a few blocks beyond Delancey—does this make them a part of the East Village rather than the LES? I’m no umpire, here, but they’re tugged from behind by the LES; the other side of Houston heads toward a city far beyond the modesty of the LES.

Or former modesty. The Lower East Side is, as everywhere in Manhattan, bending under the influx of money and cool. Not completely—there are sites in the LES and even the East Village which are more rather than less dodgy, and few would argue that the F and JMZ lines are among the city’s best—but gentrification creeps on.

It’s Manhattan. The desire for the Next Great Deal will always out.

I shouldn’t romanticize either the East Village or the LES. I’ve been in some of those apartments, and they’re awful: tiny, dark, and likely to lack basic amenities (such as, say, a sink in the bathroom). The streets are close together, so lower level windows likely never see sun. And twenty-five years ago ‘Alphabet City’ was a warning against trespassing beyond First.

But they (and the Bowery—why not?) used to be places. Not always good places, but there was something more to them than just. . . well, money.

Money is dull. Don’t get me wrong—I could certainly use more of it—but in and of itself it all-too-often adds nothing but that which caters to it. It doesn’t have to be that way, but money makes it too easy to be lazy in one’s tastes. What can I get? What can I buy? What is everyone else getting and buying?

Lack of money is never dull. Poverty or fear thereof can certainly dull one’s sensibilities, especially in a city (or a country) where money is IT!, but sometimes, sometimes, the lack of money drives those so lacking to seek pleasures and meanings beyond that literal coin of the realm.

Again, I shouldn’t romanticize: So many of those who lived in and constituted the history of these neighborhoods scuffled and hustled and did whatever they could to escape those places. They wanted the money they saw flowing from the pockets of those living further uptown. And my own skepticism of community ought to force me to scrape away the sepia from what could be a violent and oppressive past.

But I miss what was there, what is gone. It’s in large measure the cheap nostalgia of the passer-by: the one who strolls through and marvels and doesn’t have to live in the dim and the dank.

But there was life beyond—within—the dim and the dank, a life unseen by the mere passer-by. The people who lived in these neighborhoods were visible in the streets, but there was something more which connected these people to the tenements and narrow streets and one another.

Perhaps it’s still there, or somewhere, in this city. Perhaps I need to open my eyes and see what’s here, now. There is always something more.


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Fly into the sun

18 11 2009

Could you tell my post last night was dashed off?

I was thinking Oh, man, I gotta post something. What? What? Then I did the dishes, which apparently put me in mind of the apocalypse.

As I told C. in the comments (who corrected an author error in the post: Clarke, not Huxley, wrote Childhood’s End), I was so lazy I couldn’t be bothered to tab over and look up various movie titles on IMDB.

Pitiful.

Thus, an elaboration on yesterday’s post, as well as an important qualifier.

The elaboration

C. astutely noted that I included dystopias with my apocalypses. So true. I guess  I tend to think that any dystopia worth its salt was preceded by some kind of apocalypse, but they really ought to be separated.

Had I been engaging anything other than minimal brain power last night, I would have figured this out in my (minor) deliberations over whether to include Brave New World. I did not, because, as I noted in the comments, the shift into Fordism seemed a kind of progression, rather than break, with what came before.

My list was also quite sloppy: I Am Legend popped into my head, then popped right back out. (I saw the Charleton Heston version, and parts of the Will Smith. In either case, definitely apocalyptic.) And I couldn’t remember the name of that damned book with the conch and boys and Piggy, and so left it off. (Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I thought there was mention of an a-bomb at the end, but it’s at the beginning.)

There’s another book, too, listed at the back of the paperback edition of The Gone-Away World: Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead. It veers between an occasional (and thoroughly enjoyable) nasty humor and genuine pathos. More light than heavy.

I’d count Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, too, if only because of the threat. But I didn’t include Max Barry’s Jennifer Government because, if I remember correctly, that society arose more like Huxley’s Fordist scheme than through anything apocalyptic.

And I missed the whole field of Christian apocalypse, a.k.a. the Rapture. Now, there is a very good movie called The Rapture (David Duchovny, Mimi Rogers), but that’s a Hollywood film, as opposed to a Soon-To-Be-Coming-To-An-Earth-Near-You True Believer flick. I used to be a regular imbiber of TBN and CBN (wacky evangelistic fare), and they’d regularly show rapture films. Don’t know the name of a single one.

I do know, however, The Omega Code (produced by TBN and starring Kirk Cameron), which is  basic Bible-code Armageddon. And, of course, Jenkins & LaHaye’s Left Behind series. I tried to read it, but couldn’t get through even book one. I have a high tolerance for this stuff, so you know it’s bad. (But if they make a movie of it—have they made a movie of it?—I am so there.)

There are likely many, many more of this subgenre that I’m missing.

I also overlooked the Mad Max movies. I liked the second one, Road Warrior, best, but the first and third aren’t bad. And I have the sense that those crazy Danes probably have a bunch of apocalypses hidden in their Danish libraries. (Don’t know why I have this sense; just do.)

Well, I’m counting on C. to come up with a proper doom list.

Now, the qualifier.

None of these books or movies are based on historical events. Some of these may speculate on a future which could become history (got that?), but in no case are these movies or books based on anything which has actually happened.

No Holocaust. No Hiroshima or Nagasaki. No Native American genocide. No historical genocides, period. No plague, flu, smallpox, etc. No Mt. St. Helen’s or Vesuvius or Tambora or any actual natural disaster. No Chernobyl.

No event in which actual human beings experienced their own version of the apocalypse.

I don’t put these events off-limits, not by any means. A good book or movie is a good book or movie, and I think all of the stuff of our lives and deaths is there for the taking.

But I don’t include these in my apocalypse list.

There is a glee in thinking of how the world might end, how humans might respond—wondering how I would respond—to total disaster, precisely because it is so speculative. Look at all the possibilities of our end!

Possibilities. Not certainties.

In historical ends, there is a certainty, the most significant of which is the certainty of actual human suffering and death.

Again, a worthy topic of fiction. But not of glee.

 


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Categories : Musing, Review

For she loves you for all that you are not

23 05 2009

I love a good ruin. They rarely disappoint.

Buildings, I mean. Edifices. Material constructs: walls, gates, jetties, fences. Anything built to last, which crumbles.

I was perusing a book today on abandoned places—factories, mostly, but a few schools—and all I could think was slowly flipping through the pages was Oh, I want to go there.

Not that I have anything against visiting functional places. Or living in one: I like having heat and hot water and plaster which stays on ceiling and walls rather than spitting down on my head. And if you buy me a ticket to the Tate or the Louvre or the Prado I will very happily mose my way through them (tho’ a ticket to the Hermitage? I’d take that one first of all).

But after making my way through what I could of the Hermitage, I might ask if it’d be possible to check out Chernobyl. Suit me up and lead me through the plant itself, then mose with me through the near-empty streets and in and out of abandoned buildings. Let me see the overturned desks and pictures on the walls of the schools, the dust on the windowsills and the paint peeling up in waves.

Let me see all that is no longer there.

Do I find ruins romantic? Not exactly. Haunting, perhaps. Thrilling. A little spooky. It’s as if by everything being laid bare, something even more is hidden. There is the evidence of stories, with the stories themselves—gone. The silence whispers.

I remember as a kid going to Disney World and wanting more than anything to explore the castle at the center of the Magic Kingdom. A castle! What could be better!

Castle—pfft. It was a big damned hallway. I still remember walking into the joint and looking around and looking around and looking around and thinking. . . this is it? This isn’t a castle, this is just. . . a big building. A big damned disappointing building.

More disappointments followed. I’d see a building with a magnificent edifice and enter and then. . . nothing. Or, worst of all, suspended-tile ceilings, florescent-tube lighting, and gray carpeting. (Ever been though the buildings on the quad at Duke University? Gothic exteriors, seventies interiors.)

FelineCity had a good mix of old, still functional buildings and places going to seed (sometimes they were the same places).  They also had a series of ports, some of which didn’t do enough business to justify more than a chain strung between two rusted poles and a vague intimation that trespassing was not allowed, which I freely explored on my bike and on foot. There were floating rustbins and dilapidated offices and crumbling walkways and not really anyone around to shoo me away.

GradCity was also on a river, and the industries which had clustered along the waterway had largely taken leave of the city, their factories left behind for the homeless, the punks, and restless students like me. City officials have since refurbished these areas, inviting the regular folk to enjoy the scenery. I can’t really complain, not least because I no longer live there, but I do miss the kind of furtive exploration these abandoned spaces allowed.

There are seedy and abandoned spaces all over New York City, but I haven’t done much poking around them. Security is tighter here, of course, and it is more likely than not that these derelict places are nonetheless inhabited. But still, if I could get a guide. . . .

And oh! That place on Long Island, the old mental hospital? Totally off limits. I want to go.

This city is built on ruins. Yes, history is constantly erased in this Land of the Developer, but just as often it is merely hidden, built over or around, odd nooks or old mosaics or peculiar stonework all that’s left to signal that there was once something else, here.

Perhaps this is why ruins exhilarate in ways that Main Attractions! rarely do: The magic castles are so often filled with nothing but the lure of the Magic™, where the excitement is in the anticipation, not the exploration. All pitch, no promise.

But ruins pitch nothing, and that they promise nothing other than ruin is what allows one to consider not what is to come, but what has been. They are literally throw-backs to another reality, and they tempt precisely because they are present markers of the absence of another present, and presence.

Something else, something other, something more.

Gone, but not quite.


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Stay awake

27 11 2008

Given so much killing, this would not be the worst way to live:

027

(From a building across the street from Temple Emanuel-El, on Fifth and 65th.)

—–

So this is a bit of a cheat—I adapted this from a comment I left elsewhere:

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, moved to successively larger cities, and now live in New York City.

Needing to get out of the house today, I bopped over to Manhattan and strolled through Central Park. It was a bit late—the light was low—but I could catch a few images of this grand and humble place:

01510211

(stretched this one out a wee)

(jacked the contrast on this one)

I wandered around the neighborhood east of the park for a bit, taking in the discreetly exclusive apartment building between Fifth, Madison, and Park, exchanging greeting with doormen leaning out of doorways, and peeking into warmly-lit restaurants serving dinner this Thanksgiving. This is the genteel and lovely New York of near-past movies, recalling generations of families lucky enough to live within those warm lights.

Not that most New Yorkers have done so, of course. This was (and is) a city of working people, crammed together in slouching tenements which call forth a history neither genteel nor lovely.

Still, it is as easy to fall in love with the romance of hard times as it is to yearn for a sepia-lit life overlooking the park. To live amidst the tumultuous grace of history!

One of the things I love (and mourn) about this place is precisely that sense of history: when I walk through the Financial District early on a Monday morning I see the old iron sconces on the side of one building, the Art Deco doors on another, and the amazing mosaic at the entrance to the ITT building. It’s all still there.

Except, of course, it’s not. The old tenants have moved out and a pharmacy or bank or Starbucks has snuck in, and where o where is the idiosyncratic New York I moved here to find? Where is our tumultuous grace?

It’s there and it’s gone. New Yorkers are constantly bemoaning the loss of the ‘real’ city, the one which existed when they were teenagers or first moved here or yesterday, the city which justified the high prices and the crowds and standing-room only train cars. But this is the real city, today, and while I wish there were still Italians in Little Italy and working-class Jews on the Lower East Side, there are Poles in Greenpoint and Russians in Brighton Beach, hasidim in Williamsburg and Crown Heights and mosques in Bed Stuy. The Hare Krishnas and Scientologists lurk in the Union Square train station, and I even saw one brave soul setting up a McCain/Palin table not too far from the saxophonist. People from California and Cameroon and Oklahoma and New Zealand are tucked into corners all over this city, criss-crossing and occasionally bumping into one another. There’s the Stonewall Bar and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (finally fully open this Sunday) and the wrecked earth from the Sept. 11 attacks posed in Battery Park.

This city erects and erases and absorbs its histories and cultures, mystifying and horrifying and, finally, gratifying those of us who are still learning when to hustle and when to slow down.

Where is your tumultuous grace? It’s there and it’s gone, wherever you are. Pay attention, wherever you are.


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Oh, Martha (part II)

22 08 2008

Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, cont.

The beer has been poured. Okay, back to the two main lines of critique: her treatment of issues in chapter 8, and her silence on politics.

I’ll start with chapter 8: Contemporary Controversies. As mentioned in the previous post, Nussbaum picks out the Pledge of Allegiance, evolution, imagination, gay marriage, and fear of Muslims. It’s not clear to me that the Pledge deserves its place on this list (abortion? contraception? sexuality generally?), and in the section on fear of Muslims, she focuses on Europe, but the problem is less with the list itself than in how she approaches these issues.

First, the Pledge. Yes, it has its place in the annals of American jurisprudence, which may be why she includes it here, but this seems an historical rather than contemporary matter. The recent case brought by Michael Newdow, against the recitation of [‘under God’ in] the Pledge, excited a lot of commentators, but as he was denied standing by the Supreme Court, nothing happened. Nussbaum makes a plausible case that it may, at some point, ripen, but not now. As she herself notes, ‘Given public feeling on the issue, it would cause a national crisis were the Supreme Court to say that the words “under God” are unconstitutional. [. . .] If there is uncertainty about the correct way of proceeding in such a momentous case, it is probably wise for the Court to avoid the issue as long as possible—hoping that, in the meanwhile, greater public understanding of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other related religions, as well as a greater appreciation for conscientious moral atheism and agnosticism, will undermine the perception that the opponents of the pledge are all dangerous subversives.’ [314] I won’t be holding my breath for this greater appreciation, but I take her larger practical point.

The teaching evolution in the public schools, on the other hand, clearly is an ongoing controversy. She slips into hermeneutical mode at the outset of the section, pointing out that the Christian fundamentalist understanding of Genesis is unique to a subset of Bible-believers. ‘Practices of allegorical reading of scripture are nothing new, not in the least connected with skepticism or agnosticism.’ [316] Nussbaum takes the reader through Jewish traditions and into mainstream Protestant interpretations of Genesis, noting that ‘Teaching Darwin’s theory does not deny the biblical story (although it does suggest that one would need to read it nonliterally), . . .’ From this she concludes, citing approvingly Judge Jones’s decision in the Dover case, that teaching so-called creation science or intelligent design in the science classroom impermissably imposes a sectarian doctrine in the public schools.

This is all fine, but she’s doing something in the evolution section which evolves (sorry) even further in the section on imagination and difference in the classroom. This is the most intriguing case in this section, and I’m glad Nussbaum brings it up; I’m just not sure that she realizes the profundity of the issues she raises. ‘I have said that the public schools can and must teach values that lie at the heart of our political principles. [. . .] The classroom strongly encourages the use of imagination to come to grips with the variety of people who live together in our country.’ [327] (Leaving aside the fanciful notion that imagination is encouraged in the classroom, it is nonetheless a lovely sentiment.) Unfortunately, ‘For some believing Christians in our nation, this exercise of imagination is sinful. It is a kind of magical thinking, and magic is bad. What is good is strict obedience to the literal word of the Bible.’ [329] She takes up the 1987 case Mozert v Hawkins, in which parents Bob Mozert and Vicky Frost objected to various books on the schools reading lists. They didn’t like how gender roles were portrayed, or the use of the word ‘comrade’, alleged hidden messages promoting satanism, and the purported Hindu influence of the texts. Mainly, however, they objected to ‘exposing ther children “to other forms of religion and to the feelings, attitudes and values of other students that contradict the plaintiffs’ religious views without a statement that the other views are incorrect and that the plaintiffs’ views are the correct ones”.’ [330] Attempts at accommodation failed. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Court ruled against Mozert and Frost; the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Why is this such a fascinating case? After all, it seems a no-brainer: As Chief Justice Lively points out (and Nussbaum quotes): ‘The “tolerance of divergent. . . religious views” referred to by the Supreme Court is a civil tolerance, not a religious one.’ [332] The parents and children aren’t required to believe anything about these other religions, and their allergy to mere exposure to them does not rise to the level of religious oppression. They may continue to believe and practice as they see fit.

The civil/religious tolerance (Nussbaum prefers ‘respect’ to tolerance) distinction is a useful one, and does real social and political work: You are a citizen in a plural society, and such citizenship requires a practical recognition of that plurality. You may not like it, you may even try to change it, but as long as such plurality exists, you may not claim legal exemption from it. This seems a straightforwardly democratically-republican understanding of the obligations of citizenship: Democratic insofar as it recognizes difference, and republican in the insistence on a similar public treatment of one’s fellow citizens.

But what if one’s religious views truly do not allow for a recognition of difference? What if it truly is onerous to one’s religious practices and beliefs to act respectfully (or tolerantly) toward the Other? Nussbaum argues in favor of a generous interpretation of polygamy as it related to 19th century Mormons, namely because it was central to their beliefs. What if the shunning of the Other is central to belief? Nussbaum could make the ‘compelling state interest’ argument, but she sticks to the civil tolerance theme. It’s a reasonable tactic, but in doing so she ducks an unavoidable consequence of the judgment: that tolerance of the intolerable can itself be oppressive. Had she used the state interest argument, she would have had to confront head-on the coercive nature of the state’s action. Coercion may be inevitable in these cases; the least we (I concur with the court’s decision) can do is grant the Mozerts and Frosts (as well as those opposed to the teaching of evolution) the recognition of that coercion.

This also raises the question of how to deal with the children in such cases. Nussbaum writes movingly of the role of imagination in Women and Human Development, and I’m inclined to agree that a life is not fully human without such imagination. But we Americans also grant wide latitude to parents to raise their children as they see fit, seeing these children (especially when young) as members of a family more than as fully rights-bearing individuals. (It’s been a long time since I’ve read Amy Guttmann’s Democratic Education, but I think she makes the argument that we might want to consider a bit less deference toward parental control.) What if parents raise their children in such a way that they are unable, when adults, to make their own way in the world? Nussbaum is surprisingly assertive of children’s rights as individuals in Women and Human Development; here, she sidesteps the issue.

I suspect the problem is her desire to accommodate all sides of the debate (as evidenced by her careful repetition of the list of not only monotheists but also Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, pagans, atheists, and agnostics in her list of interested parties to the various debates). Consensus, when honestly reached, is terrific, but it is not always possible. In some matters, there are winners and losers, and that hard truth ought not be hidden.

Nussbaum at least puts together coherent arguments for the first three issues; not so for the fourth issue and fifth issues, gay marriage and fear of a Muslim planet. To take the latter issue first, she notes that while there have been isolated instances of anti-Muslim violence in the US, Muslims are, for the most part, free to practice their religion. (I think she downplays the significance of expressed anti-Islamic animus, and she ignores the post-September 11 roundups of Muslim males by FBI & immigration officials, but she’s right: there haven’t been any pogroms.) Thus, after a brief mention of the veils and drivers licenses (and some self-congratulatory words on Americans’ deep and entrenched respect for religious difference), she heads to Europe.

Europe is a problem for Nussbaum. Europeans value diversity less, have done a lousy job integrating immigrant populations into their societies, and in some cases (France!) are intolerant of public displays of religion. Nussbaum is not the first person to point out the difficulties some European nations are having with ethnic and religious minorities, but she does a terrible job—actually, no job—of putting such difficulties into context. She makes mention of the treatment of Jews in the eighteenth century, and that’s about it. Really: all of European history is dealt with in less than two paragraphs on p. 348. She thus concludes, from her voluminous historical research, that ‘The reasons for this difference between the European and the American traditions are many and complex. One reason was surely that the Americans had experienced the European way and didn’t like it.’ Uh huh. The other two reasons are lack of majority religion in the US (given the varieties of majority-Protestantism), and that ‘European nationalism has typically relied on ideas of blood, soil, and belonging to define nationhood, whereas America’s self-conception as a nation has, like India’s, been political: a set of democratic commitments, not a single ethnic style, is what holds us all together.’ [348]

Even I, who is embarrassingly ignorant of much European history, knows this is wrong. Blood and soil may matter to some versions of fascist thought across various countries, as well as to non-fascist sensibilities within some countries, but it was hardly across the continent. How would she explain republican France, with its emphasis on language and republican ideals? Or to British imperial history? Even if I agree with her that Jack Straw’s statements about niqab-covered women are appalling, I’m so damned bothered by her shallow understanding of these other cultures that I’m inclined to dismiss everything she has to say on this particular issue.

Finally, given her discussion in Women and Human Development of the distortions of adaptive preferences (i.e., one makes the only choices one can, however lousy, and may come to value them as good choices), how can she not even consider that some forms of religious dress might actually be oppressive? To continue that line of questioning would take me outside of the realm of this book review (and I go back and forth on this issue), but, shees, to state that the burqa is as unproblematic as ‘normal Chicago winter gear and surgical masks’ [350] is. . . idiotic. I don’t like using such a term for a thinker I (generally) respect, but the thoughtlessness of her narrative on this point is dismaying.

Which leaves me with the gay marriage section. If the Muslim section is a trifle, the piece on gay marriage is an offensive and incoherent mess. For much of the book she takes the side of the minority believer against majoritarian practices. This is a legitimate approach, but it breaks down when the issue is less of the freedom of religious expression than freedom from religion. Thus, she considers gay marriage from the perspective of belief, and questions whether any religious tradition requires gay marriage. Some prohibit, some allow, but none require. Given that Nussbaum wrote sympathetically of the centrality of polygamy to 19th century Mormon beliefs, one might suspect a concurrent sympathy for alternate forms of marriage, but the lack of centrality of gay marriage to religious belief means, for Nussbaum, that the First Amendment has little to say on this issue. ‘It seems difficult to imagine any Free Exercise claim in this area.’ [338] However,

The Establishment Clause might seem more promising, for many people see the current restrictions on same-sex marriage as a de facto establishment of a Christian or Judeo-Christian norm. But a case that claimed a right to marriage for gays and lesbians on Establishment Clause grounds would be extremely weak. As I’ve argued, these limitations on marriage are not particularly characteristic of Judaism and Christianity, at least in their present form; they are things with regard to which Judaism and Christianity are deeply divided, and non religious America is also deeply divided. Nor is there any religion that strongly promotes same-sex marriage, though many permit it.

Moreover, the state has always chosen definitions of marriage and family that favor some traditions and disfavor others, without any apparent constitutional problem under the religion clauses. . . .

But if the issue of sexual orientation is not really a religious issue, or, at any rate, not an issue to be handled under the religion clauses, is there some other way in which these clauses can help us think through our divisions over these issues? [339-40]

Oh. My. First, she offers NO EVIDENCE for the assertion (the second in this section; see also 338, top) that atheists and agnostics are divided on the issue of gay marriage. Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t, but given that it seems so terribly convenient for Nussbaum to make this assertion (so as to say this isn’t really a religious issue), I’m not taking her word on this.

In fact, it seems terrifically important that secularists are divided, precisely so she can avoid dealing with the religious component of the anti-gay-marriage argument. Because she is so focused on believers, she can’t come around to the other side to see that at times what is required, from the perspective of liberty, is a claim against religion. Dammit, it’s getting late and my thoughts are fraying, but let me try to hash out this last point before going to bed (I guess I’ll have to finish in a part III.) Nussbaum tosses out that states have always regulated marriage—so what? Nevermind that she considered prohibition of Mormon polygamy as inimical to freedom; as long as gay marriage isn’t anywhere required by religion, no problem. (Of course, there’s also the matter that some religious proponents of gay marriage are advocates precisely because they see the sanctification same-sex relationships as intrinsically involving core precepts of their beliefs. Nussbaum, however, rides right past these arguments.)

But, of course, there is a problem, akin to that facing Catholics in Protestant-influenced public schools: the state has taken on the prejudices of sect and, in imposing the requirements of that sect on all, violates its own neutrality and thus, the rights of those outside of that sect. For Nussbaum to state that because Reform Jews and some Christian denominations welcome gay marriage means there is no sectarian influence in the definition of marriage is to ignore large swaths of the political debate surrounding this issue, as well as common sense.

Shit, I’m breaking up, and I want to be very clear in the rest of my critique. I’ll pick this up later. Now: to bed.


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