Historical Jesus Is Here!

R. Joseph Hoffmann has issued the The Jesus Process, a series of essays (one by him) discussing the historicity and non-historicity of Jesus, and the processes of scholarship used to adjudicate between historical arguments on Jesus.

This is a moment of supernova-esque importance because, for the first time that I know, the public (indeed, the world) has quasi-direct access to academic scholars in the process of making scholarly arguments. This is not a journalist's report of an academic conference or paper. This is not a mass-market book made by an academic. This is not a non-academic book challenging academic scholarship.

This is the academy on the "home turf" of the public. This is the opportunity for the academy to show how and why its professionalism serves the world better than amateur scholarship in books and blogs. Now, alert readers may note that one of the three essay writers, Stephanie Louse Fischer, is a graduate student and not yet a professional academic.

Nevertheless, professionalism is what is at stake in this academic volley against prominent mythicist bloggers. This essay series puts professionalism at the center of its concerns. The facts, the knowledge, the inferences and interpretations all serve the application of professional methodologies and techniques. The final outcome of these essays and their aftermath will be both the definition of professionalism and the professional viability of mythicism. This is why the moment is so fascinating.

I am very excited about this moment and these essays. I plan to read and analyze every one. I encourage others to do so, too. From there, we on the sidelines will await what I am sure will be an equally momentous reply from Richard Carrier. There may be other mythicists, academic and non-academic, who chime in on The Jesus Process essays, but now that the essays are out, Carrier is the man. Initially, no reply will matter more than his.

Indeed, the credibility and reputation of non-academic scholarship may rest on what Carrier does with this opportunity. If Carrier can make a strong scholarly case in favor of both his use of Bayesian techniques and his mythicist position, he will have achieved something very significant and unique in modern scholarship.

But Hoffmann's essays are determined, make no mistake about it, to go after Carrier and expose his mythicism as less than professional grade. One of the essays of The Jesus Process is by Hoffmann, a long piece called "Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus." In it, he promises that the weight of history is "decisive" in favor of the historicity of Jesus. On this point, Hoffmann offers his thesis as follows:

It is my view, simply stated, that while facts concerning the Jesus of history were jeopardized from the start by a variety of salvation myths, by the credulity of early believers, by the historiographical tendencies of the era, and by the editorial tendencies of early writers, the gospels retain a stubbornly historical view of Jesus, preserve reliable information about his life and teachings, and are not engulfed by any of the conditions under which they were composed. Jesus “the Nazarene” did not originate as a myth or a story without historical coordinates, but as a teacher in first century Roman Palestine. Like dozens of other Hellenistic teachers, but lacking sophisticated “biographers” to preserve his accomplishments, Jesus is distinct only because the cult that formed around him perpetuated his memory in ritual, worship, and text, while the memory of other attested personalities of antiquity, even those who enjoyed brief cultic popularity like Antigonus I, Ptolemy I and Demetrius of Macedon are known to us mainly through literary artifacts.

You'll have to read the rest of the article to see how Hoffmann defends the thesis. Let me note, however, that Hoffmann's use of the gospels in his argument may have similarities with the narrative-based methodology employed by Joel S. Baden for the Pentateuch. Both Hoffmann and Baden are interested in immediate sources of religious texts. Hoffmann argues that a person, the subject of the texts, is probably a source for his texts; Baden argues that earlier, separate versions are the sources for his.

In addition to the positive case for the historical Jesus, Hoffmann holds the mythicist position "as fatally flawed and subject to a variety of objections." Here, Hoffmann's thesis is, well, devastating:

The attempt of “mythicists” to show that Jesus did not exist, on the other hand, has been largely incoherent, insufficiently scrupulous of historical detail, and based on improbable, bead-strung analogies.[1] The failure of the myth theory is not the consequence merely of methodological sloppiness with respect to the sources and their religious contexts; that has been demonstrated again and again from as early as Shirley Jackson Case’s (now dated) study, The Historicity of  Jesus (1912). It is a problem incipient in the task itself, which Morton Smith aptly summarized in 1986: The myth theory, he wrote, is almost entirely based on an argument from silence, especially the “silence” of Paul. “In order to explain just what it was that Paul and other early Christians believed, the mythicists are forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified… [presenting us with] a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels.”[2]

As I said, Hoffmann's essay is long, yet it's well worth careful reading and re-reading.

So, grab your popcorn and read up. I won't say "This is gonna be good," because it already is good.

A Jesus Fight...And What It Means for the Jews

Religious historian and humanist R. Joseph Hoffmann has declared war on Jesus mythicists:

This little rant (and it is a rant, I acknowledge and I do not apologize for it: somebody’s got to do it) will be followed  next week by three essay-length responses to Richard C. Carrier’s ideas: The first by me, the second by Professor Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham, and the third by Stephanie Fisher a specialist in Q-studies. We will attempt to show an impetuous amateur not only where he goes wrong, but why he should buy a map before starting his journey. Other replies will follow in course, and we invite Carrier, his fans, and anyone else interested in this discussion to respond to it at any stage along the way.

As you can see, Hoffmann's main target is Richard Carrier, a Ph.D. in ancient history, author/speaker, atheist, and mythicist. Hoffmann aims to show both Carrier and his atheist applauders that the Jesus-as-myth view is probably untenable.

But it's important also realize everything that's at stake in this war on mythicism:

• What are viable ideas in scholarship versus crankery and crack-pottery?
• Who are scholars and what does it mean to practice responsible scholarship?
• What authority do consensus views have?
• What consideration should be given to marginal and fringe views?
• What status is given to non-professionals, hobbyists, and scholars in outside disciplines?
• What roles do tradition, bias, ignorance, innovation, and personal ideology have in scholarship?
• What methods work in historical and humanities scholarship, and how do we know they work?
• Where should scholarly debates be conducted, and in what forms?

I don't know this list is exhaustive, but it is accurate and reflects a timely angst about today's hyper-traffic in ideas and opinions.

I look forward to Hoffmann and cohorts bringing in solid data and arguments. I also eagerly await Carrier's replies. I hope we'll get to see whether mythicism withstands scrutiny or not. Most of all, I hope to see how all sides of the debate directly and indirectly wrangle with the issues I've listed.

This is, folks, an important moment.

Yes, you might say, but is it good for the Jews? (i.e., we begin the humorous part of the post.) Consider this:

• The outcome of the debate will not likely stir up antisemitism, unless people walk away thinking Jesus was a myth perpetrated by the Jews to make them look foolish.
• The debate may turn out to be high impact. American and world evangelicals could get stirred up regardless of mythicism's standing afterwards.
• The Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers should be one recurring item. Some, of course, will repress the idea.

Therefore, this debate may turn out not so good for the Jews. The best case scenario for the Jews is that Jesus is concluded to have probably existed and we all return to our regularly scheduled fantasies.

Is it the students or me?

As usual, I am teaching an early-morning class introducing students to drama, poetry, and short fiction. It's a writing intensive class that I have conducted at the same community college for 10 years.

The students in this term's class have been challenging and disappointing. Usually, the spring semester's classes go well because students have come off of the fall term in the swing of academic work. They know where the library is. They know their study habits. They know their schedule.

My students this semester, however, seem very unprepared. They constantly come in late. They hand in work late or not at all. They don't ask questions when they are confused. All of these issues I have repeatedly addressed with the students in different ways. Only now, with about three weeks left in the semester, have some of the messages started to sink in and show themselves in student behavior.

I cannot tell whether this class is anomalous or a sign of students to come. I probably won't be around much longer to find out. In my mind, I have resolved to teach the fall course and then take an extended-to-permanent break.

I lean toward thinking that the students are getting "worse," by which I mean less prepared to deal with material that doesn't conform to certain expectations. In other words, I see these students as less flexible in their thinking.

For example, in one early assignment, I brought in an essay sample for us to go over together. In my opinion, the sample was very clear and well-written. It should have been easy to understand, particularly as we had been reading Hamlet, the subject of the paper.

I put it to you, readers. Is this not lucid prose?

Act I of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet depicts a time “out of joint” (I.v.189). A ghost, a threat of war, and a new king all characterize the moment; the very world seems set against Denmark. For instance, after witnessing the Ghost, Horatio remarks, “This bodes some strange eruption to our state” (I.i.69). King Claudius, newly crowned and married, offers another sign of trouble, that Denmark’s enemies may think the state has become “disjoint and out of frame” (I.ii.20). Finally, when Hamlet follows the Ghost, the sentinel Marcellus declares “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (I.v.90).

During Act I, Claudius becomes identified as the source of Denmark’s troubles. He is a fratricide and a regicide, he has unjustly assumed power, and he has wed the widow of the man he murdered. Hamlet, son of the slain king, learns of Claudius’s foul deeds; the young prince swears to avenge his father. By Act I’s end, the proud prince seems to have license for any punishment he means to give Claudius. Unfortunately, Hamlet approaches Claudius by feigning madness, a strategy that actually creates more problems than it resolves. In other words, Hamlet diminishes his noble vengeance by pretending to be mad. Hamlet’s path to revenge thus prolongs the “eruption” and makes the state further disjoint. In accordance with his motives and his father’s war-like persona, Hamlet should have decided to oppose Claudius openly.

To accept that Hamlet undermines his purpose by feigning madness, we must first examine his motives. If Hamlet has good and honorable reasons to avenge his father’s murder, it is partly because he is obliged to do so. Vengeance is right because it is duty. One such obligation is love for his father:

GHOST: List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
HAMLET: O God!
GHOST: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. (I.v.23-6)

A second source of obligation to vengeance is Hamlet’s intellect. The Ghost marks Hamlet as a discerning young man who should be impassioned by knowing Claudius’s betrayal:

                                                I find thee apt;
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this. (I.v.32-5)

In addition to love and intellect, Hamlet’s sense of natural morality obligates him to avenge his father’s murder. The Ghost appeals to this sense in Hamlet: “If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; / Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest” (I.v.82-4). Here, the Ghost agitates Hamlet’s dignity; the young prince should be affronted that an unworthy person now holds both the office and queen of a once-valorous king.

*  *  [snip]  *  *

By faking madness, Hamlet does not embrace his destiny but rather defers it. Act I ends with Hamlet poised to pursue vengeance against Claudius. Yet Hamlet also recoils at his fate, as when he laments, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” (I.v.189-90). If Hamlet defers his destiny, he also perverts the noble motives justifying revenge. To maintain his virtue, Hamlet could have publicly claimed himself the legitimate successor to the elder Hamlet. This path would have befitted the fallen war king. Prince Hamlet’s true fate, the one he defers, is to pursue revenge through battle against Claudius. By pretending to be mad, Hamlet adds a new rottenness in Denmark and aids that which already sickens the state. He chooses the wrong way to pursue the right ends.

As I said, the essay should have been easy to understand--but it eluded them. Students found the vocabulary of the paper challenging. They couldn't articulate the paper's argument at all, and they certainly did not see it as something they should try to emulate in their own academic writing.

I figure if my students and I are so far apart on something fundamental, then it's time for me to go.

Postmodern Writing

Mathematician Jeffrey Shallit links to a 2004 paper titled “Cultural Topology: An Introduction to Postmodern Mathematics.” Written by Brent Blackwell, a professor of literature at Ball State, the essay exemplifies postmodern academic prose as unclear writing.

The paragraph below seems to be the thesis:

This essay develops a new way of thinking about the cultural relationships among and within the sciences and the arts through a new understanding of the term postmodernism that at once derives from literary theory and the mathematical discipline of topology. While topology forms the main vertebra of this connective approach in its capacity as the mathematics of connectivity, quantum mechanics and non-Euclidean geometry -- the atlas and axis of this spinal column -- form the context through which this “postmodern” approach will develop. However, in order to position topology as a “postmodern” branch of mathematics, some brief explanations are in order: first, regarding postmodernism, and finally regarding topology.

Only three sentences make up the paragraph; the first two each contain over 40 words, which is a lot. Sentence one promises “a new way of thinking about” the sciences and the arts, something to do with illuminating cultural relationships between them. Sentence one also introduces the essay’s sales hook, “a new understanding of the term postmodernism.” The source of the newness, Blackwell says, will come from his combining usage of the term in literary studies with ideas taken from the mathematical subject of topology. To re-cap: one sentence, 40-plus words, and two undefined topics. Topic one is the relationship of the arts and sciences; topic two is postmodernism infused with topology.

Sentence two confuses matters further. Blackwell uses “vertebra” as the metaphor for his argument. Topology, he explains, will be the argument’s main component. But then he abruptly brings in quantum mechanics and non-Euclidian geometry, fitting the two subjects into the metaphor without explaining how the whole argument relates to the initial point about the arts and sciences. In two sentences, we have come a long way. Sentence one starts with a new way to think about the arts and sciences. It ends with a new way to think about postmodernism. Then sentence two tells us our time will be spent on topology--and also quantum mechanics and non-Euclidian geometry.

Blackwell’s paragraph is a fucking mess. It’s subject is poorly defined and sprawling. It’s vague, verbose, and technical. The entire essay is the same way. In some circles, however, such prose remains perfectly acceptable. While postmodernism has largely died and been replaced by the digital humanities, it has influenced academic writing. Today’s academic writing tends toward clarity and away from stylistic excesses, at least from what I have seen in two years “back” in the academic world. Yet, postmodernism was never only about style; it opened subjects. An English major could focus on favorite novels and the practice of quilting, on poetry and feminism, on the teaching profession and politics. Postmodernism made everything the subject, and everything was subject to study, discussion, and critique.

I am sentimentally attached to postmodernism, even to its academic writing style. From the mid-1990s to 2002, when I was a full-time graduate student in a literary studies program, my writing style resembled Blackwell’s. I don’t have an example on hand of my worst writing offenses, but I have posted here part of what would have been the second chapter in my old dissertation:

To understand how different edited texts of the same literary work construct that work differently, we need a tool for capturing the structure and functions of literary language--that is, of literary language as it becomes represented in and through text. In The Literary Work of Art, first published in German in 1931, Roman Ingarden provides such a tool by demonstrating that the literary work has a heteronomous existence, existing both on its own and dependent upon the conscious activity of a reader. Ingarden gives us a sophisticated picture of the internal ontological constitution and articulation of the literary work and its world. Because edited texts result in part from the conscious, critical acts of editors, Ingarden’s model can be used to compare different edited texts and gauge the effects of their differences on our apprehension of them and their presented worlds.

Although I would love to make a few changes to this paragraph, I don’t think it's bad writing. I also see in it hallmarks of postmodern writing. For example, “literary language as it becomes represented in and through text” (emphasis added) is a postmodern formulation. Compare it with Blackwell’s “among and within the sciences and the arts.”

Blackwell and I also share a trope, a writing template in which the scholar uses terminology from another field to generate insights about fashionable or too familiar subjects. For instance, Blackwell adopts the language of topology to make points about academic animosity between the arts and sciences. For another instance, my paragraph tells readers I’ll apply literary critic Roman Ingarden’s concepts to a study of scholarly editions in medieval literature. The dissertation project I am working on now uses this trope, although not in quite the same way.

The point is that the literary scholar does more than simply read literature or argue a position in the arts-versus-sciences debate. This factor accounts for the appeal of postmodernism and the pretenses of its prose: we're doing more than reading books and making appeals. After all, at some point, one doesn't feel there's much else to say about "Young Goodman Brown" or "Ode on a Grecian Urn." To say something new about these works or about the world, one needs to set them in a new context. Postmodernism allowed for this, first by emphasizing that words held underlying assumptions and connotations and then by arguing that literary and non-literary words could be analyzed in the same way. One could deconstruct a political speech as well as a sonnet. One could rhetorically analyze any cultural feature--temples, malls, quilts, treatises, dissident movements, academic disciplines.

While postmodernism appealed to me because it laid open the world to language-based study, its obfuscating prose was difficult to emulate. I tried to write the way the big names did: Derrida, Spivak, Jameson, Lacan, Butler, Kristeva, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze and Guattari, and Zizek. To me, their way was erudite, playful, and complex. For example, here's Brian Massumi, a pretty good practitioner of the postmodern style, in a 2005 article:

In March 2002, with much pomp, the Bush administration’s new Department of Homeland Security introduced its color-coded terror alert system: green, “low”; blue, “guarded”; yellow, “elevated”; orange, “high”; red, “severe.” The nation has danced ever since between yellow and orange. Life has restlessly settled, to all appearances permanently, on the redward end of the spectrum, the blue-greens of tranquility a thing of the past. “Safe” doesn’t even merit a hue. Safe, it would seem, has fallen off the spectrum of perception. Insecurity, the spectrum says, is the new normal.

The alert system was introduced to calibrate the public’s anxiety. In the aftermath of 9/11, the public’s fearfulness had tended to swing out of control in response to dramatic, but maddeningly vague, government warnings of an impending follow-up attack. The alert system was designed to modulate that fear. It could raise it a pitch, then lower it before it became too intense, or even worse, before habituation dampened response. Timing was everything. Less fear itself than fear fatigue became an issue of public concern. Affective modulation of the populace was now an official, central function of an increasingly time-sensitive government.

The self-defensive reflex-response to perceptual cues that the system was designed to train into the population wirelessly jacked central government functioning directly into each individual’s nervous system. The whole population became a networked jumpiness, a distributed neuronal network registering en masse quantum shifts in the nation’s global state of discomfiture in rhythm with leaps between color levels. Across the geographical and social differentials dividing them, the population fell into affective attunement. That the shifts registered en masse did not necessarily mean that people began to act similarly, as in social imitation of each other, or of a model proposed for each and all. “Imitation renders form; attunement renders feeling.” Jacked into the same modulation of feeling, bodies reacted in unison without necessarily acting alike. Their responses could, and did, take many forms. What they shared was the central nervousness. How it translated somatically varied body by body.

Here, the prose gets denser as we go along. The beginning of the third paragraph is classic postmodernist academic writing, with blocks of phrases stacked after one another. Figurative language gets ever more elaborate, and the references of words become hard to discern. I was one person who wanted to write this way. The style spoke to how the ideas and scope of our work went way beyond "This poem represents man's inhumanity to man." Other academic disciplines used jargon and had their own prose conventions, so why not literary studies? Why were we supposed to remain the disheveled daydreamers in rumpled tweed jackets?

Even as a graduate student, however, I sensed that postmodern academic prose was overwrought. This was a product of my vanity. I thought I had good ideas, so I felt it was important for readers to understand them as I did. Later, when I joined the business world and led proposal teams, I largely abandoned the postmodern style, although I still use too many paratactic, polysyndetic, and preposition-conjunction-preposition constructions. Clear and relatively simple statements are prized in my current gig, which suits me fine. I am an inveterate editor and reviser who loves clear, punchy prose. I still hold the lessons of my graduate studies, that apparently straightforward prose sometimes contains nasty presuppositions. Indeed, the postmodern style emerged partly as an attempt make them explicit. Ideally, the postmodern writer wanted both to say something and to analyze the saying--at the same time.

It was a doomed wish; that's why postmodernism declined and the style receded.

The One Book Everyone Should Read

People who want to break away from religiously based literature ask what books they should read. Before pointing them to Darwin, Dawkins, Coyne, Russell, Hume, Bayle or most anyone else, recommend them to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Meditations is the preeminent work of reason. Fewer educated people have read it today; it's not universal in literature survey courses, and Classics courses continue to disappear. This is unfortunate. Our world would benefit greatly if politicians, teachers, lobbyists, and dissidents regularly adopted the Meditations in their discourse.

Sample three passages from Book 1:

From Diognetus, [I learned] not to busy myself about trifling things, and not to give credit to what was said by miracle-workers and jugglers about incantations and the driving away of daemons and such things; and not to breed quails for fighting, nor to give myself up passionately to such things; and to endure freedom of speech; and to have become intimate with philosophy; and to have been a hearer, first of Bacchius, then of Tandasis and Marcianus; and to have written dialogues in my youth; and to have desired a plank bed and skin, and whatever else of the kind belongs to the Grecian discipline.

From Rusticus I received the impression that my character required improvement and discipline; and from him I learned not to be led astray to sophistic emulation, nor to writing on speculative matters, nor to delivering little hortatory orations, nor to showing myself off as a man who practises much discipline, or does benevolent acts in order to make a display; and to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing; and not to walk about in the house in my outdoor dress, nor to do other things of the kind; and to write my letters with simplicity, like the letter which Rusticus wrote from Sinuessa to my mother; and with respect to those who have offended me by words, or done me wrong, to be easily disposed to be pacified and reconciled, as soon as they have shown a readiness to be reconciled; and to read carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book; nor hastily to give my assent to those who talk overmuch; and I am indebted to him for being acquainted with the discourses of Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection.

From Apollonius I learned freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose; and to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, except to reason; and to be always the same, in sharp pains, on the occasion of the loss of a child, and in long illness; and to see clearly in a living example that the same man can be both most resolute and yielding, and not peevish in giving his instruction; and to have had before my eyes a man who clearly considered his experience and his skill in expounding philosophical principles as the smallest of his merits; and from him I learned how to receive from friends what are esteemed favours, without being either humbled by them or letting them pass unnoticed.

Everyone should read the Meditations. More should discuss it. It will not make one an atheist, nor will it make one a skeptic. It does not even challenge or criticize religion. Yet Meditations surpasses all in framing thought and in setting reason above desire.

We struggle to manage desire's rule, especially if we have been told that God or Jesus loves us. Especially if we enjoy being with friends and family at worship services. Especially if we like the architecture and atmosphere of a religious building. We want to feel personally empowered, loved, and connected.

The power of Meditations is to moderate desire. In fact, it puts desire in the service of reason. Until this happens, one cannot be persuaded that Jesus really isn't Lord, that God really isn't great, that Mohammed isn't Allah's prophet, that we are not sinners, that we do not have souls, that our dead loved ones reside neither in heaven nor hell, and that devils and angels are not fighting over us.

In the Humanities, We Too Want to Find Things Out

Tauriq Moosa at 3 Quarks Daily is unconvinced by my defense of pop-culture humanities, including conferences such as the Jersey Shore conference held recently at the University of Chicago. Moosa says I fail "to offer good reasons for us to take the conference even a little seriously." He then proceeds to assess the conference program against my assertions of value for the topics (based only on the titled of topics and papers--I was not there).

Here is Moosa on the identity studies topic:

I’ve never understood what identity studies are about and what it means. I say this and I live in South Africa. Having engaged with it for many years, I’ve found identity studies to be nothing but nonsense posturing as deep, complex, psychological questions. In the end, who the hell cares? I’m an ex-Muslim who studies bioethics, to change public policy on matters on euthanasia and organ donation, and I read too many comics – I’ve never considered what my identity is or means in the context of a society that is largely unemployed and uneducated. What I have considered is what those factors of unemployment and no education will do when I attempt to engage in political change on matters of medicine (since the majority of the very population I want to benefit might not at first understand my reasons for wanting medical practioners to kill their patients, legally).

But will engaging with what it means to, say, be a man in today’s world really be an important topic? I’m always hesitant about such topics since sometimes people want to take what should be a discussion as a platform to advocate how men (or women) should be; which I think is unfounded, since gender roles don’t make sense anymore with, for example, increasing acceptance of homosexual relationships and artificial insemination. Who cares “how” a man should be in today’s world? I don’t think it’s a relevant topic, but then that’s just me.

Moosa is completely correct about a danger in identity studies to produce "nonsense posturing as deep, complex, psychological questions." One is well served to have a BS-meter handy when reading any paper that purports to focus on identity issues.

Yet, questions of identity do have importance, as does engaging with such questions. Moosa asks why one should care about the topic, and why it matters to have students engage with questions of masculinity or femininity or race or income level or legal status or...so on and so on.

Here's why: because we want to know how things work, including societies and cultures. Some people want to know how light behaves under certain conditions. Others want to know how an organism survived millions of years ago in a hostile environment. Some people want to know what happens when two different molecules interact with each other. Some people want to know how people make sense of the sounds and gestures produced by other people. And some people want to know how different ideas get expressed, used, shared, and altered in a culture.

I am one of the people in this last group. I think we can look at identity categories, for one thing, as a way of studying the historical character of cultures. I believe further that knowing more about such categories and their uses in cultures helps to advance the cause of civil/legal equality and to lessen bigotry.

Moosa asks "Who cares 'how' a man should be in today’s world?" The answer is that I do. I care how masculinity gets defined, and I think it has broad social implications and historical connections. There's a light beer commercial series that focuses on unmanly behavior. Usually, one guy in the commercial won't drink the right kind of light beer and it ties into some earlier behavior that was either too child-like or too feminine. These humorous constructions of masculinity have interesting tie backs to other beer commercials and to other literature where men better behave like men. And we all know of real-life groups and situations where it was a matter of harm or death to act unmanly.

So, yeah, it's relevant how people construct manliness or Italian-American-ness or most any other identity. It's important. Moosa repeatedly he uses the words "important" (10 times) and "pointless" (6 times) to dismiss both the subject of the conference--Jersey Shore--and the approach to the subject--too shallow and posturing.

But I see the humanities as able to play an important role in (1) developing the cultural knowledge mentioned above, and (2) teaching the critical thinking skills required for such knowledge. As I remark in another post:

My point is not about the relative quality of the products, Jersey Shore vs. The Brothers Karamazov; it's about their value (also not equal) in allowing students to learn, discuss, and hone critical thinking skills. In my ideal world, the best teaching would lead people to be offended that Jersey Shore was ever offered as an option for entertainment. And then the show would fold along with others of its ilk.

Moosa rightly points out the dangers of people getting on platforms to tell us how men or women should be. In my conception, the humanities is descriptive, not prescriptive. Moosa also asks why people like me want to know how people of the past saw their world, why people like me want to understand the fictional worlds created in our literature, and why people like me want to study reality shows and comic books. The answer is (again) because we, like you, want to know how the world works. For us, the pleasure of finding things out concerns things that are made and valued by people. 

And that's why even a conference on Jersey Shore has a point and has importance. Moosa is quite right that the Jersey Shore conference could have been on anything: from the Darwin biopic to Lost, and everywhere in between. The point is, however, that we have companies and people who make something like Jersey Shore, we have companies and people who make money from the show, and we have people who watch it and have their various reactions to it. This point is important because it requires us to make up hypotheses, as Moosa does, for why the show is a hit. He says:

Most people are comfortably bored with their lives and, lacking creative stimulus enjoy seeing "better" versions of themselves through the tanned, ripped abs of Italian-American people from New Jersey; the show is so unbelievably stupid, you watch it the same way you do a car-crash in slow motion, except the things breaking are people’s lives and what’s dissolving is time better spent elsewhere; and so on.

These are excellent hypotheses and worth investigating. In my mind, in my conception of the humanities, these are precisely the kinds of questions to explore. I suspect that the papers of the Jersey Shore conference actually make just these explorations, except perhaps in a tapioca of puffed out prose, but the hypotheses are the point. We do humanities to make hypotheses, to make arguments, and to weigh and consider their merits and flaws.

From what I gather, a show like Jersey Shore screams for an explanation. Who would produce such a thing? Why would it resonate? If we start, dispassionately, at this show, what can we learn about the workings of a culture in which Snooki is a star?

These are questions of interpretation and argumentation, and they are also questions of information and data. Many of the cultural studies questions raised in the conference do or could lead to data. After all, most historical scholarship requires data on the period in question, even if the period is very recent. Indeed,  data appears to be quite "hot" in the humanities right now.

Should the Jersey Shore conference be taken seriously? I say "yes" because it offers views of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that can give us information on how our world actually works. I know folks in the sciences who get up in arms when the government or the public views their projects as frivolous, unimportant, a waste, or without benefit.

May I humbly suggest, then, that the scholars in Jersey Shore conference might have their own takes on why the conference was not a waste of funding and was a legitimate way to serve education? And may I humbly suggest that these scholars offer their takes publicly?

He Noticed!

 
I'm a-flutter (really, I am!).

Jerry Coyne gives mention to my criticism of his take on the Jersey Shore conference. In his response, Coyne writes:

But of one thing I’m sure: reading The Brothers Karamazov will make them think even more deeply.

I totally agree. A person's efforts will be much more rewarded by reading Dostoyevsky than by watching Jersey Shore.

Yet, good teaching can help students gain real value from both, and the value available to students from serious discussion of Jersey Shore has a relevance that is not offered even by literary classics. Being able to talk to students about the characters, the stories, the values, and the goals of Jersey Shore provides a right-now context for concerns that students also have right now. And unlike The Brothers Karamazov, Jersey Shore lends itself to students better: very few students ever think they understand Dostoyevsky, even when they do, while all students feel like they have a handle on Jersey Shore.

My point is not about the relative quality of the products, Jersey Shore vs. The Brothers Karamazov; it's about their value (also not equal) in allowing students to learn, discuss, and hone critical thinking skills. In my ideal world, the best teaching would lead people to be offended that Jersey Shore was ever offered as an option for entertainment. And then the show would fold along with others of its ilk.

Attempted Witty Title: A Reply To Jerry Coyne

Obligatory cat picture because this post mentions Jerry Coyne.

Jerry Coyne slams a recent academic conference that focused on the TV series Jersey Shore. He mentions that he popped in on two lectures and heard bits of other talks. The conference took place at the University of Chicago, where Coyne is a biologist.

His offers a scathing assessment of the event:

Waste of time and the money used to fund it.  I know readers will contest this, and I did go to only two talks, but both were dire, boring, and completely unenlightening.  It was a deadly combination of postmodern theory and pop culture.  It’s harmless to talk about this, I suppose, but it’s a question of how to prioritize academic funds—and scholarship

Wait a minute, Jerry. You posted the program of the event, and the broad topics seem worthwhile:

• The Construction of Guido Identity: I don't know much about Jersey Shore in particular, but a session that looks at the show's representations of masculinity, race, sexuality, and identity seems pretty interesting. What makes someone manly in that world? What importance is placed on identifying as an Italian American?
• Morality and Ethics: Again, the general topic seems worthy of the humanities. Why not use a popular TV show to explore moral behavior and ethical dilemmas faced by the characters (albeit as edited by the show's producers)? 
• Affect, Honor, and Desire: This is one session I would have liked to attend, especially the paper involving medieval Iceland. Ultimately, this session appears to want to understand how the characters of the show view their world. This understanding is the bread and butter of the humanities. We want to know the world just as Hamlet did, or just as Beowulf did, or just as Guinevere did. We want to capture the cultural perspectives that audiences in the past brought to their lives and to the artworks presented to them.
• Guido Cultural Signifiers: Another good session, if the paper titles are any indication. Surely, the people on the show have personalities and behaviors that appeal to viewers. Asking why this is so and looking for answers that go beyond pat stereotypes--well, these seem like good things to me.

I don't see why Coyne judges these topics to be "shallow." I have some sympathy with the rest of his complaint, that academic pop-culture studies are "too infested with postmodern obscurantism, and ... replace more substantive material that can actually make students think deeply about things"--but focusing on Jersey Shore and the like can indeed generate substantive material that helps students think deeply about lots of things, not least about the things all around them on campus, in the clubs, and on their computers.

Coyne's final comment (or is it a caption to the picture of the Jersey Shore cast?) registers as the most unfortunate:

Guidos and guidetttes: many think they’re as educationally important as Shakespeare. They’re wrong.

Jerry, you don't have to like the show or think it offers anything of importance. But the quality of the show is almost irrelevant because what these scholars are doing is not praising Jersey Shore. They are not comparing the show to any of Shakespeare's works.

Yet there is an education an American co-ed can gain from humanities scholarship on a show like Jersey Shore. Issues of identity come up in Shakespeare. So do issues of morality, sexuality, race, power, and history. When we talk about Shakespeare, we can talk about these issues in the context of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This discussion has immeasurable value for a twenty-first century reader.

When applied to culture as it is happening before our eyes, these discussions can also have an enormous impact on students. Their favorite show actually isn't a joke, even if its characters act like buffoons. That show they watch reinforces stereotypes, or changes them, or questions them. Humanities scholarship give students the tools to see that culture is everywhere, not just in England from 1564-1616.

Jerry's point on reading papers as opposed to giving talks is well-taken. I think most humanities scholars are taught, at least through imitation, to present the paper first and foremost, and worry very much less about connecting with an audience. This is unfortunate, especially since in our classrooms we are talking to our students and seeking to engage them as best we can.

The best parts of any conference happen when scholars receive questions and address challenges. It's an important skill, if frightening to acquire.

Can Science Explain Art, Music, and Literature?

The people are revolting, Roger. Better get used to it. But it was good to be king, wasn't it?

At Big Questions Online, Philosopher Roger Scruton thinks science is out of its element when it attempts to explain art, music, literature, and human senses of beauty:

We don’t understand the plays of Shakespeare by conducting surveys and experiments. We don’t interpret The Art of Fugue with an acoustical analysis, or Michelangelo’s David with the chemistry of marble. Art, literature, music and history belong to the ‘human world’, the world that is shaped by our own consciousness, and we study them not by explaining how they arose but by interpreting what they mean. Explanation has a method, and it is the method of science. Interpretation goes in search of a method, but is never sure of finding one.

I am, of course, a humanities guy. But who says we can't understand  Shakespeare through surveys and experiments? Yes, certainly, one important way we engage art is by interpreting what a work means, but we can learn much by developing explanations of how works arise. I don't understand why Scruton wants to make humanities and science non-overlapping magisteria.

I am also puzzled by his picture of humanities interpretation as a humble discipline of "doubt and hesitation" and science as "certainty":

Over the last two decades, however, Darwinism has invaded the field of the humanities, in a way that Darwin himself would scarcely have predicted. Doubt and hesitation have given way to certainty, interpretation has been subsumed into explanation, and the whole realm of aesthetic experience and literary judgement has been brought to heel as an “adaptation,” a part of human biology which exists because of the benefit that it confers on our genes. No need now to puzzle over the meaning of music or the nature of beauty in art. The meaning of art and music reside in what they do for our genes. Once we see that these features of the human condition are “adaptations,” acquired perhaps many thousands of years ago, during the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we will be able to explain them. We will know what art and music essentially are by discovering what they do.

Whenever people want to criticize or denigrate science, they invariably characterize it with the flaw of certainty. They suggest it is hubristic, pronouncing to hold answers it does not really have. This criticism misses the mark. More often, the critics assert scientific certainty where the scientists themselves do not. For instance, in the quote above, Scruton presents Darwinism as claiming to offer definitive, over-arching explanations of works. Unfortunately, we find not one citation to examples of literary Darwinists making this claim in Scranton's entire article.

On the other hand, we can look at another article where we might expect to find scientific hubris. Here, for example, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker favorably reviews the book, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Pinker seems quite interested in literary Darwinism, so does the following make a claim for certainty?

For its part, literary analysis would surely benefit from the latest scientific ideas on human thought, emotion, and social relations. Fiction has long been thought of as a means of exploring human nature, and the current stagnation of literary scholarship can be attributed, in part, to its denial of that truism. The field’s commitment to the dogma that the mind is a blank slate and that all human concerns are social constructions has led it to focus on cultural and historical particulars, banishing the deeper resonances of fiction that transcend time and place. And its distrust of science (and more generally, the search for testable hypotheses and cumulative objective knowledge) has left it, according to many accounts, mired in faddism, obscurantism, and parochialism. For all these reasons, evolutionary psychology and literary analysis seem to be natural companions.

Here's a second quote from Pinker (the entire review can be found here). Again, is he declaring literary Darwinism as an infallible and exclusive method for engaging or explaining literary works?

The essence of science is not a subject matter or a set of experimental techniques, but the conviction that our claims about the world are not matters of personal taste or conviction but can be evaluated for their degree of truth. A consilient literary analysis should thus pursue some of the methods of science as well as its theories, and two of the contributions argue that hypotheses in literary scholarship can be as testable as those in the sciences.

Apparently, Scruton is enamored with the idea that music, beauty, art, and similar terms are mysterious. Science fails with humanities disciplines, he says, because the scientists don't really know what the subject is that they are investigating. Scruton argues:

Until you define what music is, and how it differs from pitched sound, for example, you will not know what question you are asking, when you inquire into its origins. Until you recognize that the human sense of beauty is a completely different thing from the peahen’s sexual attraction, you won’t know what, if anything, is proved by the sparse similarities.

Yes, we need good, comprehensive definitions. We need a standard vocabulary that we can share in discussing phenomena. And understanding differences is important. No doubt, music is different than pitched sound. Music involves selection and arrangement of pitched sounds. But I question Scruton's completely different than. Whatever we make of the relationship between music and pitched sound or between a sense of beauty and sexual attraction, I see no warrant for blocking off music or beauty as phenomena of radical difference, as if they have no connection whatsoever with sound or sex--as if, in other words, they had been divinely wrought and bequeathed to humanity.

Scruton, as I see it, plots art and beauty on the same continuum with gods, free will, and souls. Defenders tell us we cannot explain the categories on the continuum. The categories are beyond our full comprehension, exceeding our language, and greater than the real things that are otherwise their material substance (e.g., religious writings and commentaries, neurons, cells and organelles).

What's more, Scruton and like-minded thinkers advise us not even to try explaining such categories:

The attempt to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about its subject matter, and does huge intellectual damage in persuading ignorant people that after all there is nothing about the humanities to understand, since they have all been explained — and explained away.

This argument is deeply flawed. I don't accept Scruton as an authority to tell us what disciplines and methods to take seriously. Ultimately, the test of disciplines and methods is the knowledge they produce. In his given examples on music and sense of beauty, Scruton finds the Darwinist explanations "absurd." Fine. That's his opinion. But we need not accept those explanations fully to understand that they (1) are out in the public domain, (2) have some legitimacy, and (3) will ultimately stand or fall based on the collection of more data and the performance of more work in the area.

Another truly odious charge is that a Darwinist line of art or literary study obliterates any other modes of explaining and interpreting. The charge is simply untrue. Humanities studies can be interested in both biological explanations and cultural ones. The development of singing, to take an example from Scruton, seems to me very interesting. I want to know about the biological impulses and struggles that singing expresses, and I want to know about the arrangement of pitched sounds. Why that arrangement? What makes it as powerful as it is? What are its precursors? How has it spread and changed in culture?

We can, I submit, both learn about art and learn from it. And we can engage art (whether painting, literature, or a sense of beauty) productively without mystifying or aggrandizing it. Scruton's position betrays intellectual authoritarianism and parochialism. It's a position of entrenched power fearfully struggling to maintain hegemony.

The Future of the Humanities

A recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe notes the shrinking percentage of college students majoring in the humanities. The entire editorial appears below:

Economic necessity is a rigid academic counselor. So it’s no surprise that the percentage of undergraduates majoring in the humanities keeps on declining, from 17 percent in 1966 to 8 percent in 2007. Especially in the face of today’s crippling debt levels and dreary job market, even students who adore Shakespeare’s poetry are seeking more marketable academic credentials. And yet the value of literature, philosophy, and history remains what it always has been — a mostly impractical gift that the undergraduate is given for a lifetime.

College administrators can only do so much to persuade students to major in the humanities. What they can and should do is make sure undergraduates take some courses that at least introduce them to Plato and Sophocles, or St. Augustine and Martin Luther, or James Joyce and William Butler Yeats. The student who’s destined to work on a computer for a living may still gain more from learning about the French Revolution than, say, an extra tuneup on HTML.

The Globe sees jobs and job-seeking as the driving force of the decline but provides no data in support of the link. I would love to see a study of why college students today choose the majors they do and why they don't choose majors (or minors) that otherwise still interest them.

Today's students may feel pressure to give priority to certain majors outside of the humanities. However, they might--or might also--hold less less interest in humanities subjects compared to other majors.

The difference is important for anyone thinking about the public perception of the humanities, on the one hand, and both the content and tools of humanities scholarship, on the other hand.

Some of the interesting comments to the Globe piece (numbering is mine):

(1) The cretins who scribble their screed all over the Globe will never have a clue on the value of the humanities. Arts and letters are barely surviving in Amerika but they are the reason we fight wars for freedom. Who ever stepped in front of a gun for progress in math and science or a better shopping mall? The humanities are how we EXPRESS freedom. Even if a country full of face-stuffing, comatose consumers and conquerors cannot see it or care less.

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(2) The long demise of the humanities in academe is fully deserved by their professoriate, who have vainly sought academic respectability by focusing on abstruse technical and procedural issues (e.g., semiotics, post-modern deconstructionism) rather than substance, which in the humanities case is values. The purpose of the humanities is not personal decoration, but self-development.

The greatest opportunity for strengthening the humanities today is in the study of philanthropy—Classically conceived as the "love of what it is to be human", translated into Latin (with paideia) as "humanitas", and applied by the Founding Fathers in creating this country as a gift to mankind, to raise the human condition to higher levels (Alexander Hamilton in the first paragraph of the first page of the first Federalist Paper, where he "adds the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism". Philanthropy, not academic humanities, is today our nation's school for values—education by exercising values in giving and volunteering.

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(3) The humanities are far from dead, they simply are no longer buried alive in Universities. With new technical tools people can now embark on studies of the humanities throughout their entire lifetime in a manner that is more conducive for learning. By forming their own quest for knowledge and honing their own methods of inquiry, learners are now able to exchange information and gain the insights that translate into knowledge with other learners worldwide.

The artificial designations of professors and students are being replaced with the understanding that learning occurs throughout everyone's lifetime. The hoarding of specific expertise to assure a lifetime of employment is being replaced by the ability to rapidly access, research, assimilate and distribute information. When that information is coupled with a foundation in HOW TO LEARN a lifetime of studies in the humanities is now possible for everyone.

In the face of a "crippling debt and dreary job market" it is the emancipation of the humanities from the impractical gift of 4 years of glorified babysitting that is the gift of technology to the spirit of us all. It makes the practicalities of the dark aspects of economic conditions bearable and brings a thread of light and hope.

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(4) This entire thing is a huge non-issue. How many articles has the Globe run in recent years complaining about the dearth of college students majoring in Engineering and Mathmatics?

Measuring by percentages in this case is useless. As one major increases, another has to decrease. No matter how you slice it, you can't exceed 100% so the decrease has to come from somewhere.

If we (as a society) really want more people to complete higher education in both the Sciences AND Humanities, the answer lies in reducing the absurd tuition and fees the schools charge while they beef up their endowment funds and over-pay their staff. Throw the percentages out and look at the raw numbers of graduates.

Arguments abound for the personal, material, and social value of humanities learning, so I won't rehearse such arguments here. Yet, I want to point to three posts by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne on "great literary endings" (here, here, and here). The posts and their ensuing threads collect responses and side discussions on aesthetics, literary technique, and categories. Those who read Coyne's blog regularly know that aesthetics, technique, and categorization factor into his science concerns as well.

The common ground is fertile ground, it seems to me, and there's opportunity to emphasize the fundamental knowledge and skills--and their attendant pleasures--offered especially by/in the humanities.