The Arbery Killers, Today’s Slave Catchers

By Robin Bates | Published: November 22, 2021
Hammat Billings, illus. of slave catcher from Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Tuesday

Having written yesterday about Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, I turn today to the Ahmaud Arbery killers, who themselves are in the final stages of their trial. The three men, two of them armed, chased the jogging Abery in two trucks, cutting him off. Because he then attacked them, they are now, like Rittenhouse, pleading self-defense. They also are claiming that they tried to make a citizen’s arrest on the grounds that Arbery, being black, must have had something to do with past thefts in the neighborhood.

As many have noted, the killing resembled an old-fashioned lynching, and there’s another disturbing connection with the past: they resembled slave catchers from pre-Civil War days, chasing down a fleeing black man because of his skin color.

When I heard an MSNBC commentator make this comparison, I thought of the slave catchers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Eliza, her newborn child, her husband George, and others are involved in a breathtaking chase with violent and lecherous vigilantes on their heels. Fortunately, unlike Arbery, they manage to escape, in part because they have their own guns:

Another hill, and their pursuers had evidently caught sight of their wagon, whose white cloth-covered top made it conspicuous at some distance, and a loud yell of brutal triumph came forward on the wind. Eliza sickened, and strained her child closer to her bosom; the old woman prayed and groaned, and George and Jim clenched their pistols with the grasp of despair. The pursuers gained on them fast…

At this point, the slaves leave the wagon and flee into the hills. Their Quaker guide, Phineas Fletcher, takes them along a narrow ledge, which puts them in a position to defend themselves:

A few moments’ scrambling brought them to the top of the ledge; the path then passed between a narrow defile, where only one could walk at a time, till suddenly they came to a rift or chasm more than a yard in breadth, and beyond which lay a pile of rocks, separate from the rest of the ledge, standing full thirty feet high, with its sides steep and perpendicular as those of a castle. Phineas easily leaped the chasm, and sat down the boy on a smooth, flat platform of crisp white moss, that covered the top of the rock.

“Over with you!” he called; “spring, now, once, for your lives!” said he, as one after another sprang across. Several fragments of loose stone formed a kind of breast-work, which sheltered their position from the observation of those below.

The pursuers show the same kind of confidence that Arbery’s killers may have exhibited as they closed in on him:

“Well, Tom, yer coons are farly treed,” said one [of the slave catchers].

“Yes, I see ’em go up right here,” said Tom; “and here’s a path. I’m for going right up. They can’t jump down in a hurry, and it won’t take long to ferret ’em out.”

Then follows a verbal exchange in which escaped slave George Harris exposes America’s justice system of the time:

At this moment, George appeared on the top of a rock above them, and, speaking in a calm, clear voice, said,

“Gentlemen, who are you, down there, and what do you want?”

“We want a party of runaway niggers,” said Tom Loker. “One George Harris, and Eliza Harris, and their son, and Jim Selden, and an old woman. We’ve got the officers, here, and a warrant to take ’em; and we’re going to have ’em, too. D’ye hear? An’t you George Harris, that belongs to Mr. Harris, of Shelby county, Kentucky?”

“I am George Harris. A Mr. Harris, of Kentucky, did call me his property. But now I’m a free man, standing on God’s free soil; and my wife and my child I claim as mine. Jim and his mother are here. We have arms to defend ourselves, and we mean to do it. You can come up, if you like; but the first one of you that comes within the range of our bullets is a dead man, and the next, and the next; and so on till the last.”

“O, come! come!” said a short, puffy man, stepping forward, and blowing his nose as he did so. “Young man, this an’t no kind of talk at all for you. You see, we’re officers of justice. We’ve got the law on our side, and the power, and so forth; so you’d better give up peaceably, you see; for you’ll certainly have to give up, at last.”

“I know very well that you’ve got the law on your side, and the power,” said George, bitterly. “You mean to take my wife to sell in New Orleans, and put my boy like a calf in a trader’s pen, and send Jim’s old mother to the brute that whipped and abused her before, because he couldn’t abuse her son. You want to send Jim and me back to be whipped and tortured, and ground down under the heels of them that you call masters; and your laws will bear you out in it,—more shame for you and them! But you haven’t got us. We don’t own your laws; we don’t own your country; we stand here as free, under God’s sky, as you are; and, by the great God that made us, we’ll fight for our liberty till we die.”

George stood out in fair sight, on the top of the rock, as he made his declaration of independence; the glow of dawn gave a flush to his swarthy cheek, and bitter indignation and despair gave fire to his dark eye; and, as if appealing from man to the justice of God, he raised his hand to heaven as he spoke.

Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Law, which allowed slave catchers to pursue slaves in non-slave America, the law is in fact on the side of the pursuers. As we see when juries rule in favor of cops and White vigilantes who shoot Black men, too often it continues to be on the side of today’s pursuers. If it weren’t for video footage of the Arbery slaying, his killers might be walking around free today. As we await the jury’s verdict, we’ll learn soon how much—or how little—we have progressed from the justice of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s day.

Further thought: At one point in her narrative Stowe unleashes her bitter sarcasm upon the slave catchers and slave traders, who she notes are on their way to evolving from human scum to respected civic leaders:

If any of our refined and Christian readers object to the society into which this scene introduces them, let us beg them to begin and conquer their prejudices in time. The catching business, we beg to remind them, is rising to the dignity of a lawful and patriotic profession. If all the broad land between the Mississippi and the Pacific becomes one great market for bodies and souls, and human property retains the locomotive tendencies of this nineteenth century, the trader and catcher may yet be among our aristocracy.

Whether the catchers have become our aristocracy is debatable, but historians have drawn lines from slave catchers to southern Klansmen to today’s racist police.

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What Brecht Would Say about Rittenhouse

By Robin Bates | Published: November 21, 2021
Kyle Rittenhouse

Monday

Kyle Rittenhouse having been found innocent, on grounds of self-defense, after shooting three people, I am repurposing a past post on Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule. While the play deals with class rather than racial differences, it still explains why a young White Man avoids consequences in ways a Black man never could.

While I am disturbed by the laws that allowed Rittenhouse to get away with murder, I am also unsettled by the images—15 minutes before the shooting—of police thanking Rittenhouse for being there with his (illegal) weapon, despite the curfew, and giving him water. Nor did they arrest him after the shooting, later explaining that he didn’t look like someone who would shoot people. Rittenhouse returned home (across state lines) and turned himself in the following day. Had a Black man wandered into the area with a gun, is there any question that he would have been treated far differently?

Basically, only Whites are allowed to plead self-defense when it comes to gun shootings, even when no one would have been killed had Rittenhouse not brought a gun to Kenosha. Whites can walk with impunity carrying automatic rifles whereas people call the police on Blacks just for making them uncomfortable. One of the clearest expressions of the double standard has come from Wisconsin’s own rightwing senator Ron Johnson in remarks about the January 6 Capitol insurrection:

“Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said during the radio talk show The Joe Pags Show. He was discussing his recent comments downplaying the danger that day and he has said he “never really felt threatened.”

“Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned,” Johnson continued.

In other words, people who look like me are by definition friendly whereas people who don’t must be repelled by gunfire.

Brecht’s play dramatizes the double standard. It’s not an exact parallel since Rittenhouse’s victims shared his skin color and, unlike the victim in the play, they actually threatened him (although the first two were unarmed and the third, who had a gun, thought he was dealing with an active shooter). But as in the play, privilege allows the killer to plead self-defense.

Like many of Brecht’s plays, Exception and the Rule is a parable about class relations. A merchant who must cross a desert in order to make a fortune kills his porter after mistaking a helpful gesture as a hostile move. Although the porter has offered him some of their dwindling water supplies, the merchant thinks that man is attacking him and shoots him. Despite this, the judge in the subsequent trial exonerates him, ruling, “In the circumstances as established it was inevitable that he should believe himself threatened.”

We can see the verdict coming when the judge is questioning the merchant. Similar reasoning led the jury to free Rittenhouse:

What you mean is that you were right to believe that the porter must hold something against you. So you did indeed kill someone who might well be harmless, but only because you could not have known that he was harmless. It happens sometimes with our police. They shoot into a demonstrating crowd, a harmless crowd, but they shoot because they can only believe that these people are going to drag them off their horses and lynch them. These policemen shoot out of fear. And their fear is that of the reasonable man. What you mean is that you could not have known that this porter was an exception to the rule.

Merchant: One lives by the rule, not the exception.

The reasoning is reiterated in the judge’s ruling. Even though the judge concludes that the porter was indeed engaging in a kindly act, he finds against his widow:

The merchant belongs to a different class from that of the porter. He could only anticipate the worst. He could not credit that the porter whom he had ill-treated, as he himself has said, would offer him an act of friendship. His common wit told him that he was in the greatest danger. The isolated nature of the area must have caused him great anxiety. The distance from the police and the restraint of the law would encourage his servant to demand his share of the water. The accused therefore acted in justifiable self-defense regardless of whether he was actually threatened or merely believed himself to be threatened. In the circumstances as established it was inevitable that he should believe himself threatened. The case is therefore dismissed; and the widow’s claim fails.

Brecht’s message is that it doesn’t matter how nice a worker or a merchant is because classism is systemic. Therefore, stop trying to placate your boss, who will turn on you the moment it is to his advantage. For Brecht, political action is the only solution.

In our situation, it’s racism that is systemic. If you are Black, it doesn’t matter what’s going on inside your head because you are automatically regarded as a threat by virtue of your skin color. Coincidentally, the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger who was chased down and killed by three men, goes to the jury tomorrow. They too are claiming self-defense.

In this case, they may not escape justice since there’s video evidence of them chasing Arbery until, feeling cornered, he finally turns and charges them. Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule, just as there was an exception for Derek Chauvin’s cold-blooded murder of George Floyd. To let cases this blatant go would expose the system even more than it has been exposed. But for the most part in America, Blacks are assumed to be guilty and Whites innocent until proven otherwise.

That’s why gun laws don’t work for both sides, why Blacks can’t “stand their ground” or “open carry” with the same impunity as Whites. The play explains it to us. In a majority White society with America’s racial history, it would not be reasonable (in the eyes of a white judge and white jury) for Blacks to feel threatened by Whites. After all, Whites aren’t threatened by Whites. Unreasonable fear would be a Black afraid of and shooting a White.

It’s why one often sees videos of police talking down, ignoring, or even (as in the case of Rittenhouse) praising Whites with guns while shooting

–12-year-old Black boys with toy guns (Tamir Rice);
–Black men who innocently pick up an air rifle from a store shelf (John Crawford); and
–Black men who calmly inform police, during a traffic stop, that they have a registered firearm in their glove compartment (Philando Castile).

Juries invariably give these officers a pass, just as they gave George Zimmerman a pass when, playing vigilante, he assaulted and killed teenager Trayvon Martin.

Those who complain about schools teaching Critical Race Theory don’t realize that only by confronting and exploring together our race history can we as a nation move beyond Whites’ irrational race fears and start interrelating as fellow human beings. It’s why we need more Toni Morrison in our schools, not less.

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“What Is Truth?” He Asked of Truth Itself

By Robin Bates | Published: November 20, 2021
Nikolai Ge, What Is Truth? Pilate and Christ

Spiritual Sunday

As we prepare for Advent, today’s Gospel reading (John:18:33-38) features the famous truth interchange between Jesus and Pilate. The passage always bring to my mind poet William Cowper’s reflection upon truth in his long poem The Task.

Here’s the reading:

Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him.”

The long and rambling chain of associations that make up The Task lead to numerous reflections, some very powerful. In this excerpt, Cowper perhaps echoes Samuel Johnson’s poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and is certainly referring to both Isaiah 40:6 (“All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field”) and Ecclesiastes 1:2 (“vanity of vanities; all is vanity”). If everything “fades like the flower disheveled in the wind,” then all that survives is “the only lasting treasure, truth,” which Cowper compares to an amaranthine flower:

   All flesh is grass, and all its glory fades
Like the fair flower dishevelled in the wind;
Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream;
The man we celebrate must find a tomb,
And we that worship him, ignoble graves.
Nothing is proof against the general curse
Of vanity, that seizes all below.
The only amaranthine flower on earth
Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth.

To go off on a tangent for a moment, the “amaranthine flower” to which Cowper compares truth was a mythical flower whose blooms were believed to never fade. It shows up in Paradise Lost (Book III) where Milton notes that, after Adam and Eve’s “offense,” the amaranth removed to heaven, where it shades the fount of life and is used by God’s angels to “bind their resplendent locks”:

Immortal Amarant, a flower which once
In Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life
Began to bloom, but soon for mans offense
To Heav’n remov’d where first it grew, there grows,
And flowers aloft shading the Fount of Life,
And where the river of Bliss through midst of Heavn
Rolls o’er Elisian flowers her amber stream;
With these that never fade the Spirits elect
Bind their resplendent locks inwreath’d with beams

But back to Cowper’s discussion of truth. His arrival there after observing that all else will fade brings him to the passage from John:


But what is truth? ’twas Pilate’s question put
To truth itself, that deigned him no reply.

If Jesus doesn’t reply, Cowper says, it’s because of the questioner. He does reply to those who are humble, candid and sincere, qualities which Pilate cannot claim:


And wherefore? will not God impart His light
To them that ask it?—Freely—’tis His joy,
His glory, and His nature to impart.
But to the proud, uncandid, insincere,
Or negligent inquirer, not a spark.

Imagining that he is being cross-examined as Jesus was, Cowper defines truth elliptically, shifting to metaphor. Truth can be like a good book or a good minister—if you don’t appreciate them, then the problem is with you:

What’s that which brings contempt upon a book
And him that writes it, though the style be neat,
The method clear, and argument exact?
That makes a minister in holy things
The joy of many, and the dread of more,
His name a theme for praise and for reproach?—
That, while it gives us worth in God’s account,
Depreciates and undoes us in our own?

Finally, referring to Jesus’s metaphor of his kingdom as a “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-46), Cowper compares truth to that pearl—but it’s a peal available only to the poor and despised:

What pearl is it that rich men cannot buy,
That learning is too proud to gather up,
But which the poor and the despised of all
Seek and obtain, and often find unsought?
Tell me, and I will tell thee what is truth.

Now you know.

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Mike Pence’s One Heroic Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: November 18, 2021
V.P. Mike Pence on Jan. 6 certifying the 2020 election

Friday

We’re slowly but surely getting a clearer picture of Donald Trump’s coup attempt, and it appears to have come much closer to succeeding than we realized. In the end, we were saved by the most unlikely person imaginable: Donald Trump’s sycophant-in-chief, Vice President Mike Pence.

Literature is filled with stories of unlikely heroes. The hobbit who saved Middle Earth is the first who comes to mind, but Mike Pence is no Frodo. I think of him more as one of A.E. Housman’s hirelings in his delicious little poem, “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”

Before applying it, here is my simplified understanding of the coup attempt:

–Trump wanted to create enough doubt about the election that Mike Pence would refuse to certify the election but instead send it back to the states, where anything could happen;
–to create doubt, Trump pressured Attorney General Barr and various governors, secretaries of state, and election boards in critical states to claim voter fraud;
–those in the White House who resisted him after the election were fired and replaced by flunkies ready to carry out his will;
–during all this time, Pence was put under intense pressure, not only by Trump but by lawyer John Eastman and others, who redefined his duties by reinterpreting the Constitution;
–to further pressure Pence and Republican members of Congress, Trump inspired a mob to descend upon the Capitol. The mob was financed by, among others, various rightwing billionaires;
–while Trump may or may not have anticipated that the mob would storm the Capitol, once they did so, he refused to call them off for four hours;
–if Pence had refused to certify the election, Trump’s circle anticipated there would be massive protests from Biden supporters. Various fascist and white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys would then get involved, seeking to stir up trouble, at which point Trump could declare martial law and, voila, stay on as president. It was because the Armed Forces feared such a scenario that they stayed away from the Capitol when it was being attacked.

As a result, for only the second time in American history (the first being 1860) we did not have a peaceful transition of power. Democracy was in danger of “falling” as America’s “foundations fled.”

And who stood true to the Constitution? Who, despite immense pressure, performed the duties he was constitutionally required to do? The man who had groveled before the Trump for four and a half years.

In Housman’s poem, the unlikely heroes are mercenaries who, against all odds, insist on fulfilling their contractual obligations:

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.  

Pence, when he convened Congress and called for the certification vote following mob violence, did indeed hold the sky suspended. And while he did not, like the mercenaries, die in the process, he is politically dead, loathed by both sides. No one, outside of Housman, gives either mercenaries or sycophants credit when they do something noble. Why should either hirelings or Mike Pence be applauded for just doing their job?

But given all the incentives for them to have acted otherwise, we should hold them up and honor them.

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My Lifelong Love Affair with the Classics

By Robin Bates | Published: November 17, 2021
British School, Man Reading by Lamplight (1839)

Thursday

Yesterday I wrote about a Los Angeles Review of Books article that seeks to debunk the myth of a classical education. There has never been a time, Naomi Kanakia argues, that we have had massive numbers of students studying the classics. A golden age, during which “the average undergrad could… quote Homer in the original Greek, and when the US Senate was filled with philosopher kings who slept with Marcus Aurelius under their pillows,” exists, like most golden ages, only in our imaginations.

The article disappointed me slightly because Kanakia barely discusses what a classical education does for one. It’s little more, she says at one point, than a class marker. Although she acknowledges at one point that her own extensive reading has “contributed immeasurably to my development as a person,” and at another that the classics “probably” make one “a better thinker or more capable leader,” that’s it. She says nothing else about what her immersion in the classics did for her.

Instead, she treats a classical education like a club she worked very hard to join, only to learn, upon admittance, that it has hardly any members. She walked into hallowed halls, only to find them empty. I sense a feeling of betrayal in her piece, as though she were sold a bill of goods.

She did, however, prompt me to look back at my own life to determine why I don’t fit her profile. While I won’t say that my upbringing was a golden age, it contained more than a few classics, starting with high school.

I attended Sewanee Military Academy, an Episcopalian prep school (now St. Andrews at Sewanee) that believed very strongly in teaching great literature from the past. My first year we read The Iliad, The Odyssey, David Copperfield, and Kim; my second year we surveyed American Literature; my third year focused on British Literature; and the fourth year featured World Literature. The American Literature course was not well taught so I don’t remember it very well, although I do recall Catcher in the Rye (which I hated)and also some fellow student pointing out to me that Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a masturbation poem. The British Literature course, on the other hand, was my favorite course of all those I have taken. It started with Beowulf and went up through Dylan Thomas, and along the way we read Chaucer, Shakespeare (Hamlet), Donne, Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, the Romantic poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham and a host of others. In our senior-level World Literature course, meanwhile, we read Antigone, Crime and Punishment, Siddhartha, Camus, Ibsen, and others.

The immersion in the classics inspired me to take Carleton College’s interdisciplinary two-semester humanities course, the first focused on 5th century Athens, the second on the European Renaissance. Although I was a history major, I took two of the British survey courses, a course in the Irish Renaissance, and a course on utopias (including The Republic, More’s Utopia, Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, and various 20th century utopias and dystopias). I also took a classics course on Greek mythology and, in French, the two surveys (starting with The Song of Roland and ending with Sartre) and courses on Diderot, Rousseau, and the 20th century French novel.

Then I attended a graduate school (Emory) that still had a traditional curriculum, which meant that we had a comprehensive exam covering a long list of works, from Beowulf to Faulkner. We were also encouraged to sit in on undergraduate survey courses to fill in any gaps.

So as far as my own education was concerned, it was fairly classical, even though I didn’t learn Greek and though my two years of high school Latin weren’t enough for me to read any literature. And because I had had this type of background, I was prepared to teach survey courses when I became a professor. Figuring that I’d better teach the highlights in my survey classes, which I regarded as a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe where my students should at least get a taste of London, Paris, Rome and Berlin–I taught Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, etc. My colleagues did more or less the same. I don’t know whether this confirms or refutes Kanakia’s view of American education.

But let me get to a second point of reflection, which is what I owe the cultural conservatives mentioned by Kanakia. First, here’s what she has to say in a passage I quoted yesterday:

[M]ost books about the humanities take it as a given that we exist in a fallen time, that the golden age of the Classical education is in the past, but lately I’ve started to wonder if that time ever existed. In recollecting my own education, I’ve started to wonder if the contemporary notion of a “Classical education” is largely the product of a series of popular books that began with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and continued through Jacques Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve (1989), Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy (2009), William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014), and others. Like me, these writers were usually outsiders, many of them Jewish (which is to say, they were not themselves part of any notional WASP aristocracy), and they had in their youths at some point bought into the idea of a Classical education. They had pursued this ideal and now found the reality — the position of the Classics in our culture and our educational system — to be somewhat lacking.

Part of me embraced and part of me rejected what these men—they seemed to all be men—had to say. While I too honored the authors they honored, I hated how political conservatives hijacked the classics, using them to batter our multicultural society. “Austen, not Alice Walker” was the slogan of some, which infuriated me since I taught both Austen and Walker and loved them both. “Dead white men” (and a few token dead white women) were used as a club against living authors of color in ways that I found reprehensible. While I have taught Jane Austen so many times that I have parts of her memorized, I have done the same with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Lucille Clifton’s Quilting, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” They all sing to me, each in his or her own key.

But back to the canonical authors. It became a mission of mine to wrest them away from the reactionary agendas promoted by Lynne Cheney and William Bennett when they headed the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts under Reagan and Bush. If Percy Shelley is right (and I believe he is) that the great authors have a deep vision of human freedom, making them the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then by teaching and blogging about them, I hope to connect readers with their liberating visions. As Shelley, writing of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, puts it,

The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life…. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

The dusty classics enlarge our imaginations—or to use Lisa Simpson’s verb, embiggen us—and so do the best contemporary authors, including that current target of rightwing attacks, Toni Morrison. And as Shelley preaches, if our imaginations are enlarged, then we become motivated to create a world in which all of us—whatever our class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual identity—can have the freedom to put our full selves into play.

We feel the stirrings of possibility when we are in the grip of a great work of literature. My mission is to connect readers with works that will set the wheels in motion and give them a sense of where they might go with them.

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Classical Education and Upward Mobility

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2021
Zinaida Serebriakova, Zinaida Serebriakova Reading a Book

Wednesday

A fascinating article in the Los Angeles Book Review questions whether there was ever a golden age where most students were classically educated. According to Naomi Kanakia, it’s a myth that isn’t borne out by the facts.

Speaking as one who believes fervently that one should be well read and that classic literature enhances one’s life, I’m sad to say that she seems to have a point.

Kanakia starts with her own longing for that vision:

I’m an immense fan of books that bewail the state of the humanities and plead for a return to the educational system of yesteryear, when the average undergrad could, we are told, quote Homer in the original Greek, and when the US Senate was filled with philosopher kings who slept with Marcus Aurelius under their pillows.

She then reports that, for the past twelve years, her own reading choices have been shaped by her determination to achieve a “classical education.” She has done this, she says,

because I thought it was what you did: I thought all writers read Tolstoy and Euripides and Chaucer — that a writer would be laughed out of town if they weren’t familiar with the “the canon.”

Like the Vietnamese immigrant Phuc Tran, whom I wrote about recently, Kanakia used Clifton Fadiman’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classical Guide to World Literature to determine her reading choices. As a result, over the past 12 years she has read

Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Plutarch, the Bhagavad Gita, Defoe, Gibbon, Fielding, Richardson, St. Augustine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Pushkin, Cather, Faulkner, Woolf, Waugh, Nabokov, and others.

Much of Kanakia’s article is about her realization that few people in the past have subscribed to such an ideal. They didn’t do so in ancient Rome or in Elizabethan England or in 19th century Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard-Princeton-Yale. Indeed, more periods of history than not have thought it “ungentlemanly” to pay too much attention to books. Nor, she reports, do most contemporary writers advocate such an education:

[A]fter I came into contact with the literary world, I realized that I’d been operating from a very mistaken — and hopelessly bourgeois — set of beliefs. I’ve only rarely met other writers who care about the Classics. When one National Book Award–winning author asked me my favorite authors, I responded, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Henry James, and he chided me, saying I should read more contemporary books (I read plenty of contemporary books, but I’d think it strange if someone’s favorite author of all time was still alive).

She discovered the same was true of her classmates in a Master of Fine Arts creative writing in which she enrolled:

Forget about reading Homer, most hadn’t read Middlemarch or David Copperfield. To the extent that they were influenced by literature, it was by recent American literature: Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson were popular influences. Virginia Woolf, at least, had some adherents, but even the modernists weren’t terribly popular, though most had some familiarity at least with Faulkner and Hemingway….According to the Classical model, this is essentially the same as being uneducated. 

Kanakia wonders whether her vision was shaped by cultural conservatives like Harold Bloom and Allan Bloom—and whether they themselves were moved by wanted they wanted to believe than reality:

[M]ost books about the humanities take it as a given that we exist in a fallen time, that the golden age of the Classical education is in the past, but lately I’ve started to wonder if that time ever existed. In recollecting my own education, I’ve started to wonder if the contemporary notion of a “Classical education” is largely the product of a series of popular books that began with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and continued through Jacques Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve (1989), Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy (2009), William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014), and others. Like me, these writers were usually outsiders, many of them Jewish (which is to say, they were not themselves part of any notional WASP aristocracy), and they had in their youths at some point bought into the idea of a Classical education. They had pursued this ideal and now found the reality — the position of the Classics in our culture and our educational system — to be somewhat lacking.

Only twice in American history, Kanakia argues, has the ideal of a classical education ever predominated amongst those in power:

The ideal that haunts America is the notion of an educated elite: a political class that is also well versed in Classical literature and history. But it’s clear, at least to me, that whether such an elite ever existed in the United States is debatable. If it did, it was only at two moments: in late 18th-century Virginia and early 20th-century New England. The Virginian planters — the children and grandchildren of adventurers — used their wealth and leisure to study. In many cases, they were the first generation of their family to be formally educated. And the early 20th-century WASP elite, finally freed from the religious shackles their ancestors had worn, tried belatedly to catch up to the continental attainments that their great-grandparents had fled from….[T]he founding fathers were highly educated and well versed in Classical culture, as was the run of patrician presidents early in the 20th century: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Kanakia’s conclusion: While the ideal of being well-versed in the classics has been around for a long time, for the most part those in power have only paid lip service to it. This had the effect, however, of motivating people who saw it as a ticket to joining the power elites. As I noted in my post on Phuc Than, that is exactly how he saw it. As a result, they often came closer to the ideal than those they strove to emulate:

As Richard Karabel documented in his monumental work The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), the general raising of academic standards at elite universities is almost entirely due to the entrance of Jewish students at the beginning of the 20th century. Because Jewish kids took all this stuff seriously: they actually studied Latin and Greek; they actually studied and absorbed the Classics. In this devotion, they were continuing a process that’s occurred repeatedly throughout history: the children of the bourgeois exploiting brief periods when a Classical education might gain them an advantage in a changing world. They’re similar to the Florentine notaries who studied the secular Classics to improve their Latin and rise in the civil service. Or to the educated laymen of the 14th and 15th centuries in England, scions of gentle families impoverished by the Black Death or merchant families enriched by it, who turned their knowledge of Latin into influential positions at a court that had traditionally been the preserve of the priesthood. Or to Cicero, a fiery orator and novus homo (his family had never held a consulship) who put his talents in the service of an aristocratic party that needed a “man of the people” who could bear its standard and oppose the rising tide of populism.

And then she notes,

What proponents of the Classical education misunderstand is that people never learned Latin and Greek merely because it would “make you a better thinker” or “give you access to the world’s knowledge.” They learned those languages because, at certain times and places, it offered a concrete way of getting ahead. Generally, those were times and places when there was strong growth in a nation’s management responsibilities and when the traditional aristocracy was unable to meet those responsibilities. The middle class, to prove itself, would adopt the culture of the aristocrats, and do it better than they ever could. At most other times, the Classics would languish: they would either be actively disdained, as in early medieval Britain or high Republican Rome, or they would be given mere lip service, as during most of American history. It’s only the active engagement of the middle class that has ever renewed knowledge of the Classics.

And as is always the case, if strivers are too successful at adopting the culture of elites, the elites will simply change the culture:

In some ways, these Jewish students killed Classical education, because Harvard and Princeton and Yale realized that, if they were only to admit students on the basis of their knowledge of Greek and Latin, their entering class would be entirely Jewish.

By the end of the article, Kanakia arrives at a couple of discouraging conclusions. One is that a classical education will not produce leaders, at least in the current environment:

Notice, I leave aside the question of whether knowledge of the Classics makes you a better thinker or more capable leader. I would argue that it probably does but that, in most eras, the wisdom conferred by the Classics is more likely, as Tocqueville noted, to discourage you from pursuing them. As we can see in our own culture, nuance and wisdom are nowhere particularly desired. This is a time for anger, action, and black-and-white thinking.

Another is that most Americans will not be helped by a classical education:

For the bulk of Americans, who are destined to be employees rather than bosses, and whose public role, even as citizens, has been increasingly devalued by the slipping-away of our democracy, there is little need to concern oneself with their education, nor do I think it will be possible to get them to ignore the fact that the wisdom conferred by a Classical education will be useless to them in the life of precarity and drudgery to come.

And further on,

The Classics can’t save us. They can’t generate wealth and opportunity from nothing.

I won’t spend time today talking about why I disagree—my daily essays are devoted to the many different ways that the classics can indeed “change your life”—but I nevertheless find Kanakia’s article very useful. It has me thinking about why I think the way I do. Tomorrow’s post will share those reflections.

For the moment, I’ll just note that she does make one important concession in her final paragraph:

[A]t the moments when [the classics] are most useful, the moments when ordinary people once more have a role to play in public life, they inevitably emerge to guide the way.

Kanakia doesn’t provides examples as to how exactly this guidance will work. Her piece is much more about classical education as a means of credentialing rather than as a way to learn vital life skills. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see her acknowledge that, at certain times, the classics can prove useful.

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A Bridge Poem for Infrastructure Week

By Robin Bates | Published: November 15, 2021
Ernest Lawson, Brooklyn Bridge

Tuesday

Yesterday President Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, described by the White House as “a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness.” To celebrate, here’s a poem by Tennessee poet Will Allen Dromgoole,” who lived at a time (1860-1934) when such poems were regularly published in daily newspapers and when, as a result, poetry enjoyed a much higher readership than it does today.

The poem is somewhat hokey–Dromgoole sounds like she churned out poetry by the barrel, writing over 8000 poems in her lifetime–but it has a nice sentiment to it, very much in the spirit of Biden’s accomplishment. It shows how popular poetry–which is to say, poetry that could be understood by just about anyone–contributed to America’s civic religion in the early 20th century. The central tenet of that religion was that people should care more about the good of society and about future generations than about themselves.

Given that the poem is about building bridges, it also reminds us that America used to be more optimistic about its future. It used to have less difficulty imagining grand construction projects.

The Bridge Builder
By Will Allen Dromgoole

An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide.
Through which was flowing a sullen tide
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head;
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”

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Vax Resisters and…Wuthering Heights (?!)

By Robin Bates | Published: November 14, 2021
Fritz Eichenberg, Catherine Earnshaw haunted by regret

Monday

Adam Gallinsky, who teaches “leadership and ethics” at Columbia Business School, has written an eye-opening Washington Post article on the role of “anticipated regret” in vaccination decisions. Understanding the psychology at work, he says, “can help us get more shots into arms, removing one of the final obstacles to controlling the virus.” As I thought about the fear of feeling regret, I looked for literary examples and settled on, of all things, Wuthering Heights. I realize this is a stretch but hear me out.

First, however, to Gallinsky, who contends that positive incentives don’t necessarily work with the vaccine hesitant. That’s because, in their cost-benefit calculations, they fear the regret that comes with doing something wrong more than they fear the regret that might arise from doing nothing at all. To illustrate, Gallinsky cites the work of a Nobel-winning economist:

Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making — have demonstrated these tendencies in a series of experiments. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate feeling more regret if they were to lose money by switching to a new stock vs. taking a loss on their current stock. And this regret is maximally intensified when we freely choose to take action— we are not ordered or coerced — and when it involves new or experimental activities. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate more regret when imagining an accident that occurs while driving home along a new route compared with driving on one’s normal route. Anticipated regret is why people often prefer to stand still rather than move forward.

Gallinsky says that calculations often change, however, with vaccine mandates, which are proving to be overwhelmingly effective. (Gallinsky points out that, despite fierce initial resistance among New York police and predictions of mass resignations, in the end no more the three dozen out of 35,000 officers refused to get the shot.) “When people don’t feel the weight of making their own choice,” Gallinsky points out, “they aren’t as tormented by the anticipated negative outcomes of their decision.”

Gallinsky adds that mandates should be accompanied by “empathic firmness.” “When people sense that those enforcing a policy are listening to them,” he says, “they are less likely to shut down.”

Now to literature, where one finds many characters who take a seemingly safe and familiar route rather than an adventurous one (not that getting vaccinated is all that adventurous), only to regret it later. I single out Emily Bronte’s headstrong Catherine Earnshaw, who marries another member of the gentry rather than her soulmate Heathcliff. Anticipating regret if she makes the wild and unconventional choice, she chooses instead the familiar one, only to find herself deeply unhappy. Because she is a strong personality, she makes everyone around her miserable as well, and the household is in constant turmoil until she dies.

I realize now, in applying the work, that I disagree slightly with Gallinsky. He makes it sound as though it is only because the vaccine is unfamiliar that some are unwilling to take it. He doesn’t mention the positive rewards that come with not taking it. In Catherine’s case, the reward is a comfortable and familiar upper-class life. In the case of vaccine resisters, the reward is getting to feel both superior too and victimized by the Enlightenment world of science and medical expertise. One gets to rail against liberal elites and imagine them as frauds. In other words, many vaccine hesitaters anticipate regret at leaving a closed ecosystem that they have committed themselves to. Leaving would be more emotionally charged than selling stock or taking a different route home.

Sacrificing that ecosystem for mere health seems a poor tradeoff, even when health is no further away than the nearest pharmacy.

It appears a poor tradeoff, anyway, until one is hospitalized with Covid, at which point the medical profession appears far more attractive. Many find themselves experiencing actual regret at this stage, as Catherine does with her marriage. Unfortunately, by this point it’s too late.

Interestingly, like a number of the vaccine resisters, Catherine tries to have it both ways: she wants to have her husband and her lover at the same time. (Linton and Heathcliff, understandably, are less enthused by the idea.) For their part, the anti-vaccine crowd want to rail against doctors until they want these same doctors to cure them, just as they want the “socialist” programs of Medicare and Obamacare to cover their medical bills. For that matter, they don’t acknowledge how vaccines have saved us from small pox, polio, the measles, chicken pox, mumps, etc, etc. Like Catherine, many behave like entitled children as they fail to take responsibility for supporting the institutions that support them.

Commentator Tom Nichols, who describes himself as a Never Trump conservative, plays the role of the no-nonsense Nelly Dean, housekeeper at Wuthering Heights who is impatient with Catherine’s histrionic fits, when he calls America “an unserious nation threatened by millions of spoiled, stupid adult children.” Real adults act responsibly–which in this case means taking steps to protect themselves and others. The gyrations of anticipated regret look awfully silly when a safe and effective vaccine is ready to hand.

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Preaching the Gospel to the Poor

By Robin Bates | Published: November 13, 2021
Edward Henry Corbault, Dinah Morris in Adam Bede

Spiritual Sunday

Reprint of a Past Post

I reread George Eliot’s Adam Bede recently for the first time in decades and fell in love again with the itinerant Methodist preacher Dinah Morris. I share today her sermon on the Hayslope village green, which we watch through the eyes of a stranger.

It’s particularly interesting to read Dinah’s sermon at a time when church attendance in the United States is dramatically dropping. I don’t know if this is because people are turned off by the politicization of religion or for some other reason, but I find it sad that people are losing access to the spiritual nourishment that religion can provide. We need people like Dinah to help us get back in touch with the divine. Here’s the first half of Dinah’s sermon:

“A sweet woman,” the stranger said to himself, “but surely nature never meant her for a preacher.”

Perhaps he was one of those who think that nature has theatrical properties and, with the considerate view of facilitating art and psychology, “makes up” her characters, so that there may be no mistake about them. But Dinah began to speak.

“Dear friends,” she said in a clear but not loud voice “let us pray for a blessing.”

She closed her eyes, and hanging her head down a little continued in the same moderate tone, as if speaking to some one quite near her: “Savior of sinners! When a poor woman laden with sins, went out to the well to draw water, she found Thee sitting at the well. She knew Thee not; she had not sought Thee; her mind was dark; her life was unholy. But Thou didst speak to her, Thou didst teach her, Thou didst show her that her life lay open before Thee, and yet Thou wast ready to give her that blessing which she had never sought. Jesus, Thou art in the midst of us, and Thou knowest all men: if there is any here like that poor woman—if their minds are dark, their lives unholy—if they have come out not seeking Thee, not desiring to be taught; deal with them according to the free mercy which Thou didst show to her. Speak to them, Lord, open their ears to my message, bring their sins to their minds, and make them thirst for that salvation which Thou art ready to give.

“Lord, Thou art with Thy people still: they see Thee in the night-watches, and their hearts burn within them as Thou talkest with them by the way. And Thou art near to those who have not known Thee: open their eyes that they may see Thee—see Thee weeping over them, and saying ‘Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life’—see Thee hanging on the cross and saying, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’—see Thee as Thou wilt come again in Thy glory to judge them at the last. Amen.”

Dinah opened her eyes again and paused, looking at the group of villagers, who were now gathered rather more closely on her right hand.

“Dear friends,” she began, raising her voice a little, “you have all of you been to church, and I think you must have heard the clergyman read these words: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.’ Jesus Christ spoke those words—he said he came TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. I don’t know whether you ever thought about those words much, but I will tell you when I remember first hearing them. It was on just such a sort of evening as this, when I was a little girl, and my aunt as brought me up took me to hear a good man preach out of doors, just as we are here. I remember his face well: he was a very old man, and had very long white hair; his voice was very soft and beautiful, not like any voice I had ever heard before. I was a little girl and scarcely knew anything, and this old man seemed to me such a different sort of a man from anybody I had ever seen before that I thought he had perhaps come down from the sky to preach to us, and I said, ‘Aunt, will he go back to the sky to-night, like the picture in the Bible?’

“That man of God was Mr. Wesley, who spent his life in doing what our blessed Lord did—preaching the Gospel to the poor—and he entered into his rest eight years ago. I came to know more about him years after, but I was a foolish thoughtless child then, and I remembered only one thing he told us in his sermon. He told us as ‘Gospel’ meant ‘good news.’ The Gospel, you know, is what the Bible tells us about God.

“Think of that now! Jesus Christ did really come down from heaven, as I, like a silly child, thought Mr. Wesley did; and what he came down for was to tell good news about God to the poor. Why, you and me, dear friends, are poor. We have been brought up in poor cottages and have been reared on oatcake, and lived coarse; and we haven’t been to school much, nor read books, and we don’t know much about anything but what happens just round us. We are just the sort of people that want to hear good news. For when anybody’s well off, they don’t much mind about hearing news from distant parts; but if a poor man or woman’s in trouble and has hard work to make out a living, they like to have a letter to tell ’em they’ve got a friend as will help ’em. To be sure, we can’t help knowing something about God, even if we’ve never heard the Gospel, the good news that our Saviour brought us. For we know everything comes from God: don’t you say almost every day, ‘This and that will happen, please God,’ and ‘We shall begin to cut the grass soon, please God to send us a little more sunshine’? We know very well we are altogether in the hands of God. We didn’t bring ourselves into the world, we can’t keep ourselves alive while we’re sleeping; the daylight, and the wind, and the corn, and the cows to give us milk—everything we have comes from God. And he gave us our souls and put love between parents and children, and husband and wife. But is that as much as we want to know about God? We see he is great and mighty, and can do what he will: we are lost, as if we was struggling in great waters, when we try to think of him.

“But perhaps doubts come into your mind like this: Can God take much notice of us poor people? Perhaps he only made the world for the great and the wise and the rich. It doesn’t cost him much to give us our little handful of victual and bit of clothing; but how do we know he cares for us any more than we care for the worms and things in the garden, so as we rear our carrots and onions? Will God take care of us when we die? And has he any comfort for us when we are lame and sick and helpless? Perhaps, too, he is angry with us; else why does the blight come, and the bad harvests, and the fever, and all sorts of pain and trouble? For our life is full of trouble, and if God sends us good, he seems to send bad too. How is it? How is it?

“Ah, dear friends, we are in sad want of good news about God; and what does other good news signify if we haven’t that? For everything else comes to an end, and when we die we leave it all. But God lasts when everything else is gone. What shall we do if he is not our friend?”

Then Dinah told how the good news had been brought, and how the mind of God towards the poor had been made manifest in the life of Jesus, dwelling on its lowliness and its acts of mercy.

“So you see, dear friends,” she went on, “Jesus spent his time almost all in doing good to poor people; he preached out of doors to them, and he made friends of poor workmen, and taught them and took pains with them. Not but what he did good to the rich too, for he was full of love to all men, only he saw as the poor were more in want of his help. So he cured the lame and the sick and the blind, and he worked miracles to feed the hungry because, he said, he was sorry for them; and he was very kind to the little children and comforted those who had lost their friends; and he spoke very tenderly to poor sinners that were sorry for their sins.

“Ah, wouldn’t you love such a man if you saw him—if he were here in this village? What a kind heart he must have! What a friend he would be to go to in trouble! How pleasant it must be to be taught by him.

“Well, dear friends, who WAS this man? Was he only a good man—a very good man, and no more—like our dear Mr. Wesley, who has been taken from us?…He was the Son of God—’in the image of the Father,’ the Bible says; that means, just like God, who is the beginning and end of all things—the God we want to know about. So then, all the love that Jesus showed to the poor is the same love that God has for us. We can understand what Jesus felt, because he came in a body like ours and spoke words such as we speak to each other. We were afraid to think what God was before—the God who made the world and the sky and the thunder and lightning. We could never see him; we could only see the things he had made; and some of these things was very terrible, so as we might well tremble when we thought of him. But our blessed Savior has showed us what God is in a way us poor ignorant people can understand; he has showed us what God’s heart is, what are his feelings towards us.”

Amen.

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