S-USIH 2012 Conference Program

Society for U.S. Intellectual History

2012 Conference and Annual Meeting

The Graduate Center

CUNY

November 1 and 2, 2012

Conference Program

Thursday, November 1

Business Meeting, 9:00-10:30 (C198)

Society for U.S. Intellectual History Executive Committee Meeting

Introduction by Paul Murphy, 2012 President

Open to All S-USIH members

Session A, 10:00-11:45

American Loneliness, American Solitude: The View from Central Europe (Room C198)

Michael Kimmage, Catholic University of America

“Familiar Territory: Wolfgang Koeppen and American Loneliness”

Richard King, University of Nottingham

“It Goes with the Territory: Hannah Arendt and American Loneliness”

Martin Woessner, City University of New York

“The Cinema of Solitude: Terrence Malick, Martin Heidegger, and the Meaning of Human Existence”

Chair/Commentator: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Religion and the Discourses of Radical Activism in 20^thCentury America (Room C201)

Mark Pittenger, University of Colorado

“Liberal Theology and Oppositional Politics: The Unitarian Radicalism of John Haynes Holmes”

Andrew J. Ballou, Boston University

“Christian Idealism and Pacifist Practicability: The Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Search for an Effective Social Ethic”

Leilah Danielson, Northern Arizona University

“Working-class Pragmatism: A.J. Muste and Progressive Labor, 1919-1936”

Chair/Commentator: Joseph Kip Kosek, George Washington University

Philosophy, Science, and Realism: Reflections on Early 20^thCentury Realism (Room C202)

Gary Hatfield, University of Pennsylvania

“Science and Philosophy in Conversation: Roy Wood Sellars and American Critical Realism”

Patsy Manfredi, Southern Illinois University

“Objects and Dewey’s Pragmatic Instrumentalism”

Chair/Commentator: Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania

The Reactionary Mind at the American Founding (Room C203)

Tom Cutterham, Oxford University

“The Revolution’s Crisis of Patriarchal Imagination”

Craig Bruce Smith, Brandeis University

“Institutionalizing Honor in the Early Republic”

David J. Gary, City University of New York

“Rufus King and the Reading of the Higher Law”

Chair/Commentator: Seth Ackerman, Cornell University

Varieties of Scientific Experience: Contesting Cultural Authority, 1865-1925 (Room C204)

Paul Croce, Stetson University

"The Scientific Making of an Audacious Philosopher: Young WilliamJames’s 'Program of the Future of Science.'"

Andrew Jewett, Harvard University

“Science, Freedom, and Control in American Philosophy, 1900-1920”

Henry M. Cowles, Princeton University

“Charles Sanders Peirce and 'The Very Age of Methods'”

Chair/Commentator: Francesca Bordogna, University of Notre Dame

Educating the Public: New England Intellectual Discourses and Educational Visions (Room C205)

Jonathan G. Koefoed, Boston University

“Guiding the Romantic Mind: James Marsh, Richard Henry Dane Sr., and the Educational Vision of Cautious Romanticism”

Amy Kittelstrom, Sonoma State University

“Education vs. Evangelism: Liberal Mindtraining from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to Thomas Davidson”

Cristina V. Groeger, Harvard University

“Service to Selection: Vocational Education and Intelligence Testing in Boston Public Schools, 1919-1930”

Chair/Commentator: Charles Capper, Boston University

Lunch Break, 11:45-1:00

Session B, 1:15-3:00

Intellectual Authority, Communities of Discourse, and the Culture Wars (Room C198)

Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Masters of Culture Warfare: How Evangelicals Have Thrived on the Battlefield of Intellectual Authority”

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, The New School

“In Defense of the Family: Parents, Teachers, Taxes, and Sex Education” 

Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University

“Rethinking the Culture Wars: How the Wars of Position in Higher Education Complicate the Conventional Narrative”

Chair/Commentator: James Davison Hunter, University of Virginia

Sympathy, Aesthetics, and Politics (Room C201)

Alan Robert Ginsberg, Columbia University

“The Salome Ensemble—Translational Motion Across Oceans and Emotions”

Andrew L. Erdman, Independent Scholar

“George Jessel and Darryl Zanuck Don’t Care: Commerce, Politics and the Making of ‘The I Don’t Care Girl’”

Lisa Szefel, Pacific University

“‘The Glare of Vivid Words’: Taste, Tears, and Trotsky”

Chair/Commentator: Ann Fabian, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

The Sciences of Emotion in Postwar America (Room C202)

Susan Lanzoni, Harvard University

“Empathy Metrics:  Calibrating Social Emotions in the Social Sciences”

Nadine Weidman, Harvard University

“Konrad Lorenz and the Science of Emotion”

Erika Milam, Princeton University
"Alpha Males: Aggression in Men of Science and Other Primates"

Chair/Commentator: To be determined

Critiques of Kissinger’s Realism from Détente to the War on Terror (Room C203)

Brian Mueller, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

“The Institute for Policy Studies and the Radical Confrontation with Realpolitik”

Ellen G. Rafshoon, Georgia Gwinnett College

“Realpolitik and Religion: Morgenthau and Kissinger’s Jewish Problem”

Chair/Commentator: Joseph G. Morgan, Iona College

Politics of the Postwar University: Democracy, Civil Rights, and Decolonization (Room C204)

Mary Ellen Lennon, Marian University

“New Democracies, New Universities: The Creation of the African and American Universities Program, 1958-1965”

Marybeth Gasman, University of Pennsylvania

“Perceptions of Black College Presidents: Sorting Through Stereotypes and Reality to Gain a Complex Picture”

Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University

“God and Man at Yale and the Politics of Higher Education in the 1950s”

Chair/Commentator: Peter Wirzbicki, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Religious and Political Liberalism in Twentieth-Century America (Room C205)

David Mislin, University of Massachusetts Boston

“‘There Sit Side By Side Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew’: The Religious and Political Origins of Modern American Pluralism”

Kip Richardson, Harvard University

 “‘The Man Who Gets the Largest Salary Can Do the Most Good’: The Political Economics of the Social Gospel Moderates”

Gene Zubovich, University of California, Berkeley

“The Politicization of Protestantism in the WWII Era: Catholics, Evangelicals, and the Protestant Establishment”

Chair/Commentator: Matthew Hedstrom, University of Virginia

Session C, 3:15-5:00

Roundtable: Liberalism, Conservatism, and the 2012 Election (Room C198)

Chair: Sam Tanenhaus, Editor, New York Times Book Review

Beverly Gage, Yale University

David Greenberg, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Orlando Patterson, Harvard University

Leo Ribuffo, George Washington University

Roundtable: On the Discourses of Pluralism and Secularism (Room C202)

Chair: Tisa Wenger, Yale University 

Pamela E. Klassen, University of Toronto

K. Healon Gaston, Harvard University

Laura Levitt, Temple University

Early America and the Intellectual Foundations of Cultural Institution Building (Room C203)

Michael D. Hattem, Yale University

“‘Improving the Minds of Our Fellow Citizens’: The Independent Reflector and Print as a Form of Institution-Building in British America”

Mark Boonshoft, Ohio State University

“The Great Awakening, Academies, and Ambition in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic”

Jonathan W. Wilson, Syracuse University

“The Bread and the Cheese: Writing Americans in Manhattan, 1821-1828”

Chair/Commentator: Catherine O’Donnell, Arizona State University

Transatlantic Communities of Legal Scholars, 1870-1914 (Room C204)

David M. Rabban, University of Texas

“The Historical School of American Jurisprudence”

Mark S. Weiner, Rutgers University-Newark

“Lewis Henry Morgan and the Rule of the Clan”

Benjamin Coates, Wake Forest University

“Exceptionalism and Internationalism in the Professionalization of International Law in the United States, 1898-1914”

Chair and Commentator: Nadav Shoked, Northwestern University

Left-Liberal Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Modernity (Room C205)

Jay Garcia, New York University

“Richard Wright, Philip Wylie and the Culture Concept”

Drew Maciag, Independent Scholar

“John F. Kennedy and the Intellectuals:  One Brief Shining Moment for Modernity”

Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University

“The Making of a Cultural Historian: Warren Susman and American Cultural Criticism in the 1950s and 1960s”

Chair and comment: James Levy, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

Plenary Session, 6:00-8:00 (Elebash Recital Hall)

Roundtable: Speech Rights: Legal History as Intellectual History

Chair: Allison Perlman, University of California, Irvine

Jack Balkin, Yale University

Vincent Blasi, Columbia University

Ronald Collins, University of Washington

Catherine Ross, George Washington University       

Friday, November 2

Session D, 10:00-11:45

Historians and the Academy: Politics and Profession in the Careers of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and C. Vann Woodward  (Room C198)

Michael O’Brien, Cambridge University

“C. Vann Woodward in His Letters”

Sheldon Hackney, University of Pennsylvania

“C. Vann Woodward: The Outsider as Insider”

David Moltke-Hansen, University of South Carolina

“From Edinburgh to Rome: Society in the Thought and Life of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese”

Chair/Commentators: Martin Burke, Lehman College and the Graduate Center (CUNY), and Daniel Joseph Singal, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

The Expansive Legacy of Francis Schaeffer (Room C201)

Ian Carr McPherson, Saint Louis University

“The Making of Francis Schaeffer: How Youth Culture Defined the Ideas that Redefined American Evangelicalism”

David Sessions, New York University

“Francis Schaeffer and Worldview Education”

Alissa Wilkinson, The King’s College

“Making Art for Jesus: Schaeffer’s Lingering Effect on the Art-and-Faith Community”

Chair/Commentator: Damon Linker, University of Pennsylvania

Behavioral Sciences in the Postwar Era: Community of Discourse or Community of Practice? (Room C202)

Philippe Fontaine, École normale supérieure de Cachan and Institut universitaire de France

“The Committee on the Behavioral Sciences: When Natural Scientists Talk about Society, 1949–1955”

Hunter Heyck, University of Oklahoma

“The Career of High Modern Social Science”

Jeff Pooley, Muhlenberg College

“‘A Not Particularly Felicitous Phrase’: A History of the ‘Behavioral Sciences’

Label”

Chair/Commentator: Nicolas Guilhot, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/New York University

Discourses of Temporality in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Room C203)

Jamie Pietruska, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

“‘The Great American Prophet’: Edward Bellamy and the Politics of Foresight”

Laura Thiemann Scales, Stonehill College

“‘Strange Foreshadowing’: Prophecy and Unpredictable Reading in Dred (1856)”

Kyla Schuller, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

“Handmaidens of Heredity: The Queer Evolutions of the First Generation of Women Physicians”

Chair/Commentator: Rosalind Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Religion, Presidential Elections, and Public Philosophies (Room C204)

Daniel K. Williams, University of West Georgia

“When the Right-to-Life Turned Right: The Development of the Pro-Life

Movement’s Alliance with Political Conservatism”

Christopher Shannon, Christendom College

“From Goldwater to Guadalupe: The Strange Career of L. Brent Bozell”

Raymond J. Haberski, Marian College

“The Illusory Community: Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, and Rise of a New Metaphor”

Chair/Commentator: John Fea, Messiah College

Postwar Political Economy (Room C205)

Caley Horan, Princeton University

“Selling ‘Self-Made’ Security: Private Insurance and the Emergence of Neoliberal Governance in the Post-WWII United States”

Mike O’Connor, Independent Scholar

“Tax Revolt!: California’s Proposition 13 and Modern American Conservatism”

Chair/Commentator: David Steigerwald, Ohio State University

Lunch Break, 11:45-1:00

Keynote Address, 1:15-3:00

Introduction by S-USIH President, Paul Murphy

David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley

“Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Survivalism, and the Question of Secularization”

Session D, 3:15-5:00

Roundtable: The Meeting of the Minds: Reckoning with Corey Robin and Michael Kazin, or, Left and Right in Theory and History (Room C198)

Chair: L.D. Burnett, University of Texas-Dallas

Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

James Livingston, Rutgers University

Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Michael Kazin, Georgetown University

Roundtable: New Directions: Ideology, Transnationalism, and the Role of the U.S. in the World (Room C201)

Chair: Christopher McKnight Nichols, Oregon State University

David Engerman, Brandeis University

Brad Simpson, Princeton University

Daniel Immerwahr, Northwestern University

Roundtable: Conceptual Contexts: Historians and Philosophers in Discourse on Religious Ideas (Room C202)

Chair: Marilyn Fischer, University of Dayton

John Kaag, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Louise W. Knight, Northhwestern University

Anthony B. Smith, University of Dayton

German Ideas and Intellectuals in America (Room C203)

David Weinfeld, New York University

“Self-Hating German: Horace Kallen’s Anglophile Rejection of German Ideas”

Daniel Bessner, Duke University

“Hans Speier and the Rise of the American Defense Intellectual”

Benjamin L. Alpers, University of Oklahoma

“Leo Strauss and German Thought in America”

Chair/Commentator: Anne Kornhauser, City College of New York (CUNY)

Concepts, Dialogue, and Community in the American Novel of Ideas (Room C204)

Anthony Hutchison, University of Nottingham

“Charisma in the Post-war American Novel of Politics”

Adam Kelly, Harvard University

“Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace”

Peter Kuryla, Belmont University

“Metaphysical Intimacy: Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein and The Varieties of Religious Experience”

Chair/Commentator: Morris Dickstein, CUNY Graduate Center

Going Public: Scientists in 20^th Century U.S. Culture, Politics, and War (Room C205)

Alexander Olson, University of Michigan

“Strength in Numbers: Professional Networks, Mass Media, and the Science Service”

Rebecca Onion, University of Texas at Austin

“Restoring Color to Science: Frank Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium as Cultural Intervention”

Sarah Bridger, California Polytechnic

“Access and Expertise Without Influence: Jason Scientists and the War in Vietnam”

Chair/Commentator: David K. Hecht, Bowdoin College

Plenary Session, 6:00-8:00 (Elebash Recital Hall)

Roundtable: The Most Commanding Theme of U.S. Intellectual History?

Chair: David Sehat, Georgia State University

Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas-Dallas

Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester

Jennifer Burns, Stanford University

Jonathan Scott Holloway, Yale University

Updated 10.16.2012

Tired Thoughts on Social Psychology, Neoroscience, and Intellectual History

I just got back this afternoon from an overly long--and far too eventful--family vacation (should that last word be in quotation marks?) that consisted of spending almost a month driving back and forth across about a dozen-and-a-half states.*  I hadn't intended not to post to USIH during the trip, but life seemed to get in the way. Though I have neither the time nor the energy for a longer (or more polished) post today, I wanted to put up a little something to mark my return home. And for a variety of reasons I've been thinking a bit lately about whether and how social psychology and neuroscience might inform the practice of intellectual history.

I've begun reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, a fascinating book that raises a lot of important questions about how people think. What I particularly appreciate about Kahneman's approach is that it seems more grounded in empirical research than a lot of "evolution psychology" that purports to explain social behavior, but often seems merely to affirm dominant cultural prejudices via a series of just-so stories.  While reading Kahneman, I've repeatedly asked myself whether work like this might inform my understanding of intellectual history. While at some abstract level I think it might, I'm not entirely sure how it would do so.


Meanwhile, I find myself back in Oklahoma during yet another record heatwave.  We're apparently expecting 113º weather on Wednesday, with highs over 105º the rest of the week.  Bearing in mind that hot weather no more proves global warming than mild weather disproves it, heat like this makes me wonder, yet again, why people (especially in Oklahoma) are so resistant to the idea of global warming, which has, in fact, been pretty conclusively proven via actual science.  Obviously, (well-funded) ideology has a lot to do with it. But given the fact that, in a state like Oklahoma, things have become uncomfortably hotter, why do people believe ideology over what appears to be empirical evidence to the contrary?

I should point out in raising these questions that I don't have any answers (I suspect that I wouldn't on a day on which I hadn't driven from Atoka, Tennessee to Norman, Oklahoma...I'm certainly not going to have them on a day on which I have).  I should point out, however, that, about a year ago, Mike O'Connor raised some similar issues on this blog.  I'll add that I agree with those in comments on Mike's post who caution against taking at face value many claims about extraordinary new discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive science.  However, the existence of a lot of bad cog sci and, with it, bad social psychology, doesn't mean that we intellectual historians might not still learn from good cog sci and good social psychology.



_______________

* The itinerary was:  OK to NC, NC to OH, OH to VA, VA to MA, MA to NY, NY to MA, MA to NY, NY to VA, VA to NC, NC to OK.  It should be stressed that each of these legs served a tangible family purpose (none was merely a matter of tourism), though some of them were caused by an utterly unexpected family emergency.  But if that looks exhausting to you, I can only affirm that it was!

Inarticulate by Choice: the Decline of Letter Writing and the Future of the Intellectual Past, Part Two

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Along with others of my generation, I have witnessed the decline of the practice of letter writing in my lifetime.

My question in this small series of posts is whether this matters. On a personal level, it matters to me greatly. But for our purposes here on the USIH blog, I am hoping one or two people might ruminate with me about what we might be losing not just personally but also professionally, if anything, with the demise of letter writing. Should we accept with acquiescence the complete displacement of this ancient practice by electronic forms of communication--email, text messaging, Facebook, and the like? Are they really the same or even better as seems to be widely assumed?

I mentioned in last week's post that I had the experience of exchanging letters with a close friend for the duration of the semester I recently spent in Italy. Here, we both use email, including to keep in touch with one another in between the times we spend together, so we saw this as an experiment to see whether letter-writing was, in fact, the ideal way for us to keep in touch for those five months. If it wasn't, we were ready to communicate in the ways more common today. But it was ideal. As a result, I am drawing on this experience, since it is so fresh in my mind, to try to articulate what I, as just one witness to this momentous change in personal communications, find so different about exchanging letters. While I already knew what letters meant to me growing up, re-experiencing them after moving on to electronic forms of communication has made this difference very clear.

For anyone who has received even one meaningful letter in his or her lifetime, the benefits are well known. From a personal, or better human, standpoint, it should go without saying (though I think in these times it does not) that experiences that involve the five senses are often more deeply gratifying than those that do not. There are few things in life more wonderful than receiving an actual, tangible letter from someone one loves. The love letter, after all, is legendary for making tangible the presence of the beloved in his or her absence. Hence, customs of yore like adding a scent of perfume or kissing the seal (the Internet age didn't invent abbreviations, though it may have made them less endearing than S.W.A.K.) Recipients seem to go into a kind of a trance, and the act of opening the letter is, without doubt, a sensory experience...


But, snapping back to professional reality here, is there something about letters that is lost for those whose relations do not necessarily fall in the category of the hopelessly in love, at least in the romantic sense?

I would contend, yes. Briefly this has to do with several characteristics of certain letters, such as those to which we often turn in intellectual history. Because we have moved on wholesale to other forms of communication, these characteristics are easily put in sharp profile by way of contrast with email.

Length. Emails are, as general rule, much shorter than a typical letter exchanged between two correspondents really aiming to communicate something.

Time. The time it takes to write a letter is, as a general rule, thus longer than for an email. Consequently, it takes longer to read.

Composition. The passage of time alone does something to the process of composition. By now, it is a well-known and oft-heard complaint that most emails show signs of having been written in haste. Typos, grammatical errors, and missing punctuation marks are commonplace. But composing a letter calls out for more than just correction. When time is allowed to pass during the writing process, the mind goes through different dispositions or moods in its encounter with the subject it is contemplating and sees different sides of the question. These moods are reflected in the style of our writing, which is (typically--of course there are exemplary emails and less than stellar letters) so different in a letter versus an email message.

These moods can be discerned in other kinds of writing which, so far, have survived the electronic communications revolution. We still see fit to write essays, articles, and books, after all. And on the pages of these, whether tangible pieces of paper or visual representations of them on screen, certain words mark these changes of mood quite openly: however, further, in illustration, etc. But there are other changes of mood not signaled so openly, unnoticed sometimes even by the one writing, let alone the one reading. These subtleties can be fascinating and uniquely revealing. They give us a sense of the complicated texture of our thoughts, their ins and outs, our ups and downs, their intermingling with our other thoughts. Their playing out over time is one of the main gifts we receive when we get to share in someone else's thoughts, isn't it?

Deliberateness. Once one has spent any length of time composing a letter, just as with building a wall or planting a garden or teaching one's child or student, it is natural to stand back, even momentarily. Whether just taking in a breath after any form of exertion more extensive than a brief spurt of energy, or by disposition or habit surveying the results, one generally takes another look before pressing "send," unlike with email. We do not have to go any further for evidence of this built-in pause for reflection than the institution of the unsent letter, something in symbiotic relation to the letter itself, which we have so far assumed to have been sent to its designated recipient.

When someone takes a second look at his or her words before presenting them to someone else, conveying them becomes a deliberate act.

There is much to be said for sharing ideas outside of the choreography of deliberateness. Far be it from me to rule out altogether the spontaneous expression between two people, though its beauty (or helpfulness, depending on the context) may in truth lie in its rarity. But surely unedited and edited expression can coexist.

What will a world without deliberateness in written communication between people look like?

Privacy. Yet the kind of deliberateness that comes into play is different from that which prevails when one is preparing a piece for wider circulation. For me, one of the most off-putting aspects of email and Facebook-type networking is the fudging that is possible regarding who is the proper recipient, the potential use of these forms for communication with more than one person at a time. I realize they do not have to be used that way, and that the mass production and consumption of home printers that scan, fax, and copy have brought new ease to the copying of even a real letter. However, letter writing, as an inherited practice with a history, brings with it expectations that appear to be lacking in the newer communication forms that are untethered to traditions of privacy and uniqueness.

Receiving a letter you know was meant for you and only you is different from receiving an email. Your name and address are hand-written on the envelope, perhaps more commonly now, since not all of us print envelopes, or typed by means of computer or even the occasional typewriter. The envelope and paper, like the writing implement used to draft the letter, was a choice made with the full knowledge that you would be the recipient. If the upshot was just that you feel special, these things could be dismissed as superficial, I suppose. Our culture of marketing and advertising capitalizes on the omnipresent desire to feel special. What is different in this case is these signs of consideration adorn contents that resist the usual homogenization, commodification, and superficiality of today's cult of personalization. In this case, there is no consumer item, nothing that has to be insured for hundreds of dollars, but instead something often far more valuable: thought as expressed in words. But this is not thought aimed at just anyone. It is thought tailored precisely for you, either as a small group, or better yet, a single individual. And it is generally not--not yet, anyway--thought that is prepared for formal publication. (Some letter writers of course address themselves to more than one person and still others have their eye on eventual publication. But they are still writing for someone in particular in the here and now.)

Eclecticism. A professional email tends to focus on a single topic. Even when not narrowly devoted to one concrete task, which is not often, it is rarely as mixed in content as a letter. Letters, by form, tend to blend personal and professional topics, even if one is dominant. This eclecticism makes letters different from other private forms of communication and as well as public ones.

Eclecticism brings freedom to explore different sides of a question and, in fact, different questions altogether, without having to justify why to the same extent as in an article or paper. The usual expectation of limited focus so much a part of email today prevails only in the most pared-down kind of professional letter designed to accomplish a concrete task with speed and efficiency. In a more involved letter that aims at an exchange of ideas, non sequitur is par for the course. There is much variation, but for the most part while thoughts are organized in paragraphs, paragraphs do not have to relate to one another directly. Thus, while there might be a greater deliberateness, more editing and attention to form, there can also be greater freedom in content.

This freedom, I realize, could be why forms like this one, the blog post, currently have such appeal. Some of the old letter writing energies may have been redirected here. In the starkly bifurcated world of memo-type work emails and published work, where else can people explore ideas together in a way that does not enforce unity and formal coherence prematurely? Of course there are conversations in person or long telephone conversations, which are in a class of their own. But generally speaking, they leave no written record, as journal writing seems to be going the same way as the letter. This is good for one of the values above, privacy, but not always so good for the multi-layered communication that can happen when one spends time thinking about someone else when not in his or her presence. Blog posts, new for me to consider, do not of course have the precision regarding the intended reader(s) that distinguishes letters.

Meditation. Ultimately, what struck me the most about my recent re-immersion in letter writing was the way it enhanced the meditative aspects of my life. Others commented that receiving letters these days is such an unusual treat that they could not understand how I could resist tearing a letter open and reading it immediately upon receipt. Instead a letter can sit on my desk unopened for a significant amount of time.

At first this was not the case. But the exchange of letters, and the amazing regularity of them in our case, soon tapped into a part of life often shunted to the side by the press of daily events--or more aptly, tapped into a particular disposition toward all of life. It was a disposition with which I was familiar, but not to this degree.

I knew that within each received envelope there awaited a report of various happenings, ranging from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous, that constitute a person's days; her musings on the political scene; her exquisite observations of the natural world, news of which she conveyed with as much attentiveness as with the human world; the activities of family members, friends, and acquaintances, some shared and some unknown to me; her own projects and plans; and a sensitive response to what I had written her in my last letter, or to something perhaps from our history as friends. This bounty removed a kind of underlying tone of urgency in the daily experience of time and put in its place a kind of generalized desire to savor, reflect, contemplate, meditate.

I chose to read her letters when I could concentrate solely on them and enter this state of mind. Doing so freed me from the demands of the moment, however wonderful they too might be at that time, or however difficult. Concrete current moments, hours, or days can exert such powerful influences on thought and feeling and as much as we might know these influences should not hold such sway, they often do. But there have existed various traditions, institutions, practices, or habits that help limit their influence, when negative, and shore up that alternative disposition. As they fall away, isn't it a whole way of life we are losing--a way of life that is inextricable from our field of study? We are acquainted with the way in which the demands of teaching and committee work can edge out time for our "own work." Yet it is not just time it edges out, but a particular kind of meditative or contemplative state, as in the deeper level of concentration required of a long, ongoing project versus a quick answer to a small, focused question or the completion of a specific task.

In the case of intellectual history, edging out this meditative state might mean losing just about everything.

To be continued...

Irony and Sin

The remains of the Twin Towers were still smoldering when Roger Rosenblatt's essay in Time appeared.  The aftermath of America's "worst" day since Pearl Harbor revealed the dawning of a new, profound era to Rosenblatt and other conservative observers.  "One good thing could come from this horror," he wrote, "it could spell the end of the age of irony."

Right...irony disappeared into a haze of violence and robo-patriotism.  More than a decade after the event that made our world "real" again, it seems pretty clear that without irony we are stuck wondering what the hell just happened.  I had a problem not merely with the impulse of many conservatives had to declare an end to irony--which meant to them an end to the culture wars--but with the reflexive way many conservatives and many liberals used Reinhold Niebuhr as their go-to guy for rationalizing the age that would follow the end of irony.

Niebuhr's famous essay, "Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist," was reworked into a clarion call for defeating evil in the age of terror.  The cold war caricature of Niebuhr was resurrected as the dark, brooding theologian of war.  His sense of irony reimagined as a the worse kind of engagement--America would be given a pass on evil acts as long as it claimed to defend (and spread) civilization.

Yet missing from this discourse was the foundation on which Niebuhr built his sense of irony--his understanding and acceptance of sin.  I write that word knowing that it might conjure images of Puritans, the devil...and the Church Lady.  I accept the slippage because the aspect that enraged me as the U.S. plowed across two countries was the willful lack of reflection.  I wrote about Susan Sontag's rage in this respect earlier, and reading the perceptive discussions on irony over the last week here made me think further about the link, as James Levy writes so evocatively about, between irony and engagement.

Niebuhr considered himself nothing if not an engaged religious intellectual.  He was a preacher more than a theologian, according to his autobiography, and had view of sin that differed markedly from versions of original sin in that he believed the fallen nature of man did not condemn humanity to existence of perpetual paralysis.  Rather he understood sin as essential to seeing or recognizing without qualifications the work that needed to be done.  In other words, humanity was in a collective of hope because it was in a collective of despair.  Irony described the state of affairs but not the state of humanity.

I admire the different discussions of irony we've had here.  And it seems to me that there are two broad ways to understand and perhaps use the term from those discussions.  Jim Livingston gives us the paring of William Appleman Williams with practicioners of irony in the first half of the cold war--Niebuhr, Burke, White.  Accordingly we are caught in a play on truth--recognition of that existence does not clarify our state but moves us from understanding our plight as tragedy to irony. And we have James Levy's philosophical discussion of irony as processed through the culture of audience.  In Levy's understanding, irony makes evident the culture of reproduction--its technocracy from top to bottom--and thus using the methods of play to create not a reproduction but a fractured mirror and therefore a critique of the culture we often can't see clearly enough to critique.

Both versions are products of modernity and as such, I think, suggest the existence of third, foundational understanding of irony. Chris Shannon in his review of cold war social science and in particular in his comments following the post, argues for a way beyond our modern use of irony--as a reminder of what the object of irony might be and therefore the point of engagement.  Shannon points out at the heart of the struggle to make sense of the world either violated or imagined by social science is the human person. Irony makes sense only if one accepted that the person was rooted in a perpetual, not a sociological, community.  By this I mean a community that was not waiting to be discovered or perfected or more fully realized by the advancements in science, technology or, even, theology.  It was a community that people lived within but had no real ability to fully understand.  And the distance between living and understanding allowed for two responses, a humility borne out of awe of ignorance and a confidence (and hubris) borne of out awe of accumulation.

Niebuhr practiced a theology of irony because he believed both positions were joined by the human condition of sin. Neither could recognize the their truths were not normative; and neither would allow that those of the other position were involved in the same struggle to preserve this perpetual community.  But accepting sin meant accepting something modernity was suppose to make obsolete--the irrational belief that, as Niebuhr wrote in 1925 as a young preacher in Detriot, the "cross is a symbol of ultimate reality."  But this ultimate reality was not to be theorized, measured, and cataloged.   Nor was it to be understood as exceptional, as a metaphysical club that gave members a pass on dealing with non-members.

This is why for Niebuhr the Christian church could not be pacifist.  Faced with the crimes of fascism and communism, Niebuhr went to war because he saw abominations against the perpetual community.  Both movements abandoned civilization in an attempt to produce a materialist definition of the person--that was tragic (and horrific).  What Niebuhr saw as ironic was the terrible prospect of responding to these abominations because whatever means would be used to counter fascism and communism would violate civilization as well.  But Niebuhr's use of sin could make him sound "churchy" and alienating.    

Yet, Niebuhr's irony, grounded as it was in sin, presaged a reality that allowed him to argue for a type of engagement that went beyond the tautology of truth that Jim Livingston points to and a world of engagement that James Levy's ironic brigades imagine for us.  As Chris Shannon notes, to make a perpetual community viable requires recognizing that there are limits on a society, and that this society also accepts a notion of perpetual community.  For Niebuhr, there was no other way to understand those two ideas than to recognize the relationship between our perpetual community and a kingdom of God.  That was the Christian life for Niebuhr and it was the source of his irony.  When many other post-9/11 conservatives rallied to return the United States to a pre-culture wars reality, claiming a return literally to God, they often used Niebuhr as a crutch.  What they utterly overlooked (or more likely willfully dismissed) was Niebuhr's radical notion of irony in calling any society back to God.  It's not that Niebuhr shared more in common with the critics of the war on terror than it's promoters acknowledged, but that his view of civilization shared little in common with a materialist notion often associated with civilization.  We often forget that Niebuhr shared Marx's visceral repulsion to the degradation of modern industrial society.  But Marx never went far enough for Niebuhr. (a view Zizek seems to share as well, correct?  Perhaps that is where Zizek is headed when he praises the Chinese cultural revolution for its ideological boldness in attempting to make community an ideology)  For Neibuhr irony described the contemporary situation, sin grounded that situation in history, and community existed as the reality that made the human person something more than a sociological study.