Revisiting Leo Strauss's "Why We Remain Jews" (A High Holidays Post)

We're currently in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays: last Monday and Tuesday were Rosh Hashanah; Yom Kippur starts this Tuesday at sunset.  I have a fairly complicated, and fluctuating, personal relationship to Judaism. I can't--and don't--claim to be a believer of any sort. Yet I always celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Since moving to Norman, I've attended a traditional High Holiday minyan that a number of faculty and community members put together at the University of Oklahoma's Hillel.  Being essentially a non-believer yet spending all day on Yom Kippur fasting and attending shul both is, and isn't, unusual.  It's unusual because, on the face of it, it doesn't make a lot of sense (it puzzled many of my non-Jewish friends in college). Yet, within the Jewish community, it's its own kind of tradition. People like me are often called "three-day Jews," a term that began life entirely pejoratively within the late-nineteenth or early twentieth-century German Jewish community, but now has slightly less negative baggage associated  with it.*

Thinking about these issues this year led me to reread Leo Strauss's lecture, "Why We Remain Jews," which was given at the University of Chicago's Hillel half a century ago, on February 4, 1962.  This talk has received much attention since its initial publication in the 1990s.** The lecture's appearance in print, and the subsequent interest in it, has reflected a more general reconsideration of Strauss as a Jewish thinker and as a thinker about Jewish things that has taken place in the last two decades or so, and which has led Strauss to be taken more seriously by a variety of academics outside the intellectual circle defined by his students and his students' students.


"Why We Remain Jews," in particular, seems to have an appeal for people who have an otherwise ambivalent relationship to Strauss.  To take two examples:  Eugene Sheppard concludes his critical, but not hostile, intellectual biography of the young Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile (Brandeis, 2006), with a discussion of "Why We Remain Jews." This leads into the book's two concluding, unusually personal paragraphs, in which Sheppard notes that while he "reject[s] many of Strauss's fundamental convictions about humanity and politics," he sees a "progressive and radical alternative" in Strauss that has been, as yet, too little explored.*** The political scientist and anti-Straussian student of Straussians Anne Norton provides another example. Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2004), which excoriates the Straussians while attempting to rescue Strauss's legacy from them, gave a talk at a conference I attended on Leo Strauss in Nottingham, England, in which she used "Why We Remain Jews" as the (somewhat, but only somewhat, ironic) basis of a bitterly righteous critique of Guantanamo and the torture and detention policies initiated by George W. Bush.  Having largely blamed Straussians for what went wrong in the Bush years in her book, Norton managed to find in Strauss's "Why We Remain Jews" resources with which to attack what she saw as his students' works.

In the broadest sense, Strauss makes a case in "Why We Remain Jews" that Judaism as a religion, very traditionally conceived, remains necessary, even for those Jews for whom religious belief "is not feasible, humanly speaking" (320).  Such a message might, in principle, be illuminating for Jews like myself.  And it was in this spirit that I reread the text during these High Holidays.

What I found, however, was not a particularly usable Strauss, at least not for me.

Like practically everything written by Leo Strauss, "Why We Remain Jews" is a complicated, multilayered text, and I'm not going to be able to summarize it comprehensively in a blog post (it's available, if you're interested, at the Internet Archive, at the link above).  The title as well as the subtitle ("Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?") were not chosen by Strauss. Instead, his talk was one of a series of lectures on this theme, which seems to have been chosen by the U of C Hillel Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky.  Strauss reframes the theme in terms of "the Jewish Question," which Strauss does not explicitly define, but which he seems to understand very traditionally.  And his overall thesis about it is, at first glance, very straightforward: "there is no solution to the Jewish problem" (317).

Much of the talk consists of rejecting a series of potential solutions.  Individual acts of assimilation are generally doomed to failure, as people will continue to recognize the assimilated Jew (whether he has assimilated to Christianity or to secularism) as a Jew and will continue to discriminate against him (313-317).****  Collective assimilation "as a sect like any other sect" is also, in Strauss's view impossible, in part because such sects are entirely voluntary, while one's status as a Jew is a matter, in the first instance, of birth (318).  A third possible solution is "assimilation as a nation," i.e. Zionism.  But Strauss, who had been active in Zionist circles in his youth, rejects Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem, as well. "Political Zionism," which stressed the creation of a Jewish state was too strictly political: "The mind was in no way employed, or even the heart was in no way employed, in matters Jewish" (319).  "Cultural Zionism," created in reaction to this deficit, hoped to supplement political Zionism by making "products of the Jewish mind" central to Zionism. But Strauss suggests that this effort was doomed to fail, as the "rock bottom of any Jewish culture is the Bible, the Talmud, and the Midrash. And if you take these things with a minimum of respect or seriousness, you must say that they were not meant to be products of the Jewish mind"(319-20).  This leads, in turn, to "religious Zionism," which runs aground on the fact that some Jews simply cannot return to the faith of their ancestors.

Nonetheless, argues Strauss, "[i]t is necessary to accept one's past. That means that out of this undeniable necessity one must make a virtue. The virtue in question is fidelity, loyalty, piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas" (320). There follows a long discussion of varieties of anti-Jewish sentiment through the ages, meant to establish both the noble nature of Jewish belief and the heroic nature of Jewish struggle against persecution.  After a somewhat ironic side journey to Nietzsche's Morgenröte (The Dawn), aphorism 205 ("Of the people of Israel"), which Strauss uses to suggest that the creation of the state of Israel is, in a positive sense, the fulfillment of Nietzsche's radical vision of Jewish assimilation, Strauss reaches his conclusion:  Judaism is a "heroic delusion."  After referencing the prayer Aleinu as "the greatest expression" of this delusion, Strauss elaborates: "What is a delusion? We also say a 'dream.' No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and wallow in it." (328)

Strauss concludes with a discussion of the insufficiency of "positivism" and the need for science, too, to strive for the infinite:

the object of science is everything that is--being.  The belief admitted by all believers in science today--that science is by its nature essentially progressive, and eternally progressive--implies, without saying it, that being is mysterious.  And here is the point where the two lines I have tried to trace do not meet exactly, but where they come within hailing distance. And, I believe, to expect more in a general way, of people in general, would be unreasonable. (329)

After Strauss finished, Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's old friend and colleague, who had introduced the talk, noted "Dr. Strauss is known to have spoken other times on the theme of 'Jerusalem and Athens.' My only observation tonight is, I believe he has done it again." (329)

In a sense, I think Cropsey has hit the nail on the head, despite the fact that classical philosophy ("Athens") goes virtually unmentioned in the talk. Strauss's theme of "Jerusalem and Athens" consisted of the notion that revealed religion and classical philosophy were in constant tension with each other, and that the vibrancy of the West had historically depended on this tension. But modern political philosophy threatened both sides of this binary.

Classical philosophy's most significant appearance in "Why We Remain Jews" is Strauss's invocation of the virtue of pietas as underscoring the need for Jews who cannot believe to nonetheless remain loyal to the faith of their ancestors.  Strauss, it should be said, was such a Jew: an atheist by belief, but willing to affirm the importance of the most traditional understanding of Jewish religion as revealed, divine law. Strauss himself embraced neither of the possibilities that he invokes at the end of his talk, science and revealed religion. Then again, the careful listener will have noted that these are all that can be expected of "people in general." And, in Strauss's view, those fit for philosophy are, by definition, not "people in general."

For all its intellectual interest and occasional elegance, "Why We Remain Jews" remains rather unappealing to me, for the same reason that I find most of Strauss's political and philosophical conceptions unappealing.  At its heart is a rather pessimistic and deeply hierarchical understanding of human possibilities. Whatever else it may mean, my fasting on Wednesday will not be an attempt on my part to forestall nihilism by publicly reaffirming a necessary, noble delusion.

To all our Jewish readers: G'mar chatima tovah!
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* In the interest of full disclosure, like many contemporary American "three-day Jews," I actually only celebrate one day of Rosh Hashanah, but I also celebrate Hanukkah and Passover. Yet the old German epithet remains.

** "Why We Remain Jews" first appeared in print in Kenneth Deutch and Walter Nicgorski (eds), Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp. 43-79.  It was subsequently reprinted in Leo Strauss (Kenneth Hart Green, ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (Albany: SUNY, 1997), pp. 311-356. Page numbers above reference this second work, which is also what I have linked to above.

*** Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, pp. 119-130.

**** This point is accompanied by a rather Friedmanite discussion of the impossibility of preventing discrimination in a liberal society, complete with warnings that the USSR is a fine example of a country that has tried to legally prohibit discrimination.  Like his fellow German-Jewish émigré Hannah Arendt, Strauss was skeptical about the advisability--or even the possibility--of attempting to legally end racial discrimination.


UPDATE (5:36 pm CDT, 9/25):  I've corrected the title of the Norton book above. I had mistakenly repeated the (very similar) title of the Sheppard book when originally posting this.

Paul S. Boyer (1935-2012)

The New York Times has reported the passing of Paul S. Boyer on March 17 at the age of 76.

As readers of this blog know, Boyer was one of the most important U.S. intellectual historians of his generation.   Unlike many others who have earned that title, however, I don't associate Boyer particularly with any distinctive methodological, topical, metanarrativistic, or stylistic shift in the field or sub-field. To put this another way:  I can't think of any time that I've read someone else's work and have thought "that reminds me of Boyer"... and I'm not sure what would remind me of him.

But Boyer is one of that small group of historians who wrote three books that have made a real difference to me. And in Boyer's case, they are three books on very different topics:  Salem Possessed (1974), By The Bomb's Early Light (1985), and When Time Shall Be No More (1992).




Salem Possessed, co-written with Stephen Nissenbaum, applied the tools of the (then new) social history to the case of the Salem witchcraft trials and made an ingenious, if ultimately not wholly convincing, case that the witchcraft scare could best be explained by looking at land-ownership patterns and the distribution of wealth. By the time I encountered it in grad school in the late '80s, Salem Possessed read as a kind of object lesson in both the possibilities and limitations of the kind of social history that had exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s.

But by then, Boyer had moved on to other things.  By The Bomb's Early Light was an extraordinarily well-written and fascinating look at American view of atomic weaponry and power in the years immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.*  Boyer's interest in this topic reflected his own lifelong pacifism (he had been raised in one of the traditional peace churches).  Analyzing an extraordinarily broad range of materials, the book conveys both the hopes and the fears that Americans felt about the bomb from the start.


By The Bomb's Early Light would eventually serve as a kind of preemptive strike (albeit an ultimately politically unsuccessful one) against the nonsense that befell the proposed Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian a decade later, when various politicians and veterans organizations attempted to suggest that only recently had a small group of pointed-headed revisionists questioned the goodness of the atomic bombings of Japan.  In fact, as Boyer had told us, many Americans had been skeptical and fearful of the use of atomic weaponry from very early on.

When Time Shall Be No More grew out of By The Bomb's Early Light, but concerns a seemingly very different topic: premillennial prophecy in U.S. culture since World War II.  Boyer first realized the shear scope and significance of premillennialism while working on By The Bomb's Early Light, as atomic weaponry quickly came to play a role in premillennial prophetic understandings of current events in the mid-20th century. In taking premillennialism seriously as a strain in American culture worthy of real historical attention (rather than dismissing it as a kind of cultural neurosis), When Time Shall Be No More anticipated both the enormous growth of interest in religion (and especially vernacular religion) among American historians in the last two decades and the growing interest in American conservatism.

Yet the book does not (as far as I remember; I read it when it first came out and used it several times since in a classroom setting, but haven't taken a look at it for at least five years) present itself as boldly leading American historiography in a new direction. Boyer had simply found a fascinating and important topic and chosen to write about it. And like By The Bomb's Early Light, When Time Shall Be No More has an almost effortless feel about it.  In Boyer's hands, the thought of modern premillennial Christians comes alive as historically important and intrinsically interesting in a way that is neither celebratory nor dismissive.**  The book is an excellent work of history, but also a very good read.

When thinking about great historians (I almost put "great"...and then "great historians"... in quotation marks), I think we are most often drawn to revolutionary figures in a Kuhnian sense, authors who shifted the paradigm in one way or another. I don't think Paul Boyer fits this model of historiographical greatness.

But I do think it's fair to call Boyer a great historian.  He wrote a number of significant and enduring works of history on a wide range of topics, some of which found themselves on cutting edges that had not even yet emerged when he started work on them.  Both By The Bomb's Early Light and When Time Shall Be No More are models of serious scholarship written in a way that might reach broader, non scholarly audiences; I wouldn't hesitate to recommend either one of them to non-academic friends interested in their subject matters (and in fact have recommended both to non-academics over the years).

This is a career worth remembering and celebrating.

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* In between working with Nissenbaum on Salem and publishing By The Bomb'e Early Light,  Boyer wrote Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (1978), which was also a very important book at the time, but which, I'm ashamed to say, I've never read.


** The first time I taught When Time Shall Be No More, one of my students happened to have come from a premillennialist background and he found the book familiar, in certain ways, but fair, interesting, and accurate.

Tim's Light Reading (3-1-2012): The Information Age, ISIH, Ron Paul, Religious Freedom, And The Minds Of Children

1 (of 5). The History of the Information Age

One could do worse for primary and secondary intellectual history sources on "the information age" (depending on how defines that age) than those listed in this "FiveBooks Interview" with Nicholas Carr. Three of the books Carr recommends are, in fact, histories of some sort. Standage's The Victorian Internet is number one on Carr's list.


2. The Mind of Ron Paul

I noted in the other post that I wasn't interested in writing any more about Rick Santorum. But I didn't promise I wouldn't offer something on history and another contemporary politician. This piece on Ron Paul, for instance, is different. Authored by David Halbfinger for The New York Times, the title signals its historical bent: "Ron Paul’s Flinty Worldview Was Forged in Early Family Life." Here's an excerpt from the articles opening passages:

His father and mother worked tirelessly running a small dairy, and young Ron showed the same drive — delivering The Pittsburgh Press, mowing lawns, scooping ice cream as a soda jerk. He also embraced their politics, an instinctive conservatism that viewed Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman as villains and blamed Democrats for getting America into wars.

As a young doctor in training, dissecting cadavers or practicing surgery on dogs, he would tell all who would listen about how the country was headed down the wrong path, about the urgency of a strict gold standard and about the dangers of allowing government too much power over people’s lives.

“Once that got ingrained, that became his religion,” said his brother Jerrold, a minister and a psychotherapist. “He says he preaches the ‘gospel of freedom’ — that’s the money quote. Politics became his crusade.”

And the article's thesis: Supporters and detractors often marvel at his consistency since entering politics in 1974, citing it as evidence of either levelheadedness or lunacy. It contrasts sharply with some of the rivals he is trailing in the Republican primaries, including Mitt Romney, who is often accused of ideological flip-flopping.

As the article progresses you learn more about the books he read (e.g. Atlas Shrugged, Doctor Zhivago, The Road to Serfdom), the family roots of his ideology, and his relationship with the Birchers.


3. The ISIH Annual Meeting for 2012

Here's the CFP for the ISIH's 2012 meeting. Here's the title: "The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective." Very cool. And the meeting is on U.S. soil!---at Princeton University. Cool. Too bad my travel funds are uncertain for this year because I'd love to go and talk about the great books as liberal learning in a transnational perspective (i.e. jump start my next book project!). Here are the first two sentences from the CFP:

The ideal of liberal education, long a mainstay of Western ideals of higher education, is suddenly under attack the world over. In country after country, the idea that higher education should aim primarily at the cultivation of the intellect and sensibility rather than at preparation for a particular vocation is being swept vigorously aside by more exclusively utilitarian understandings.


4. The Freedoms of Individuals v. The Freedoms of Religious Institutions

Janine Giordano Drake applies historical thinking to the topic at Religion in American History. Here's the big question: Can Catholic social service agencies have it both ways? Can a private, religious organization both manage social services on behalf of the public and also be immune from the checks and balances of that public which invested them with that worldly power?

And here's a taste of her conclusion: We’ve been through all this before. A hundred years ago, Catholics were protesting the overreaching power of Protestant schools, hospitals, and insurance companies in the civic realm. Protestants maintained that this was their “public witness,” even though Catholics held that nobody had the right to a public witness which overshadowed the right of others to follow their alternate Christian conscience.

Check it out.


5. The Minds Of Children and the Role Ideology in Children's Libraries

Writing for The Millions, Alan Levinovitz dissects the issues around the late twentieth-century, and early twenty-first, censorship of certain children's books. The occasion for the article is tomorrow's film opening of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. In the course of reading the article I learned that Tim LaHaye published an iteration of his "Left Behind" for children (of which Levinotvitz rightly observes that the book has never been the object of a censorship drive by Left-leaning parents).

The Silverman Machzor and the Culture of Mid-Twentieth-Century American Judaism

We are now in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays:  Rosh Hashanah began last Thursday at sundown; Yom Kippur begins this Friday at sundown.*  Since coming to University of Oklahoma in 1998, I have davened on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with a traditional minyan that a few OU professors put together for the occasion.**  It's a bit of a catch-as-catch can affair.  We have access to a spare Torah from Emanuel Synagogue in OKC, which also lets us use a portable ark of theirs.  And the machzorim (High Holiday prayerbooks) that we use are hand-me-downs that were once used by OU Hillel, and which they got (apparently) from a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.  These machzorim are the 1951 edition of what's usually called the "Silverman Machzor" (after its editor Rabbi Morris Silverman), a prayerbook first published in 1939, which was the official High Holiday prayerbook of Conservative Judaism in this country for the next three decades.***

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that a prayerbook assembled in 1939 shows its age, though the 1951 edition has clearly been changed substantially from the original (the Holocaust, yet to occur in 1939, has been added to the Yom Kippur martyrology, for example).  But for just this reason, I find our 1950s prayerbooks a fascinating glimpse into mid-twentieth-century American Judaism.****

Like most machzorim, the Silverman primarily consists of the liturgy itself, in Hebrew on the right and in English translation on the left.  Occasionally editorial commentary is inserted in the form of notes or footnotes. And occasionally passages from the Hebrew are left untranslated.

I'm sure there's a lot to be said about the choices of what to include and not to include in the liturgy and particular translation choices that lie far beyond my extraordinarily limited Hebrew (and my basically non-existent Aramaic).  But in this post I just want to point to a few things in the Silverman that strike me as interesting and potentially suggestive of larger questions in American Jewish culture.

The first is a long footnote appended to the Torah reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Genesis 21, which includes the story of the birth of Isaac and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael. When Sarah asks Abraham to send away Hagar, the Silverman Machzor appends a footnote to its English translation of the text:

Judged by present-day moral standards, the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael seems an unusually severe act. It must be understood in light of primitive social standards, according to which the child of a concubine enjoyed a lower social status, and had no claim to the same rights and privileges as the son of the wife.

The footnote then goes on to offer some more standard rabbinical understandings of the justice of Ishmael's banishment.  But there's obviously some tension between seeing Ishmael's banishment as just and seeing it as an artifact of "primitive social standards."

Interestingly, no such concerns are expressed about the reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac.  While the Silverman Machzor devotes a page-and-a-half to explicating the theological significance of God's decision to "stay the hand of Abraham" and substitute a ram for his son, there's no attempt to grapple with the very disturbing quality of God's initial demand.

The final interesting feature of the Silverman I want to mention involves the Avodah service of Yom Kippur, which recalls the actions performed by the High Priest in the Temple on Yom Kippur.*****  At the core of the temple ritual were a series of sacrifices.  The Avodah service carefully describes these, as well as the way that the High Priest would sprinkle the blood before the Holy of Holies.  All of this is preserved in the Hebrew in the Silverman Machzor. But the English translation methodically avoids mentioning any of the sacrificial aspects of the ritual.  And the extensive notes on the Avodah service don't say anything about the sacrifices, either.

As a congregant, this decision has always bothered me.  The Temple services on Yom Kippur (and other holidays as well) involved copious animal sacrifices. And there's something basically dishonest about avoiding this fact.  Reform Machzorim often eliminate the Avodah service entirely, which I've never liked, but which at least seems a tad more honest than having everyone listen to vivid recitations of slaughter and blood-sprinkling in Hebrew while reading English "translations" that say nothing of them. 

But as an historian, I think these editorial decisions--to apologize for Hagar and Ishmael's banishment, to simply accept God's call to sacrifice Isaac, and to avoid and paper over the sacrificial facts of the Temple rituals--suggest really interesting things about the way leading lights of the American Jewish community in the mid-20th-century were thinking about Jewish religion in a modern age.

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* Gamar chatima tova!

** Religiously speaking, I am largely what used to be described disparagingly in Germany as a Drei-Tage-Jude (Three-Day Jew), that is a Jew who is only religious on the two days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur...except I celebrate only one day of Rosh Hashanah, which I supposed makes me a Zwei-Tage-Jude.  However, as a good American Jew, I also do Hannukah and Passover.  

***Most of the High Holiday services I went to before coming to OU used the successor to the Silverman, the Harlow Machzor, which was the official Conservative High Holiday prayerbook from the early 1970s until 2009.  Though the Silverman has always looked familiar to me, so I suspect that somewhere along the line I had used it before coming to Oklahoma.

**** I should say, at this point, that the history of American Jewish prayerbooks is very far from my area of scholarly expertise. But my effort to find out more about the history of the Silverman Machzor was a nearly total failure.  JSTOR contains not a single reference to it.  There seems to be something of a literature on the history of American Jewish liturgy, but I don't know my way around it at all.  So consider this an apology for not knowing this literature...and a bleg if any of the readers of this blog  know of scholarship that addresses the issues I discuss in this post.

***** Most of the rituals of Yom Kippur as described in the Hebrew Bible involved services performed in the Temple which became impossible to do following its destruction.  The Avodah is just a particular example of the more general strategy of Rabbinical Judaism to essentially substitute prayers for the Temple services.

Tim's Light Reading (11/05/2010)

I offer the following as a break from our (excellent!) long posts reflecting on conference matters:

1 (of 5). The Problem of Political Philosophy: Only Links to Offer

Bookforum's excellent Omnivore blog held forth on "The Problem of Political Philosophy" in a post a few days ago. If you're not familiar with Omnivore, its posts are constructed as carnivalesque clouds of links on specific themes. Each link is usually a full story, opinion piece, or book review. My favorite link in this post is to a paper by Francesca Pasquali that brings together political theory, political philosophy, and public philosophy. The last has been a concern to me for some time because it links the work of Walter Lippmann and Mortimer J. Adler. Here's a provocative excerpt from Pasquali's abstract (bolds mine):

Public philosophy detects the shared values grounding political practices and employs them to develop criteria for guiding policy decisions. It is attentive to empirical data and constraints and it provides solutions that are effective in political terms. Political philosophy takes its distance from congiuntural facts and practically subscribed principles. While sensitive to practical problems, it does not aim at elaborating practically viable solutions: it is rather concerned with the theoretical adequacy of its principles. Public philosophy seems better equipped for developing proposals serviceable during hard times, when effective political responses are in need.

2. A Poll: "The Best Quality Journals in the History of Philosophy"

University of Chicago Law School professor (and philosopher) Brian Leiter, who runs Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, recently conducted a poll that should be interest to all intellectual historians. Using CIVS (Condercet Internet Voting Service), he asked readers to rank the best journals, of a list of seventeen, for publication on the history of philosophy. Here are his Top 11:

1. Journal of the History of Philosophy
2. Philosophical Review
3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
4. British Journal for the History of Philosophy
5. Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie
6. History of Philosophy Quarterly
7. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
8. European Journal of Philosophy
9. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
10. Canadian Journal of Philosophy
11. Journal of the History of Ideas

See the rest of his results here.

3. Teaching The Big, Hard Ideas---Online

Writing for the National Association of Scholars (a rather conservative group that advocates "working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges"), David Clemens offers a rather pessimistic assessment of the ability of online courses to relay the essence of the humanities online. Here is a sampling of his reflections (bolds mine):

I recall a college administrator who while cutting literature classes spoke passionately about more “student access to higher education.” I said, “Access doesn’t do them any good if there’s no higher education when they get here. What you are cutting is higher education.”

Between dumbing down and advocacy teaching, peer editing and “student-centered” classrooms, Theory and CorporateU., PowerPoint presentations and courses on Buffy— higher education in the traditional sense has been smothered. ...Instead of seriously examining such eternal questions of the meaning of life, the liberal arts and humanities wither away in favor of pragmatic but less formative pursuits. What do these words have in common: American, leisure, postcolonial, liberal, gender, disability, queer, environmental, animal? Answer: followed by the word, “studies,” all are degree-granting college majors. ...

The Big Question is whether the imperatives of current educational models make widespread embrace of online classes inevitable. It may be a situation of hug or die. ...Conversely, online is ideal for what I call “boutique” courses, classes people take because they are interested in the subject, not because they “need” them. ...That’s online’s proper role—to supplement face-to-face classes for students in special circumstances (pregnant, remote, homebound) and as a lab for exploration of niche topics. Will that prevail? I doubt it.

To bring this home, Clemens piece makes me skeptical that intellectual history courses can be effectively taught---or at least effectively absorbed by students---in an online teaching environment.

4. Defining American's Knowledge of Religion

About a month ago, before the elections heated up, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" was all over the news. Like other "shocking" surveys that make an impression, this one was about how ignorant Americans are. These are usually about history (or those are the ones I remember), but this one covered comparative religion. Because it asked respondents their religious affiliation, it was also able to break down responses by sect. Here's an excerpt from the survey's Executive Summary (to catalyze your memory):

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. ...Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

I'm bringing this to your attention not to replay the results, but to draw your attention to this excellent set of scholarly replies posted at The Immanent Frame, a blog hosted by the Social Science Research Council. Here is a sampling of the first reply by Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University (bolds mine):

Insofar as it aims to grade Americans on their “religious knowledge,” the new Pew survey contains a strongly normative subtext: that there are certain things that every American ought to know about religion. ...In an earlier piece, I suggested an alternative interpretation: that the things social scientists take to be important about “religion”—--in this case, a range of externally available facts about “the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions”—--aren’t all that important to many Americans. This need not imply that Americans are insincere or incapable of successfully orienting themselves in a culturally diverse environment; rather, it suggests that the conceptual maps they use to do this don’t always conform to the expectations of demographers.

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion.

Amesbury suggests the very thing I pointed out to a few friends in a debate about the results: We study epistemology because there are different ways of knowing. And in this case, the creators of the Pew survey did not address practical knowledge in relation to religion---or the kinds of knowledge (i.e. ethics, or how-to navigational skills) that practitioners seek from their chosen faiths. I hope that historians of American religion make these distinctions when they assess how religion operates? And this topic also matters to those assessing how religion fits into the Culture Wars in the United States.

5. A New Journal: History of the Present

Andrew Hartman alerted me to this via his FB page, but History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History should be of interest to U.S. intellectual historians. It relays its avowed purpose as follows:

Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. Its editors want to encourage the critical examination of both history’s influence on politics and the politics of the discipline of history itself. The journal’s object is to showcase articles that exemplify the practice of what might be called theorized empirical history.

I can definitely see some of our regular USIH contributors and commenters taking an interest in getting into this periodical. It seems like this endeavor borders on investigative journalism---which reminds me of a quip I recently heard, relayed by Bill Moyers: "The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference." Humor aside, it looks like History of the Present will be a place for historians to act in the Laschian tradition of social criticism. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (11/05/2010)

I offer the following as a break from our (excellent!) long posts reflecting on conference matters:

1 (of 5). The Problem of Political Philosophy: Only Links to Offer

Bookforum's excellent Omnivore blog held forth on "The Problem of Political Philosophy" in a post a few days ago. If you're not familiar with Omnivore, its posts are constructed as carnivalesque clouds of links on specific themes. Each link is usually a full story, opinion piece, or book review. My favorite link in this post is to a paper by Francesca Pasquali that brings together political theory, political philosophy, and public philosophy. The last has been a concern to me for some time because it links the work of Walter Lippmann and Mortimer J. Adler. Here's a provocative excerpt from Pasquali's abstract (bolds mine):

Public philosophy detects the shared values grounding political practices and employs them to develop criteria for guiding policy decisions. It is attentive to empirical data and constraints and it provides solutions that are effective in political terms. Political philosophy takes its distance from congiuntural facts and practically subscribed principles. While sensitive to practical problems, it does not aim at elaborating practically viable solutions: it is rather concerned with the theoretical adequacy of its principles. Public philosophy seems better equipped for developing proposals serviceable during hard times, when effective political responses are in need.

2. A Poll: "The Best Quality Journals in the History of Philosophy"

University of Chicago Law School professor (and philosopher) Brian Leiter, who runs Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, recently conducted a poll that should be interest to all intellectual historians. Using CIVS (Condercet Internet Voting Service), he asked readers to rank the best journals, of a list of seventeen, for publication on the history of philosophy. Here are his Top 11:

1. Journal of the History of Philosophy
2. Philosophical Review
3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
4. British Journal for the History of Philosophy
5. Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie
6. History of Philosophy Quarterly
7. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
8. European Journal of Philosophy
9. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
10. Canadian Journal of Philosophy
11. Journal of the History of Ideas

See the rest of his results here.

3. Teaching The Big, Hard Ideas---Online

Writing for the National Association of Scholars (a rather conservative group that advocates "working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges"), David Clemens offers a rather pessimistic assessment of the ability of online courses to relay the essence of the humanities online. Here is a sampling of his reflections (bolds mine):

I recall a college administrator who while cutting literature classes spoke passionately about more “student access to higher education.” I said, “Access doesn’t do them any good if there’s no higher education when they get here. What you are cutting is higher education.”

Between dumbing down and advocacy teaching, peer editing and “student-centered” classrooms, Theory and CorporateU., PowerPoint presentations and courses on Buffy— higher education in the traditional sense has been smothered. ...Instead of seriously examining such eternal questions of the meaning of life, the liberal arts and humanities wither away in favor of pragmatic but less formative pursuits. What do these words have in common: American, leisure, postcolonial, liberal, gender, disability, queer, environmental, animal? Answer: followed by the word, “studies,” all are degree-granting college majors. ...

The Big Question is whether the imperatives of current educational models make widespread embrace of online classes inevitable. It may be a situation of hug or die. ...Conversely, online is ideal for what I call “boutique” courses, classes people take because they are interested in the subject, not because they “need” them. ...That’s online’s proper role—to supplement face-to-face classes for students in special circumstances (pregnant, remote, homebound) and as a lab for exploration of niche topics. Will that prevail? I doubt it.

To bring this home, Clemens piece makes me skeptical that intellectual history courses can be effectively taught---or at least effectively absorbed by students---in an online teaching environment.

4. Defining American's Knowledge of Religion

About a month ago, before the elections heated up, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" was all over the news. Like other "shocking" surveys that make an impression, this one was about how ignorant Americans are. These are usually about history (or those are the ones I remember), but this one covered comparative religion. Because it asked respondents their religious affiliation, it was also able to break down responses by sect. Here's an excerpt from the survey's Executive Summary (to catalyze your memory):

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. ...Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

I'm bringing this to your attention not to replay the results, but to draw your attention to this excellent set of scholarly replies posted at The Immanent Frame, a blog hosted by the Social Science Research Council. Here is a sampling of the first reply by Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University (bolds mine):

Insofar as it aims to grade Americans on their “religious knowledge,” the new Pew survey contains a strongly normative subtext: that there are certain things that every American ought to know about religion. ...In an earlier piece, I suggested an alternative interpretation: that the things social scientists take to be important about “religion”—--in this case, a range of externally available facts about “the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions”—--aren’t all that important to many Americans. This need not imply that Americans are insincere or incapable of successfully orienting themselves in a culturally diverse environment; rather, it suggests that the conceptual maps they use to do this don’t always conform to the expectations of demographers.

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion.

Amesbury suggests the very thing I pointed out to a few friends in a debate about the results: We study epistemology because there are different ways of knowing. And in this case, the creators of the Pew survey did not address practical knowledge in relation to religion---or the kinds of knowledge (i.e. ethics, or how-to navigational skills) that practitioners seek from their chosen faiths. I hope that historians of American religion make these distinctions when they assess how religion operates? And this topic also matters to those assessing how religion fits into the Culture Wars in the United States.

5. A New Journal: History of the Present

Andrew Hartman alerted me to this via his FB page, but History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History should be of interest to U.S. intellectual historians. It relays its avowed purpose as follows:

Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. Its editors want to encourage the critical examination of both history’s influence on politics and the politics of the discipline of history itself. The journal’s object is to showcase articles that exemplify the practice of what might be called theorized empirical history.

I can definitely see some of our regular USIH contributors and commenters taking an interest in getting into this periodical. It seems like this endeavor borders on investigative journalism---which reminds me of a quip I recently heard, relayed by Bill Moyers: "The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference." Humor aside, it looks like History of the Present will be a place for historians to act in the Laschian tradition of social criticism. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (2/19/2010)

1. Historians As Activists---Against Bad History: The History Channel is at it again---meaning irritating professional historians. InsideHigherEd has relayed that a group of political historians are protesting an upcoming series on the Kennedy family. The show's script writer, however, retorts that their complaints are premature---that the show isn't finished yet. Saying that the show is "not a documentary [but] a dramatization," Steve Kronish actually underscores other important issues in history---popularization versus nuance, public history versus traditional practice, the role of money in distorting exchanges about history, and political families who protect their legacies via manipulating archival access and lording over the work of historians (e.g. Kennedy family protectors fearing the work of Joel Surnow, a friend of Rush Limbaugh). Overall of these fears is the forgetfulness by everyone involved (historians ~and~ their subjects) that history is perspectival, subjective, and has always been a field of competing accounts. But it is also true that the free flow of truth---whether by storytelling or in conversation---is often overwhelmed by unequal concentrations of wealth in the hands of political partisans. In other words, propaganda fed by money can make the truth difficult to discern. In this particular case, it looks like there is enough blame to go around.

2. The State of Academe: Sadly, William Pannapacker gets closer and closer to some truths about academe and the life of the mind today with every column he writes. It's hard for some of us (no matter your position or security within the academy) to distance ourselves from the job situation out there, but there can be no question that a future intellectual historian will have to deal with downside of credentialism in the intellectual life, particularly in humanities graduate studies.

3. Another Important Subfield With Identity Issues: Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey authored a piece for InsideHigherEd that documents an "everywhere and nowhere" identity problem in the history of religion in America. The title of their article mimics precisely a line from Wilfred McClay's assessment of USIH that appeared in Historically Speaking last fall. Here's the Schultz-Harvey thesis:

Religion is everywhere around us, and religious historians have written about it in compelling and exciting ways, but within mainstream historiography it has been basically left behind. In a sense, religion is everywhere in modern American history, but nowhere in modern American historiography.

4. The Myth and Reality of Christianity's Role in America's Founding: Continuing somewhat the theme from point #3, the historical question of the Christian origins of America was recently addressed in the NY Times. Presented in the context of textbook adoption and revision discussions for Texas schools, here's the article's thesis:

[Christian conservative activists] hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,” they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the intent of the founders. The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society.

Tim's Light Reading (2/19/2010)

1. Historians As Activists---Against Bad History: The History Channel is at it again---meaning irritating professional historians. InsideHigherEd has relayed that a group of political historians are protesting an upcoming series on the Kennedy family. The show's script writer, however, retorts that their complaints are premature---that the show isn't finished yet. Saying that the show is "not a documentary [but] a dramatization," Steve Kronish actually underscores other important issues in history---popularization versus nuance, public history versus traditional practice, the role of money in distorting exchanges about history, and political families who protect their legacies via manipulating archival access and lording over the work of historians (e.g. Kennedy family protectors fearing the work of Joel Surnow, a friend of Rush Limbaugh). Overall of these fears is the forgetfulness by everyone involved (historians ~and~ their subjects) that history is perspectival, subjective, and has always been a field of competing accounts. But it is also true that the free flow of truth---whether by storytelling or in conversation---is often overwhelmed by unequal concentrations of wealth in the hands of political partisans. In other words, propaganda fed by money can make the truth difficult to discern. In this particular case, it looks like there is enough blame to go around.

2. The State of Academe: Sadly, William Pannapacker gets closer and closer to some truths about academe and the life of the mind today with every column he writes. It's hard for some of us (no matter your position or security within the academy) to distance ourselves from the job situation out there, but there can be no question that a future intellectual historian will have to deal with downside of credentialism in the intellectual life, particularly in humanities graduate studies.

3. Another Important Subfield With Identity Issues: Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey authored a piece for InsideHigherEd that documents an "everywhere and nowhere" identity problem in the history of religion in America. The title of their article mimics precisely a line from Wilfred McClay's assessment of USIH that appeared in Historically Speaking last fall. Here's the Schultz-Harvey thesis:

Religion is everywhere around us, and religious historians have written about it in compelling and exciting ways, but within mainstream historiography it has been basically left behind. In a sense, religion is everywhere in modern American history, but nowhere in modern American historiography.

4. The Myth and Reality of Christianity's Role in America's Founding: Continuing somewhat the theme from point #3, the historical question of the Christian origins of America was recently addressed in the NY Times. Presented in the context of textbook adoption and revision discussions for Texas schools, here's the article's thesis:

[Christian conservative activists] hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,” they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the intent of the founders. The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society.