Reviews and News:
Keith Miller was the literary editor of The Spectator, an editor for The New Statesman, and a co-founder of London Review of Books—an old-school man of letters and a good father.
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The return of Beowulf: Does its violence, musicality, and secularism make it the poem for our times? James Parker thinks so.
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Gilbert Meilaender on the promise and perils of gene editing.
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Materialism cannot account for the mind partly because its definition of matter is too simplistic: “A century of agnosticism about the true nature of matter hasn’t found its way deeply enough into other fields, where materialism still appears to be the most sensible way of dealing with the world and, most of all, with the mind. Some neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as the nonscientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality. But this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or rather, what we don’t know.”
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What happened to general education at American universities? Chad Wellmon reports from the University of Virginia: “Our students shared less a curricular life than an extracurricular one. What bound them together was not their classroom experiences, their chemistry labs, or the books they read, but, rather, the clubs they led, the basketball games they worshipfully attended, and the parties for which they diligently planned. Veblen’s description held true. Our university was a divided institution in service of little more than success—or in UVA’s perverse reformulation of Aristotlian eudaimonia (human flourishing) ‘the endless pursuit of better.’ And the consequences were extensive and grave.”
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Oxford American at 25: “First published on a shoestring budget in 1992 by Marc Smirnoff, Oxford American has been snuffed out several times despite publishing work by such giants as John Updike, Richard Ford and Eudora Welty. Best-selling thriller writer John Grisham kept the magazine alive for a while, but it still ran out of money, suffered a crippling embezzlement, got hit by a huge bill from the IRS and endured a sexual harassment controversy that divided its staff. Fortunately, the nonprofit magazine, now housed at the University of Central Arkansas, seems to be enjoying a much-deserved period of stability.”
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Essay of the Day:
In City Journal, Pascal Bruckner argues that our changing definition of what it means to be civilized is reflected in changing definitions of childhood:
The terrible presumption of the cry ‘we are civilized’ too often meant, earlier in European history, that ‘we are superior to you.’ The colonial system could not fail to degenerate into de facto segregation and an apology for the white race, debasing both native and colonist. The exportation of violence to distant lands, where it could be practiced without witnesses, allowed the conqueror to abandon laws and rules and turn back the wheel of progress—especially since Europe left this business to rogues and desperadoes. But the violence came adorned with the culture’s forms and alibis, giving it an impunity in the name of a superior vocation.
“Today, being civilized means knowing that we are potentially barbarian. Woe to the brutes who think they’re civilized and close themselves in the infernal tourniquet of their certitudes. It would be good to inject in others the poison that has long gnawed away at us: shame. A little guilty conscience in Teheran, Riyadh, Karachi, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Caracas, Algiers, Harare, and Islamabad would do these governments and their peoples considerable good. The finest gift that Europe could give the world would be the spirit of critical examination that it discovered and that has saved it from many perils. It is the best remedy against arbitrary violence and the violation of human rights.
“Our shifting understanding of barbarism and civilization is reflected in how we have viewed childhood. Childhood, like the nuclear family, is a relatively recent notion in Europe, as historians Philippe Aries and Edward Shorter showed in famous studies. Regarded in medieval times as a fragile little thing, with neither heart nor face, a res nullias—the infant mortality rate was, of course, very high in those days—the child attained full humanity only over time. It wasn’t until the seventeenth century, and only among the well-to-do classes, that religious orders were able to inaugurate a school movement and children began to be seen as part of a family based on intimacy and private affection. Now viewed as innocent, in the image of the infant Christ—until the Renaissance, artists had depicted babies as miniature grownups—the little child was to be protected from noxious influences. He would be placed under the control of pedagogues endeavoring to prepare him for adulthood, an educational project that required sustained attention, new methods, and a new class of specialists. The child was akin to the native, in need of instruction and improvement.
“We have rejected this heritage, or, rather, we have reorganized it along different lines. Another tradition, this one inherited from Rousseau and Freud, refashioned our vision of childhood. Not only did childhood become the key to the development of the adult; it also came to be seen as a squandered treasure that we must recover by any means possible. The child and the savage were still understood as kindred figures, but now they were sources of wisdom. Both live in an immediate communion with things, a limpid apprehension of truth, a purity that civilization and society have yet to contaminate. From Freud, we retain the emphasis placed on the first years of life and childhood as a foundation that haunts us until our last breath. Rousseau, though, leads the dance with his eulogy of the state of nature. Anticipating our interest in primitive peoples, he announced, in his usual fulgurating manner, two of the intellectual obsessions of modernity: ethnology and pedagogy.”
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Photo: Saturn’s strange moon
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Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Multum in Parvo”
