Reviews and News:
Why Lincoln and others supported racial segregation.
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What is a philosopher exactly? “As Justin Smith points out, the word coined by the Greeks 2,500 years ago meaning ‘love of wisdom’ and implying a simple, serene way of life has come to mean a credentialed, cordoned-off university profession consisting of people who ‘do philosophy’ the way others do accounting. He brings up a prominent professor (unnamed) who, in 2014, threatened to sue another, lesser-known professor for having written that he was ‘not a philosopher’ (because, despite his standard academic credentials, he was in a different department). Smith wonders what it could mean if ‘one could plausibly conceive of “philosopher” simply as a sort of license or accreditation, and thus . . . think of the claim that someone is “not a philosopher” as a simple denial of something that is factually true.’ It seems to mean that philosophy, which, according to Aristotle, begins in wonder, has ended in pedantry and protocols and office charts.”
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J. M. W. Turner was ambitious and talented. He was also difficult to: “A barber’s son, he rose through the class-bound ranks of late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain to become the nation’s most celebrated and controversial painter. And yet he ended life in scandal, living with a secret mistress under the assumed identity of a sea captain.”
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Searching for the Lost Colony: “The mystery of the Lost Colony, insists archeologist Eric Deetz, can be solved. ‘If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t spend so much time out in the woods, digging stuff up,’ he says. Deetz, a board member with the research-minded First Colony Foundation and a lecturer in anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says the tools of modern science are turning up a trail of new clues. This summer, scouting a Roanoke Island shoreline for the National Park Service, Deetz dug up eight blue-and-white shards of a tin-glazed pottery jar or vial, of a type manufactured for only a few decades around the time of the First Colony. The container almost certainly came ashore with the colonists or another expedition two years earlier, Deetz says, and the jar’s purpose was probably scientific, not domestic.”
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A life of Ulysses S. Grant: “The Ohio-born son of a tanner, he survived West Point, did well at war in Mexico, then resigned from the Army amid rumors of heavy drinking. He failed in business, failed in farming and finally fell into his father’s leather shop in Galena, Ill. The Civil War slid him back into uniform. When he fought, he rose. However high his rank, though, he remained a nobody from nowhere, and he knew it. Grant hardened the membrane of contact between himself and “the world” into awkward armor plate, stiff layers of silence.”
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Romeo and Juliet is “not merely a love story, but a play about what happens to lovers in a city without politics and law. The action is split between the open, lawless streets and the walled-off homes of the families who rule by tribe and clan. Fathers make the rules. Family is protected. Strangers are murdered. Even the Church fails to help.”
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Essay of the Day:
Christopher Lasch was a genius. Susan McWilliams explains why in Modern Age:
“Trying to remember the year 1991, the year Christopher Lasch wrote The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, can be like trying to conjure a foreign country.
“Back then there were no tablets or e-books or smartphones. There was no Facebook and no Amazon and no Twitter and no Google. Only a handful of geeks and government agents had even heard the word Internet.
“In 1991 the revolution that had Americans talking wasn’t digital—it was Russian, with the last days of the Cold War passing more in whimpers than bangs as an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev destabilized and eventually dissolved the Soviet Union.
“There was a war in Iraq, but it was quick and decisive. There were wars against terrorists being fought around the globe, but there was no War on Terror. And there was nobody in the United States who seemed particularly concerned about the possibility of mass-murderous attacks on American soil.
“It was a time before so many contemporary cultural touchstones: before 9/11, before Columbine, before Oklahoma City. Before Harry Potter, before Lewinsky, before O. J. Before Lawrence v. Texas, before Citizens United, before Bush v. Gore. Before Obama, before the euro, before Y2K. Before Viagra.
“Now think of all the distance that seems to separate then and now, all the change that marks the last quarter century.
“That’s why to read The True and Only Heaven today is to appreciate Lasch’s genius in a way no one could have appreciated it in 1991. Although written then, the book cuts to the heart of now. Today it’s clear what could not have been as clear twenty-five years ago: Christopher Lasch saw beneath the superficial ebbs and flows of American history and politics to the more enduring and decisive currents beneath.
“Before anything else, then, reading The True and Only Heaven teaches you two things. First, despite what anyone might tell you and despite how things might seem, the defining features of American politics have not changed much in the past twenty-five years. And second, Christopher Lasch is a prophet of our time.”
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Image of the Day: Mark Twain’s haunted house
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Poem: William Baer, “Sappy Love Poem”
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