Happy Birthday, Jesus (Sometime Before Spring of 4 B.C.) [28 Nov. 2012]

  In Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (2012), Pope Benedict XVI notes, as a lead in the UK Daily Telegraph puts it, "Jesus born years earlier than thought." What I find most interesting about this story has been that it was news.

            In 1950, in a totally non-controversial passage in the history textbook The Ancient World, Joseph Ward Swain of the solidly Big Ten, classically Midwestern, University of Illinois, wrote that "Jesus was not born in the year 1," or, I guess, Zero. "Two of our four Gospels tell us that he was born under Herod the Great, who died in the spring of 4 B.C."

            Working through other information in the Gospels, the scholarly consensus by the late 1940s was "that Jesus probably was born about five years before the turn of the century" — in the Christian counting of centuries — and that it's "fairly certain that he was crucified on April 7, 30 A.D." Swain adds, "There is, of course, no evidence regarding the exact day of his birth, and not until several centuries had passed did Christians agree to observe Christmas on December 25" (II.476-77).

            Of course. And then Swain moves on to the significant historical stuff about "His" — Jesus's — "Preaching and Crucifixion," the next subsection title, and then a long discussion of the rise of the Church.

            So Jesus was "born years earlier than thought" by whom?

            Americans are a people of strong faith, but as surveys pretty consistently indicate, "large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions — including their own";  and, I'll throw in, that "large numbers of Americans" includes a lot of reporters.

            The United States is not "a Christian nation" mostly because we're not a nation at all; it's "the American Republic," and the Republic is a stew or chop suey or mish-mosh (not a melting pot) of races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions. Which is a damn good thing.

            We are, though, strongly … let's call it inflected by Christian culture, and Americans, for understanding our country, need some knowledge of Christianity. Also of the other world religions, but that's for another time.

            Christians especially should know Christianity, and it shouldn't be some sort of traumatic shock if someone tells them that it's a fair guess that Jesus was born in the spring — "when shepherds were watching their sheep in the field by night" (Luke 2.8) of 4-5 BC, and that it's no coincidence that Christmas in the northern hemisphere is a Festival of Lights like Diwali, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa: it's the winter solstice, people, and the time of the old Roman Saturnalia, so December was and remains an excellent time for a winter holiday balancing spring holidays like Passover and Easter. (The Islamic New Year, Muharram, is a quieter holiday.)

            It's Constitutional for secular public schools to teach about religion, and in principle the US Supreme court and NGOs like The American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way are all for such teaching. Still, serious religious education is politically risky for a school district and undoubtedly expensive: doing the job decently requires well-educated teachers.


            Someone, though, needs to do a better job, and the various Christian churches and Christian households are obvious places for serious study of the faith. One good way to start a discussion would be hitting kids with the neat paradox that Jesus Christ was born "B.C." and checking out what the Gospel narratives actually say on the subject. For that exercise, Pope Benedict has definitely supplied a "teachable moment."

Philosophers are Different (5 Dec. 2013)

             Philosophers are different from the rest of us, even "the rest of us" when they're mostly graduate students and non-philosopher intellectuals. Or, anyway, a lot of the philosophers and "philosophically inflected" people I've encountered have been, well, different.

            I got the first inkling of this factoid in the very late 1960s when an instructor I knew and liked from my time in the University of Illinois Microbiology Department told me about preparing to teach a "science-and-society" type honors seminar for advanced students in Micro. His premise was that the life sciences moving into the 1970s was like physics moving into the 1930s: workers in the life science were about to run into some major ethical quandaries, and he thought it important to get budding biologists to start discussing the sort of questions scientists of earlier generations hadn't resolved until too late (if at all): questions about the social, political, and ethical implications of their work.

            So the Micro. man called the U of I Philosophy Department and asked to be put in touch with a philosopher who could talk to his class. The Head of the department said, more or less, "Well, we could send over Harry Tiebout. You know Harry?" And the Micro. prof responded that of course he knew Harry; everyone knew Harry; Harry Tiebout taught a highly popular course in comparative religions and was chairman of the Champaign County Democratic Central Committee. Harry would be fine for one session, but, he asked, how about an ethicist?

            I only got the microbiologist's side of the story, and I'm reconstructing it from memory — but what I remember is that the microbiologist said the Head of Philo. said, "We don't study those aspects of the field; we're an analytic department" — which I'd write as movie dialog as, «We don't do ethics, sir; we, sir, are a philosophy department!»

            My real introduction to the issue, though, came shortly after that when I went to conferences of Danforth Graduate Fellows, or just Danforth Fellows, as we were called at the time.

            (I received mail from the Danforth Foundation at my department office addressed to "Richard D. Erlich, DF," which got me kidded by colleagues since at the time "DF" meant "dumb fuck," and my colleagues complimented me for using that designation with my name, or the Danforth Foundation's knowing me that well. I passed that story on to the Foundation staff because I thought it was funny — and they changed the initials. But I digress.)

            If you own a pet or a herd of mammals or run a lab, you've contributed to the Danforth family fortune — they're the Ralston-Purina people and make "NAME OF TYPE OF ANIMAL Chow," including, if Futurama got its prediction right, "Bachelor Chow" in the 31^st century. And Danforth folk used to give really nice fellowships that would support graduate Fellows in all manner of fields through the Ph.D. And in the late 1960s and early 1970s they'd have conferences, bringing us DF's together.

            So I got to meet bright young people from across a broad spectrum of disciplines: usually guys at the time, but a few gals, fairly consistently not jockish enough or quite top-drawer enough to get a Rhodes Fellowship or a Marshall, and/but with a good record, good potential, strong interest in teaching — beyond its keeping a guy out of the Army — and at least some interest in religion (William H. Danforth, our Founder, was big on Christianity).

            At the conferences we'd break into groups and do little projects requiring cooperation and compromise, and, for the most part, we did this efficiently and pretty easily. A LitCrit type such as I could communicate and work with an engineer or a zoologist or whatever … or almost "whatever."

            After one particularly frustrating session, someone suggested, "Look, why don't we divide up into just two groups: those who've taken more then thirty hours of philosophy, and those who haven't." It was a good suggestion.

            For whatever reasons, these young philosophers just seemed to think differently from the rest of us. More exactly, they undoubtedly thought human thoughts of the mid-20^th-century, educated-American variety, but with enough differences that they had trouble communicating and cooperating with the rest of us, and vice-versa; and those philosophy students seemed convinced that the rest of us just had thinking wrong.

            Moving into the late 20^th century and early 21^st, the LitCrit field got far more philosophically respectable, and I got increasingly uncomfortable as literary criticism — criticism in the arts generally — decreased in status, and scholarship along with it; for a book or article to earn prestige, it had to have capital "T" Theoretical significance. One had to think Theory.

            Even with Theory that denied certainty and insisted on ambiguities and celebrated fuzziness — even then one needed firm definition of terms and explicit statement of method and self-conscious examination of one's process(es) and, in general, rigor in dealing with ideas. And one needed to deal with ideas.

            What one mostly didn't need was what most of us peasants in other fields thought of as data: evidence from either nature observed or experimented with, from examination of a text or other work of art. Indeed, one of my colleagues only half joked that he rather resented getting to the portion of an article in a literature journal where he was expected to say a word or two about a story or poem, or a play, film, or whatever: "Texts get in the way of my Theorizing." And in one case, I pointed out a place in an excellent feminist discussion of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) where the author could cite a shot in the movie that would cinch her point. She thanked me politely and ignored the suggestion: she did what she wanted to do — what I saw as a philosophical disquisition — without needing much about what audiences would see and hear in a theater.

            (She was talking about masculinity in RoboCop. There's a shot in that film where a criminal kicks Robo in the crotch, and the criminal goes down in pain. "Hey, what a man that Robo is! He's got balls of …. Oh …." Indeed. RoboCop only has a crotch: no testicles, no penis. What you see is what he's got: Robo has the biggest, baddest gun on the firing range, and, the ultimate macho body, but he's a eunuch: a fighter only, not a lover. The same point is made in Jim Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's The Terminator [1984], except more so: there the ultimate Schwarzeneggerian fighting-machine, macho-man isn't a man at all, just the literal ultimate fighting-machine of a Terminator hunter/killer-robot.)

            The times have probably changed already; intellectual fashions move more slowly than fashions in, say, clothes or hair styles, but, by definition, all fashions change — and Theory had had a long run by the time I retired in 2006. Plus, I only encountered a small sample of philosophers, and, more important, the "philosophically-inflected" in my fields were subject to some degree of disdain from a fair number of their philosophy-department colleagues.

            Still, most of us most of the time when we're trying to think seriously are still pretty vulgar empiricists: we like to check our ideas against the world as it can be directly perceived or at least encountered through lab instruments. For most of my professional career, there were robust and influential schools of thought that were pretty solidly sure facts were a myth — and that relying overmuch on evidence was no way to think.


            You may find yourself dealing with students brought up in those schools and now out in the world. For several recent academic generations, the Philosophy Department may've been very small, but Philosophy reigned in many of the big humanities departments. And for good and for ill, such semi-pro philosophers can be really, really different. 

Unfriendlies on the Left (Background): Me and the MLA (8 Oct. 2014)

The invitation came as a surprise but a very welcome surprise: an offer to contribute an essay to a publication of The Modern Language Association, the publishers of PMLA, arguably the premiere journal in literary studies.

I was invited to submit an essay for consideration in the MLA volume on Teaching Hamlet, which was somewhat curious since I hadn't inquired about the volume nor asked to be invited — and my dissertation covered what I called "Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies," which meant for me the fours major tragedies after Hamlet and not including Hamlet.
Still, I thought I had something to say about Hamlet and a couple other Shakespeare tragedies and suggested an approach to the plays out of Bertolt Brecht and the structure of an Elizabethan playhouse like the Globe and borrowing from at least one more recent critic (probably Francis Fergusson).

Short form: a public playhouse was mostly a raised platform thrust into an audience, surrounded on three sides and a bit, with the players both definitely separated from, but near the audience. There was little scenery, and the effect was far from "illusionist." So you would know you were watching a play, and the usually pretty rhetorical style of acting — to say nothing of dialog in verse — would reinforce that knowledge.

Still, the audience was physically close, and within the space of a few lines — in the opening Chorus to Henry V, for a defining example — audience members could be alienated from the characters and invited to identify with them. That is, you could watch them objectively as speaking objects moving around the stage, and you could get sucked into their stories and identify with them as if they were real people.

This complex point of view is highly significant in a Romantic tragedy like Romeo and Juliet and still more so in a Romantic/Satiric tragedy like Antony and Cleopatra. At times we identify strongly with the lovers — or do with Romeo and Juliet, unless you're soul-dead; and at other times, or at the same time, we can look at them objectively and know that they're making mistakes that will lead to the tragedy we paid money to see and can never totally forget that we're seeing.

Hamlet is definitely presented from the point of view of Prince Hamlet, and we will him well and hope he succeeds in getting revenge. On the other hand, we know that Hamlet is in the star of a tragedy by  Shakespeare, so we know if he follows the course he wants to follow and we want him to follow because we like him and see things from his point of view — well, we know that if he proceeds as he wishes he'll end up featured among the litter of bodies that will end the play.

Also, Hamlet, viewed objectively — especially if you were a normal theatre-goer and hadn't read the script — Hamlet viewed objectively as the play moves along is a bit of a puritanical putz. He's also an intellectual who isn't thinking well. "To be or not to be" is always the question if Albert Camus is right, and Hamlet answers it every time he gets out of bed in the morning rather than turning his face to the wall, giving up, and dying. Or stabbing himself, or whatever. The Question, Hamlet, is whether or not to kill the king, and ethically it is a damn interesting question and should be on the minds of an audience in a Christian monarchy.

Kill the king, Hamlet, or don't. In either event shut up about it; you're annoying people — except that the poetry is really good. More important than annoying people, Hamlet is also killing people one way or another, and in the case of two of his friends he kills on the basis of partial evidence judged with prejudice. For a 30-year-old advanced student at the prestigious Wittenberg U, Hamlet commits some major intellectual, and ethical, errors.

Well, and so forth. It was a pretty good essay on teaching the play: looking at Hamlet in terms of theatre and ethics and the conditions of physical production — and not as "a long poem with speaking parts," as often done, and definitely not as an object of veneration. It was an approach that could spark class discussion.

And the essay was accepted, and I awaited the volume to come out and get reviewed and pretty much guarantee I'd get promoted.

Then the volume didn't come out as scheduled, and I didn't hear from the editors. And then it still didn't come out and still didn't, and I still heard nothing.

And then I was told very casually that the Teaching Hamlet volume hadn't come out because it would not come out. The MLA radical caucus had won the election at the last convention, and they cancelled the volume of old-fart essays and commissioned a volume more up to date.
Could they publish two volumes, for an interesting debate on a really wide range of approaches to Hamlet and literature more generally? Well, maybe, but it would be expensive, and, more important, the old approaches were imperialist, Eurocentric, sexist, (etc.), and wrong.

My Hamlet essay never did get published, and I soon completed my exit from Shakespeare scholarship and criticism into the brave new field of Science Fiction and Fantasy (and horror and eutopia and dystopia) — with an increasing interest in movies. And eventually I became a full professor, served out my thirty-five years and retired to a decent climate and work "on spec" in the movie industry.


Miami University in Oxford, OH, is fairly conservative — it's in John Boehner's Congressional District — and I was sufficiently unconservative to work with the group trying to organize a union. I would get my due from Miami, and for the most part did get my due,  but with delays. That's how the game is played, and that was okay with me. Having my Hamlet essay cancelled, though, was annoying. I should not take it personally, but I do: as an unfriendly gesture from my colleagues to my Left.