If Guido Taught Humanities 4

I just got an email from one of the helpful people at IVC's EOPS office (they buy books for students who can't afford them). She noted that the bookstore listed some thirteen books for my Humanities 4/Culture Since 1700 course. Certainly, she said, this must be a mistake. Did you mean to have students select four of those books?

I don't know how she came up with the number "four," but I assured her that all thirteen books would be required. Granted, some of the books are relatively short (The Communist Manifesto, The Social Contract, Candide, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and some of them are collections of essays from which I'm only assigning selections (The Basic Writings of Immanuel Kant, Heidegger: Basic Writings, Simulacra and Simulations; and I'm only assigned some sections of Walden). But that still leaves some long books for them to read (On Photography, Mrs. Dalloway, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Gay Science, and The Myth of Sisyphus).

Listing them like that, especially when I remember that this is summer course, only lasting six weeks, does make me feel pretty evil.

I comfort myself by remembering a conversation I had with my predecessor/colleague here at IVC, Peter Morrison. We were discussing the ideal reading load for Humanities 3--Western Culture from 1100-1700--and without missing a beat he said, "about a book a week." I also comfort myself by remembering that summer school students need to do the same amount of work as students enrolled in a sixteen-week semester.

I also remind myself that covering three hundred years worth of literature, history, philosophy, and art is a pretty impossible task even if you are reading 500 books.

But there is more to it than that.

In Fellini's 8 1/2 Guido faces the same problem I face every time I send my book orders, for any class, to the bookstore. I can't decide which books to read, which films to watch, which artists to highlight. There are too many good choices. There are too many necessary choices. This is the same problem Guido faces in 8 1/2. Which film will he make? Which plot-line will he leave out? Which women will he keep in his life, his bed, his heart? In the end he keeps them all.

Trust me, I haven't come anywhere close to keeping "all" of the books, films, ideas I wanted to keep for this Hum 4 class. Still, I, like Guido, like every modern person, find myself oppressed by my options. I have too many choices most of the time. I can imagine that in past generations humanists could immediately point to this or that philosopher, author, artist as "essential" for a particular course. But aren't we too savvy for this kind of thing? Don't we all know, at some level, how ultimately contingent all (such?) choices are? Isn't this what Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sontag, and Baudrillard have shown us? Isn't responding to this what Camus, Woolf, and Kundera were trying to do? Of course, to understand that project, that project of engaging in/with "normal nihilism," we have to know something about the murderers of God Nietzsche describes in The Gay Science, so don't we at least have to read Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Kant (et al)?

So, no, the students can't choose four out of the thirteen books I've assigned for the class. As it is, I've narrowed my choice to thirteen from five hundred.

I know, it's a lot, but I think it's going to be a really fun six weeks, and hopefully not just for me.

CCHA Talk on Nietzsche and Carrie Bradshaw

First, some notes on my title. In my original draft for the proposal I had a question mark at the end of the title as if I were going to answer the question, is Carrie Bradshaw Nietzsche’s Superman? The question mark really fits the gist of what I want to say about Carrie Bradshaw, because I’m not sure Nietzsche would actually think of HBO’s fictional sex-columnist as the successor to humanity prophesied by his Zarathustra. In fact, I’m pretty sure he would NOT think of her in such grand terms. But there’s no question mark at the end of my presentation title because one of my colleagues suggested it made it seem like I was responding to a question lots of people were asking, but, of course, I’m responding to a question no one is asking. Still, I do hold up Carrie Bradshaw as at least a partial incarnation of Nietzsche’s ideals and I want to present her to you in that way.
In my “Introduction to Humanities” class we spend the first four or five weeks of the semester discussing ethics, but I try to do so in a way that would not duplicate the good work done in typical ethics classes in our philosophy department. Instead, we begin with Plato’s “Euthyphro” and then spend a few weeks with Nietzsche before watching Woody Allen’s film, “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Certainly Nietzsche’s own oeuvre is vast enough on its own to keep some “Intro to Humanities” students busy for a few weeks, but I find that for most of my students, Nietzsche’s writings are among the most difficult texts they’ve ever read. (They are not much comforted when I tell them that as primary philosophical texts go, he’s not that hard. When compared to Hegel or Kant he seems downright fun.) To help them engage the text I sometimes assign Mark T. Conard’s article, “Thus Spake Bart.” (In The Simpsons and Philosophy, 2001)
In that article Conard wonders which Simpson would be a better model of virtue, Lisa, or Bart? He writes:

Now, while Nietzsche rejected and even laughed at the traditional ideal, the so-called "good person," the compassionate, religiously virtuous person, he forged something of his own ideal: the free spirit; the person who rejects traditional morality, traditional virtues; the person who embraces the chaos of the world and gives style to his character.

Could it be that from a Nietzschean perspective we've been admiring the wrong character? Might Lisa Simpson be part of what Nietzsche calls world-slandering weariness, decadence, slave morality, resentment? Sure, it's fun to be bad, but might there be something healthy and life-affirming, something philosophically important about it? Could Bart Simpson be, in the end, the Nietzschean ideal? (pp. 60-61)

Conard’s conclusion is “no,” Bart Simpson is not Nietzsche’s Superman because, for Conard at least,

the Nietzschean ideal culminates in the figure of the Übermensch, or overman, the being who has achieved this very difficult project of making an artwork out of his life, the self-creating being. Nehamas says: “Thus Spoke Zarathustra is constructed around the idea of creating one’s own self or, what Schacht says: “. . . the ‘overman’ is to be construed as a symbol of human life raised to the level of art. (p. 68)

Conard stresses that the Superman is not the same as master morality, or some kind of bullying brute, but “more the artist, the self-overcoming, self-creating individual, who forges new values, who makes an artwork out of his life.” Conard concludes that this is NOT Bart Simpson.
But does popular culture offer another model for this ideal, someone who is not a slave to some kind of “written-in-stone” ideal, but who is, instead, this kind of self-creating individual, who forges new values, who makes an artwork out of his life? I would suggest that there is such a figure: Carrie Bradshaw.
Sure, Carrie is not a perfect representation of Nietzsche’s ideal. She sometimes caves-in to self-doubt, compromises herself, and makes mistakes, but I don’t think that would cause Nietzsche to reject her—at least not from the category of “free spirit” (and he might actually agree that she is at least an intimation of the Übermensch)—because these qualities, these “failings” if you will, are, after all, what make her human. But even with these human weaknesses, Carrie does seem to embody some key aspects of the Nietzschean ideal.
First, she does not accept any values as “given,” but neither does she cave into nihilism. In fact, the whole structure of the show is built around her attempt to find, clarify, and construct her own set of values. In a typical episode, Carrie and her friends, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, are confronted with various choices, dilemmas, and difficulties that send Carrie to her trusty Apple Notebook. She muses over the problems they are facing and then poses a question, usually a question of value. We then see her pursue this question throughout the rest of the episode until she finally reaches some kind of clarity, perspective, or value. She does not find, nor does she even seek, THE authority that could clarify her situation and provide her with a fixed, universal set of values. But this failure to engage in any kind of universally-binding authority never leads her to conclude that her world is devoid of meaning and value. On the contrary, she engages in Nietzsche’s anti-nihilism project, revaluing values by positing herself as the source of those values.
Second, we might think of her as a kind of Übermensch because she has style. In his notebooks Nietzsche wrote:
One thing is needful.-To "give style” to one's character-a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. . . In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste! (Will to Power, 371)

Carrie Bradshaw definitely has style . . . and taste. She “gives style” to her life and in the process creates values. Probably the thing I find most engaging about Sex and the City is that, in general, the characters do not “learn valuable lessons about life” and “discover deep moral values.” On the contrary, what they discover is their own sense of style and the importance of that style in giving one’s life meaning and purpose.
I admit it, Carrie Bradshaw is probably not the ideal being Zarathustra had in mind. She is, after all, human, all to human, struggling just like the rest of us. Still, I can’t help but wonder, in a world in which people cling tenaciously to the authoritative universal-values-granting institutions that have given birth to the culture wars—in other words, in a world in which values have become political, that is, without any personal value—could we all learn something from a free-spirited sex columnist who blows half her salary on a really nice pair of shoes?

[Clips are from “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” ]

Privileging the Bible

One of the real challenges of teaching religion in an academic context is how to face those students who “privilege” the Bible above other texts. (It’s true, many, or most, Muslim students also privilege the Qur’an in this way, but they seem less strident about this, perhaps because as a religious minority in America they are more accustomed to the idea that not everyone values the Qur’an in the same way they do.)

Privileging the Bible in this way is understandable, but it is not appropriate in an academic context. In college, especially in the humanities, one of the things we are supposed to be doing is challenging just such privileging of texts (and challenging certain privileged readings of those texts).

But there is NO REASON to privilege the Bible in that way. There are literally thousands of religious texts around, hundreds of them in my office, and there is nothing special about the Bible. It is a product of human culture.

This doesn’t mean it is not valuable. It is. I read and think about it all the time. But I no longer accept the idea that is a “miraculous book” that contains any kind of direct message from God. What it does contain is a record of many people, over hundreds of years, wrestling with some of the most important issues people face.

When Christians try to defend this privileging of the Bible, they usually do so on the basis of three arguments: the Bible’s supposed inerrancy, fulfilled biblical prophecy, and some kind of personal authentication of the Bible’s message. While these strategies convince those who are determined to be convinced, they don’t convince anyone else.

The inerrancy argument is just wrong. The Bible has many errors of fact and history as well as contradictions. The “privilegers” defend this doctrine on a point-by-point case with elaborate, a-historical arguments that are ingenious, but ultimately unconvincing to most of us because they are so patently desperate, absurd, and even dishonest. (For example, see the problem of who killed Goliath explained by a "privileger" and by a "non-privileger."

The prophecy argument works in three areas: ancient prophecies of O.T. events that have been “fulfilled” in ancient history, prophecies fulfilled by the life of Jesus, and prophecies about the “end times” which we see being fulfilled today. None of these are convincing either.

The so-called fulfilled prophecies of the O.T. are ex eventu prophecies. In other words, these texts “predicted” events that had already happened. There are hundreds of ancient documents that do this. The only ones that people consider valid today are those found in the Bible. This is privileging. It would be like me producing a document I claimed to have written in 1995 that claimed, “the two towers in the great city of the apple will fall, yeah, they will fall in a day.” Nobody would believe that this text was produced supernaturally or after the events of 9/11/2001, nobody claims that for all the other ancient texts, yet Christians want a special privilege for the Bible. They take texts that are clearly cases of ex eventu prophecy and claim they are authentic.

Similarly, prophecies about Christ fulfilling O.T. prophecies are really examples of the gospel narratives being shaped in order to make the events of Christ life fit the prophecies. A an easy to understand example is the birth narratives. Matthew and Luke’s stories are completely different. They only agree on two points: Jesus was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth. Obviously, Jesus did grow up in Nazareth, but there is no evidence that he was born in Bethlehem. Instead, in order to “fulfill” the prophecy in Micah that seems to predict the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, they invented stories (Matthew has Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem but fleeing because of Herod’s death threats; Luke has Mary and Joseph living in Nazareth but moving traveling to Bethlehem to meet a Roman census requirement [otherwise unattested]).

The most absurd use of biblical prophecies is the attempt to demonstrate that the events we see depicted in our newspapers were predicted thousands of years ago in the Bible. I’ve been following this discussion for thirty years, and the referents for these “prophecies” changes every few years. Besides, it’s completely obvious that virtually every word of Revelation was intended to comment on events that were current in the late first century. Revelation is about the ancient Roman Empire. It has NOTHING to do with our current situation.

The final argument that is sometimes presented is that the Bible is self-authenticating. As you read it you “hear God speaking” through it to you. This seems to me like the only valid argument for the divine origin of the Bible, but because it is so subjective it does not allow one to privilege the Bible in the way Christians do. People hear truth, or Truth, or God, in lots of places and in lots of ways. While this feature of human engagement with the Bible is very important, it is not unique.

So, am I arguing that people should stop reading the Bible? No. Far from it. What I am arguing is that we should stop privileging it—exempting it from the normal critiques and methods of evaluation that are applied to other texts—and start taking it seriously. We are not taking the Bible seriously when we refuse to see it for what it is and attribute some magical quality to a text that is otherwise valuable as a record of the human quest for God and the human attempt to make sense out of our lives here.

Does Paz “work”?

The other day, a student offered a very interesting objection to Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude.

He asked, “what if you like being part of a particular group?”

I think his objection was meant to suggest that people “like” their associations with particular groups, probably because of the strong sense of identity we get from them.

No doubt this is true. In fact, as a matter of political strategy, one might conclude that Paz’s “strategy” is completely ineffective. You can’t construct a political movement out of a “universal” identity like the one suggested by Paz’s category “alone.” People join movements because of “interests” they believe they share with those movements, and it seems that Paz’s urge for us to unite with all humanity doesn’t take that into account. His definition of “community”—a place where I can see myself in the other—seems to work better the more narrowly defined the community.

However, this failure to create a more universal community out of the move into the “labyrinth of solitude” seems to be the only way to avoid the kind of conflict we are seeing in Iraq right now. The divisions between Sunni, Shiah, and Kurd would be resolved best if the members of those communities could see themselves as part of a single community—but this seems unlikely at the moment.

Furthermore, I would really like to see America return to a greater sense of community. Paz would ask us how we can hope to solve any of our problems if we can’t have a real dialogue about them. It is our insistence on “winning,” (as opposed to “solving”) that seems to be driving our current political crises. We are facing tough issues—issues related to the war, security, the economy, immigration, corporations, the environment, etc.—and it seems counterproductive to approach these issues with the desire to win one for our side, rather than with the desire to do the best we can for all of us.

Ahhh . . . Nietzsche

Ahhhh . . . . Nietzsche. I really love that guy.

I’ve been really getting down on myself about the way I’ve been teaching my Hum 22 class. I haven’t been saying what I really think, and I’ve devoted to little time to real scholarship, and too much time to responding to uncritical, but loud, assertions. It seems that most of the students, and all of the more vocal students, are strident evangelicals. They seem to think that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is ignorant, or stupid, or evil. They seem to be quite Manichaean.

To be an evangelical Christian means that you believe the Bible is a miraculous book. You think it contains no errors of history or science, and contains no contradictions. To hold this view is to reject two hundred years of historical scholarship. It is to part ways with every major scholar in the world with the exception of those who are not free to pursue the truth because they teach at conservative Christian colleges and universities that require them to never deviate from the party line. To be an evangelical is also to reject the obvious evidence of the text itself—a text that contains a lot of interesting, compelling, and profitable discourse on the nature of our existence—evidence that clearly demonstrates, again and again, that the Bible is the product of human culture. Like literally thousands of other religious texts, it was created by human beings who were asking the same questions, in the same way, we are. It should have no special authority over any thinking person.

But, of course, evangelicals are thinking people. Many of them are quite intelligent. They just can’t face the thought that their safe, confined, well-organized world—a world that is really a system that exists only in their heads, and exists only to make them feel like they know THE truth of the universe—a universe completely devoid of mystery, and, therefore, from my point of view, a world devoid of God (yes, these evangelicals have killed God, I see God’s blood all over them)—and, because they know the truth of the universe they can go to bed every night, not only, in their words, “certain they will go to heaven when they die,” and convinced they are better than the rest of us (though, of course, they deny this is their attitude).

They honestly would rather see me, and you, and billions of other people burn in hell for eternity then find out there is no hell at all.

Just think about that.

What do evangelicals believe?

They believe:
• God created everything in the universe in six days. Most of them think this event occurred less than 10,000 years ago.
• There was literally a Garden of Eden (located between the Tigris and Euphrates River which, miraculously, still existed even after the [global] Flood) and in this Garden there were two trees: one of these trees was actually named “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” and the other was actually named “The Tree of Life.” A talking serpent manages to trick Eve into eating some fruit form the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and this leads to all the pain and suffering we now experience. They do not believe this is symbolic. They believe it is history.
• They believe that virtually every biologist on this planet is an idiot for believing that all of the biodiversity on this planet is the result of long, gradual, inefficient, but biologically explainable processes. Yes, according to evangelicals, those scientists are incredibly stupid to believe such nonsense, but it is perfectly reasonable for evangelicals to believe that the ancestors of every bird, animal, and person on this planet once lived together on a single boat (Noah’s Ark).
• They believe that God actually parted the Red Sea so that the Israelites could walk through it. (And that God sent ten plagues on Egypt, including turning the Nile River to blood and covering all of Egypt with frogs . . . literally.)
• They believe that the prophet Elijah did not die; instead, an actual chariot of fire came down from heaven and lifted him up to heaven.
• They believe a man actually lived in the belly of a big fish for three days . . . and then was regurgitated and survived.
• The believe that we are all surrounded by myriads of unseen spiritual beings—angels and demons—who can and do interfere in human affairs.
• They believe that sometime soon Jesus will come back to earth, at least as far as the atmosphere, and then they will be transported ,magically, up to meet Jesus in the air.
• They believe in the soon-coming “Great Tribulation”—a period of seven years when the human population (minus the already-raptured Christians) will suffer terribly. This is inevitable, from their point of view, and that explains why they don’t really worry about stopping devastating ecological or military disasters. If terrorists were to set off a nuclear bomb in New York City, they would see a silver-lining: this would mean that Jesus’ return would come soon.

But, of course, it’s okay that they believe all those things. What I find so soul-crushing is that they not only feel entitled to believe these bizarre things, they feel that those of us who don’t agree with all this nonsense, those of us who want some proof before we believe any of it, are evil, stupid, ignorant, etc.

I know all of this because I use to be one of them.

But it’s so frustrating. I want to engage them. I want to get them to consider things reasonably. But this would be to bang my head against a stone wall. So I swallow my words. I don’t tell them what I really think. (Besides, I can’t waste class time arguing points with people who are unable to believe anything different than what they already believe. They can’t believe otherwise. They really can’t help themselves.)

So, on the train home tonight I was very happy to turn to my faithful friend and guide, F.N., speaking through his most famous voice, that of Zarathustra:

“Do not be jealous, lover of truth, because of these inflexible and oppressive men! Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man.

“Return to your security because of these abrupt men: only in the market-place is one assailed with Yes? Or No?

“The experience of all deep wells is slow: they must wait long until they know what has fallen into their depths.

“All great things occur away from glory and the market-place: the inventors of new values have always lived away from glory and the market-place.

“Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung by poisonous flies. Flee to where the raw, rough breeze blows!

“Flee into your solitude. You have lived too near the small and the pitiable men. Flree from their hidden vengeance! Towards you they are nothing but vengeance.

“No longer lift your arm against them! They are innumerable and it is not your fate to be a fly-swat.”

(Thus Spake Zarathustra, I. “Of the Flies of the Market-Place,” trans. Hollingdale.)

Click Here for an Example of Moderate Muslim Response

Click on the title to this post to see an article about a website that represents the kind of moderate response to which I was referring in the previous post.

Cartoon Controversy

Does the recent controversy over the "Muhammud cartoons" represent a collision of cultures? Maybe, but I suspect there is more to the story.

My undergraduate degree is in journalism, and I take the right of the press to function freely and without intimidation to be essential in a modern democracy. In this country, the mainistream press has been embarrassingly hypocritical in its coverage of the cartoon fiasco, almost every venue refusing to reproduce the cartoons out of "respect for the religious beliefs of others." This sense of respect did not, however, keep journalist (e.g. CNN's Wolf Blitzer) from displaying Islamic cartoons that disrespect Jews. Perhaps the more accurate reason for not displaying the Muslim cartoons comes under the "responsibility" excuse, which I take to mean "fear of reprisals."

The thought that fear, in this case, fear of violence, would silence journalist, sickens me. Part of living in a society with a free press is that you will find yourself, no matter who you are, ridiculed and disrespected by someone with a printing press, or t.v. transmitter, or . . . computer, but that is part of the price we pay for the right to criticize others--they may also criticize us.

But is this a sign of a conflict between two civilizations--Christian and Muslim, or . . . modern and, well . . . Muslim?

I don't think so. We might ask who is the main audience for all of the violence and outrage over the cartoons. I doubt that the audience is the (secular) West. Rather, it seems to me that the audience for these (violent) demonstrations was the Muslim world. As Reza Aslan has argued (in his book, No God but God), the Muslim world is in the midst of a "reformation" in which Muslims are struggling over the very issue of what it means to be Muslim. Aslan notes, for example, that the very day before the most recent London bombings, almost all of the top Muslim clerics in the world had issued fatwas condemning just such terrorist violence and the bombings in London occured not in the financial or tourist areas of London, but in neighborhoods populated by large groups of Muslim immigrants.

It seems to me that the extended circulation, debate, and protest over the cartoons has been a way of drawing Muslims around the world into a debate over the nature of Islam. It has presented a challenge to those Muslims--in fact, the vast majority of Muslims--who increasingly emphasize tolerance, personal ethics, and spirituality to reject western institutions. In this discourse the cartoons represent the irreverance of the west towards Islam and reinforce the idea that the west is hostile towards Muslims. I suspect the purpose of this rhetoric is more to critique tolerant Muslims than it is to engage "the West" in a meaninful way.

But the West is not alien to this problem. Remember the sixteenth century? Europe endured over a hundred years of intense religious controversy, violence, assassiantion, and, yes . . . terrorism. I believe Aslan is right: Islam is working through its own "reformation" right now.

If he is right, then the repeated attempts to frame this moment as a "clash of civilization" is to undermine the position of the vast majority of Muslims who advocate tolerance, respect the religious beliefs of others, and want to live in societies where dissent can be expressed. This is not a conflict between Christian and Muslim "civilizations." This is yet another chapter in the saga we call "modernity."