Lived religion

New, revised and final poster/flyer for next week's roundtable...

the talented young designer Kaushal has outdone himself!

Divine images

My little camera continues to amaze me! Went up to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine this afternoon to get a photo of Keith Haring's "Life

of Christ" altar, which we have permission to use for our upcoming Queer Christianities conference. It was in an unlit closed-off chapel, glowing.

Wiener Blut

I should have known better than to think a 2011 ballet setting of Brecht and Weil's "Seven Deadly Sins" costarring Patty LuPone would be good, but I'm glad I didn't. The piece I went for was banal for variously uninteresting reasons, but the rest of the New York City Ballet program at Lincoln Center this afternoon was all Balanchine, and all joy.  Especially transporting was the closer, "Vienna Waltzes" from 1977. Before ending with the first dance suite from "Der Rosenkavalier" it's all older Strausses and Léhar, starting with "Geschichten vom Wienerwald." Indeed, the marvelous set starts as the Wienerwald, changing gradually into a grand ballroom by way of a Jugendstil studio which seems to grow out of the roots of the trees as their scrim rises. (I'm not describing it well; it was magic.) And the sheer pleasure in movement of the dances!

After the faux profundity of the blandly unpretty "Sins" (Brecht would have wept), the joy in beauty of these dances was a revelation (Brecht would have sighed and said he told you so). For me it was also a trip back to Vienna, which for a long time was an important part of my view of the world. In the sooty years of Austria's political neutrality before the cold war ended and Austria joined the EU, I was a sort of spiritual Mitteleuropäer, proud to know where every scene of "The Third Man" was filmed. Waltzing imperial Vienna was a fata morgana for tourists. I was oriented by the world depicted in the the k.-u.-k., occupation and Austrian stamps I bought at a shop in the Opernpassage, the giddy interwar movies at the Bellaria Kino and the blunt and ineffective efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung at the Burgtheater, and Greene's world was mine. Funny how much that's fallen into disuse, but nice that it's still there. The moment the zither twanged in "Geshichten vom Wienerwald," I was lost, and found. [pic]

Once upon a time

Thirty years ago this August (can that be true?) I left home to go to the United World College of the American West, an international baccalaureate college in Montezuma, New Mexico. It was the inaugural year for the school, the sixth member of the United World College family, and we were a hundred students from forty-six countries. An amazing experience all around! I went back for the tenth and twentieth graduation reunions in 1994 and 2004 but missed the twenty-fifth in 2009. Nobody wants to wait until the thirtieth, however, so we're having a reunion in New York this May for our class and the two classes which came after us. Lots of folks are coming, and people have started posting photos from back in the day. Here's one I'm delighted to see again, the cast of a movie shot during "Project Week" in Spring of 1983, a historical drama of forbidden love, class differences and murder. The cast hailed from France, England, the Netherlands, Venezuela, New Zealand, France, Ecuador, Jamaica, Belgium and the US. I wrote the script, full of heavy-handed metaphors, but happily nobody had time to learn it!

See the islands!

Remember those islands you can sometimes see from my parents' place in California, here in this image from the Guardian's great "Satellite eye on earth" series of you can see them from space. Evidently the blurs are windstorms from the mainland, whose sediment attracts phytoplankton out in the Pacific which, in turn, attracts our friends the whales!

Living color

Coming soon! The India China Institute is paying for a Canadian scholar to join what was just a religious studies event, so we get the benefit of their immensely talented flyer-designer, too. Thanks, Kaushal!

On the make

Thus H. G. Wells about James Harvey Robinson's 1921 The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform, the first important book to come out of The New School for Social Research. Robinson was the leader of the "New History" and in 1921 he was The New School's first "director." The book was based on Robinson's popular lecture course on "The History of the Human Mind" and intended initially to be part of a Worker's Bookshelf series of inexpensive, accessible works of critical thought conceived by the new Worker's Educational Bureau of America, which was housed at The New School.

Mind in the Making was a best-seller, and put The New School on the map nationally. But the Worker's Bookshelf series was nixed by the head of the American Federation of Labor who feared it was communist. And in 1922 Robinson, together with his fellow New Historian (and fellow Columbia refugee) Charles Beard, had given up on the fledgling school. How to tell this story? And, the shades of the New Historians ask, why?

The New History argued that history should be useful. It should teach not lists of names and dates but what Robinson in his 1912 The New History called "the technique of progress." In Mind in the Making, he promised that "history, by revealing the origin of our current fundamental beliefs, will tend to free our minds so as to permit honest thinking" (14). Traditional forms of history teaching were disempowering not only because they focused on a distant past presented for genuflection but because they didn't explain how history worked. "[T]he present has hitherto been the willing victim of the past," Robinson and Beard wrote in 1916; "the time has now come when it should turn on the past and exploit it in the interests of advance."

Mind in the Making calls in particular for a "scientific" view of history. It begins with an account of how three centuries of scientific discovery and invention have changed the human understanding of nature and expanded our powers to control and use it. The study of human phenomena, meanwhile, remains "medieval," blinded by ancient abstractions and religious prohibitions. To truly understand ourselves, and reform ourselves, we need not only to focus on recorded history but to acknowledge the ongoing legacies of a half million year history.

To understand the four layers - that is, to learn to rule them rather than be ruled by them - we need to acquaint ourselves with the findings of four new scientific fields: animal or comparative psychology; genetic and analytic psychology; anthropology, ethnology and comparative religion; and the history of philosophy, science, theology and literature.

It's a tall order, but makes for an exciting course. One wonders what the equivalents in the human sciences of organic chemistry, electricity and flying machines will be, and hopes against hope that they will prevent another Great War. But Robinson's optimism was faltering already by 1921. The carnage of the war should have shown the world the need for a new age, an end to nationalism and ideology, but responses to the war were just more of the same. Mind in the Making ends with a discussion of the "repressive" nature of most human institutions (especially religion), and by 1930 Robinson was writing "man is by nature not an open-minded progressive creature, but, in general, one which distrusts innovation..." Mind in the Making's call for more intelligence shows both why and how we must grow, and why we will likely fail.

I don't think Robinson left The New School for world-historical reasons. It's certainly not a story of world-historical importance! Many of the other founders left, too. (Dewey even returned to Columbia.) Maybe it was a despondency at the souring historical moment. Maybe it was conflict between deeply different visions of The New School as a center for research or for teaching, for workers or for experts or for the middle class. Maybe it was the difficulty of fleshing out the dream of a new kind of institution - an institution, indeed, that wasn't supposed to function like an institution! Maybe it was personalities. Continuing in 1922 with a first "president" (The New Republic's Alvin Johnson) and a changed list of trustees, The New School continued to teach all those new sciences Robinson thought necessary (along with the social sciences he didn't - economics, sociology, political science) but the focus inevitably evolved.

It's hard to tell this story, but including the New History and the role of leading New Historians in the brief first efflorescence of The New School makes it easier. The question isn't the Rankian question of what "really occurred" but how (whether!) the story can be told in a way useful to us in the present. That doesn't allow us to make things up - Robinson and Beard understood themselves as social scientists, not spinners of tales - but it does both permit and require us to be "presentist." Although there's no question that we're telling the story differently than would people outside the school, or in different places within it, or a decade or two ago, or to a different audience (I'm always aware of the many Parsons students in the room), the aim is still "honest thinking."

A usable past, Robinson and Dewey and others would surely agree, should focus on processes rather than only on abstractions - or founders! But, and here they might not follow, a usable past also has to be past - if not a "foreign country" at least a place different enough from the present to enable us to imagine beyond the present and its problems. Or, to split the difference, a place with present problems of its own, some of the initially most useless-seeming of which might enable us to ask new questions of our present.

Brrr

Winter's been gentle here, but in other parts of the world it's clearly a very very different picture. Hundreds have frozen to death in eastern Europe in recent weeks, and millions are affected in Mexico. Geneva is better equipped for cold (though someone still froze to death in a homeless camp), but this image from the Times blew me away - look at that tree! From the Tribune de Genève, more fantastical images still.

漬けっぱなし

My Japanese housemate has completed his New York sojourn, and left me with this surprise - a fermenting pot for making nukazuke pickles 糠漬け. (He was using it for the bento he brought each day to the Metropolitan Opera, where the Japanese Culture Ministry paid for him to be a "creative content intern" - he got to watch "The Enchanted Island" from conception to completion, lucky bastard, along with a dozen other old and new productions.) Nukamiso is a mix of rice bran with kombu and fermenting bacteria (perhaps introduced with vegetable peels early on, but then self-sustaining). Once started you can apparently keep using it to pickle vegetables forever, like a sourdough starter. As you can see he left some cucumbers and daikon as models. A gift that keeps on giving! The only catch is that the nukamiso should be mixed each day, preferably with bare hands...!

Exciting semester at LREL

This program has really got its groove on in 2012!

RIP Wislawa

Just heard that Wislawa Symborska, the Polish poet, has died. Here's a poem of hers I've presented here before (in January '07) which still seems to me... miraculous.

Miracle Fair
Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable is thinkable.

Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska,

trans. Joanna Trzeciak (NY & London: W. W. Norton, 2001), 119-20 [Pic]

Is the best good enough?

A question which came up in Delhi with my friend S, only fully explored today in New York with his wife L: S took me to the divey but delicious Karim, "the best Mughlai food in Delhi," and apparently one of the best restaurants in all of Asia - or so did Time Magazine declare in 1985. (As this sign indicated, it has the same problems with imitators as the One and Only Original Ray's Pizza.) Supposing it were indeed the world's best Mughlai food, should I be taken there for my first experience of the cuisine? Would I even be able to appreciate what made it good, let alone the best? And wouldn't it in any case condemn me to disappointment in all future Mughlai food-eating experiences? They may sound snarky, not to mention ungrateful, but they were serious questions.

Skyward

Rising swiftly at 14th and Fifth, the new University Center -
10 stories to go!

Historical wrinkles

Second week of "The New School Century," and we have to start telling a story about The New School! I'm better at taking stories apart - and, sometimes, then putting them back together. So, for instance, we need to challenge the "crisis at Columbia" story about The New School's origins. Columbia's importance is quite different.

The "crisis at Columbia" story

With the US's entry into World War I, Columbia's president Nicholas Murray Butler announced that the university would not tolerate any professors' objecting to the war. Two did and were fired. In 1919 historians Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson resigned in protest, and, together with their buddies Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey, started a "new school" founded in academic freedom, a kind of anti-university that was truer to the ideal of the university than craven Columbia. (Some versions of this story make Beard and Robinson pacifists, too.)

A nice story, but unsupportable on the facts, most significant among which is that discussions about setting up a new school, involving Beard, Robinson and others, date back at least to 1916, well before the US entered the war. (Beard and Robinson both supported the war, by the way.) Butler's firing of Catell and Dana may have been the trigger, but plans for a new kind of school were already afoot. As a matter of fact, Robinson, Beard and Veblen had all published books criticizing American universities. Columbia and Butler were not the problem, universities were. Indeed, it was on Columbia's dime that Robinson and Beard were able to develop and publish their critiques of universities. Columbia (which Dewey never left) wasn't a terrible place but as good as a university could be. It was not Columbia's failure as a university which was the problem, but that even as accomplished a university as Columbia had shown it could not be trusted.

There are at least three problems with the "crisis of Columbia" story, beyond its inaccuracy. First, it suggests that New School developed as a reaction to Columbia - without Butler's patriotic persecution of pacifist and socialist faculty, there would have been no New School. But a new school was on its way to happening; the hub of discussion was The New Republic, which published the proposal for a new school a year before the Columbia resignations. Second, seeing a New School founded to protect true academic freedom under fire at Columbia makes it seem that the founders were concerned to form a truer, better university. In fact, they were suspicious of universities as a whole for all sorts of structural reasons, and exploring alternative structures.

Finally and a little more subtly, seeing the New School founded on "academic freedom" risks making the New School project sound like just what it was rejecting. When we think of "academic freedom" these days we tend to think of debates about tenure, which it is argued allow scholars not only to do politically unpopular work but also to devote themselves to the kind of specialized and often arcane scholarly projects which worldly trustees cannot understand. The university is a blessed space which allows the more otherworldly values of pure scholarship to survive, safe from the pressures of publication and popularity. Well, the founders certainly were all for academic freedom - understood primarily as academic self-government free of the intrusions of deans and trustees, who were seen as suppressing work critical of the Establishment to which they belonged. But they had no interest in unworldly scholarship; Beard, Robinson and Dewey criticized universities for being unworldly spaces which rejected knowledge of the real world, and accountability to it.

So yes, New School was founded by people, some of whom had resigned from Columbia because of Butler's firing of war-objectors - but others stayed on, and yet others had no connection to Columbia at all. Columbia had not stifled these founders' critiques of universities but made them possible, and productive relationships with Columbia characterized the New School's early years, from the large number of Columbia faculty who taught there to the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, whose editor-in-chief Edwin Seligman was at Columbia and associate editor was New School president Alvin Johnson. Columbia was friend, not foe. But New School wasn't trying to out-university Columbia; it wasn't trying to be a university at all. Already before the War, the founders had been involved in different institutions for "social research," from the Institute of Municipal Research to The New Republic. The discussions about a "New School of Social Science" begun already in 1916 were not about forming a better, truer university, but imagining something radically different than a university. "Academic freedom" was part of it but nearly anti-academic conceptions of social relevance and accountability were, too.

Does this make a better story, or a story at all? It does, I think, and a story even more relevant in this moment when, for old and new reasons, universities are under fire. But to tell the story well we really need to explore the alternative institutions of the progressive era and see The New School in the context of them, not just among universities. That's just where the class is going next week! Stay tuned!

Scaffolding off!

After more than a year shrouded by scaffolding, Jefferson Market Public Library is back!

Profound pastiche

Caught the final performance of "The Enchanted Island," the Metropolitan Opera's revival of the baroque form pastiche, where bits and pieces of various operas as cobbled together to accommodate a particular constellation of stars and resources. Librettist Jeremy Sams and Arts Florissant director William Christie ranged widely in their borrowing, from Handel and Vivaldi and Rameau to a host of lesser-known baroque composers, and from operas to sacred cantatas and even some coronation anthems. It was a hoot! And divine sung by a stellar cast, notably Joyce DiDonato, Danielle de Niese (Melbourne-born!) and, stepping in for an indisposed David Daniels, Anthony Roth Costanzo.

I knew some of the music (from "Semele," "Ariodante," "Les Indes Galantes" and "Griselda") but could actually place only one at the time, the finale of "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato." But that was enough, as I could feel the appropriation, and approve of it. Here as in the original work, it comes at a moment of resolution, and feeling the pathos of the other work (one of my favorite pieces in music) flow into this one deepened the experience.

For most of the viewers, most if not all of the music will have been delightful new discoveries. (For instance there's some amazing nearly atonal work from one of Handel's Marian cantatas - who knew there were such!) The pastiche-y part will have been felt and approved instead in the storyline, which weaves together Shakespeare's "Tempest" and "Midsummer Night's Dream." How can you do that, you ask? And yet they did, and it didn't feel cheap or tacky but like spending more time with old friends, learning more about them. Pastiche, because of its postmodern uses, sounds frivolous, but "Enchanted Island" shows it can be profound play.

The performance was sold out (and not just, I think, because you could hear what my Japanese housemate called なまドミンゴ namadomingo - Placido Domingo live - in the part of Neptune). I hope it enters the repertoire, spawns imitations, and maybe even a revival of some of these old operas, like Vivaldi's "Griselda."

Kallen to the rescue!

The first course on religion taught at The New School, Spring 1920.

Dewey eyed

Reading Dewey's Democracy and Education for Tuesday's class, I'm finding myself thrilled. It's been a while since I've spent time with Dewey's boldness in challenging all our lazy pieties and providing charged alternatives. There are no small ideas here!

From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive to his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone — an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.

John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction

to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 52

Gee, darling

Isn't it delicious! A whole day at home, doing nothing in particular...

Karma chameleon

It's one of the truisms of religious studies that "Hinduism" was a foreign invention. Before the Brits, indeed before the Mughals, there was no such thing - no unified -ism, no religion. I stumbled on a rather cheeky variant of this in a pulp novel while in India called The Immortals of Meluha, the first book in a trilogy about Shiva. (The second volume, The Secret of the Nagas, is out, too.) Even the story of the book is exciting: outsider writer braves rejection by publishing business to achieve greatest success. The writer Amish Tripathi is not a subaltern, however, but a financial sector star from one of India's top management institutes, who used knowledge from the world of marketing unheard of in Indian English-language publishing to create a sensation. But in its way that makes it even more interesting! Amish is creating a usable past for India's new technocratic elite, supported by but still in some ways alienated from family religious traditions (most are brahmins). What he is able to imagine is that the great god Shiva was not, in fact, a god at all, but a man of a kind of all-around splendor which Indians know to be possible - or at least knew, before foreigners' judgments corrupted their understanding - before the invention of "Hinduism," I might add! I picked up a copy for the flight home, and, slow reader that I am, only just finished it. (It's a cliff-hanger, and I've ordered the sequel!) Well-written it is not, but fascinating nonetheless. In Amish's imagined 1900 BCE world, the prosperous and righteous Suryavanshi kingdom (founded by the great scientist Brahma and statesman Ram) faces an existential threat from its evil neighbors the Chandravanshi, who overflow with slums and decadent opulence and are trying to kill the Saraswati River whose waters scientists have used to keep the Suryavanshi forever young. Both are waiting for a savior, the Neelkanth, an outsider who will be known by a luminous blue throat. Our hero Shiva, who comes from near Mount Kailash in Tibet, doesn't believe in chosen ones or in faith in redeemers, but steps up to the plate when terrorists nearly kill his love Sati and destroy the central research compound of the Suryavanshi. The Suryavanshi unite behind him as their divine savior, but he knows that anyone can be divine.

Yet it's not quite the euhemerist story I was expecting. In one way it is a secularization of a religious tradition (and a secular vindication of it). In the system set up by Ram there are varna (castes), for instance, but they are meritocratically filled out in each generation - children are raised communally far from most adults, as in Plato's Republic, and in time choose the status which best suits them. Only the bending of these rules to allow the rich to raise their own children has corrupted what is essentially a perfect system. Other problems are also the result of deviation from the rationality of Ram's view. Shiva teaches them to reject the idea that misfortune is a consequence of crimes in a past life, and nearly shows them that faith in a supernatural savior is a superstition which hides their own capacities from them. (Feuerbach would approve!) And yet we've not quite demythologized everything. Shiva became godlike because of his karma...