New Religion?

For our New School Histories vertical I've been struggling with writing a piece about religious studies at the New School. That's for two reasons, at least. First, there's more than fits into a short piece - and it's not a unified story. The other reason has to do with the fact that religious studies at the New School is me. It's bound to look self-aggrandizing or aggrieved - or both! What to do?

Currently my draft has four parts (after a clever opening remarking that our centennial festival fell between the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, and naming the "Religion - Why?" lecture series held on Friday nights in 1933). The first part considers what "religion" meant to our founders. It includes a cameo of Herbert Croly, who seems to have subscribed to a Comtean religion of humanity, seeing social research as a kind of theology for a new day. James Harvey Robinson thought the social sciences were the belated application of scientific method to the study of the human, which had been held back by medieval theological ideas about human uniqueness. And then must of course come Horace Kallen, who taught about religion from 1920 on, rejecting (while still studying) the world religions but defending the particular understanding of the importance of religious freedom he eventually called "secularism as the will of God."

Kallen shaped the pluralistic ethos of the New School, one which did not just embrace the social scientific of study of religion but welcomed dialogue with public theologians. In the 50s we gave honorary degrees to religious luminaries Reinhold Niebuhr (1951), James H. Robinson (1953), Paul Tillich (1955), Martin Buber (1957) and Jacques Maritain (1959)! Niebuhr, Tillich and Maritain each were significant presences over the years at the New School, too, as was the Union Theological Seminary theologian and sociologist of religion Arthur Swift, whose quarter century at the New School began with the "Religion - Why?" course of 1933 and ended with his being Vice President for Planning and Dean of the School of Politics and Social Studies. Our longest serving president, Jack Everett, also studied (and was ordained) at Union, and was introduced to the New School as a specialist in philosophy and religion. If the University of Chicago is one overlooked peer of the New School for Social Research as it worked out its mission in the world, Union Theological Seminary may be another.

That wants to be the second part, mainly for reasons of chronology. Public theology is as forgotten now as messianic hopes for the social sciences. The third part celebrates New School as a place where important academic thinking on secularism has happened, mainly in the sociology of religion. (Philosophy has also long engaged theology in a way few other programs do, notably in the work of Hans Jonas and Reiner Schürman.) It's quite astonishing really that so small a place should have been the site for the writing of Peter Berger's Sacred Canopy, Jose Casanova's Public Religions in the Modern World, Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion and, if a little indirectly, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. There's something in the mix here which leads people to see beyond the limitations of facile theories of secularization... the result, I think, more of the intersection of continental social science and American religious rambunctiousness than of Kallenian pluralistic liberalism.

The final part is the hardest, as it has somehow to tie these together, if only as disparate threads. But better if I could render them all moments or elements of some central thing! What I'd like to get at is what I called the "faith(s) of the New School" at the Festival of New - to suggest that this religious/secular efflorescence wasn't accidental but reveals something essential about the project of the New School. (This is where I need to try not to sound aggrieved...) I'd like to build off a letter Kallen wrote to one of the Protestant presidents explaining that the New School was a sort of "free religious society," its supporters a "church." For Kallen the church language wasn't metaphorical. The New School was a temple to Adult Education, its ultimate concern - a Tillichian idea Kallen happily coopted - freedom in all its dimensions. Curious! And still true? Are we a church still, and, if so, what do we revere? In the end I'd like to find a way gently to suggest that our talismanic invocations of "the new" border on idolatry!

So there you have it, six characters in search of an author. And still I'm leaving so much out! Where is the Jewish New School, which produced wonders like the course "The Bible: A Human Document," taught by a Reform rabbi in 1971 and featured as one of ten representative courses in a TV series? (NS030107_001676)? For that matter, what about all the zany brainy courses offered in the Adult Division over the years, or Krishnamurti's New School lectures? Some of the earliest courses in feminist and gay theology? But my argument needs not to be about religion or its study as narrowly conceived; the folks I've mentioned all saw it more broadly.

System --> Power --> Lived Religion

It made sense at the time. (Actually, after a whirlwind tour of Clifford Geertz, Talal Asad and Meredith McGuire, I shut up and let the class speak, just jotting phrases from what they said on the board.)

Mixed media

I guess I used the words "a gappy legacy" in one of our podcasts. Well...

it's taken on a life of its own, as a zine from one of our archivists!

California ablaze

Of all the terrifying pictures from the California fires, the scariest may
be this one of beautiful firefly-like embers blowing in the strong winds.

Awakening in the Anthropocene

Tore through this new novel this past weekend, at least until the end, when I was wearied by the tightening macrame of plot twists. A novel in term-time? I assure you: it was research! The novelist Amitav Ghosh is of course the author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017) which, among other things, argues that the world-making of literary novels makes them somehow structurally incapable of taking the Anthropocence seriously. (I avail myself of his arguments in my forthcoming piece on philosophy of religion in the Anthropocene, wondering if modern religion has the same blinders.) So how does he do as novelist?

If you've read his 1995 Calcutta Chromosome you're familiar with the structure and rhythm, a hapless narrator who finds himself drawn into a vortex of mysteries, a past and a present which seem to echo each other, and uncanny coincidences so plentiful they can't be coincidences - or can they? (Of 2004 The Hungry Tide, which I also loved when I read it a decade ago, I had to report "if Ghosh's writing has a vice it is this hypersignification, which can make things seem contrived.") In the Calcutta Chromosome, you're supposed to notice the flamboyant plot-fixing: the feverish storytelling may be a symptom of malaria (which may also be a goddess). This time the gleeful coincidence-contriving dares us to consider that what we're encountering is not so much a novelist in overdrive as one who lets his work be a revelation of a world gone off its rails.

It struck me that the Venice I had encountered today ... was closer in spirit to the city that the Gun Merchant would have seen in the seventeenth century, another era when unaccustomed forces were churning the earth. Except that now it was unimaginably more so; it was as if the very rotation of the planet had accelerated, moving all living things at unstoppable velocities, so that the outward appearance of a place might stay the same while its core was whisked away to some other time and location. (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 181)

The 17th century, Ghosh has told us through a reported academic talk, was the time of the "Little Ice Age," which led to weather extremes and political instability across the planet. And it may also have been the beginning of the turn to fossil fuels which has led to the current debacle...  

'all around the earth, ordinary people appear to have sensed the stirring of something momentous ... what they didn't allow for was that the story might take a few hundred years to play out.' (137) 

The story doesn't just give multiple servings of extreme weather, though wild weather is the norm (there's even an evacuation of the Getty Museum because of a brush fire, just as the talk on the Little Ice Age ends - a little unnerving at the moment I'm writing). Gun Island takes place in a world where things are moving in untoward ways, with animals from Irrawaddy dolphins to California sea snakes to Italian spiders displaced from their habitats by global heating. These new flows include people, climate refugees fleeing drought- and typhoon-ravaged lands for Europe, and the novel ends in a Bugsby Berkeley water ballet of migrating animals intervening to save an Egyptian ship of rifugiati off Sicily, perhaps with the assistance of the serpent-mediating goddess Manasa Devi and La Madonna de La Salute. (You'll have to read the book for yourself to see how a story that begins in the Sundarbans ends here.)

It's a happy ending, imagine, complete even with reunited lovers! Is Gun Island, then, a fantasy of reenchanting a ravaged world? It dares us to believe otherwise. When the narrator describes his cognitive distress and paralyzing confusion at the cavalcade of improbable things that have been happening, a wise historian friend tells him that in the loss of "will" and "freedom" - volontà e libertà'- he has the symptoms the Inquisition associated with demonic possession! But the possession isn't something he's just now entering.

'You and I don't live in a world where it is possible to be possessed in the old sense. These things happened to our ancestors because their will, and their sense of their presence in the world, were essential to their very survival. To get by, they had to depend on the soil, the weather, animals, neighbours, family and so on, none of which would yield what they needed just for the asking, in the manner of, say, a cash machine, or a ticket agent at the stazione. Everything they depended on for their livelihood could fight back and resist, no matter whether it was a spouse or a horse, let alone the wind and the weather. Merely to survive they needed to assert their presence or they would have been overwhelmed, they would have become shadows of themselves. ... You and I face no such threat. We live in a world of impersonal systems; ... no one needs to assert their presence in order to get by from day to day. And since it is not needed, that sense of presence slowly fades, or is lost and forgotten - it's easier to let the systems take over.'

It took me a couple of minutes to work out the implications of what she was saying. 'But if that's true, Cinta,'I said, 'then what you're implying is that people today - people like us - are already possessed?'

She smiled in her enigmatic way. ... 'the world of today presents all the symptoms of demonic possession.'

I gasped. 'What? You can't be serious, Cinta! In what sense does it present the symptoms of demonic possession?'

'Just look around you, caro. ... Everyone knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a livable place ... and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit, as though we were in the grip of forces that gave overwhelmed our will; ...'

She smiled and reached out to pat my hand. 'That is why whatever is happening to you is not "possession." Rather I would say that it is a risveglio, a kind of awakening. It may be dangerous, of course, but that is because you are waking up to things that you had never imagined or sensed before. You are lucky, Dino - some unknown force has given you a great gift.' (235-37)

We don't ever quite find out who the unknown force is - the mythical "Gun Merchant," Manasa Devi? It's Ghosh himself, of course! But he wants to share billing with the role of stories in human life, especially supernatural ones. Is the Anthropocene a result of our presuming to live without the guidance of legends?

In the end, Gun Island is a work of optimism. Not just in the potential for stories to help us learn anew to live in a world which demands our presence, resisting us but also potentially working with us. The novel suggests that the Anthropocene is not so qualitatively different that we are without resources, without hope. A 17th century story (which isn't just a "story") foretells - maybe even facilitates - an apparently miraculous contemporary rescue. In the church of la Salute in Venice, the wise Cinta tells our fumbling narrator: 

'Remember these words, caro, think of them whenever you despair of the future: Unde origo inde salus - "From the origin salvation comes".' (244)  

He thinks of them at the novel's end.

I understood what she had been trying to tell me that day: that the possibility of our deliverance lies not in the future but in the past, in a mystery beyond memory." (312) 

Let's hope that's true.

Fall colors

Perfect day for a Hudson outing (and going up next weekend, too!).

Golden key

At a memorial gathering for Ann Barr Snitow, already a part of our New School firmament even as nobody can quite imagine the world without her, a niece read us a story. It was one of Grimm's fairy tales - Ann loved fairy tales and had shelves and shelves of them from all around the world - and this was one she had clearly returned to often.

Once in the wintertime when the snow was very deep, a poor boy had to go out and fetch wood on a sled. After he had gathered it together and loaded it, he did not want to go straight home, because he was so frozen, but instead to make a fire and warm himself a little first. So he scraped the snow away, and while he was thus clearing the ground he found a small golden key. Now he believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock, so he dug in the ground and found a little iron chest. "If only the key fits!" he thought. "Certainly there are valuable things in the chest." He looked, but there was no keyhole. Finally he found one, but so small that it could scarcely be seen. He tried the key, and fortunately it fitted. Then he turned it once, and now we must wait until he has finished unlocking it and has opened the lid. Then we shall find out what kind of wonderful things there were in the little chest.

Ann's niece read her this story (which I gather the Brothers Grimm placed last in their collection, to suggest the trove was unending) two days before she died. Apparently it calmed her a little. "What happens next?" she said. And then: "Afterward we won't be able to discuss it!"

First blush

The sunset may have headed south for the winter, but shorter days are bringing us rosy-fingered dawn by way of compensation!

Surface

Behold Daan Roosegaarde's interesting, slightly stunt-y media installation WATERLICHT at Columbia's Lenfest Center for the Arts. As steam, swirling and eddying in gusts of breeze, meets slowly undulated sheets of LED light it can seem like waves, or like fast-motion films of storm systems. Flickers and flashes of Buddhist epistemology! It's supposed to make one think about rising seas, I think, and in its original iteration on a broad square in Amsterdam evoked the sea much of the Netherlands would already be under, but for dykes. In the somewhat less open plaza at Lenfest, with wind, eddying around buildings and young trees sparkling as their branches and leaves caught the LEDs, it was more entertaining than thought-provoking. But a fun thing to stroll over to - it's just down the road from our new digs!

Trained but not overtrained

Had a fun session of our New School history ULEC today. The topic was adult education, a dull topic until you start to think about what it could mean, and we sparked discussion by giving students an outline of a curriculum for adults drafted by the inescapable Alvin Johnson in 1953. Mark it up, cross things out, update and supplement! we urged, but many found it promising as it stood. (It didn't come to pass.) While it goes on to include "Problems of the Citizen," "Our Economic Life" and "The Enrichment of Life: The arts and amateurism," what students were excited by was the first category, "On Personal Development."
The students who spoke up seemed to think that beginning with self-knowledge would be a boon to learning, and to your fellow students, too. "Take your own mask off before you put the mask on others." a student quipped approvingly, an idiom unfamiliar to me, which seems to combine self-awareness with a spin on the instructions for airline safety in the event of an emergency. The discussion was and was not about the "life experience" which some advocates of adult education (like Horace Kallen) thought sheltered college students of conventional age lack.

Our discussion touched also on the importance of "defeats" and "losses," things Johnson thought were part of adult self-knowledge... but I was reminded also of the time I was part of a delegation of New Schoolers at a conference on general education where we decided, not quite jokingly, that one of the hallmarks of a New School education should be "failure." I think that idea lives on, a little defanged, in the "Shared Capacity" goal of "resilience," but the defeats and losses Johnson is thinking of seem deeper. I guess I think the classroom should be a safe space in an unsafe world (like many other "human relations"), a space to name and process and engage that unsafety... adult?

Making history

Have you heard? The New School is getting a new president!

The New School Free Press has the perfect cover for their story on it.

God's gonna trouble the water

Went to Riverside Church for the solemn commemora- tion of the 400 Years of Inequality project, sponsored by Riverside and Union Theological Serminary. Mindy Fullilove, the New School faculty member who conceived the project, read the "Statement of Observance."

Today we gather in a place where inequality still prevails.

We gather here in 2019 to remember the story of this place, and to think of other times and other places.

We remember that 400 years ago Africans landed at Jamestown and were sold into bondage.

We remember that those Africans were forced to work land stolen from the Native People.

We remember that white workers, men and women, were forced into indentured servitude.

We see that from those roots was built an ecology of inequality, and we know we don’t want to live in the House of White Supremacy. 

Therefore, on this day, we lift up this place.

We acknowledge this land and the sovereignty of the people who have lived here.*

We lift up all the ancestors who have struggled for justice, and in their memory we proclaim that we are the history of a just future.

There were performances, interfaith prayers and readings of texts from four centuries of struggle. The climax was a fiery homily by the Rev. William Barber, which started with these words from Genesis 15

[God] said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge

and proceeded to spell out the "seven sins" of white supremacy which produced slavery but survive it in a culture still structured by oppression and inhumanity. After four centuries we face a choice of life or death - planetary destruction or the overcoming of the distorted biology, sociology, economics, politics and ontology of white supremacy. Amen.

Botanic

 

 

 
Fort Tryon Park makes it a little easier to be so far from the BBG

Manifestation

The gang's all here - a hand-painted illustration to the Diamond Sutra from the Ming Dynasty in the Met's survey of the divine in Chinese art.

Post-Christian

More evidence that public "Christians" are driving young people away from Christianity. Efforts to impose an atavistic "Christian morality" will only exacerbate the effect. Generational culture wars await.

Weather

Usually you can see our building from here...

One act festival?

In our New School Histories class today we tried to tell the heart-stopping story of the University in Exile in a new way. This turned out not to be necessary, as it turned out; it was the first most of the class had heard of it! But it was fun to tell it in a new way, and in the headspace of the centennial of the New School.

To the usual story we added granular detail of how the University in Exile was conceived, funded and staffed - choosing which endangered scholars to try to rescue must have been unbelievable painful, and then getting them over hard in many other ways. We pointed out that Alvin Johnson was well positioned to direct this project through the work he'd done as associate editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences - the University in Exile happened at The New School because the school was already the hub of an international community of scholars.

But not just scholars - the nearly two hundred refugees scholars granted safe passage by the New School included many artists, a part of the story which warrants remembering, especially given the kind of school we've become. So we talked about the Dramatic Workshop, established by Johnson with refugee director Erwin Piscator, building out an already thriving theater program to meld American and European theater practice, Epic Theater and Broadway. Berlin, New York and Moscow!

It's an exciting story of its own, and paints a quite different picture of what the New School was and represented in the 1940s. We'd become a center for the arts in the 20s and 30s, learning to appreciate the modern arts as themselves forms of social research, and this took it to a new level. The grafting of the work of Piscator and his partner Maria Ley onto that of Theresa Heilburn and John Gassner, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg was just the kind of "Renaissance" which Johnson had seen the University in Exile ushering in, bringing European thinking to American materials. The New School at that time was humming with these Renaissance energies, new sciences and arts in a new kind of synergy.

The Dramatic Workshop has fallen out of our story, although it is the source of most of the celebrity alums we used to claim. The New School parted ways with it in 1949, and the school's commitment to theater subsided. It never disappeared, of course. Indeed, Mary Ley Piscator tried to bring the spirit of the Dramatic Workshop back twice, in the 1960s and at the end of the 1980s, when Dramatic Workshop alumna Judith Malina offered a "Dramatic Workshop II." Theater came back in a more substantial way a few years later, with a partnership with the Actors Studio, which lasted for a while (its new home Pace University now claims the whole legacy), but just looking at the constantly changing names suggests that theater's place has never been stable.

It's fitting in its way that Maria Ley Piscator's students in 1965 offered "An Evening with Kafka"! It may be fruitless to consider what the place of theater (or anything else, for that matter) will be at The New school in a hundred years. But it's worth considering the power that awareness of such legacies - both the days of glory and how short lived they were (barely a decade for Dramatic Workshop or Actors Studio) - might have in shaping it. Meanwhile, the shining example of the University in Exile suggests ways The New School might again become a path-breaking haven for scholars aborad. (Bob Kerrey, the New School president who ended the relationship with the Actors Studio, also  unsuccessfully proposed a new university in exile for scholars from the Middle East.)

Today, the New School offers BFAs and BAs in theater (at the College of Performing Arts and the College of Liberal Arts, respectively), while the MFA seems to be on hiatus. The legacy of the University in Exile has recently been reactivated in the New University in Exile Consortium, spanning fifteen universities but homed at The New School. And we have a new president coming in Spring. What next?

Inter-dependence

Funny, I'd just been trying to get the "Theorizing Religion" class to imagine what a Buddhist theory of religion - might look like. Perhaps one could see the religions (but not "Buddhism") as so many ways in which people flee from the realities of suffering, impermanence and non-self.  (I had Walpola Rahula and David Loy in mind) Such attempts are understandable but doomed, ultimately extending and compounding the suffering they claim to transcend - how pitiable! You can't build a house on sand, at least not a house that will last very long. Better to understand the sand, and the ways we might yet come to terms with living on it. But that might be better conceptualized not as another kind of "religion" but as something qualitatively different... psychology, perhaps, or philosophy! Then we found something very like this argument in Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion (p129), as he surveys the "religious" emotions which respond to intuitions of dependence.

Score

Haha, wasn't I naughty.