The Love of Scrooge

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as  a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Obviously, I recently reread A Christmas Carol.  I’ve been reading this story every year for decades.  If the definition of a Great Book is one which you can reread many times and always discover something new, then A Christmas Carol is indisputably a Great Book.

This year’s reflections:

If T.S. Eliot were to write A Christmas Carol, it would begin with an old man, stiffening in a decaying house, unconsciously saying, “I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact?”  In the face of a dying world, we are all Ebenezer Scrooge.  When I have noted in the past that we are living in the Waste Land, I am frequently met with an objection that the world isn’t all that bad.  Indeed, to compare us all to Scrooge will strike many (most? all?) as absurd.  So, consider anew Dickens’ tale.  And then ask yourself, Whom do you Love?

Love has been unbelievably corrupted in the modern world.  Consider this:  If I say I love my wife and my kids, everybody nods politely.  (Or, if they are Mount Holyoke students, they say “Ahh, that’s so sweet.”)  If I say I love mankind, well, it’s actually just boilerplate and nobody will bat an eye.  But if I say I love my students, then something sounds a bit off.  And if I were to look a student in the eye and say to her, “I love you,”…well, you can imagine the reaction.

But why?  The second greatest commandment is what?

 

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."  (Matthew 22: 34-40, NIV)

And, what does it mean to love your neighbor?

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” 

He answered, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind' and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.  A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.  But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

(Luke 10:25-37, NIV)

Now I can say I love Mankind and that’s OK.  But the Good Samaritan didn’t love Mankind; he loved the hurting man on the side of the road to Jericho.  He loved him enough to make sacrifices for that man; he cared enough for that man to take the time to treat the man as if he was important, because that man was important.  The Good Samaritan is a model of love.

And Scrooge is also a model of love.  Scrooge is what we can become.  Because of Christmas, because in the juvescence of the year /Came Christ the tiger, we have the possibility of loving our neighbors. 

Yet, we have no language with which we can express that love.  I do love my students.  It’s my Christian obligation to do so, but that doesn’t make the love somehow less genuine. 

Some of my students I love a lot.  I hope those students know that, but sometimes I am not sure they do.  It is surely a sign of the poverty not of our language but of our culture that I cannot simply tell those students, “You know, of course, that I love you.”  Most of the time, this probably doesn’t matter all that much.  But every now and then, I have been talking to a student, for whom the simple statement “I love you” would make a world of difference, and yet because of the degradation of our culture, there is no way to say those words without them being terribly and horribly misunderstood.  We all know that feeling loved is vital to the human soul; it is not some strange accident that the two greatest commandments are both about Love.  And yet, we have lost the ability to express the very idea of a love without an overtone of the romantic or the erotic or the merely abstract.

And so, this Christmastime, I want to say to those students, both current and past, with whom I have a deep bond of friendship, and I hope you know who you are:  I love you.  A lot.

If you haven’t read A Christmas Carol yet this year, I’d highly recommend it.  And, even better, read the text from which that book draws its moral lesson.  Then, emulate Scrooge at the end of the story, and take someone you know who is not a member of your family and for whom you feel no romantic or erotic attachment at all, and tell that person, “I love you.”

The State of First Things, undated

It has now been many months since this once-regular feature appeared.  I started The State of First Things series back when I was trying to figure out if the magazine was still worth reading.  Most of the issues were a bit light on substantive content.  I still read every issue cover to cover, and every now and then a really good article would appear, but mostly each issue was just OK at best.  Then R. R. Reno became the new Editor and Wow! what a difference an editor makes.  I have read 5 issues since he took over.  Five out of the five were amazingly good.  So good, that reviewing them would have been a major time sink.  An issue has 7 essays, and using the standards I was using back when this feature was regular, I would have reviewed at least 6 of the 7 articles from each issue.  Moreover Reno’s editorial remarks are also always worth reviewing.  [And the short bits at the end are fun—not Neuhaus good, but still good.]

The only real problem with the magazine right now is that the Book Review section is still terribly weak.  I have been trying got figure out why.  I think it is the books they are choosing.  From the last four issues, the books which got the long reviews are:

Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex in America

Grafton and Weinberg, “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”

Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist

Farrow, Ascension Theology

Gottleib, Faith and Freedom

The Holy Bible, NIV

Volf, Allah

Wallace, The Pale King

Kugel, In the Valley of the Shadow

Kass, Kass and Schaub, What So Proudly We Hail

Smith, et, al., Lost in Translation

Rosenberg, The Atheists’ Guide to Reality

Hancock, The Responsibility of Reason

Clark, Founding the Fathers

Landes, Heaven on Earth

McWilliams, The Democratic Soul and Redeeming Democracy in America

Genzo, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye

Lemert, Why Niebuhr Matters

Burleigh, Moral Combat

Grayling, The Good Book

Now the first thing to notice about that list is that there are not many books on it of which I would have seen the title and thought, “I wonder if that book is any good” or “I can’t wait to read a review of the book.”  So, when the book is not inherently interesting, it is incumbent on the reviewer to convince the reader that the book was worth reviewing.  And on that front, most book reviewers fail miserably.  A good reviewer can write an interesting review of a good or a bad book and the review will be worth reading.  A mediocre reviewer has no hope of writing a good review of a book which has no intrinsic interest to the reader.  Since really good reviewers are rare (though, The New Criterion seems to have a steady supply for some reason), the book review editor of a magazine needs to do a careful job picking the books to be reviewed so that a mediocre reviewer writing a solid review will still be writing something worth reading.  So, here is the question: Does anyone, anyone at all, think that those were the 20 books published at that time which were of greatest interest to readers of a journal like First Things?  Surely, there were better, more interesting books to be reviewed in the realm of Religion and Public Life.  Now don’t get me wrong.  Some of the reviews of those books were really good.  Hart, for example, reviewed the Genzo book, and like everything Hart writes, it was fascinating.  But the average review was a not terribly interesting review of a not terribly interesting book.  Let us hope that the book review section gets livelier in time.

This, however, is just a quibble about the magazine as whole.  First Things has rejoined the New Criterion as Must Reading.

Whodunit?

On page 9 of And Be a Villain by Rex Stout, Archie (Nero Wolfe’s right-hand man) makes a quip about the Rides of March.  A radio producer immediately get excited and starts to offer Archie $10 for the rights to use the phrase, then pauses and ask his assistant, “What percentage of our audience ever heard of the Ides of March?”  “‘One-half of one,’ she said as if she were quoting a published statistic.”

Clever, because of course one immediately thinks of the title of the work in which this exchange occurs, and wonders what percentage of the readers of a Nero Wolfe mystery have ever hear the phrase And Be a Villain?  Then, Amusingly Clever when one realizes that to solve the mystery all you have to do is wait until someone shows up who smiles and smiles, and you’ll instantly know the identity of the murderer.  Sure enough, on page 42, a smiling man shows up.  Mystery solved.

But, then a funny thing happens.  He didn’t do it.  So, what’s up with the title of the book?  I have no idea.  Other than that, it was a decent enough Wolfe story.  I think I would have enjoyed it more, though, if I wasn’t certain about the identity of the murderer who wasn’t really the murderer.

I read that book on the heels of reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Links.  That was a very satisfying Hercules Poirot story.  Comparing Poirot and Wolfe is an interesting parlor game.  Which one is more clever?  In a battle of wits, who would win?  I want to say Poirot because I have always had a fondness for him, but honestly, Wolfe’s large (nothing about Wolfe is little) gray cells may be a match for Poirot’s little grey cells.  [Archie is way better than Hastings, though—I’ve never really been fond of Hastings, and in this book, he is downright annoying.]

I read Christie on the heels of reading Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock, included in the Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s.  It’s a good story, very well told.  No mystery here; we know who murdered whom.  But, the central problem is interesting.  Suppose you knew that a wealthy and powerful man murdered someone, that you were the only one who could place the murderer at the scene of the crime and that if anyone ever finds out that you know this, then you’ll end up being blamed for the murder.  Now suppose you work for the murderer and the murderer is looking for an unknown man whom he saw near the crime scene so that he can place the blame on this unknown man and that you know that said unknown man was you.  Now, add the extra twist that you are put in charge of discovering the identity of the unknown man.  Good luck with that one.  The Big Clock is ticking down to zero.

About the middle of the Christie book, I toyed with the idea of spending all month reading one crime novel by the each of the whole range of the greats, but alas after three of them in a row, I decided to move on to other genres.

However, I did read one more detective story while reading the above. I read the first collected volume of Alan Moore’s Top Ten.  That was a fascinating experience.  I loved Hill Street Blues when it was on TV.  Indeed, I’d put it in the top 5 shows ever.  (Along with Twin Peaks, Doctor Who, and a couple of others whose status in the top 5 varies over time.)  Now imagine a Hill Street Blues in a world in which everyone has superpowers.  That’s Top 10.  Seriously, reading the comic book is exactly like watching an episode of the TV show.  There is the same Police Precinct, with the wandering camera, following characters as they wander through the station.  The same overlapping sort lines.  The same range of quirky cops.  There is even the gruff cop who gets a call from his mother while on the job.  I have no idea, to be honest, if I really liked Top 10 because I liked thinking about Hill Street Blues the whole time I was reading it.  And speaking of the TV show; why are only the first two seasons out on DVD?

The Box

Finals week ends tomorrow, and thus it seems like a good time to induce in a bit of reminiscing about the Past Semester.  All in all a good semester—far too much administrative busywork, and a teaching schedule that had me teaching 4 days a week (instead of my normal 2) meant that I felt rather rushed many days.  Blog posting suffered as a result (alas, poor blog; thou hast been neglected.  But, weep not for the blog.  It, like Adonais, is made one with Nature. (No, I don’t know that that means either, but Lily is currently writing a paper of Wordsworth and so I am thinking about Romantic Poets.))  On the upside, one class went rather well and one went decently.  [Only one really bad part in a lecture and just one botched answer to a student asking a question after class. So, that is still below my threshold of failure indicating the need to retire.]  My tutorial went well, and some great independent study students this semester.  Plus, many unbelievably interesting conversations with unbelievably interesting students.  I really like my job, mostly because I really like my students.

One book from the semester still needs to be reviewed:

Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

The quick conclusion:  The Box is really cool.  (The item “The Box” is what is really cool, not the book The Box.)  Truth be told, I, like everyone else, had never really given The Box much thought before reading this book.  But, now after reading a history of it, I am pretty convinced that it deserves mention as one of the truly great inventions of the 20^th century.  A standardized shipping container which can be easily loaded onto ships, trains and trucks has revolutionized the ability to transport goods from one place to another.  Why can we get goods so cheaply from other countries?  Why can we transport goods so easily across the country?  Why is international shipping so fast?  The Box.  All Hail The Box.  Really.  If you have never been thankful for The Box, now, at this Blessed time of Year when One gives gifts to others in order to celebrate the Greatest Gift Ever, would be a good time to Give Thanks for The Box (and all the other things for which one is thankful too for that matter).

As for the book named after this wonderful invention, well, it was OK.  The Box is cool; the book The Box erred on the side of tediousness.  After all, even though the item is great and amazing, that doesn’t mean every detail about the rival shipping companies who developed The Box and the battles among unions of workers at the ports and so on is equally amazing.  On balance, I thought the book was good, but I have yet to meet a student from the class in which I assigned the book who liked the book at all.  Alas.  However, Fairness dictates that I note that the students in this class had just finished the book on Pirates before starting this book, so I suppose any other book was doomed to be a disappointment after a book on Pirates.

Pirates and The Box---hmm, there is a great novel in there somewhere.

And thus ends a semester.  It’s a strange end for a Fall Semester, though.  As I have noted here before, normally I find Spring semester to be terribly bittersweet as students with whom I like to talk graduate, but the end of Fall semester has not traditionally been tinged with any such thing.  With the increasing number of December grads we are seeing here, that is changing.  This semester there are a couple of students graduating whom I am really going to miss.  

Fannie and Freddie

It will come as a shock to nobody to discover that books about the causes and consequences of the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 keep being published.  It will come as a shock to none of my students that I keep assigning such books.  (I like assigning books.)  The latest entry in the category “Assigned Books on the Financial Crisis” is:

Acharya, Richardson, Nieuweburgh and White, Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance

Sadly, I suspect very few of the students in the class to which I assigned this book will actually read all the way through it.  Or another way of putting it:  Not a good Christmas Gift.

I thought the book was decent enough—it is a great reference book.  If you want a number, it’s in this book.  Endless detail.  Endless.  Combine endless detail with 181 pages of text and you get one very dense book. 

The thesis:  Well, the subtitle gives it away.  Blaming Fannie and Freddie was very popular with conservatives in 2008.  I was terribly puzzled by the rush to blame these organizations.  Sure, they are really absurd organizations and they most definitely should be abolished, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily played a big role in causing the crisis.  Finally, we are getting the first research on the matter which begins to document the case that the organizations were a part of the problem.  (Note: a part of the problem—not the whole problem.)  It’s nice when there is evidence to support one’s theories, so those wanting to blame Fannie and Freddie can at last breathe easy.

My biggest surprise about this book came in a Tweet from one of my students:  she sent me this link.  Who knew that the authors of a technical thing like this book are cool enough to appear on the show epitomizing Cool Faux News?

Shakespeare in the Bush

One of my students just e-mailed me a copy of that staple of high school and college reading lists, “Shakespeare in the Bush.”  She asked for my thoughts.  So, since I had to type up my thoughts anyway, I might as well put them here.  Now future students who are assigned a paper on this much overrated essay can find an analysis, explanation and review of the true meaning of the essay "Shakespeare in the Bush" about the true meaning of the play Hamlet.

“Shakespeare in the Bush” is much beloved by the Multicultural Leftists because it purports to show that the works of Shakespeare are not universal.  After all, if we can show that even Shakespeare is inherently bound up by his culture, then it isn’t much of a leap to say that there is nothing that isn’t inherently bound up by a culture.  And if we can say that, then it isn’t much of a leap to argue that the products of Western Civilization aren’t universally True.  And if we can say that, then we can argue that there is no Universal Truth.  And then the Teacher can say whatever the Teacher wants.  Mission accomplished.

But, look again at the story.  The members of a tribe in Africa have a hard time understanding the plot of Hamlet because, for example, they don’t believe in ghosts.  Thus, the tribal leaders argue, the storyteller is getting the plot wrong, because according to the Tribe’s norms, Hamlet would have behaved in a different way after his encounter with the Spirit.  The whole point of the article is that this, along with all sorts of other culture-bound parts of the play, proves that understanding Hamlet requires being of the same cultural milieu as Shakespeare.

But, here is the funny thing.  I don’t believe in ghosts.   I also don’t believe that the ghosts of dead kings walk around in the night. I don’t have any cultural norms about how a royal family should behave after meeting a ghost since I grew up in a culture without a royal family in a world without ghosts.  And, yet, even though I have different cultural norms than the Prince of Denmark, I understand the plot of Hamlet quite well.  Why?  Because I can understand that some stories are from different cultures and thus to understand a story one must understand how the characters in it are supposed to behave.  Thus, I read the story Hamlet and extract universal truths, not from the basic story—that is not universal since nobody in my social circle will ever have a similar experience—but from the lesson the story is trying to teach.

Now, here is the curious thing.  If I can understand Hamlet, why did the tribal leaders in Africa have an impossible time understanding the story?  Perhaps it is because we here in Western Civilization make a point of understanding different cultures.  That is a unique feature of Western Civilization; other cultures did not develop an interest in The Other.  The West did.

So, here we have an essay arguing that we have to consider cultures other than our own.  It does so by showing us a culture which cannot understand cultures other than its own.  The Lesson:  Western Civilization sure is superior to that of this tribe in Africa.  Look how broad-minded we are compared to them.   We actually try to understand the African tribe’s cultural norms—that after all is the whole point of the essay.  They cannot understand the cultural norms in Hamlet.  That is a failure of their imagination.  All of which makes me really glad I am a product of the West and not tribal Africa.  All of which gives us another reason to take Pride in Western civilization.  Which, of course, is exactly the opposite conclusion than the one the types who assign this essay want us to take from it.

Ah, but then again, Hamlet is a deep reflection on the tension in the Western Mind, that conflict between Athens and Jerusalem which we products of the West can never escape.  So, maybe the tribal leaders truly were incapable of understanding the depths of that conflict.  Of course the essay doesn’t reflect on that deeper problem of understanding Hamlet’s dilemma.  Instead, we just get to laugh at how silly the tribal leaders are because they cannot understand the simple plot.  And as a result, they have no hope of understanding the deeper problem in the play.  Sadly, the author of “Shakespeare in the Bush” also doesn’t seem to understand the deeper problem of the play.  So, the joke is really on both the tribal leaders and our anthropologist.  The question for take home test:  Consider the Tribal leaders and the Anthropologist.  Which one has the more childish intellect?