Tuesday, October 09, 2018


A WRITING LIFE

Jerry Harkins

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
                                                                                                          –Bishop Berkeley [1]

If a man says something in a forest and there is no woman around to hear him, 
is he still wrong?
                                                                                                                      –Jerry Harkins


I am a writer.  I have written everything from a dissertation on statistical modeling to short stories for high school kids learning to read.  I once made my living writing marketing and advertising copy about highly technical products and exotic financial services and speeches for favored politicians.  There was a time when I wrote a bi-weekly column of political satire but I quit because I couldn’t cope with the discipline involved and because the political climate lost its sense of humor. I have written a performance piece for talented high school students, a few serviceable poems, the lyrics for twelve hymns and, since my retirement, three novels and over a hundred essays.  Some of these works have been published but that has never been the point.  I write mostly for my own pleasure.

My Daddy used to say that everyone likes the smell of their own farts and I, for one, do like my own writing.  I enjoy re-reading old work, even things that have been comatose in the “pending” file for years.  I am a decent writer even though my writing retains hints of the grammatical and logical formalism drilled into me by the Sisters of Charity and the Jesuits. Whenever I write something like everyone likes the smell of their own farts, I glance over my shoulder to be sure crazy Sister Mary Agnes isn’t standing there with her yardstick raised over my head.  The doddering old bat might or might not object to the use of the vulgarism but she would whack you down for the count if you used  their instead of his or her.  “Jerome, by the time you reach the sixth grade, you should remember ‘everyone’ is singular and must be modified by singular pronouns. Always, Jerome.”  I could never bring myself to use a word like memorandums and I always use a plural verb with data.  Because data are a plural Latin word.  My hand would fall off if I ever referred to a single person as "they" or followed that pronoun with a singular verb.  They is...  Indeed!  Gender preferenes cut no ice with grammatical formalism.

English is blessed with an opulent vocabulary which  makes it possible to write with  a fair degree of both precision and concision.  In comparison, other Indo-European languages are impressionistic. As someone once said, you should do science in English and make love in French.  Still, English can be a blunt tool.  Why, I often ask myself, do I persist in writing in a language in which the phrase “known but to God” means exactly the same thing as “unknown but to God?” Or in a language whose rules were written be the Red Queen. 
The plural of ox is oxen,
The plural of goose is geese,
Which doesn’t explain why ax isn’t axen,
And mongooses aren't mongeese.

More outrageous  still is a class of words I call contranyms, words that can be used as their own antonym.[2] For example, a cakewalk is an intricate dance but is usually used to mean simple.  Seeded can mean either with or without seeds.  A stain is a color or a discoloration.  Dead usually means deceased but may also mean perfectly or positively as in the expressions dead on and dead to rights.  Transparent means both visible and invisible.  Sanguine may be hopeful or bloody.  Cleave can mean stick to or force apart.  Cool is often hot.  And while yes means yes in some precincts, more often it means maybe. Ditto for no.  Note the range of opposition in such pairs, from out-and-out opposites to subtle antagonisms.

It’s hard to choose a favorite contranym but “bitch” has to be near the top of the list.  It began life as a German word for a female dog and is still used that way by the Westminster Kennel Club even on prime time broadcast television.  Dogs, of course, are intelligent, loving creatures whose aim in life is to please human beings.  Nevertheless, the word came to refer to an overbearing, obnoxious human female often enough used in a libelous way by an overbearing, obnoxious male. From there, it was a small step to refer to a stupid error or a task that turned out to be more difficult than anticipated.  Used as the participle, bitching, it means smart, clever or excellent which, at least, bring us back to the characteristics of dogs.

I am not the first person to notice the eccentricities of the English tongue.  Cock, for example, refers to a male chicken who struts around the farmyard making loud, screeching noises.  As every woman knows, this translates directly to a common synonym for penis and by natural extension to the definitive set of male personality characteristics.  It has also come to refer to a cuckold and it bears a connection to Google.  The latter is a long story tracing back to a 1913 children’s book and a 1919
comic strip which is still running.  Barney Google – he of the goo-goo-googly eyes – was the ultimate cuckold who wound up divorced and “living with his horse.”  To demonstrate how these things work, the company called Google was begun by a couple of orthographically challenged engineer types.  They were undoubtedly thinking of googol which is the word engineers use for the number 1100 which, in dollars, is how wealthy they will soon be.  But, being males, they didn’t think of proofreading their work any more than they would ask for directions while driving.  Oh, yes, it is noted that roosters do not have penises.  Which may explain why they greet the dawn with the characteristic cry "Cock-a-doodle-do."

English is a losing battle.  Thus, any small victories that may come your way can give a lifetime of pride and pleasure.  Mine include a high school English teacher who once promised a grade of  A+ for the marking period for anyone who could come up with a correct English sentence using that as a relative pronoun.  I immediately piped up with Mark Antony’s line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “They that have done this deed are honorable.”  In the Middle Ages, the language of what is now Southern France was called langue d'oc– the language of yes – and the region in which it was spoken is still called Languedoc.  By a similar logic, English is the language of exception.  Where the French multiply rules in the mistaken belief that the universe is rational, English speakers multiply exceptions in the oxymoronic belief that the universe is governed by chaos.

Of course, to return to the question I posed five paragraphs ago, I write in English because I don’t know any better. Literally.  I am an American and therefore I don’t need to know any other language.  Cassius asks Brutus, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed / That he is grown so great?”  The meat we Americans feed upon is English and it allows up to “bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus.”  It is a foolish conceit.  Yes, damn it.  Conceit!  You remember, before except after or when sounded like as in neighbor and aweigh.  Aweigh not away.  And except for the thousands of exceptions such as ancient, science, beige, being, seize and, of course, their.  God only knows how Sister Aggie would react to there own farts or even thier own farts.
Henry Higgins complains, “Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?” But that’s the wrong question. English cannot be taught, it must be absorbed from streets, schoolyards and rock concerts.  Consider the once common phrase “the bee’s knees.”  In the eighteenth century, it referred to something small and insignificant.  In the 1920’s, for some reason it was used to mean really excellent.  To a foreigner (before but see [3]), its meaning can only be guessed at by the context.  It has no more literal or even metaphorical meaning than the cat’s pajamas or warp speed which is the faster-than-light speed at which Star Trek spacecraft travel or the English language changes.
Lewis Carroll knew all this better than most people.  There is his famous passage where Alice and Humpty Dumpty are discussing the meaning of the word glory. “But glory doesn't mean a nice knock-down argument, Alice objected.  ‘When use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’  ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that's all.’”  (Neither had ever visited western Montana where glory refers to a breakfast drink of beer and tomato juice.  In eastern Montana, the same concoction is called a smile.)

The poor benighted oddball who is addicted to writing learns very early that it’s a tough row to hoe and that no sympathy is deserved or can be expected.  In the age of the emoticon and the 140 character twit (sic), none is deserved. To begin with, no one needs to read anything more complicated than a stop sign.  It took millions of years for communication to evolve from chemical signals exchanged by nematodes to the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, hundreds of years to evolve from Shakespeare to James Joyce, a few decades to produce Bob Dylan and a few years to move on up to Twitter.  The most famous advertising slogan of the 1960’s was:

At sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce
comes from the electric clock.

Twenty years later, the most famous slogan belonged to Pepsi-Cola:

Uh-huh!

Now Uh-huh doesn’t actually mean anything.  Neither do most political speeches, newspaper editorials, religious sermons or Bob Dylan lyrics.  Meaning, as a function of the connection between words and the things or ideas they refer to, is obsolete.  It has been replaced by something simpler that requires no intermediation.  The connection is direct, immediate and subliminal.  As long ago as 1901, Pavlov conditioned his dogs to connect the sound of a bell to food.  Instantly they would begin to salivate.  Moreover, they became hungry regardless of when they were last fed.  A human hears four bars of a favorite top 40 song and immediately calls up Twitter even while driving 70 miles an hour in rush hour in a blinding snowstorm.  He (invariably) has become addicted to sharing his pathetic emotions with the entire world which is to say he “salivates” just like Pavlov's pooches.  His message is carried by words, abbreviations and emoticons which can be absorbed without conscious thought by the “reader.”[4]

The so-called “paperless society” has long been a myth.  In the United States, we produce nearly 100 million tons of paper a year, 700 pounds for every man, woman and child.  We also produce trillions of words to go on that paper.  The tax code and its official guides alone have 4 million words on 74,608 pages.  No one reads this verbal diarrhea.  Somebody has to write all this stuff but it’s not me.  I write for a lot of reasons:  to clarify my own thinking, to vent my frustrations, to confront hypocrisy, to challenge ideology, to ameliorate my fears.  But at the end of the day, I write because, like mountain climbing, it is fun to tilt at windmills.

Notes

1.  George Berkeley was a highly regarded eighteenth century Irish philosopher who married well and served as the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork from 1734 to his death in 1753.  He is best known as an empiricist and, God forgive him, a proto-phenomenologist.  He is said to have been a genial, generous and warm-hearted person who nonetheless made important contributions to both physics and metaphysics.  Berkeley, California is named for him even though the citizens of that town have never learned to pronounce the bishop's name.  It is Bark-lee.  The quotation cited here is a common variation of the good Bishop’s actual question which is almost incomprehensible.  It is thought that it was his considered opinion that no sound was made in the absence of a hearer because, as he wrote, “The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived.”  That’s the empiricist in him.  But on another occasion he  wrote, “…the tree continues to exist in the Quad when ‘nobody’ is there simply because God is always there."  It suggests that God always sees the tree but doesn’t hear it when it falls.  That’s the phenomenologist in him.

2.  Merrian-Webster calls these words contronyms but that seems to violate the Latin preposition contra.  Some grammarians use the term "Janus words" after the two-faced god of Roman mythology.  It's an inspired coinage but it fails to deal with the spectrum of opposition these words evince.

3.  Foreign is actually an exception to the exception. It derives from the Medieval Latin foraneus and the Old French forain both of which are pronounced like as in neighbor and away.

4.  If you don’t believe this, consider the instructions you received when you bought your last computer.  Long gone are the days when the box contained a thick manual.  Now you get a poster with line drawings and arrows.  There may be a few words but they are virtually irrelevant.  The only time you see a lot of words is when their authors do not want you to read them. All they expect is that you will click the “Agree” button at the bottom.  If you don’t, they won’t play with you.  On the other hand, the party of the second part (you) can make neither head nor tail of the deathless prose.  Something called “Our Privacy Policy” is similar.  They do indeed take your privacy very seriously.  The operative word is “take.”  There are lawyers who specialize in corporate privacy policy prose.  They are sometimes called Peeping Toms.



Sunday, July 22, 2018


JOHN MILTON AND THE MYTH OF ADAM AND EVE

Jerry Harkins

Paradise Lost is – or so I and many others believe – the greatest poem in the English language.  But it is something more:  an unprecedented, even shocking fulfillment of Augustine’s injunction to interpret Genesis literally.
                                                                                           –Stephen Greenblatt[1]


No, it is not.  Okay, Paradise Lost is certainly shocking and certainly a re-hash of Augustine’s dour views of God, the universe and humankind.  But it is by no means the greatest poem in the English language and would not be even if there were such a thing which there is not.  You might have a favorite poem.  You might have a poem you admire more than any other.  Personally, I admire the Odyssey more than the Iliad although I enjoy them both.  On the other hand, I admire the Aeneid but do not particularly like it.  And, of course, there is the adage that vox populi vox Dei.  The community of readers gets to have a consensus opinion and may be forgiven if it mistakes most memorable for greatest.  But there is no such thing as the “greatest entertainer who ever lived” (pace Michael Jackson) or the “greatest song of all time” (pace Bob Dylan) or the “greatest military blunder of all time” (pace Winston Churchill).  There is not even the greatest sub-atomic particle in the universe although the recently confirmed God Particle is a strong candidate (pace Peter Higgs).  I’m not trying to be coy here.  It’s just that I think “greatest” implies some empirical standard beyond “me and a bunch of other people believe.” An objective criterion, however, cannot be met by a class of phenomena as complex and ethereal as poetry or any other kind of art.  I freely admit that, in the case of Paradise Lost, as bad it is, you can’t dismiss it out-of-hand simply because it is a difficult, convoluted poem about an ignorant, absurd theological ideology by an admittedly well-educated but narcissistic and churlish popinjay.

What!  Milton?  John Milton? The immortal genius of whom William Wordsworth wrote, “We must be free or die, who speak the tongue / That Shakespeare spoke: the faith and morals hold / Which Milton held.”  I’m reasonably sure Wordsworth never read much of Milton. [2, 3]  But Stephen Greenblatt has.  Dr. Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, a pioneer of the New Historicism approach to literary studies, [4] and arguably the most delightful scholarly writer working today.  The reader immediately recognizes that he has derived great pleasure from his researching and writing and that he knows how to pass on his enthusiasms.  He is the author of the most absorbing book I have read since The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.  That was 35 years ago. [5]  But the important point is that this essay is not a review of his new book dealing with Adam and Eve.  Given the subject,  he had to confront Paradise Lost.  I just wish he had dismissed it as the trash it is.

We need to get a few things straight before we tackle Paradise Lost and the Book of Genesis.  First, John Milton’s poem is a grab bag of interpretations of our origin myth yoked together to support an extreme fundamentalist  theology.  Greenblatt recognizes both the myth as a myth and the fact that Milton swallowed it literally.  What he does not seem to realize is that believing it constituted intellectual malpractice, coming as it did 34 years after the heresy trial of Galileo and eight years after Nicholas Steno began to explicate the true age of the earth. European intellectuals had long thought that Genesis was metaphoric at best.  Among the skeptics was Lucretius who was the subject of another of Greenblatt’s books.  De rerum natura had been rediscovered in 1417 and was common currency among educated people 250 years later when Milton published his poem.  What Greenblatt fails to do is call Milton out for being a gullible and ignorant theologian as well as a loutish misogynist.  

Second, we are dealing with a flaw in an otherwise excellent book.  Like most of Greenblatt’s books, this one promotes several controversial ideas. He irritates me several times by dismissing Darwinian evolution as merely our modern origin story.  But being a Socratic gadfly  – going against the grain of the conventional wisdom –  is pretty much the function of the public intellectual and it plays a vital role in preventing cultural stagnation.  Greenblatt is nevertheless guilty of the most common form of error in biblical exegesis, the failure to give due consideration to the most direct and explicit meanings of words, sentences and passages. Translators and interpreters should bear in mind the rule known in science as Occam’s Razor:  the simplest possible explanation should be accepted until it is no longer consistent with what we know to be true.  This is not as easy as it seems because language evolves and it is not always possible to know what an ancient reader, writer or listener understood by a given locution.  For example, in Genesis 1:29-30, God tells Adam and Eve:

“I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground — everything that has the breath of life in it — I give every green plant for food.”

Taken literally this suggests a divine commandment that all animals be vegetarians but does “seed-bearing” exclude mushrooms?  Of course mushrooms are not green either.  Was God merely speaking of their diet in Eden?  Was Eden a forerunner of Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom where, “The wolf shall live with the lamb…the calf and the lion and the fatling together?”  As even a seventeenth century grandee would have known, a “fatling” is a young animal being prepared for the slaughter to feed him and his friends.  Words mean different things at different times. What, for example, was Shakespeare thinking when he wrote about “cool” courtesans in King Lear or a “cool” rut-time in The Merry Wives of Windsor?

Milton was a misogynist, not an unusual bias in his time or any other.  Worse, though, he accepted misogyny as something ordained by God and therefore beyond criticism.  In Book 4, Lines 295-311, “the greatest poem in the English language” describes Adam and Eve as follows:

Whence true autority in men; though both [ 295 ]
Not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd;
For contemplation hee and valour formd,
For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
Hee for God only, shee for God in him:
His fair large Front and Eye sublime declar'd [ 300 ]
Absolute rule; and Hyacinthin Locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustring, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
Shee as a vail down to the slender waste
Her unadorned golden tresses wore [ 305 ]
Disheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav'd
As the Vine curles her tendrils, which impli'd
Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receivd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, [ 310 ]
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.

With a slightly updated orthography this could, of course, have been a description of the conventional wisdom at any time between Genesis and #MeToo.  It is not difficult to read misogyny into Genesis or the Bible generally.  It is not that Milton was wrong to do it.  He was wrong because he ignored Genesis 1:27:  “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;  male and female he created them.”  But what is worse is that he should not have allowed himself to be a purveyor of conventional wisdom.  Not only did he promote himself as a public intellectual, he was a true if not always wise revolutionary in religion and politics but a pig in the way he treated women including his wives and daughters.  He defended his view of women by reference to their descent from Eve as described in Genesis.  According to Greenblatt, Adam knew Eve was his equal and struggled to love her.  I don’t know how Greenblatt knows this.  He claims it’s because Adam is quoted as saying, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.”  The full quote in a modern translation is, “This one at last, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, / This one shall be called Woman for from man was this one taken.” [6] Maybe Greenblatt is relying on Pope John Paul II who butchered these words in his 1995 “Letter to Women.”  He said they reflect an “enormous richness.” “…[T]he first man at the sight of the woman who had been created are words of admiration and enchantment, words which fill the whole history of man on earth.”  Really? Not she is.  This one. And Adam was talking to God not to Eve. There is no record in the canonical Bible that Adam ever said a single word to Eve. [7] There is no hint he found her attractive. In fact, as long as they were in Eden, that is, through the first three chapters of Genesis, there is not a scintilla of evidence that he ever experienced sexual attraction. Yet this is the story endorsed by Milton and not denounced by Greenblatt.

In addition to being a card-carrying misogynist, Milton was an apologist for slavery.  Again this was not unusual for his time and place but what is despicable is the way in which he twists the Bible to justify it.  According to Genesis 9:20-27, slavery was invented by Noah to punish one of his sons, Ham, in the aftermath of the flood.  Ham’s offense was coming upon his father naked, drunk and asleep and not averting his eyes.  The penalty of slavery was invoked not against Ham but against his son Canaan and Canaan’s descendants.  Milton, once again with a debt to Saint Augustine, claimed in Paradise Lost that Ham’s failure was his inability to follow the dictates of reason and that God himself approved Noah’s punishment. There is nothing in the biblical text to support either conclusion but both became part of the preferred theological justification of one of history’s greatest evils.  But, as usual, the clever Mr. Milton gave the matter a lot of thought and came up with a sufficiently convoluted explanation of a crazy myth.

There are several ways to read the Bible if you are a Christian.  We are dealing with two of them, two themes that, it can be argued, permeate it:  the chronic wrath of God promoted by the likes of St. Augustine, John Calvin and Jimmy Swaggart, and God-is-love as developed mainly by John the Evangelist and preached by the British monk Pelagius and others.  These are pretty much opposite understandings of the text and both can be easily supported. One’s choice in the matter, therefore, reveals more about the reader’s psyche than about the theology of the Bible.

It is easy to read the God of Genesis as an inept creator and a raging sociopath who regularly engages in a bracing bout of genocide brought on by disobedience.  As he tells Moses in Exodus (34:6-7), “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”  Well, to all generations even to the end of time. When he concludes the human race is beset by wickedness without specifying what kind of wickedness, he says, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created — and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground —for I regret that I have made them.”  He proceeds to do just that, leaving only the family of poor, mad Noah. It does not work.  Somehow, wickedness persists.

Teasing out the God of Love requires a slightly more subtle reading.   John (3:16) tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  But this hardly counts.  Having your son crucified is not compelling evidence of love for that son.  As Jesus said with what was close to his dying breath, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew: 27:46)  Still, there is no doubt that Jesus did preach the centrality of love, a theme ending with the remarkable claim that, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

In between Genesis and 1 John, it is possible to trace an evolutionary path beginning perhaps with the fascinating story of Job. God says, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”  He then proceeds to destroy him to win a whimsical bet with Satan.  There is no admission of wrongdoing, no apology but he does seem to hear his victim’s denials of guilt which is a lot more than he did to Abraham’s plea to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find one good man there.  He continues to the end to mock Job’s inadequacies.  “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”  “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?  Can you loosen Orion’s belt?”  “Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?”  And on and on.  You’ve heard this rhetoric since third grade:  my schlong is bigger than your schlong. [8]  But in the end, he relents and restores Job’s wealth.  By the time you reach the apocryphal Book of Tobit, God or his ambassador Raphael is acting as a nurturing marriage broker.  Two hundred years later, Jesus is proclaiming love as the greatest commandment and Paul is saying it is the greatest of virtues.

A God of love would be an attractive foundation for a system of morality.  Think of Julien of Norwich’s vision that God invented sin or evil to show us his forgiveness and infinite love.  Poor Milton would have none of this.  He was a sourpuss who enjoyed whining about his lot in life.  In his famous meditation “On His Blindness” he claims, contrary to all the biblical evidence, that God is independent of his creation:

Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d
I fondly ask;  But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is kingly.

The idea of a God who needs for nothing is unique to the Abrahamic tradition and deeply unsettling.  Of course God needs his creation, else why bother?  But that is precisely what gives away the absurdity of the myth.  God is said to have known all things before he began to create.  Why would a rational God deliberately create a word he knew was doomed to failure?  The traditional answer is he gave Adam and Eve free will but that begs the question. Adam and Eve were hardly free in any meaningful sense if their disobedience was the cause of evil entering the world.

I have long known that the Bible is an anthology.  It represents the evolving opinions of the Jewish culture about leading the moral life.  This seems obvious, the first thing any adult reader should realize. But, we in the west have set ourselves the impossible task of interpreting it as a whole as though it had been devised by a single intelligence.  I understand this.  Personally, I want to see it through the lens of love and so I do so.  The institutional church sees it as an affirmation of its power on earth and so it reads just that in Jesus’ commission to Peter, in Matthew 16:19.  “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  John Milton saw the Bible as the inerrant foundation of Puritan doctrine which sought to “purify” Anglican doctrine by exposing and expunging its remaining “popish” elements. The Puritans stressed five theological ideas:  the total depravity of the human race which resulted from the “original sin” of Adam and Eve;  the predestination of the few to heaven and the many to hell;  the atonement of Jesus which was limited to the elect;  irresistible grace which forced the elect to lead righteous lives;  and, the perseverance of the saints in a sinful environment.  There is a wealth of illogic in all this.  If grace is irresistible, for example, how does Milton dare embrace the doctrine of “free will?”  If Milton purported to believe that Adam and/or Eve “sinned” he would be intellectually compelled to explain how they knew disobedience was evil before they ate the apple that made them like gods knowing the difference between good and evil.

The story of Adam and Eve is a fiction.  Even as myth, it simply does not mean a lot.  It may be, as Greenblatt suggests, that it evolved as a Hebrew response to the Babylonian Captivity.  But today, the Bible would be better off if Genesis was scrapped and the story of western religion began with Exodus.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, biblical citations are from the 2011 edition of The New International Version published in the United States by Zondervan of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

1.  Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, W.W. Norton and Company. 2017, p. 163.

2.  You may be delighted to learn that the Oxford University Press has now released Volumes II, III, VI and VIII of its projected 11-volume Complete Works of John Milton.  Volume III, consisting of the shorter poems in English, Latin and Greek was originally withdrawn due to unspecified errors but is now available once again.  OUP never revealed the nature of those errors or who made them and it never refunded the $250 price.

3.  Wordsworth was a staunch Anglican unlikely to have approved of Milton’s radical Puritanism or to have read any of his theology.  Like Milton, he did have a fondness for excessive verbiage.  His inaptly named Prelude is 2,521 lines long. It was meant to introduce a much longer poem but he only completed one more section of 8,093 lines.  Prelude is the poem that elicited the famous first line in a review by the Scotch critic, Sir Francis Jeffry, “This will never do.”  The poem praising Milton’s faith and morals is the sonnet “We Must Be Free or Die” first published in 1803.  It is thought to be an argument against the repeal of the infamous anti-Irish Penal Laws of 1695.

4.  The New Historicism has attracted unfavorable attention from no less an academic superstar than Harold Bloom who complained that it reduces literature to a footnote of history.  I hate to tell such a distinguished litterateur that, given the global state of literacy, literature is a footnote of history.

5.  My favorite book of the last 35 years is Greenblatt’s The Swerve:  How the World Became Modern (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011).  It is the story of how an early Fifteenth Century book dealer re-discovered Lucretius’ First Century BCE poem De rerum natura which became the catalyst of the Renaissance and the Modern Era.

6.  Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses, W.W. Norton and Company, 2004, p. 22. 

7.  There are several non-canonical books (pseudepigrapha) of Adam and Eve and some of them include extensive but basically pedestrian conversations between them.  The Book of Jubilees, also known as Lesser Genesis, follows Genesis closely in discussing Adam and Eve.

8.  “Schlong” derives from the Old High German word for snake. Do you think that’s just a coincidence? I’m not sure what would be revealed if God loosened the belt of Orion which consists of three stars of the second magnitude:  Mintaka, Alnilam and Ainitak.  It might be embarrassing.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM BUBBLES
Jerry Harkins
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air
They fly so high
Nearly reach the sky
Then, like my dreams,
They fade and die.
                         —Jaan Kenbrovin, 1918




Bubbles always explode;  they never either fade away or implode.  Because air must be blown into a film that will form the surface of a spheroid, the pressure of the air trapped inside is greater than that outside.  As the bubble expands the pressure differential increases and, ultimately, the internal pressure overcomes the surface tension causing the bubble to pop. In other words, the death of the bubble is inherent in the remorseless working of its physics.  If you wanted to write a play about this, it would have to be a classical tragedy.  The hero is born to die.

I’ve been thinking about bubbles ever since the so-called dot com bubble blew up in 2000, sending a couple of trillion dollars to the landfill.  Just a few years earlier, it had been fashionable to believe that the laws of nature had been set aside for the benefit of technology investors.  There was, it was said, a “new economy” abroad in the world, one where sales and earnings had become hopelessly obsolete as measures of a company’s value.  In its place there was a vision of infinite happiness in the global village aborning.  Like the promise of heaven or the ancient dream of perpetual motion, the idea of a business where net equals gross captured the imaginations of serious people.  Stock prices soared in a frenzy of what Chairman Greenspan famously called “excessive exuberance.”

Then we were once again rudely reminded that new technology is unpredictable.  We should have remembered the turn of the last century when it was becoming clear that the automobile was about to revolutionize the world.  By 1900, there were 300 American companies making cars using three competing technologies. [1]  An investor comparing them would almost surely have bet on steam engines which were quiet and easy to handle and maintain.  The technology was already mature having been commercialized in 1776. Steam engines could burn almost any fuel.  They had already achieved a 50% share of the automobile market.  True they took about 15 minutes to warm up (i.e., “get up to speed”) and they could go only about 50 miles before they needed water, but these were minor irritations compared to the cost of electricity and the unreliability of gasoline engines. [2] But as automobiles of all kinds proliferated, the once ubiquitous roadside troughs which had been placed there for horses disappeared.  Drivers could no longer count on having water everywhere to top off their boilers.  Thus, by replacing the horse, the steamer magnified its own major flaw.  Still, early on, steam was the way to bet.  Stanley, the industry leader, maintained a profitable business until 1927 but it was Henry Ford who built the IBM of his day and John D. Rockefeller, Sr. who created the Microsoft.

A similar story can be told about the computer industry in the 1950’s.  Everyone knew electronic brains were the coming thing.  This time there were two competing technologies, and, as early as 1949, it was widely known that ENIAC, a 30-ton digital machine with 19,000 vacuum tubes, was 180 times faster than its analog counterparts.  But you could solve far more complex problems with a much smaller and more elegant analog machine.  You could also put it on the back of a truck and run it off a field generator.  Given that the United States Army Artillery Corps was the largest customer, it was not surprising that most people bet on analog. [3]  The IBM 360, introduced in 1964, should have given fair warning.  It was by no means suitable for outdoor use but it was so powerful, so fast and so flexible that it could work complex problems by simply overpowering them in “real time.” [4] The 360/67 was a time sharing machine which meant you could hang 20-pound “dumb” terminals off it and use it anywhere you had access to a phone line.  The big analog players (Philbrick Researches, Inc., MB Electronics, Nicolet Scientific, Fox Technology and Liberty Technologies) were quickly left behind. You are probably a lot more familiar with the digital competitors known as IBM and the seven dwarfs. [5]

It has never been easy to predict the course of a technology.  Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1793 enabling King Cotton to rule the American South.  It was an instant success but Whitney went bankrupt because it was so simple any farmer who needed one could build one and Whitney could not enforce his patent. Thomas Edison was arguably the greatest of all inventors and his world-changing genius was evident early in his career.  But an investor who bet on him in 1885 was also betting on direct current and against the alternating current being promoted by Nikola Tesla. [6]

Similar stories can be told about photography, color television, rocketry, convenience copying and other common technologies. So it should not come as a surprise that the internet bubble burst.  Still, information technology is one of the great themes of history and the collapse of Silicon Valley did not mean a return to the world of typewriters, carbon paper, slide rules and MonroMatic calculators.  Hundreds of companies went under but the Valley revived thanks to the irresistible force of the internet and the courage and foresight of people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

What worries people about the dot com bomb today was its suddenness.  But, again, there were precedents such as the devastating railroad panic of the 1870’s. The logic of the transcontinental railroads was impeccable.  It combined Manifest Destiny, Yankee engineering ingenuity and national unity in the aftermath of the Civil War.  Of course  it passed through thousands of miles of beautiful if largely empty scenery but the financial types had a theory.  The feds would back the project with vast land grants.  The roads could borrow against this real estate and then settle it with pioneers, thereby creating their own markets.  The theory turned out to be faultless except that it unfolded at a snail’s pace.  The few equity investors made profits only by giving themselves exorbitant construction contracts and bribing Congress to accelerate the land grants.  They then issued bonds secured by the same grants, selling most of them to serious English investors.  In the summer of 1873, the firm of Jay Cooke and Co. led an effort to place $100,000,000 in new bonds for the Northern Pacific.  It was selling into an oversold market and the issue failed.  On September 18, Cooke closed its doors and within days the country’s largest banks became illiquid.  Before the end of the year, 89 railroads went bankrupt and the United States and Europe went into a depression that lasted for nearly a decade.

The Great Global Recession of 2008 followed a similar course.  A small group of Wall Street “rocket scientists” set out to make silk purses out of sows’ ears by bundling and “securitizing” large packages of sub-par mortgages whose riskiness was known and could be priced into the new securities.  Profits were virtually guaranteed and they were snapped up by big bank asset-liability managers and dentists with more money than brains.  The idea spread to small business loans, credit card receivables,  payday loans and commodity futures and options.  The latter were so complex, it was widely believed that even their creators did not understand them.  But at least part of the problem was obvious.  A lot of money was being made on bad mortgage loans which, naturally, stimulated the market for such loans.  Banks had been writing “adjustable rate” mortgages at extremely attractive initial interest rates.  These were packaged and sold to suckers including some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors.  As profits expanded, the adjustable interest rates adjusted upward and suddenly many more people than  expected were forced to forfeit.  Everyone had known the bubble would burst sooner or later but everyone wanted to be the last man out before the deluge.  Millions of lives were damaged and, again, trillions of dollars went down the drain.

It is said that armies are always prepared to fight the last war.  Our financial system, on the other hand, never learns anything from the last disaster and, like Sisyphus, is condemned to fight the same crisis over and over again down through the centuries.  The “system” of course is a creature of human nature which is called upon to detect and honor the fine line between necessary personal incentives and corrosive greed. We have not quite reached that skill level in our evolution.

Notes

1. Carroll, Glenn R., Stanislav D. Dobrev, Tai-Young Kim; “The Evolution of Organizational Niches: U.S. Automobile Manufacturers, 1885-1981,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 47, 2002.  Only 30 of the 300 were producing cars commercially and all of these were privately financed “skunk works.”  Total production in 1900 was 4,192 units.

2.  Electricity, when available, cost about twenty cents per kilowatt hour in 1900.  Counting inflation through 2001, that comes to $4.09 in current dollars.  Today the actual price is a little more than fourteen cents.  The first commercial electric car could travel about 182 miles on a single charge (14 hours at 13 miles per hour) but later models were not nearly so efficient. They were quieter than steamers and easier to drive, but they had trouble climbing even modest grades.  

3.  The many problems of firing long-range artillery shells at an unseen target contributed greatly to the advance of mathematics in the eighteenth century.  The immortal Pierre Simon Laplace was in fact the French army’s artillery examiner and one of his pupils was Napoleon Bonaparte who was trained as an artillery officer.  It is said that Napoleon read Laplace’s treatise on celestial mechanics and asked him where that left a role for God.  Laplace replied that he no longer needed the God hypothesis.

4.  Well, not really.  First, since these first 360 machines could only do one thing at a time, you had to get your project in a queue.  You did this by handing in your punch cards with the data and the program you wanted run.  The clerk gave you an estimated time, rarely less than 24 hours away.  Actual “run time” was measured in minutes and charged at $1,000 per minute.  The dumb terminals of the 360/67 all did things like issuing airline tickets at places called “ticket counters.”

5.  The names of the seven dwarfs varied over time, but the first list included Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, Scientific Data Systems and Univac.  There remain trace elements of all these companies but not in the computer business.  To say they were strategically unfocused is to point at the folly of competing with Big Blue in its prime.  Univac, for example acquired the computer operations of RCA in 1971 and then bought Sperry which had bought Remington Rand.  Fifteen years later, Burroughs bought Sperry Rand in 1986, calling the combined businesses Unisys.  Eventually, Honeywell’s computer operations were acquired by Bull which was nationalized by the French government and then privatized again in 1994 when NEC became the principal shareholder with the French government as a junior partner. The saddest story of all is that of SDS. Founded by Max Palevsky, it developed powerful minicomputers and was acquired in 1969 by Xerox which soon discovered it did not know how to sell computers.  SDS next became the seed of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, a beehive of invention.  Everybody but Xerox profited hugely from PARC’s innovations which included the Graphic User Interface and Ethernet.

6.  Ah, yes, but in spite of a century of world-changing innovations, Westinghouse somehow managed always to play second fiddle to Thomas Edison’s General Electric.  Today, the Westinghouse name survives as a subsidiary of Toshiba providing nuclear power plants and related services.  Ironically, GE and Westinghouse both became famous for AC appliances while DC went on to power the Information Revolution in such things as cell phones and portable computers.


Wednesday, June 20, 2018


PREFIGURATION AND FULFILMENT IN THE BIBLE

Jerry Harkins



The Bible is an anthology, not a novel.  It consists of the Old Testament of 39 books, the New Testament of 27 books and, in some versions, the Apocrypha of 14 books. [1]  These compilations were assembled by various authorities at various times from a much larger reservoir of similar texts.  Inclusion was based primarily on the assertion that they were divinely inspired. In fact, however, the Old Testament is mainly the mythology of the Jewish people together with some history, some wisdom, some literature and a fair amount (16 Books) of prophecy. [2]  The New Testament relates primarily the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth together with some history, some philosophy and some mysticism.

Although there is no central plot, several major themes emerge and evolve.  Among the most important are:   the belief in a single god who created the universe and continues to act in history, the gradual change in the personality ascribed to that god from the raging sociopath of Genesis to the loving, self-sacrificing god of 1 John, and the acceptance of a moral code that must be followed if one is to achieve eternal life in the presence of that god.  The power of these fundamental ideas is suggested by the adherence to them of billions of members of the Abrahamic religions.

There is another theme, less obvious but more explicated by theologians and that is the belief that various prophecies and other material in the Old Testament foreshadow or prefigure important events in the New Testament.[3]  Consider, for example, these five lines from Psalm 22 attributed to King David:

1.   My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 

8.   “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, / “let the Lord rescue him. / Let him deliver him, / since he delights in him.” 

15.  My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, / and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; /  you       lay me in the dust of death.

16.  Dogs surround me, / a pack of villains encircles me; / they pierce my hands and my feet.
All my bones are on display;  

18.  They divide my clothes among them / and cast lots for my garment.

Each of these lines has been interpreted as prefiguring an aspect of Christ’s passion.  Line 1 is, verbatim, one of the seven last words of Christ as reported by Matthew (27:46) and Mark (15:34)  and Line 15 is a close parallel of another as reported by John (19:28).  Line 8 is often seen as the predicting the mockery of Christ as reported by Matthew (20:19), Mark (10:34) and Luke  (18:32). Line 16 is said to refer to the holes made by nails in his hands and feet and, of course, Line 18 is quoted almost verbatim in Matthew and seems to refer precisely to what the Roman soldiers did at the foot of the cross.  Obviously, if King David foretold so many details of the passion a thousand years before it occurred, the commentators have a strong argument for prefiguration and, indeed, for the divine inspiration of the Bible.

Line 1 of Psalm 22 refers to its author as “me” but  it is clearly not David who never had cause to think he had been abandoned by God.  Quite the contrary, even God’s punishment for his crimes of murder and adultery – the death of his first-born son by Bathsheba – was modest by comparison with those meted out to Adam and Eve, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah or the entire world before the Flood. In the famous Psalm 23,  David recognizes that the Lord has been exceedingly generous to him.  “You anoint my head with oil;  my cup overflows.” [4]  Some think the “me” in 22 is Israel but there is nothing in the history to hint at any cause for despair during David’s reign. In any event, for a variety of reasons, the members of the Jesus Seminar coded the New Testament version of the forsaken line red, concluding that Jesus did not utter it on the cross but rather it may have been inserted by the author of Mark and copied by the author of Matthew neither of whom was present on Golgatha.  If so, it had to have been a deliberate attempt to promote an historical connection that did not exist.

Obviously, with perfect hindsight a case can be made for prefiguration in the Bible.  But the biblical prophets had no such intent. Rather they were raging against what they saw as the failure of the Jewish people to live up to divine expectations in the present and threatening dire consequences in the near future. (They would have been surprised to learn that there was a long term future, given God’s anger.)  It was, of course, the New Testament writers who introduced the idea of prefiguration.  Doing so forced them to stretch their interpretive powers to the breaking point in order to assure their readers of an intimate continuity between the teachings of ancient Israel and Jesus.  They were, after all, writing to their fellow Jews so it was natural for them to claim that Jesus was the promised Messiah. [5]  They found no fewer than 40 Old Testament citations to support this claim not one of which is convincing.  It is true that the Jews anticipated the coming of a Messiah or Redeemer from the earliest times but their belief was not based on any specific promise in any of the covenants God made with the patriarchs.  It is Isaiah in Chapter 53, not God, who describes the role of one who redeems mankind through his suffering.  The renewed availability of redemption after the fall is the central message of the Bible and the lynchpin of Western civilization.  Every aspect of it has been scrutinized in depth through every lens that could be devised including art.

Perhaps the most famous line of prefiguration is Isaiah 7:14:  “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a a son, and will call his name Immanuel.” This is repeated in Matthew 1:23 and used as a Recitative in Handel’s Messiah.  But Immanuel (God with us) cannot be Jesus Christ because two lines later Isaiah describes him as a boy saying, “before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.”  A Christian, of course, must believe that Jesus is God and certainly knows the difference between right and wrong.  Another Recitative in the Messiah is taken from Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 15:54).  “Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”  The “then” refers to the last days when “The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised.”  And the saying is said to be a paraphrase of the Prophet Hosea (13:14),  “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes.”  This is rendered by Handel in the duet, “O death, where is thy sting, o grave where is thy victory?”  The passage in Corinthians begins with Paul saying, “Behold I tell you a mystery.”  The writer wants you to believe that the resurrection of the dead will defeat death itself and he is certain because God promised it to the Jews.  But that connection is nonsensical.  Hosea meant almost the opposite.  In this passage, he was denouncing Israel, personified as Ephraim, in the voice of God who says he may still ransom the innocent but, of the guilty, “repentance shall be hid from my eyes.”  In other words, there are some sins so heinous that even God will not forgive them, a teaching quite at odds with Christian teaching.  Paul didn’t have to claim prefiguration;  the issue is moot once you believe in salvation. But throughout his epistles, Paul was determined to offer definitive proof of the correctness of his interpretation of the good news vis a vis that of the Jerusalem apostles.  He invents the story that he was taken up to heaven for a meeting with God the Father and Jesus who wanted him to correct the doctrinal errors being preached by Peter and the others.

A similar distortion of the Bible’s meaning occurs in many of the inscriptions carved on the Cross of Bury Saint Edmund (also known as the Cloisters Cross).  In one case, the quotation seems to have been selected as foretelling the perfidiousness of the Jews of Jesus’s time.  In fact, Zechariah was denouncing lapses in keeping God’s commandments.  But a medieval scribe latched on to an obscure phrase (12:10) mentioning “the one they have pierced” as though it were intended to foretell Christ’s crucifixion. This sort of mendacity is easy to practice.  A close reading of Homer’s Odyssey can be used to prefigure many of the “superweapons” developed during World War II and the opening lines of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid can be interpreted as the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland in 1943. A dedicated scholar would have no trouble finding a forerunner of the Republican Party Platform in Marx’s Das Kapital or, for that matter, in the Sermon on the Mount.  History may or may not repeat itself but those who use it in debate rarely strive for objectivity.  As Shakespeare tells us,  “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. / An evil soul producing holy witness / Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, / A goodly apple rotten at the heart. / O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” [6] But if someone tries to tell you that The Merchant of Venice prefigures the Trump presidency,  you should check to be sure you still have your wallet no matter how much you might agree.


Notes


1.  The numbers given are for the King James and most other Christian versions of the Bible.  The Hebrew Bible contains the same material as the Old Testament but arranged in 24 books and does not include the Apocrypha.   Christian versions that contain the Apocrypha vary in their understanding of its authenticity and authority.

2.  The Biblical Prophets have a different function than the Greek and Roman oracles and from the Prophet Muhammad.  The oracles see and predict the future.  Muhammad is best thought of as the Messenger of Allah, the last in a line that includes Jesus.  The Hebrew prophets are guardians of God’s commandments to the Jews.  In addition to the 16 prophets counted here, Job, David and Solomon are sometimes considered to be prophetic.

3.  What I call "prefiguration" is often referred to as "typology" by biblical commentators but this strikes me as confusing.  The Latin root of type refers to an image or a symbol and its use in the sense of a prediction as meant here is a long stretch.  Some authors of commentaries propose that every verse of the Old Testament predicts something in the New Testament which is clearly nonsense.

4.  There is no chronological or other discernable order to the Psalms.  Thus, it is merely coincidental that David’s thanksgiving follows immediately on the heels of the despair described in Psalm 22.

5.  The “writings” that constitute the Bible were probably aimed at the very small number of people who knew how to read and write and, in the case of the New Testament, were perhaps meant as guides to them to teach others about the person and message of Jesus.  The gospel authors, with the possible exception of John, were not the disciples we refer to as the evangelists but codifiers of slightly different traditions who ascribed their work to more authoritative names.  The gospels were written by individuals two to three generations removed from the life of Jesus.

6  I am well aware that, like the Devil, I am quoting the Bible in this essay for my own purposes and that I benefit from the fact that hardly anyone these days has read the Bible cover to cover.  I would like to think that, like Sir Galahad, “My strength is as the strength of ten / Because my heart is pure” but most days I know better.