In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.
Maharastra - Au-dessus de Bombay, Karli, caverne Bouddhique aménagée vers le IIè siècle.
See?
All of these are awesome. Thanks to Luke Neff.
If we could use digital tools to estrange ourselves from our books, to defamiliarize what we think we know, we might learn something new about how they were made and how they are used. People keep pointing out to me that we are in the incunabula age of digital texts. We are. And that’s what makes it so exciting.
The smartypants of old used the obelus to call out chunks of text that might be somehow wrong, whether as a result of translation errors or info that was just plain bad to begin with. For example, there’s some debate about the Gospel of John’s Pericope Adulterae — the story where Jesus saves an adulteress from stoning by making her would-be punishers remember that they too have sinned. Although the story is one of the more famous of the New Testament, its authorship was questioned by the third-century scholar Origen, who marked the passage with an obelus. And yes, there is a certain irony to him being the one to find fault with the passage that gave the world that famous line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
It should be noted, however, that it wasn’t always the ÷ that was written. A simple line could also be an obelus, as could the dagger symbol, or even the sign ./., which is sometimes called a lemniscus and which somehow evolved into the ∞, or the infinity symbol. (This symbol is properly called a lemniscate, and I wrote about it in a previous “word of the week” post.) In fact, there seems to be a great deal of overlap, both in form and name, with the division sign, the infinity sign and the symbols people use to say “Hey, this passage is wonky.” I am not clear why.
Exploring the secret history of the approval curl
But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune. Corporate and government funding may warp research priorities. A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent. Some ask whether Stanford has struck the right balance between commerce and learning, between the acquisition of skills to make it and intellectual discovery for its own sake.David Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has taught at Stanford for more than forty years, credits the university with helping needy students and spawning talent in engineering and business, but he worries that many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”
The internet has changed who the gatekeepers are. For much of recent American history, gatekeepers had to get voted in by the gatekeeper guild—usually members of the New York liberal elite—to play even a small role in the national conversation. And that’s still the case if we think of some of the public intellectuals often in the news: Nicholas Kristof (Harvard/Oxford); Jeffrey Sachs (the quadrifecta of being an undergrad, grad student, post-doc, and professor at Harvard before moving to Columbia); or Naomi Wolf (Yale/Oxford). “Progressives” might support liberal policies, and think of themselves as democratizing figures, but they are part of and empowered by a public sphere whose meritocratic structure, however democratic it looks to insiders, looks pretty darned elitist and closed to those out there in the cold at East Grantham Community College.
Indeed, what Thomas Kuhn called “the paradigm effect” will make it hard for Balmer and his ilk to properly appreciate what concerns Douthat. The depth of their difference is signaled in a tiny little sentence late in Balmer’s review. As he announces, “institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety.” That, my friends, is pretty much the heart of the matter: it is precisely the devaluing of institutions that Douthat decries, and it is just such an anti-institutionalism that has been woven in the warp and woof of American religion–perhaps nowhere more intensely than in the loose fabric of parachurchism that is American evangelicalism.Which is precisely why we can now see former (or soon-to-be-former?) evangelicals replaying exactly the accommodationist moves that Douthat documents among the mainline in the last century. Anyone with an analogical imagination will see in Douthat’s chapter on mainline accommodation in the 60s and 70s a preview of some current discussions in evangelicalism….
It would be disappointing–but not at all surprising–if so-called ‘progressives’ in evangelicalism took Balmer’s predictable review to be an excuse to ignore Douthat’s book. I think Douthat has named what is at stake for the future of Christianity in the United States. Some, like Balmer, believe that progressive, revisionist, “updated” Christian start-ups are the way the faith will survive. Others of us, like Douthat, see such ventures as extending something other than Christianity. In contrast, we’re betting on something that will seem almost completely counter-intuitive: that the future of Christianity in the United States depends on the revitalization of orthodox institutions. Or, to put it otherwise, we’re betting that the future of Christianity in the United States is catholic.