Alan Jacobs

Do your students also love to say “reading too much into this”? I remember this remark as a buzz-kill that frequently deflated discussions in high school English. Just when we had begun to dig into the precious details of a novel or poem and unearth some larger idea, someone would inevitably scoff, “we’re reading too much into this.” Today, my students, indignant, ask “isn’t that reading too much into it?” about almost every attempt to find meaning in the art, literature, and cultural artifacts of the past.? I cringe every time I hear it. The sentiment strikes me as exquisitely anti-intellectual, creating an image of the useless scholar wasting time on meaningless trivialities, like Socrates measuring how far a flea can jump in Aristophanes’s anti-intellectual comedy, The Clouds. “Reading too much into this” seems equivalent to saying “there’s too much thought going on here,” a complaint that has no place in a history class!

— Rivka Maizlish

Yes, students do often say this, but there's a reason for it. They're failing, from mere lack of experience, to realize the difference in time and intellectual investment between reading a book, or, in the case cited here, reading about someone's career (which they have just done) and writing a book, or making a career (which they have not done).

I’ve often gotten this from students who are reading Joyce’s Ulysses. I try to remind them that he was an immensely brilliant man who spent seven years writing the book. A great many things might occur to you when you spend seven years working on a book, especially if you’re immensely brilliant. And if that doesn’t convince them I show them the Linati schema.

Of course, it’s easier to do that than to convince students that Al Jolson was just trying to make money when he wore blackface. In that case you’d have to convince students that people have complex and inconsistent motives and may not even consciously understand why they’e doing what they’re doing. But that too can be done by reference to their own lives.

And then there are those occasions when the students are right: you really are reading too much into it. And it’s good to keep that open as a possibility.

Do your students also love to say “reading too much into this”? I remember this remark as a buzz-kill that frequently deflated discussions in high school English. Just when we had begun to dig into the precious details of a novel or poem and unearth some larger idea, someone would inevitably scoff, “we’re reading too much into this.” Today, my students, indignant, ask “isn’t that reading too much into it?” about almost every attempt to find meaning in the art, literature, and cultural artifacts of the past.? I cringe every time I hear it. The sentiment strikes me as exquisitely anti-intellectual, creating an image of the useless scholar wasting time on meaningless trivialities, like Socrates measuring how far a flea can jump in Aristophanes’s anti-intellectual comedy, The Clouds. “Reading too much into this” seems equivalent to saying “there’s too much thought going on here,” a complaint that has no place in a history class!

Brian Doyle wrote recently about the strangeness of attempting to imagine W. H. Auden in the uniform he was issued when he was commissioned as a (temporary) Major in the U. S. Army when he worked for the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey at the end of World War II. No need to imagine: here he is, with his close friend Tania Stern. The photograph was almost certainly taken by Tania’s husband James Stern.

The protagonists of post-Enlightenment relativism and perspectivism claim that if the Enlightenment conceptions of truth and rationality cannot be sustained, theirs is the only possible alternative.

Post-Enlightenment relativism and perspectivism are thus the negative counterpart of the Enlightenment, its inverted mirror-image. Where the Enlightenment invoked the arguments of Kant or Bentham, such post-Enlightenment theorists invoke Nietzsche’s attacks upon Kant and Bentham. It is therefore not surprising that what was invisible to the thinkers of the Enlightenment should be equally invisible to those post-modernist relativists and perspectivists who take themselves to be the enemies of the Enlightenment, while in fact being to a large and unacknowledged degree its heirs.

In 2001, about to graduate from college, I turned down a programming position at a hedge fund. Instead, I chose to do bioinformatics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for a much lower salary. I was excited about the possibilities of doing biological research using computational tools. Two years later, I enthusiastically entered graduate school in molecular biology, with my salary dropping by half for the next six years. As a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, I am not even back to earning what I did ten years ago as a junior programmer with no skills or domain-specific knowledge. In a commercial setting, my compensation would have kept pace with my knowledge and skills, but in academia, there seems to be a complete decoupling of the two.

I remember at another election a sturdy old woman of Somerset, with a somewhat menacing and almost malevolent stare, who informed me on her own doorstep that she was a Liberal and I could not see her husband, because he was still a Tory. She then informed me that she had been twice married before, and both her husbands had been Tories when they married her, but had become Liberals afterwards. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards the invisible Conservative within and said, “I’ll have him ready by the ‘lection.” I was not permitted to penetrate further into this cavern of witchcraft, where she manufactured Liberals out of the most unpromising materials; and (it would appear) destroyed them afterwards.

Here another great subject opens upon us, when I ought to be bringing these remarks to an end; I mean the endemic perennial fidget which possesses us about giving scandal; facts are omitted in great histories, or glosses are put upon memorable acts, because they are thought not edifying, whereas of all scandals such omissions, such glosses, are the greatest.

One of the people I interviewed for the story was Rev. Robert Seymour, who had been Smith’s pastor at the Binkley Baptist Church since 1958, when he first arrived in Chapel Hill. Seymour told me a story about how upset Smith was to learn that Chapel Hill’s restaurants were still segregated. He and Seymour came up with an idea: Smith would walk into a restaurant with a black member of the church.

“You have to remember,” Reverend Seymour said. “Back then, he wasn’t Dean Smith. He was an assistant coach. Nothing more.”

Smith agreed and went to a restaurant where management knew him. He and his companion sat down and were served. That was the beginning of desegregation in Chapel Hill.

When I circled back to Smith and asked him to tell me more about that night, he shot me an angry look. “Who told you about that?” he asked.

“Reverend Seymour,” I said.

“I wish he hadn’t done that.”

“Why? You should be proud of doing something like that.”

He leaned forward in his chair and in a very quiet voice said something I’ve never forgotten: “You should never be proud of doing what’s right. You should just do what’s right.”

What I’m offering here is a mere outline of an an argument that I want to make in more detail later. It is inadequate on its own because of its dearth of quotations from and detailed analysis of the books under consideration. I’m posting it now more as a reminder to myself than anything else, though I would welcome thoughtful feedback too.

Two of the most ambitious and widely-discussed works of intellectual history in recent years are Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation (2012). The books are interestingly comparable in many ways. Both are written by Catholics; both rely on a very old and simplistic story about what the Reformation brought into being; both are strangely incurious about developments in Protestant thought after, and even during, the sixteenth century.

For Gregory, the cardinal error of the Reformation — which he tends to present as a uniform agent, as I’ll show below — was to apply intellectual remedies to a moral problem. In dismissing alternative views to his own, he writes that “the failure of medieval Christendom was not a function of the demonstrated or demonstrable falsity of central doctrinal truth claims of the Christian faith as promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church”; nor were there any problems stemming from too great diversity in religious practice or “an enforced uniformity of piety and religious practice.”

The failure of medieval Christendom derived rather from the pervasive, long-standing, and undeniable failure of so many Christians, including members of the clergy both high and low, to live by the church’s own prescriptions and exhortations based on its truth claims about the Life Questions. It was at root a botching of moral execution, a failure to practice what was preached.

Gregory doesn’t, as far as I can tell, do anything to establish the truth of his claim that the only failings of the medieval church were moral — though it is clearly vital to his understanding of the period. (“The Reformation ended more than a thousand years of Christianity as a framework for shared intellectual life in the Latin West.” All by itself, with no assistance from the Catholic Church.) Certainly many people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to believe that at least some Catholic teachings were false. In a book about the consequences of the Reformation, the assertion that such falsehood was not established — or maybe that (Gregory’s prose is vague here) any such demonstrations of falsehood were inconsequential — seems to be the mootest of moot points.

But let’s waive all that and assume that these claims of Gregory’s are correct. Even if so, these scarcely exhaust the possible explanations for “the failure of medieval Christendom.” It’s perfectly possible — indeed, one would think, quite likely — that the “central doctrinal truth claims of the Christian faith as promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church” were imperfectly and inconsistently understood by many medieval priests, whose education was highly variable and in some cases almost nonexistent. And what did those clergy actually teach the laypeople of medieval Europe? The historical record seems to indicate pretty clearly that actual teaching, from pulpit or elsewhere, was highly variable too. It seems strange that Gregory doesn’t consider the possibility of this kind of intellectual failure, serious though it could be. Instead, he takes refuge in what seems to me to be nothing more than a consoling fiction: that there was one “framework for shared intellectual life” everywhere in the Latin West that stood consistently for an entire millennium.

But to acknowledge variability in this monolithic structure of belief, in time or space — or, even if this story of fixed truth were true, to consider failures in the understanding and transmission of Catholic doctrine — would be to undermine Gregory’s whole argument, which is, again, that in trying to apply intellectual remedies to moral problems the Reformers inadvertently generated tragic cultural consequences. If the medieval Western church was in fact beset by doctrinal inconsistencies and incoherences, in addition to its moral ones, then the magisterial Reformers’ strategies become easier to understand and defend, and it becomes harder to blame the whole of Infamous Modernity on them.

I find Gregory’s book massively tendentious and unfair in its determination to see intellectual Catholicism as a simple victim of the Reformers’ acts of (however inadvertant) destruction. Taylor’s A Secular Age strikes me as a much richer, deeper, and more fair-minded book. Taylor is much less ready than Gregory to dismiss the achievements of modernity: he knows, as Gregory often seems not to, that if the Catholic Church had been able to stifle the Reformation in the cradle we might be living in a world that few of us would want to live in. (One of the oddest features of Gregory’s book is that its concluding chapter, “Against Nostalgia,” could scarcely be more nostalgic about the Catholic Middle Ages.)

But there is a flaw that Taylor’s book shares with Gregory’s: a failure to recognize that from Martin Luther on the most intelligent Protestants have been quite aware of, and concerned or alarmed about, the forces that they unintentionally unleashed, and have devoted constant and rigorous thought to these issues and how they might be addressed in light of biblical truth and (often enough) Catholic tradition.

Consider this: Taylor’s 900-page book about the varieties of secularization and secularity that have arisen in the past half-millennium, and the varieties of actual or possible Christian response to them, does not mention the name Kierkegaard. Not once. (Gregory mentions him a single time, in a mere list of Protestant thinkers.) Yet it would be impossible to name anyone who thought more deeply, more rigorously, and more critically about the relationship between Protestantism and the emergent secular — though the other names that one might mention in that context, for instance Barth and Bonhoeffer, are equally ignored by Taylor and Gregory.

Moreover, the magisterial Reformers themselves, from Luther to Calvin to Richard Hooker, even in the midst of social upheaval, are often quite acute on the very matters that concern Gregory and Taylor.

Both Gregory and Taylor construct stories in which “the Reformation” is the one historical actor, while poor Catholicism stands by, helpless to prevent the birthing of Modernity (understood by Gregory as a monster simpliciter, by Taylor as something more ambiguous, rather like Doctor Frankenstein’s creation as described by Mary Shelley). A more truthful account of the past five hundred years would acknowledge (a) the full range of ways in which Catholicism participated in its own dethronement, (b) the remaining power and influence of Catholicism both intellectually and as a set of forms of Christian practice, (c) the deep, lasting commonalities between at least the magisterial Reformation and the doctrinal inheritance of the Christian west going back to the Fathers, and (d) the immense devotion, creativity, and intellectual rigor which the deepest Protestant thinkers have brought to the very problems which Gregory and Taylor address.

“The subway sounds quite brutal,” Murphy tells the Journal. “There’s a missing opportunity at the turnstile.” Rather than having the subway’s turnstiles release a shrill beep every time they receive payment, Murphy would like them to each release one of many pleasant tones that, during busy moments, would coalesce into a grand harmony. Murphy’s vision would have every station in the city set to a different key, and he thinks now could be the time to turn it into a reality.

“‘This is not a big deal!’ you cry. ‘There are way bigger problems in New York!’ you yell. You’re pretty much totally right,” Murphy writes on a website for the project, which he’s calling Subway Symphony. “But this one is so infuriating because, quite simply, it would be really cheap and easy to change.  And I think it would be really lovely, honestly.”