Right wingers keep up their attacks on reason and its uses. One recent example is the Florida Senate bill that would make the teaching of critical race theory an offense and could have it sued by bounty-hunters. See Paul Krugman’s column on the topic. A proper history of the US would become impossible, since students “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” Republicans are covering this attack on rational discourse by using two widely accepted masks. First, they adopt something that has become somewhat common in the culture. They invoke a feeling of discomfort as sufficient excuse for refraining from inquiry, just as some students want to be excused from reading the story of Dinah’s rape in Genesis because it is too disturbing to them. Secondly, the Republicans turn everything around by pretending that this feeling of discomfort is commensurate with the denial or minimization of the Holocaust. False dichotomy: The long-standing overt and covert racism of US society should not be analyzed, but the history of the Shoah or at least its mention are to be kept up as a subject of inquiry. And why shouldn’t the discomfort experienced when seeing pictures or stories of the horrors of WWII also excuse students from pursuing that topic? The phrasing of this new bill makes clear that both totalitarianism and racism are joined at the hip. It is more crucial than ever to study both critically and include this draft of a bill as evidence.

Last week, the archbishop of Santa Fe, John Wester, issued a document on nuclear warfare that is crucial reading regardless of one’s religious inclination or lack thereof:
pastoral letter on the Catholic position on nuclear disarmament. Santa Fe and its state, New Mexico, are home to two of the three nuclear labs of the USA (Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories).

Major objections to continuing the conception, production, and strategic or tactical deployment of these weapons: first, the fact that nuclear weaponry is systematically targeted at large population centers and would have long-term climatic consequences; second, the framing of international relationships within a balance of terror or mutual assured destruction that relies on the absence of trust and hope and contributes to it; finally, the immense cost incurred by countries pursuing these programs instead of spending the intellectual, social, and financial capitals on other urgently needed pursuits such as social programs and the eradication of poverty. The dangers posed by nuclear armament have recently increased and are at their peak: increased risk of launching errors—with several incidents in the past—, the discontinuation or rejection of treatises—including the Non Proliferation Treaty—, and the more recent danger of electronic warfare.

Interesting though not very searching article on paganism and its replacement of Christianity in yesterday’s NYT by Christopher Caldwell. The author starts from a new book by Chantal Delsol, La fin de la chrétienté, which argues that we are living through the end of Christian culture or civilization. This turn of events would be undoing what Christians did to Roman culture, namely the “normative inversion” of its ethics and values, and their surreptitious borrowings from pagan culture. I would put a plural and talk of pagan cultures, with multiple centers and customs. We would be re-paganizing and our “undoing” would be a sort of sweet revenge on the undoing of Roman values in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era… I note that when the author defines Christian culture, he is thinking of art, philosophy, and lore, not of the beliefs on which everything else was anchored. A sideline is that the “woke” culture of today and its erosion of values—many or most based on Christianity—is somewhat rued by Delsol.

The article doesn’t go into the politics of pagan and Christian kingdoms. The beliefs in Christ and the historical claim they rested on made it difficult and paradoxical but not impossible to develop a political system in which kings and elites rode on the coattails of the re-structured divinity. Think of the representations of Christ Pantocrator as conveying the power of kings and the renewed dream of empire. Political and military power stemmed from the Bible and trinitarian god, but the meanings of the messianic claims made it contradictory and self-defeating, in the long term at least, to hold onto the Biblical God and its crucified messiah as the origin of power. As Marcel Gauchet has long been saying, the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not reject everything Christian. They rejected the contents, not the forms. They subjected Christianity to its own secularized power. They still held to the structures and formal concepts of Christianity when they justified the industrial revolution and its abuse of labor, the imperial and colonial adventures, or progress, as religious-like necessities stemming from the popular will but no more from a divine creation and incarnation. Most of this ontological framework collapsed by the end of the twentieth century, or so we are given to think. Modern ethics and moral claims lost the two main grounds they have had in the past two millennia. Now, they have to be moored in something else than Christian theology and liturgy, and in something else than national values. Human rights? One would like to believe that reason alone, if open and aware of its limits, could do the trick. But can it attract many people and give them the disciplined passion that divine and national religions provided?

What is evil for me? If challenged to write a definition of evil in less than one hundred words, my first thoughts about this question don’t get me too far. When I think of evil, or “le mal” in French, it is the notions of break (déferlement, as what waves do) and overflow (débordement) that come first to mind. I think of viciousness elevated to such a degree that limits disappear. Could this still be part of the cosmic realities…? But then I immediately wonder how it could happen, because I also know of lesser forms of evil: cruelties that one can teach even to animals—or some of them—as extensions of human ill will, indifference where there should be care, jealousies, hate at the local level, paralyzing bullying, or violent acts of self-defense (stopping at torture, however?), etc. Is evil a kind of wave of long-amassed, hidden failures that eventually breaks and carries everything in its path? Should one think of it in the way that in The sound and the fury Quentin remembers his father saying “that Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels?” How does a Cain go from the reasons that he has of seeing himself unfairly treated by the deity to the murder of his brother? Or how does one explain the explosion of violence at the Capitol last January?

My sense is that we are a strange kind of animal that has the capacity to abstract and restructure themselves from and against nature at a much higher degree than other animals—nature here including our past transformations of our environment—. It is this capacity for abstraction—or for leveraging our distance from nature—that makes us equally capable of doing good and evil. So, would evil be this overflow of hidden intentionality that somehow was not revealed until a certain point of accumulation and its explosion in full light? Its converse would be hidden goodness. As the poet Apollinaire said in La jolie rousse: “Nous voulons explorer la bonté contrée énorme où tout se tait” = “We want to explore kindness, enormous region where everything falls quiet.” Apollinaire the wounded soldier of WW I. The drama of good vs evil is a dialectic that swirls around acts of kindness, goodness, self-giving, forgiveness, as the hurricane around its eye. Kindness—the broad giving of everything that limits calculation and expectation of recognition—is at the center of being human or pan-human, or is all that this noosphere may consist of.

Hawley, the freshman senator from Missouri, equates modern secularism with pelagianism, in an article he published last year in Christianity Today. Pelagianism is originally an ascetic and aristocratic movement. Pelagius, to the contrary of Augustine, didn’t believe that humans were totally depraved because of an original fall but held that they could initiate the needed steps towards salvation on their own, aside from the help of divine grace.

Pelagius’ concern was to defend asceticism against the accusation of Manichaeism by insisting on human capacity to chose the good thanks to a God-given power. The denial of the doctrine of original sin seems to have been introduced later by Rufinus the Syrian and doesn’t seem to have been of interest to Pelagius himself. In other words, Pelagius was no leftist liberal and Hawley’s effort to pull the Augustinian rug to the conservative radical side is a misreading.

By linking this ancient heresy with modern secularism, strangely enough, Hawley is casting himself in the role of a Manichaean for whom the dramatic struggle of light and darkness is playing itself out in predestined souls. Note that the capacities of human nature have long been recognized, if not celebrated, in many Biblical passages: Genesis 1, Psalm 104, for instance. Of course, the idea of human self-sufficiency is in conflict with the notion of human sinfulness. But the resolution of this tension doesn’t have to be Manichaean, or even Augustinian, and exaggerate the depravity of human beings as irremediable. It is all too easy for elites à la Hawley to take this proto-fascist path in which non-elites are damned.

Facebook metamorphosed and metastasized yesterday into a new entity called meta or metaverse. The use of meta, if taken to mean beyond, behind, points to the company’s holy grail of being a universal messianic presence to everyone. What will this second baptism change in a company that is so focused on mediating every move of its desiring subjects? Its pocket machinery increases our potential distance and separation from other living beings. It is known that it would like to go further and build the next level of imaging machines without having to go through Apple’s iphones or Google’s phones and search engines. Capitalist institutions rely upon this fleeing and deepening distance, separation, and absence, including that from oneself, to offer their paying (re)mediations of a false presence. Our industry, commerce, and banking need our estrangement from each other. So, Facebook or Meta are perfect, wildly successful expressions of this much larger movement. They are not so very different from the kingdoms of ancient times where, sometimes with the help of priests, kings justified their existence and increasing authority by providing and managing close access to divine-like representations in temples and imagery that were devoted to ever-distant gods. Like them, Facebook and other companies help increase our distance from each other while circulating and putting right into our pockets simulacra of intimate presence.

The UCSC campus has officially been invited to become a member of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It will be #126 in this select group. I love the architecture of both UCSC libraries, the McHenry main library and the Science and Engineering Library. I greatly appreciate the services and the promptitude of very busy librarians, especially in the acquisition system. I like the tools, for instance the speed of searches, even though I am not too fond of certain aspects of it, for instance the tendency to gush unhelpful information instead of the sought out title and an intelligent form of the Dewey shelf browsing. And I’m glad that UCSC leads the good fight in shaping the Open Access Initiative of the future.

But I find it difficult to celebrate this recognition for the following reason. It is astonishing that the ARL didn’t seem aware that a fraught decision to remove and shred about 83000 titles—some of them irreplaceable—was taken in 2014 and executed in the summer of 2016 with no consultation of faculty, in order to create more space. See T. Wipke’s Emeriti’s Editor’s Corner for some of the numbers involved. Or see my two blogs, Pulp Fiction and Bits of Knowledge, regarding this sad affair.

I read Bergson’s Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience or his booklet on laughter when I was in the seminary. I don’t have the time, inclination, or capacity to go presently into Bergsonian philosophy. All I can say is that I see his dynamics of closeness and openness as both necessary, if only in following our nineteen-month grandson who is beginning to feel his way between the rules necessary for life, which he can only receive without rational discussion, and the constant, necessary exploration that will translate later as a permanent struggle between desire and delayed gratification. But what I don’t see evoked in Blake Smith’s reflection in the Tablet on Bergson or in Bergson himself—except in his idea of the prophet—is the necessity for modern capitalist society, i.e. all of us, to use and abuse the traditional, conservative moral systems that are vehiculated by millions of villagers going to work in new cities. They bring to their work and new urban environments their traditional values of fidelity, courage, honesty, sense of duty, reciprocity, cooperation, etc. These values in turn are systematically used and abused by corporations because they are fundamental, costlesss externalities that help modern enterprises succeed. The capitalist machine, however, needs to destroy these values in turn if it hopes to transform all of us into grand, infinite, solitary, desiring selves who owe nothing to anyone—or who think so—and calculate as rationally as they can their interests and rates of satisfaction. All in the name of freedom, a value that doesn’t appear in the Bible, or at least that word… So, I see liberalism only as the handmaiden of capitalism. It gets recycled in ads that are paid for by global companies. But it seems impossible for most of us to go back to traditional, survivalist moral systems and old fabulations. From where I stand—California coast, with a housing market that tracks the riches of the Silicon Valley—, the future is worrisome. And yet, perhaps there are prophets among us, including Spinoza at the head of them. Perhaps all of us are called to be prophet-like, because we are realizing at long last that we are all in it together and that the global economy is only there to turn us into that one body that Novalis talked about: Einst wird alles Leib/ Ein Leib = “One day everything will be body, one body”. So, perhaps a universal capacity to work and live in dignity and fidelity (חסד) is waiting around the corner to be recognized by all of us.

Please vote NO in the upcoming recall election. Keep our duly elected governor. Urge all your friends to also VOTE NO, including urging their own friends to do the same and tell everyone about it. Our NO vote chain is a vote FOR DEMOCRACY.

(From my journal on Thursday 22 July 2021)

John Patrick Lynch died peacefully at home on the 21st of July. The length of his illness didn’t soften the shock I felt at the news as I was waiting for a driver’s test at the Capitola DMV. It was one vanishing after that of three brothers. Only my imagination keeps them alive. As he said every Thursday before Cowell college night when he was provost: Nil non mortale tenemus pectoris exceptis ingeniique bonis (Ovid, Tristia 3.7.43–44). Or: “We possess nothing that is not mortal except the blessings of heart and mind” (LCL translation). His love of Greek and Latin and his long, great training—starting at eight years old or so—took many forms. Not only did he publish his important book on Aristotle’s school (Aristotle’s School: A Study of a Greek Educational Institution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) under the guidance of first-rate scholars, but he and N.O. Brown were in a class of their own in terms of knowledge of the classics. They would compose in Greek and JPL confided that NOB excelled at it. John was loved by his students and went far beyond the call of duty in encouraging them to achieve their highest possible levels. To teach was his passion. His competitive spirit, in sport and learning, was both fierce and remarkably generous.

Last Thursday before his passing, during one of the so-called great lectures that we watched together every week, he could quote Alexander Pope’s famous verses:

Be not the first by whom the new are tried
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

He certainly had the courage and sometimes the impetuosity to try or rather enact the new, in hiring and in supporting people who were confronting difficult circumstances.

In his role as provost, he brought numerous visitors to campus. In particular, he helped us organize an evening with Alan Stivell who was touring the United States alone in 1985 and played his electronified Celtic harp. The show, in the middle of a powerful winter storm, was a complete success. thanks to John’s and Sheilah’s hospitality in the Cowell Provost House. Breton was alive in Cowell for a brief moment.

As Peter Blackshaw said on the occasion of JPL’s retirement:

In so many respects, John fulfilled the true Santa Cruz ideal of teacher/scholar, and he did so with an understated, almost humble form of over-achievement. He truly walked the talk on UCSC’s college vision.

Peter also reminded us on this same occasion that the official UCSC mascot design owed much to John’s teaching:

When student leaders mulled over the establishment of a centralized student government (now the SUA), John provided thoughtful guidance and counsel. And here’s a big one for the history books: when the first SUA voted to put the banana slug on ballot as official mascot, John unwittingly inspired the current, and now official, Fiat Slug design. Indeed, when Cowell student and artist Marc Ratner (Cowell ’87) and I collaborated on the slug design, it was no small coincidence that the slug was wearing glasses and diligently reading Plato.

He became a trusted friend to many faculty across disciplines. He mentioned that aspect in the remarkable chronicle kept in the Regional Project archive at UCSC. His oral history has a passage on the so-called Kervorkian episode, which gives an idea of his occasional impishness and sense that there were limits to what could be done to sustain institutions. The situation in the Literature board of studies had become extremely challenging in the eighties. John was asked to chair but despaired from making any progress, finally leaving a meeting in medias res. “But what are we going to do, John?” was the plea. “Call Jack Kervorkian!” i.e. the doctor who was infamous at the time for helping patients to die.