The Ancients Whisper: Further Notes on Mesopotamian Religion

I have moved on from Mesopotamia to a campy "popular" history of Egypt, Barbara Mertz's Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs. But I did not express to my own satisfaction in my last post the underlying dialectics of ancient Mesopotamian religion. So here goes ...

The fact of the Mesopotamian additive, accumulative, and mechanical listing and doubling approach to imagining the influence of the divine upon everyday life does not mean that there was not a dialectic going on. Mechanical thinking is, I would assert, only a rhetorical means of approaching the expression of the irreducible dialectics of being and living. What that means in the concrete is that the pragmatic side of Mesopotamian religion was not burdened with a supervening transcendence which could obscure its practicality and tolerance as opposed to what came later ... religion as repression and exclusive monomania.

This was the contribution of the ancient Hebrews. I hasten to pre-credential myself ... that is to cover my derrière ... by noting that my speculations on ancient Hebrew religion express nothing of my lifelong love of the Jewish cultural influence on Western society. I have never written about that here, and I will have to do so at some point. But the ancient Hebrews effected a revolution in thought that transformed the ambient pan-cultural and accumulative religious system into a "national," exclusive, and substitutive one. Where any individual or community could choose from a pantheon which divinity they preferred as their intercessor and defender, the Hebrews required allegiance to one god. By that move, they had to create a god who transcended the mechanical relationship between the divine and the real ... in other words, no longer was each event or moment the result of a narrative or an approachable decision maker, but now all reality was transcendentally controlled ex nihilo by one supervening and enveloping totality.

Monotheism ... what a curse. And a fraud ... because the high level notion of the great oneness never quite matches up with the on-the-ground practical need for intercession, exorcism, and help. That ultimately is where Christianity with its Jesus myth and Islam with its countless Sufi and Shia cults came in to "liberate" Hebrew religion from its ethnic cubbyhole and remake it into popular, boundary-less, and transmissible religious systems. The persistence of Hebrew religion among Jews over the millennia as the most pure of monotheisms is one of the most remarkable stories in human history. There's no go-between for the Jews and their god.

But that is not what I want to address right now.

Hebrew religion served as the transmission belt for the worst aspects of Mesopotamian religion ... its at-bottom nihilism, the dialectic of blinding brilliance and dispiriting terror. Its hopeless view of human life as coming from nowhere and ending in nothingness.

As I have been re-reading ancient history, I am simultaneously obsessed with wondering what it was like to live then, and ensnared by the horror that their obsessions with hopelessness and terror infected all of human history ... the venom that Fred Phelps and, today sadly, the SCLC spew against those they revile is the transmogrified religious system of Uruk in the fourth millennium B.C.E.

Transmogrified ... in other words, it is not that Mesopotamian religion was filled with hatred, for it did not seem to be. It was filled with dread. But dread plus monotheism equals hatred.

It's reasonably easy to assign reasons for the small steps in history ... why Prussia beat France in 1870, or why Octavian won at Actium. But it is difficult to understand what the particular impetuses are behind the huge earthquakes. As the aforementioned Barbara Mertz speculates, why did Egypt rapidly move from a millennia-old string of villages splayed down a river to a great, unified kingdom that would last for millennia? And why after 3500 years did Mesopotamian religion go into an occlusion, only to re-emerge with a vengeance in the era of Constantine and conquer the as yet unimagined Western world? Why was faith, the successor to the fatalism of the Mesopotamians, able not just to conquer reason, the concomitant and anointed successor to Greco-Roman religion, but to harness reason to its own purposes? Why was reason not able to crush the last stingy upwelling of the Mesopotamian miasma?

Of course, I pose these things from my own perspective. Plenty are those, blithely ignorant of the Babylonian genesis of the christ myth, who shudder in ecstasy at having that special intercessor ... just as the Mesopotamians shivered as they performed their rituals to whatever intercessor they might choose.

So this is not felicitous prose ... I know it ... but I leave you with this question: what determines which ancient historical dynamics turn out to be unextinguishable? I think that is why I read history.

The Ancients Whisper: Mesopotamian Religion

I have been reading the superb Jean Bottéro's Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (1998; tr from French to English 2001). So these are notes about what I take away from the last couple of months of reading about ancient Mesopotamia, focused on religion; I will stick in a few page references so I can get back to the source when I re-read this down the road.

I want to make five points:

1. Lists

The ancient civilization that we can describe came into view because of scribes and writing and the need to keep track of the accumulation of goods at temples. I do not want to try to describe the flux and reflux of religion and state, or priest and king, and I do not want to make too broad an assertion about the role of religion in the rise of civilization. But writers ... without the scribes, there is no civilization. And they started with lists. Once they made lists, other scribes coped the lists. Whenever Sumerian gave way to Akkadian and became a classical, liturgical language, scribes made translation lists. There were lists of gods, lists of omens, lists of goods.

The listing behavior is evidence of a society whose thinking is mechanical and additive. Indeed, it is easy for us in the modern world to forget that the vast majority of people throughout time have lived in societies which describe their life world in additive, mechanical ways. The careful reader of my scratch-post will recollect that my own academic work concerned the nature of writing in a radically oral society in which a caste of scribes and writers produced writing to be recited to the non-literate and owned by the powerful. The three millennia of Mesopotamia fits precisely in this zone.

So think of that caste of writers. They spent their lives learning the complexities of cuneiform. By the time they became "journeymen" they had copied hundreds of texts and immersed themselves in a long past that was constant, in which change was a terrifying irruption that had no basic impact on how lives were led or how the universe was imagined.

We do not know the lines between scribes and priests. Indeed, we know that there are sundry types of priests, but we are not sure what each type did or how one type related to another. But we do know that the lists upon lists were he closest thing to what we would call scripture, and that the lists were mnemonic devices to remind people how to encounter the divine, how to influence the forces, ow to make the best of what all admitted was a dark and foreboding reality.

Now lists can have more than one element, and this is key. They had lists that gave the Sumerian name followed by the Akkadian name of a god. They had lists that described an event followed by what the event portended. But once you have a list, why not get more lists, and so ...

2. The ancients in the near East favored accumulation over substitution (82). In other words, they liked to add gods, but they never fully discarded a god even if he fell from centrality. An gave way to Enlil who gave way to Marduk. But none of them was banished.

The dialectical frame of mind always sees in the confrontation of elements the immanent possibility of the destruction of one, or both, and the transformation of a counterposed pair into a new, "higher" singularity, itself subject to further contradiction. That is not the way of the ancients. They were compound, not complex, in their explanation of reality. Again, additive ... one explanation did not preclude another. One set of gods did not preclude another. Indeed, for much of time, one king did not preclude another, notwithstanding the periodic impulses to empire.

The additive or accumulating mindset is coincident with the religious notion that the divine world and the material world are roughly parallel if not thereby equivalent. Which leads to ...

3. Doubling the visible world (44). The fundamental conception of the divine among the ancient Mesopotamians was to see in the divine world a parallel structure to the experienced world. Every item or force in the real world had a corresponding and decisive force in the divine world. Nothing happened in the real world without the impetus of the divine world. This is the source, obviously of the accumulating tendency.

We know, of course, that reality is a bitch. And we must assume that, prior to penicillin and modern dentistry, the bitchiness of life was the more acute. So the ancients saw a divine world in which the gods created human beings in order to feed them and so that they did not have to work. This is the source of the elaborate feeding the gods ceremonies of which we have textual evidence. But the ancients didnot feed the gods just because they felt a duty to do so. They fed them because they feared their wrath if they were not fed.

This doubling of the material world was grounded in a conception of the gods as fearful, evoking brilliance and terror (39). If the divine world doubled our own, then what happened in our own world was beyond our direct control. We are the victims of the whims of the gods, alive only to serve them.

Of course, people always want to negotiate with fate, and Bottéro makes a brilliant argument about how exorcism supplanted magic as the primary way in which people approached the gods. In his argument, magic is just a technique intervention. But exorcism relies on the notion that a person by failing to perform a required duty to the gods has sinned, and therefore been punished by some divine flick of the wrist. So if the supplicant can only find the right way to approach the god and mollify and compensate him, then perhaps the god will reverse the punishment. Just as one would approach an angry monarch, or an angry landlord, or an angry judge.

The doubling concept of heaven and earth reflected, then, being trapped in a concept of society and hierarchy. "Reverence, admiration, and self-effacement with respect dominate in the texts." (40) And just as in society one could not deal with everything, so it was in the divine. One had to choose, based upon one's place.

Interlude: allow me to quote a text just for the purpose of tasting how the ancients wrote, albeit the odors faint and elusive.

How long has the river risen and brought the overflowing waters,
so that the dragonflies drift down the river?
The face that could gaze upon the face of the Sun
has never existed ever.
How alike are the sleeping and the dead. (105-6)

Or how about:

I will praise the lord of wisdom, solicitous god,
Furious in the night, growing calm in the day:
Marduk! lord of wisdom, solicitous god,
Furious in the night, growing calm in the day:
Whose anger is like a raging tempest, a desolation,
But whose breeze is sweet as the breath of morn.
In his fury not to be withstood, his rage the deluge,
Merciful in his feelings, his emotions relenting.
The skies cannot sustain the weight of his hand,
His gentle palm rescues the moribund. (190)

Ah, Semitic religion. Then, as now, filled with terror and darkness, where the solicitude of the god is not expected but rejoiced upon should it make its occasional entry.

4. The Personal God. Bottéro argues that Mesopotamian religion was not precisely polytheism, but rather henotheism which "admits the plurality of the gods but is interested in and attached at least hic et nunc, to only one of them" (41).

First of all hic et nunc ... Latin, here and now ... how obnoxious is it that a 2001 translation into English chooses to assume that most of its readership will have enough Latin to know hic et nunc ... now, I am proud that I do, but it is s silly pride given that I am old and one of a tiny minority of folks who plans to take up Latin again when I retire so I can read Catullus and chuckle.

But more to the point, hic et nunc: here and now. Notwithstanding that ancient Mesopotamian civilization lasted longer than the period of time that separates us from Homer ... think about that ... their religion was always focused on the hic et nunc.

Onward ... the personal god ... in a divine world that is a doubled and powerful mirror of the real world, there is a madness of gods. Just as the individual in society has a particular life, so he should have a particular god. I think you see this in India nowadays as well. The individual picks a god who shares, on the other side, roughly his position in the hierarchy. And he goes to that god for help and for mitigation of the problems and miseries of life.

What goes on in the central temples and near royalty are far from the average person. And this accumulating and doubling religion provides him with this answer, a personal god. It is worth noting that we know about this aspect of Mesopotamian religion because of lists of personal names that celebrate the relationship of a given person to a particular god.

But lest we get too euphoric, we have to remember that this religion was gloomy and dark, with no release from fate for the individual. Your personal god, or your relationship with an exorcist priest, might mitigate the miseries of the moment. Butnothing could save you from deth ... that is the lesson of the first great epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh. We are all doomed to die, and thereafter to inhabit a dark world of shadwos with the future or past, not prospects, no activities, no change, no joy.

5. Hell, evil, fate. We have little indication of the exact nature of the cosmology in which our forefathers believed for three millennia. The reason for that is that the scribes did not write treatises on religion or the structure of the universe. They made lists.

But we know that there was a place "under" where the departed went. They did not have a notion of the soul per se. And there does not appear to be a separation between the good and the evil. There does appear to be some sort of hierarchical differentiation ... one cold hardly expect kings to live forever in the "under" with peasants.

But this was a gloomy notion of the end of life. Remember that the gods created human beings so that they could be fed without working. So the reward, such as it was, for a long life spent feeding the gods was a shadowing eternity in this frozen nowhere.

Evil was the result of the gods being angered at the failure of human beings. The Mesopotamians did not have demons per se. But the gods were capable, idiosyncratically, of terrible moods, vengeful actions particularly directed against hose who neglected them. That said, even in the ancient world, there were skeptics who wondered why the pious might get sick while the wicked might get rich.

The brilliance and the terror of the divine. The joys and the fears of life. Parallels.

Photos by Arod of the rather few Mesopotamian relics in local museums. I hope to add the descriptions soon enough.

The Mullahs and the Machine Guns

As I write this, the sun has set in Iran. Chants of "Allahu Akbar" ring out across the rooftops in conscious imitation of the 1979 revolution. The bloodlusting basij re dragging people from their homes, beating them, killing some, kidnapping others to prisons and dungeons. it is not yet clear if the climactic moment has passed, if the protests has been subdued, or if tomorrow promises further action. The thugs apparently were fought to a standstill today, but that is not predictive of how it will turn out.

Of course, I do not actually know what is happening. To do a little pos and neg credentialing ... I am not an expert on Iran. I have read extensively about the Elamites, the Achaemenids, the Sasanids, the Safavids, and the coursing of Islam across Persia in the first Islamic centuries. My doctoral (Cal, 1998) research concerned premodern Malay Muslim manuscripture, and I have read widely in Islamic and Central Asian history. But not an expert in the modern Iranian state.

We hear little from actual experts. We hear a lot of self-credentialing from Twitter, and certainly Twitter has been a key source of information from inside Iran. I see no evidence that it has played a role in the events other than, perhaps, to embolden people to action knowing that the whole world knows. Most of the Twitter posts simply repeat in one form or another how important Twitter is; some of the posts propound rumors, and these posts are often retweeted; a few of the posts point to web footage or photos or analysis.

But nowhere have I seen a lot of analysis of the key issue at stake ... what is the state of the Iranian state, and how does its present composition portend for current events and future possibilities?


So, let me start by proposing a series of deductions, assumptions, and evident or apparent facts; I will try to credential them as I go along.

I would propose that there are five broad categories of actors in the current state, two in power, one contested, and two out of power. Those are the mullahs, the military and paramilitary forces, the Presidency, the legislative branch, and the people. None of these are simple or without contradiction.

The mullahs are actually a broad layer of society that crosses class, region, economics, ethnicity, political outlook, and involvement. It is an error to assume that the mullahs are supportive of or even corporately linked to the Guardian Council. I believe it is also an error to assume without proof in the events that the Guardian Council or Khamanei is in control of events.

The military, or as I will call them, the agencies of repression, are actually at least four forces: the army, the police, the Revolutionary Guard, and the basij. How they cooperate and by whom each are led is not clear to any of us on the outside. I think the key issues all come back to these facts.

The Presidency is obviously what is at issue. But we should note that Ahmadinejad is evidently not a toady of the mullahs. I do no think that is proven. There is good evidence that he represents a turn in the state towards the primacy of the repressive instruments and away from the primacy of the clerics, notwithstanding that often all of them at least on the surface appear to have the same interests.

The legislative branch is impotent and deeply divided and, if history is a guide, cowardly. But at any ripe moment it could begin to play a role.

The people, as always in history, are a cipher, everything and nothing by turns.


I believe that the state is increasingly dominated by a competition among agencies of repression acting largely independently, if also interdependently ... in other words they have some kind of communication and coordination of action, but their interests are not identical and they each reserve the right to independent initiative.

The one thing that mullahs, agencies of repression, and presidency share is that in this situation they want a return to the status quo ante, even though the status quo is obviously in flux irrespective of the popular movement that challenges all of them.

Who runs the army, and who makes the decisions? I suspect that the army is the most afraid of the current movement because its soldiery is representative of the population that is getting very tired of the slow militarization of society. There are numerous reports of troops refusing to fire, none confirmed. But in any revolutionary situation, the attitude of the troops is key ... look at how the troops slaughtered their innocent brothers and sisters in Burma and the movement was crushed.

Does Khamenei actually control the Revolutionary Guard, or is he slowly becoming a monarch in palace captivity? If Ahmadinejad indeed represents a turn to the military organizations, then curiously Khamenei could actually benefit from championing Moussavi who is an old ally; if he managed to trump the agencies of repression, he could establish himself as a Caesar figure, transcending and overshadowing competing class and political forces. But his pitiful speech at Friday prayers showed no inkling of any independent basis of action. He almost begged for everybody to return to the Iran of a week previous, and to forget all the unfortunate stuff. Sure, he threatened repercussions, but what specifically did he threaten? Which of the agencies of repression can he actually command? He can certainly order any of them to do what they already want to do. But can he rein any of them in? Can he coordinate them? Can he expertly craft a middle path? I don't think so.

I think he is a captive of the Revolutionary Guard and the Guard's more extremist supporters among the high-ranking mullahs, and I think they could topple him in a thrice. I have no actual evidence ... but history is filled with late dynasty monarchs who live at the pleasure of their imperial guard and the guard's allies in the bureau. Theocracy is always short lived ... the guys with the swords, or in the modern world the machine guns, eventually assume power for themselves.

Think of the Revolutionary Guard as the SS (from Nazi times) and think of the basij as the SA, the brownshirts, the semi-organized, anarchistic thugs, young underemployed males lusting to break heads in favor of an idea greater than them but beyond their ability to fully grok. Who actually controls the basij? More to the point, does anyone have the ability to rein them in? In the case of the Nazis, when it came time for the state to be in indubitable central control, Hitler unleashed the Night of the Long Knives, and slaughtered the SA without mercy.

No one in Iran, I would assert, has the power to slaughter the basij. And yet they are capable of independently determining the course of events right now. What is the coordination between the Revolutionary Guard and the basij? Who determines where they strike and who they beat up or kill and who they bust? Will it occur at some point that the Revolutionary Guard will have had their fill of these thugs?

Most importantly, if the popular movement overcomes the brutality now being unleashed, and if they manage to overturn the election, how does a revitalized legislative side deal with a self-entitled militia of thugs and killers?

Just to close the circle, I think the police are followers and not leaders. The dynamics of repressions play out among the army, the Revolutionary Guard, and the basij. The cops can hurt people, but I do not think they decide the issue.


The next days will probably see a lot of blood. But if the movement presses forward in a mass and peaceful manner, I think there is a possibility that the army pulls back from the brink. That is the only way that this does not turn into a colossal bloodbath. At that point, however, the captive palace (Khamenei and his band of mullah toadies) and the captors (the Revolutionary Guard and the overtly fascist wing of the mullahs) are threatened, and they have common cause with the basij. In that event, there is a real challenge to the status quo.

Remember that Moussavi is not a revolutionary. If Ahmadinejad represents a movement in the direction of a consolidated, statified militarism, Moussavi represents only a state which seeks to rule in its own name. The goals of the popular movement appear to be nothing more than the promise of the state as described by the constitution. But such a movement presents intolerable contradictions among the agencies of repression who operate with impunity and apparently independently of the authorized state agencies. So defeat will occur only in an epochal bloodbath, but victory promises another bloodbath of uncertain characteristics.

It is not a pretty picture. None of it portends the end of the world's most notorious theocracy. None of it portends freedom of the individual. Iran has decades of suffering to free itself from the curse of its modern history and ancient, martyr-obsessed and bloody religion.

All that said, every lover of freedom the world around admires and yearns for the success of these noble men and women who have stared vicious brutality in the face and said no to repression, yes to freedom.


Photos from around the web, but especially the Tehran Bureau which has excellent coverage, and boston.com which has an excellent collection of truly heart-rending photos.

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The Ancients Whisper: Heroes, and Clay and Silicon

So I promise to end up at some point with the Internet. In my professional web 2.0 cruising ... or social media work as the Tweeters would have it ... I learn that mblog will be more popular if I use buzz words like Twitter and Internet and Flip camera. But I keep thinking about the men who for three thousand years made wedge marks in clay in what we call the Near East.

I've finished the rather quirky History Begins at Sumer by the quirky scholar Samuel Noah Kramer ... I say quirky because his fastidious self-credentialing becomes almost comic after a while. Kramer is the paragon of dedication to his arcane but essential specialty, and he is the sort of scholar that I admire without reservation. But he must have been quite a crazy guy.

All that said, I cannot agree with his take on heroes and heroic ages. Kramer delineates three accepted heroic ages ... the Homeric, the Indian, and the Teutonic ... and then argues that Gilgamesh and Enmerkar and Lugalbanda are a fourth and the earliest heroic age. Kramer posits a number of common elements in heroic ages ... a concern for individual heroes, and the tendency of the poets who celebrate the heroes to embellish the historical with the mythical. It is here that Kramer brushes against the truth of the heroic, but marches on. For the heroic ages are not in the eye of history but in the eye of the writer.

What is so amazing about re-reading ancient history at this point in my life is the degree to which all my thinking focuses on the scribes. Since I last read The Epic of Gilgamesh as a 30-something freshman at Cal in the mid-80s, I have written a doctoral dissertation that attempted to extract the consciousness of the writer from 15th-century Malay manuscripts which obscured as a matter of course the hands that created them.

So too with the clay tablets, the thousands upon thousands of them, which inform us of the life and times of some portion of life in the millennia before the Greeks transformed writing once again. We have to remember a few things about these writers. To begin with, we remember them, while we do not remember the story-tellers and neighborhood wags who have been the purveyors of traditions and knowledge in societies around the globe since before Sumer and into our own times. We also have to remember that the scribes were not a flat class of equals, but that they must have embodied hierarchy and structure in parallel with the society that they both served and created. In a chirographic society (that is, a society in which the most people both high and low were not literate, but in which literacy was the craft of a caste of trained specialists), writing was a precious object, indeed a fetish object, the possession of which marked power and charisma. So the scribes, both high and low, were in contact with power even if they did not hold it. And they no doubt sought to influence power, both secular and religious, sometimes at risk to their own safety.

Kramer makes the mistake of failing to understand that the "minstrels" and the scribes co-existed, and that they had a reflexive relationship, albeit one which we can only infer given that the sources we have are almost exclusively in the form of cuneiform. So when we think of the first great epic, that of Gilgamesh, we have to assume that there were popular versions, recited by bards in fire-lit villages far from the hubbub and glamor of urban Uruk. But those bards were influenced by the existence of writing. And I would aver that the chief influence is to focus the mind on the question of supervening authority.

Everyone enjoys a good yarn. And good yarns come with a moral, more often than not. The moral tells you something not just about how you should act but more so about the structure and meaning of the society in which you live. When I read Gilgamesh ... and remember that the main source for the popular version that most of us read is a Babylonian interpretation that largely but not exactly mirrors the Sumerian version that predated it by a millennium of more ... when I read Gilgamesh, I see the construction of a worldview that is deeply pessimistic, but that still posits the necessity of a king who is in contact with the divine. The Gilgamesh epic is thrilling, certainly. It is dramatic, and it seemingly contravenes expectation. But this is what modern people miss when we read the highly redacted version that most of us experience: no one who heard this text 3,000 years ago would doubt its authenticity. What they would feel from it is a re-affirmation of the real, not only the visible, but the ethereal which envelopes and contains and determines everyday life.

So I come back to this dialectic that bothers me all the time ... authority versus authenticity. We moderns are bedeviled by our legitimate concern with authenticity. We want to know if the story is real, if the scribes got it right, if the tablets are whole, if the translation is valid. But we forget at our peril that the concern for the authentic was not primary in the minds of the ancients. They wanted to understand the basis for being, for society. That something was authentic was guaranteed by its being there ... that is what I mean by arguing the primacy of immediacy in the pre-modern mind. But did the thing that was there reveal something about the structure of reality? Was it authoritative?

That was the job of the scribe: he was charged to produce authoritative texts, and these primarily went into the collections of monarchs and temples where the act of possessing them conferred the authority of the text to the owner.

Writing is so different now. It is no longer the province of a caste of the highly trained. The Internet, paradoxically for a time in which television had been threatening to create the first post-literate society, has created the greatest explosion in widespread writing in the history of humanity. You do not need wet clay, or a lifetime of training, or a kiln. Anyone can write. When we think of the impact on social relations of a society of active writers, we should also think of the impact on ancient social relations of a society in which writing was the most specialized activity.

People loved then, and they love now. People ate and drank then and now. People lived and died just as we do. But it is not the commonalities that reveal. It is in difference that we find out who they were and who we were, even if it is arguable that we are more similar than different. And the differences in the meaning and role of writing are an excellent place to start.

Photo by Arod from the Louvre, generally believed to be a representation of Gilgamesh, but also called "The Hero Overpowering a Lion", Neo-Assyrian period, reign of Sargon II (721-705 BC)

The Ancients Whisper: Enlil and the Wind

I've been reading Samuel Noah Kramer's History Begins at Sumer, published in 1956. My edition was the first Doubleday Anchor paperback published in 1959, sold for $1.95, and one of those classic old paperbacks that the bibliophile loves to fondle. Alas, like so many old paperbacks, the spine did break despite my best efforts. None of the folios have slipped out, though.

Preserving an old book is what Kramer did, of course, though his books were in the form of tens of thousand of broken clay tablets. Kramer does not lack for pride in his work, but he did put together many previously separated chunks of fable and myth. I am not sure what his reputation is now in the field; the Wikipedia article is certainly laudatory.

What I know about Sumerian religion entirely derives from Kramer, and something like six readings over the course of my life of the Babylonian epic about the Sumerian Gilgamesh; I am going to tackle that again once I am done with Kramer. So what I write here is pretty impressionistic, meant more to illustrate where my mind is going in trying to imagine for myself the nature of consciousness in the earliest civilization about which we have written evidence.

Written evidence, of course, is what defines civilization if only because we know a great deal of what we know from written evidence. Cuneiform was a remarkably long-lived and relatively stable form of writing; it was in active use for a longer period of time than the time that separates us from Homer! And, of course, because its medium was clay, we have an enormous resource of fragments and remnants.

I am interested in the scribes; I am always interested in the classes to which I might have belonged had I been born into another era. The earliest writings about Sumerian civilization in Uruk (in modern southern Iraq), the biblical Erech, include descriptions of the intense curriculum and strict corporal punishment provided to prospective scribes. The graduates stood to inherit high position in society, at the cusp between the religious establishment and the political power. Most of what they wrote was bureaucratic, and this provides us with a deep look into economics and social relationships at the dawn of history. But there is enough writing on myth and attitude to give us great insight into the mind.

Kramer points out that the Sumerians did not write what we might call meta-prose ... speculative supervening prose that situates and explains. I would say that this reflects what I called the immediacy of myth and speculation when I discussed Herodotus. The Sumerians were very good at lists, as were their inheritors, and those lists have provided not just enumerations and chronology but also great sources for translation and deciphering. Lists and the immediacy or unmediated quality of reflection are characteristic of chirographic society ... that is a society in which writing is produced by experts for consumption by a society which remains radically oral.

So in the case of the myths which Kramer outlines, we see the repetitive style and textual chunks typical of oral texts, but we see them in written form. By chunks, I refer to stock phrases ready at hand for an oral storyteller; the most famous is the Homeric "wine-dark sea". The storyteller has these elements, preformed with rhythms and measure appropriate to the genre, at ready hand so as to make easier the task of putting a story together in performance. BTW, Kramer makes an error typical of his era (see page 137) when he says that the scribes are the "heirs and descendants of the illiterate minstrels of much earlier days" ... first of all, I prefer "non-literate" rather than "illiterate" because you can only be illiterate in a society which is radically literate, in other words in a society in which the vast majority of people read and write. This was not the case in Sumer, or indeed in any society until much later. But more importantly, we can have little doubt that the "minstrels" were contemporaries of the scribes, as evidenced by the oral techniques with which they wrote, but also by induction since storytellers have been characteristic of all radically oral societies. The "minstrels" and the scribes lived in the same lifeworld and they had exchanges and interchanges which we can only imagine since they apparently are rarely if ever depicted in the sources.


So the scribal arts, notwithstanding the literate caste that produced them, reflect the oral society in which the life world is immediate and unmediated. The gods are viewed as ever present, constantly going about their work, and living their lives, but invisible to humankind except in the effects that they produce. The four major gods are An (heaven), Enlil (the air god), Enki (god of the abyss and wisdom, and the organizer god), and Ninhursag (the mother goddess). But there are also hundreds of gods in charge of more or less everything and anything. It becomes a rather impersonal system, one fitting for a people unprotected against ill-fortune and bad fate, so they developed a system of the personal god who could serve as an intermediary to petition for or act on behalf of the individual with the other gods who, seemingly, were unconcerned with the fate of one person or another.

It is noteworthy that in a thought system where there is no evident conceptual mediation (i.e., where cause and event and consequence are seen as immediate and connected and inseparable), a mechanical form of mediation is invented in the ethereal realm to represent the possibility that cause and effect can be split apart. Compare that to our personal god ... Jesus ... who mediates between the very distant, unerring, and unchanging god the father, but in doing that, he himself is distant, unerring, and unchanged despite his dabble in history 2,000 years ago. There is something deeply revealing about this structure of divine portrayal, and the evident necessity to invite a mechanical means in the form of the personal god of breaching the divide between the immortals and us.

The unchangeability that we project to the immanent but distant god, the Sumerians found in their everyday life. It was a lifeworld that appeared as stable and immutable, and change was something that had to be entreated. Kramer writes, "The main thesis of our poet [of the first version of the Job myth] is that in cases of adversity and suffering, no matter how seemingly unjustified, the victim has but one valid and effective recourse, and that is to glorify his god continually, and keep wailing and lamenting before him until he turns a favorable ear to his prayers." That god is the personal god of the individual supplicant who, by this means, had some recourse against the immediacy of fate ... but a recourse of little effect and much wailing and bemoaning.

Again, this is pretty broad speculation based on a limited set of facts known by the writer, but it is how I try to imagine consciousness when people are in possession of a different set of not only notions but also explanations and facts.


I think this idea also explains why Enlil appears over time to have displaced An, the heaven god, as the primary god. Again, for us, the primary god is always in heaven, and heaven which is above us, unknowable and unimaginable, unreachable except through death and redemption. For the muslims, it is a layered above, albeit rather fully explained in their much more mechanical textual approach to religion, but admission is at the behest of the god who is without intermediary.

But for the Sumerians, the action was not in heaven. Enki, the god of wisdom and organization, ran the world. But Enlil was the wind, the air ... that is, Enlil was what mediated between heaven and earth, what caused change, what brought good and evil, what moved. Enki established the rules of culture and living, and ultimately ordered people as they died and went to the underworld. But Enlil, the wind, was the great god, most in need of sacrifice and appeasement. He was the divine representation of mediation, and thus appeasing him was of central importance in undoing the terible effects of change upon a world where immediacy was the coin of the realm.

Again, this is a mechanical way of representing mediation in a world in which mediation was not the default position.

I hope that this is not too obscure ... and I really hope that it is not utterly wrong. I'll try to return to this when I have re-read Gilgamesh.

Photos by Arod of the sky. Top photo taken at MRU, the major research university where I hold out my hands expecting a rain of heavenly delights; second photo is of the hill in the park behind my house in San Francisco. the third is the sky reflected in a window which, as I recollect, is on Haight Street in San Francisco.

The Ancients Whisper

So, to set the scene ... and with no reference to the title of this post which, evidently like all my titles, breaks evolving rules of social media ... I took the day off to make a four-day weekend, cleaned two aquaria, ran around town and faced down the mad weekday traffic of downtown San Francisco in order to do my duty by recycling a bunch of old computer stuff. Now I am chilling with a beer that descibes itself as a "Handcrafted Ancient Ale". This would be a Midas Touch by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery who write this about the brew: "This recipe is the actual oldest-known fermented beverage in the world! It is an ancient Turkish recipe using the original ingredients from the 2700 year old drinking vessels discovered in the tomb of King Midas. Somewhere between wine & mead; this smooth, sweet, yet dry ale will please the Chardonnay of beer drinker alike."

I picked the beer because I am re-reading ancient history. The regular reader of this scratch will note that my reading habits are a never ending peregrination through history, period by period as the mood strikes me. What I want to focus on, in reading ancient history for the first time in 25 years, is the mind of the ancient world ... how did people construct reality, what were the signposts of the mind, what assumptions of system and configuration informed perception and action?

One has to beware of this sort of thing because the tendency is to look for commonalities. That is what I like to call the tyranny of relevance ... what can I find in the mind of Sargon that is like me. No doubt that sort of thought is comforting, but making the assumption that relevance and an unrequited empathy is the purpose of the study of history predisposes us to project our own being backward. That would be at best idealism and at worst an underhanded teleology. In other words, the approach that starts and ends with commonalities across the millennia either postulates some prior universal humanity, which would be a religious concept, or it assumes that history is the process whereby the present drags the past behind it.

I am human, of course, and I want to know what it would be like to be in Uruk in the third millennium before the myth of the cross ... I want to know how those people are just like me. But that is a projection; it has to be balanced with an understanding of how they differ.

So, from reading the magnificent Landmark Herodotus ... there are two themes that I found constantly in Herodotus.


Firstly, at least in the written word, there is a familiarity with the immediacy of death that we have lost in the modern Western world. That is a subset of the immediacy of culture and habit and action. Herodotus explains things very plainly and forwardly, even when he speculates about underlying causation. He is plain with his audience as if they are at his side. This is partly explained by his writing for a world which was still radically aural ... aural is in the hearing side of a radically oral society. This was a world where, notwithstanding writing, people knew things by reason of their having heard them ... and speaking and hearing were formalized in a way that we have lost. Now, we lost that way only recently, and there are still many places where that way has not been lost, or at least not fully lost. But in a radically oral society, and especially in a radically oral society before the invention of a radically literate society, people thought differently than we do.

That difference ... and I reference my dissertation on this ... is the difference between the primacy of authority over authenticity. In the ancient world, authority spoke, and authority guaranteed authenticity; we, by contrast, are obsessed by the authentic, and afraid lest we have been conned into accepting something inauthentic. In that sense, for us, authority exists primarily to guarantee authenticity. Herodotus never thinks of the authentic ... notwithstanding that he often does not believe things he has been told. He wonders about the veracity of who told him about things, and he posits veracity based on that. There is a religious dimension to this. You never read him saying that some passage is the inerrant, uncreated, permanent word of god ... in other words authentic by reason of the text being authoritative. Rather, you read him speaking about the authority of various interpretations of oracles. It is curious in this world where science and religion were genuinely inseparable that the divine was revealed not through inerrancy but through interpretation.

So the immediacy about which I started this section is an immediacy of speech and person and authority. And that dovetails with a world view that is immediate. I noticed how flatly Herodotus explains culture ... this or that is the habit of such a people. He does not layer his explanation with any ideology of acceptance or non-acceptance. Difference inheres in peoples and locations, and that is the way the world is. We do not see universals in Herodotus. We see a wide-eyed explanation ... albeit with plenty of sly self-credentialing ... where he postulates an audience that will accept his revelation as true because he is an authority. Immediacy, authority, interpretation.

Note how that differs from the Christian world with its distant god ... a world of mediation, authenticity, and, paradoxically, inerrancy. So ... and I slide into the tyranny of relevance here ... there is an argument that in some ways liberals and our love of ambivalence share at least the notion of interpretation with Herodotus where modern christians share virtually nothing.

So, on to the second theme ... reciprocity, or balance. Not balance in the sense of equality, but reciprocity in the sense of the action assuming or predicating or predicting the unavoidable countervailing counteraction that will balance the scales. For example, pride always calls out a comeuppance. The gods are the agents of this phenomenon, but they as much as we are bound to it. Reciprocity, in that sense, is a characteristic of reality, an ether in which we live. It is inescapable in Herodotus. It can be complex, and sometimes the reciprocity is paid by subsequent generations ... that, of course, is another part of the ancient mind, the corporate nature of the individual's being. And again, that is something that has not disappeared in much of the world. But I would aver that these notions were unquestioned in the ancient world where even in a place like Diyala province in present-day Iraq, people are aware of the antithesis to their corporate notion of personality ... that's why they hate us.

Reciprocity in Herodotus exists on the grand scale ... the Athenians helped the Ionians to revolt against the Persians, and the Persians burned Athens to the ground. But the Persians profaned various temples, so they lost at Salamis and Plataea. Herodotus explains all of this, as above, flatly and plainly, if artfully. He explains it as my grandfather explained the birds and animals, and the way that you do things. He explains it as if it is plainly real, true because it is, not because it is authentic.

So immediacy and reciprocity. Not that those are exclusive to the ancients. I have to find a way to express what was different about the ancients, and those are starting points. That's why I read history. I have finished Herodotus ... I thought him an excellent way to start thinking about the ancient mind. Now I am reading the history of the ancient Near East. Let me say only this about that ... the time from the first writing that we have from Uruk until Alexander defeated the Persians is longer than the time that separates us right now from Homer. Pause, my friend, for a moment, and think about that.

In the meanwhile, I have finished the second of my ancient Turkish beers. It is full and honeyed and grained. I know it is ancient because the label assures me of its authenticity ... and that is a relief since I paid $13 for four of them. Authentic ancient beer in a modern bottle. The authority is a web site put up by the makers ... and that I distrust. Hmmm.

Photos by Arod of statues at Sans Souci, Great Frederick's palace in Potsdam, Germany.

Fear and Loathing ... and the Storm a-Coming

So to set the scene ... beautiful Sunday afternoon. I am preparing to add 4 koi to the pond in the back yard. Skipping a meal each of yesterday and today because I have slipped above the limit of what I am prepared to tolerate ... not that I am technically overweight, but I do have a limit and I am not going over it! Wee Timmie Lincecum looking merely mortal pitching against the Padres ... the stuff is there but the killer instinct seems a little soft. I figure he needs a bit of time to get over the off-season celebrity and get back into the desperation for winning that undergirds every great athlete. Went through my closet and tossed a pile of clothing roughly three feet high to Community Thrift. And I am preparing to devote a few of these declining hours of the weekend to The Company, as I sometimes like to call MRU, the major research university where I stuff m&m's into tiny boxes in exchange for enough candy to support my heathen lifestyle.

So life goes on ... even as our christian friends are dressing in strange colors and weird fruity hats in order to celebrate this high holiday of their death cult. Yes, death cult. One does not have to be a historian these days to understand how much this religion is a death cult ... one need only review the ludicrous and bizarrely amateurish new ad that the curiously named NOM has created ... A Storm is Coming.

First off, har-dee-har, we have the bizarre experience of a week in which the extremist fundies start a campaign called 2M4M (2 Million 4 Marriage) AND the extremist wingnuts start a campaign called teabagging. Do these people live in some cellar somewhere immune to everyday life? But ya gotta laugh!

So, there are plenty of critiques of the ad ... for reference, a bunch of actors mouth short lines in front of a montage of the dark clouds of a gathering storm replete with lightning. The actors look fearful, almost weak. You can search for it on YouTube ... I don't want them to count my site as a link.

Or you can watch all the parodies here. I think this is the coolest one:


So much has been written about the dishonesty of the ad ... that the performers are actors, many of whom tried out for multiple parts. That the ad primarily addresses civil rights cases in which church organizations and religious individuals offering public accommodations were required to offer those accommodations to all comers. Yawn ... it is such a problem for bigots living in a free country.

But I think the darker side of the psychology of this ad has received insufficient attention. The storm predicted gets us coming and going. It is a direct reference to the apocalyptic vision of end times, the gathering storm of all these evils terrifying the good souls faithful in Christ. But the storm is also a direct call for action against gay people. This is a longtime subtext in christian homophobia ... the love the sinner, hate the sin is a giant lie, and those of us who suffer from these bigots know it in our bones. This ad gives cover to those who would physically attack us, and it is an unmistakable call for violence.

The bigots make much of their being a rainbow coalition founded in love to protect traditional marriage. What a crock. We do not want their love ... history is replete with how painful their love has been.

History, too, plays a role here. I think this is yet another attempt by the extremist fundies to put the medieval back into christianity. And by that I mean the superstition and the fear and the death.

The regular reader of my musings will know that I am a voracious history reader, and that the Middle Ages is a favorite period. Among the fascinations of history is the idea of trying to imagine the mindset of an era who assumptions and modera operandi are, at bottom, utterly alien to our own. So ... not to put too fine a point on this ... the medieval mind accepted the notion of an active god and an active devil who intervened directly and personally in all affairs. Evil was incarnate, in the flesh. Now, the Middle Ages were not a monolith, and as the church developed its power to command souls, it did so in large part by augmenting its role in direct intervention in personal life. The church always railed against a rising tide of evil, and blamed all reverses upon the sordid nature of human error.

But it was only in the 11th century that the Church changed its mind about the meaning of the Sodom myth. It never liked homosexuality ... it never liked sexuality ... but there are few homosexual purges before the Crusades. That said, the entire era groans under the mindset that human affairs are the active battlefield between the divine and the diabolic incarnate.

We ... rational, secular society ... find that nonsensical. Most of the religious see God as vastly further away, more ethereal, less corporeal than did our medieval predecessors. Heaven may still be for the righteous, but righteousness for most of us is honesty and hard work and goodness. We just do not believe to the same degree in the notion of incarnate evil ... pope Ratzinger's handwringing fulminations notwithstanding.

Now, that may not be as true for the fundies ... but I would argue that even fundies, and especially the young, share in this notion of the distant God. Their nearly erotic love of Jesus as personal intercessor is a way of bridging the distance between an ethereal God and everyday life. (As an aside, this is not what Constantine had in mind when he signed off on the Trinity in 325.) But there is a danger here, because the personal relationship with Jesus is fungible, individual. It threatens to allow individuals to decide for themselves what Jesus means to them. It might even allow homos to decide that Jesus thinks that gay is okay.

So these ads are an attempt to put the Jehovian God ... and the fear and the superstition ... back into the conversation. I think it is a feeble attempt ... but that is the subtext. Jesus may love you, but Jehovah of the flaming sword and gathering storm is an angry God who slays and brings torments and plagues. Love Jesus, but fear God.

Fear God ... fear the homos ... fear the government.

Fear. There is a storm coming, and it is a storm of fear. The righteous will fear god ... and the faggots will fear the righteous.

Yes, the campaign is laughable and it has fallen on its face. But we must remember what it meant to mean, and what it speaks to and about our implacable enemies who still actively fantasize our corporeal destruction.


Happy Easter ... in the strictly pagan sense of that greeting. And long live the multicolored egg-laying Easter Bunnie ... the perfect riposte to the death cult that still threatens our lives and happiness.

Photos by Arod, the first two are street art on or near 16th Street in San Francisco, the last is a pic of Easter Eggs at Le Zinc Café on 24th, one of my favorite eateries.

... p.s., here's another riposte, a kick to the ribs ... with all due deference to Genesis ...

Birthday Ramblings

Yes, it's my birthday ... and to spare any suspense, it would be #56 ... gawd.

I took a four-day weekend ... spent Friday touring West Marin and Sonoma counties with Roy and Jim ... got some pix here. My friend Tony put together a little dinner party on Saturday ... very pleasurable. And then today I did something I have done many times on my birthday ... wandered around town, stopping at cafes and reading, ended up in North Beach at City Lights Books and then a black-and-blue filet mignon at a sidewalk table at Calzone on Columbus.

The beef ... I try to eat beef rarely, and when I do I want it to be sublime ... was accompanied by Herodotus. That Herodotus. After another dalliance in late antiquity, I have decided that I should re-read ancient history systematically for the first time since my freshman year at Cal. My friend Ian gave me The Landmark Herodotus for Christmas, and that seems like the perfect way to get back into the ancient mindset. First off, this volume is all of what is great about the new academic history. It is well-produced, critical, and lavish in its resources, and it starts from revisiting all of the commonplaces and shibboleths that have bedeviled history for two centuries. Virtually all of history has been rewritten in the last three decades, so much so that one must very wary when reading old scholarly works.

But Herodotus in this magisterial translation is new.

I am in the early stages, and this concerns the story of Croesus and fall of Lydia. There is a story which concerns one Adrastos; his name means "no escape." He ends up, quite by accident, being a double murderer, and he kills himself on the tomb of Croesus's favored son, Atys, his second victim. The episode is useful psychological situating because Herodotus reminds us through the words of the grieving Croesus that Adrastos is not a murderer, but rather a victim of fate and merely the vehicle of the gods' whims and fancies.

Reading history always requires a certain psychological empathy with mindsets that are utterly foreign to one's own. Again, that is why reading Herodotus is such an excellent re-introduction to reading ancient history. Of course, there is also some sense in which the predilections of the past inform the present ... not in the sense of some coarse rhetoric of crass relevance, but in the sense that nothing human is alien.

So, to be coarse, I got thinking about the notion of being named "No Escape." I tried to tie it to the heartsick undergirding of current era, to whit the fear that somehow the crisis will find me too. Adrastos could not outrun his fate, and I will only know at the end if the fate I am running from will find me ... and whether that will be good or bad. Which again ties us to a moment in Herodotus ... ancient literature is like that ... in which he depicts s meetings of Solon and Croesus in which Croesus more or less demands that Solon accepts that Croesus is the happiest man. Solon's retort, so exquisite, disgruntles Croesus, and puts him in his place. It is a place where we enjoy seeing so many of the greed-riven monsters who have destroyed the world economy:

The man who has great wealth but is unhappy outdoes the fortunate man in only two ways, while the fortunate man outdoes him in many ways. The former is more capable of gratifying his passions and of sustaining himself in adversity, but the fortunate man, although he does not have the same ability to sustain himself in adversity or passion, avoids those by virtue of his good fortune ... but the man who goes through his life with the most blessings and then ends his life mot favorably, he is the man, sire, who rightly wins this title [of most fortunate]. We must look at the end of every matter to see how it will turn out. God shows many people a hint of happiness and prosperity, only to destroy them utterly later. [Strassler, pp22-23; Herodotus 1:32:6 - 9]

Herodotus sees an "end of every matter" ... in the postmodern world we admit of no endings. Instead, I like to talk of pivots. I am actually uninterested in who might be considered the most fortunate, because the most fortunate in our world so often, if not always, are so undeserving and so ungrateful ... some time I will write in a crankier mood than this one of the contorted faces of entitlement and excess that I see in the tonier parts of Menlo Park and Palo Alto when I bicycle around for lunch. And certainly in the current earth shattering crisis, there is evidently no shame, no shame. As the unfortunate burn, the privileged bemoan that they have to cut back on caviar.

Greed, loathing, comeuppance ... nobility, courage, honesty ... eternal themes.

So back to eating filet mignon on Columbus in San Francisco. Earlier I was in a cafe I occasionally frequent ... the Cafe Abir on Divisadero at Fulton ... and there ws a man whose laptop was emblazoned with a sticker that read:

blah, blah, blah ... good point, but fuck you anyway

I laughed, but that is as much a psychological outpost of the era as Herodotus' notin of fate. And as Herodotus' notion of fate made me wonder about the shape of our world to come and my place in it, so this tinpot jerk's finger to the world makes me wonder what happened to my city.

When I arrived here in 1981, and when I visited three times in the late 70s, there was a different odor to San Francisco. Yes, there was a different odor to the world. But San Francisco was still the place that people came to create new tribes, to challenge orthodoxy, to make new realities and to rub out old ones. It's not like that now ... I don't want to be too cranky ... it is now a city of the smug, it is a city of people who like to model for themselves with the city as nothing more than backdrop. "Aren't I cool ... I live in San Francisco ... doesn't my Hummer look good." Well, I am being obnoxious. That said, the city is palpably more shallow. That the electronic revolution happened here is, we assume, natural. But where for many decades the genius of the place was to be found in the irrelevance of the business cycle, San Francisco is now the temple of the business cycle.

And the odor is gone. It seems like everywhere else, only cooler. It seems like what I like to call spaceship tourism ... a real place where a spaceship has landed to suck out the organics and leave behind a mall.

I think I will leave it there. It was a good birthday ... I enjoy wandering alone and speculating more than almost anything else. Tomorrow's maelstrom in the job which I have left aside for four days is amply worth the reflection of wandering and wondering. I do still have that pit-of-the-stomach feeling that things are really bad out there. My fate, to be decided, will be whether it ends up sweet for me. I hope so, and I dedicate myself to making it so. And that is what I learned from this birthday.

[Postscript ... I have had the NCAA final between North Carolina and Michigan State in the background, but the Tarheels are creaming the boys in green; it's boring. Only investment I have is that it is the last time we see the monstrously gorgeous Tyler Hansbrough in college. Never thought I would miss the archly egomaniacal Billy Packer, but his replacement, Mr. Kellogg I think, is the worst of sports color men ... loud but uninformative, repetitive and obvious.]

Photos by Arod, all taken today ... the top is on Columbus in North Beach, San Francisco; second it the Palace of Fine Arts; bottom is from the interior of the Cafe Abir.

Stanley Goes to the Fish Market

I read Stanley Fish's blog in the New York Times pretty regularly, and he recently published a piece called The Last Professor. The post questions the survivability of the humanities in the academe, and refers to a recent book by one of Fish's students, Frank Donoghue, who has a new book entitled “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.”

Fish argues for "higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility" ... I refer to a similar concept in the phrase "the tyranny of relevance." Fish writes (and I have conflated two paragraphs for clarity's sake):

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the [ideal of Michael Oakeshott that "there is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining"] (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

Both Fish and Donoghue say "no" ... regardless of the merits, scholarship as an end in itself untethered to an explicit and argued social utility cannot and will not survive.

There is plenty of evidence to back up their skepticism, not the least of which is that students increasingly look to post-secondary education with career in primary mind. The last flush of inutilitarian idealism might have been the 70s when people like me took classes in Chinese language whose principle was that the memorization of Tang dynasty poetry could lead to fluency. The result of that is that I can recite imperfectly two lines of a famous poem and I can scratch out around 25 characters.

I believe, and I am in agreement with Fish here, that scholarship is justified about anything that is knowable or anything about which we still do not know everything. That covers pretty much any subject. To require an explicit tie between knowability and utility predisposes the scholar's work with reference not to the object studied but to a present paradigm that may have nothing to do with the object. This was precisely the tyranny-of-relevance error of the whole theory digression that bedeviled literary studies for a couple of decades ... I am happy to aver that the grip of airless theory seems to be loosening.

Having said that ... that study itself is sufficient argument for scholarship ... methinks Professor Fish got lost in the marketplace. Because as with everything, the pure argument, the single source of truth, is always wrong at least because it is incomplete but more so because it closes the door to the fuller explication of the underlying dialectic. You see, scholarship has never been free of the tyranny of relevance in any meaningful overarching sense. Certainly one has professor x who spent three decades deciphering runes while his colleagues snickered at his tawdry clothes and poor hygiene. But even professor x lived in an institution situated within a society, an institution subject to rulership, economics, pressures, and social changes.

Complexity is what interests me, and reductive-to-the-single-point arguments run out of steam. I can stamp my foot all I want about pure scholarship ... I could rage on about the undeniable fact that most professors produce precious little of memorable quality ... and I could feel good about it. But it would not get me closer to understanding the dynamics that are rendering scholarship in the current era.

I think you need to start with the counterposing pure scholarship and social context. They are never separate, though social context pays vastly less attention to pure scholarship than the other way around, certainly. The fascination is in the complexity of that relationship. I wrote a few days ago about a forum on the term "Islamism" and I hope that I prefigured a couple of these points there. Emmerson, the scholar talking about Islamism took the term out of its robust and fractious social context and laid it before us as something to be studied. I think that Emmerson lost a chance to change scholarship by insisting on writing a book about this term instead of creating a living monument on the web. But that demonstrates precisely the struggle between the pure scholarship of wresting the term from its context and looking it as a captured wave (not a fixed or reified object) and the social context that wants some feedback from the pointy-heads who do this kind of stuff.

Emmerson lives in a rarified world, the world of the endowed scholar who just thinks and writes. Great work if you can get it. I think that world has a responsibility to knowability, even when the objects it might choose to study are not relevant, or what is more significant posed-as-relevant, to come current issue or problem. In other words, we can demand of endowed scholars that they do something, and then we can tell them that we are free to make of what of what they do what we want. They can't own it or keep it back. Again, that is a dialectic.

The key to saving the humanities is to inhabit both terms of that dialectic.


At MRU, the major research university where I pile seashells on the beach in exchange for loaves and fishes, I have argued on numerous occasions ... and you must realize that I have no formal standing to make this argument ... that the humanities departments need to seize the idea of the double major. I like this one: French and Civil Engineering. Or, Classics and Urban Studies. Or, Art History and Mechanical Engineering. Or, History and Earth Systems.

Yes, there is a grave danger here that the humanities find themselves tied to a stated and required relevance. But, so long as one keeps this slippery slope in mind, such formally combined majors enable the humanities to inject into the real world the perspective of pure scholarship. More significantly from the social context point of view, they can round up some students and increase their own footprint.

So, the French and Civil Engineering works in Africa for the United Nations, the Classics and Urban Studies student intertwines classical ideas of open space and citizenship with modern transportation systems, the Art History and Mechanical Engineering student retains the notion of beauty as he proposes a bridge on a freeway, and the History and Earth Systems student comes to this most complex of human issues with an understanding that we have ripped our environments to shreds since we first walked the earth.

The humanities can surrender the social context parts of the double major to the science and engineering departments, and thereby liberate itself to its own genius, to whit the inutilitarian search for the knowable.

I propose this example by way of outlining a path for the humanities to engage with the world that threatens it even as it operates to save its most previous perquisite ... the ability of scholars to define for themselves what is worth studying. Moaning that the world has no room for us, well, that is an ancient complaint that has an odor not of striving and research but of coffee and upholstery.


A few further notes on complexity and military history

Last night at a dinner of five pointy-heads, my excellent friend Ian and I sparred about the Dresden bombing and that spun into Hiroshima and the Japanese surrender. Dresden is in the news these days because February 13 was the 64th anniversary, and the day often presages neo-Nazi marches about war crimes committed against Germany. There is a nice piece in the English Der Spiegel here in which Frederick Taylor, a British historian who has written extensively on Dresden, is interviewed. (I suspect he is the son of the noted left-wing British historian, AJP Taylor but I could not find any proof of that).

Taylor rejects the view that Dresden was chosen only because it was an architectural jewel and as part of a singular effort to destroy Germany by destroying civilian morale; he argues that these were certainly factors, but that it was also a significant military target. One can quibble, and we certainly now know that the carpet bombing strategy was not a significant factor in the defeat of Germany. But I find a reduction of the bombing of Dresden to war crime to be a kind of moral cubbyhole that exempts the viewer from the full range of dialectics at play in the moment. In other words, once we assign the single factor and require that all argument start there, we lose the ability to understand how things actually happen, how strategies in the high sense devolve into tactics on the ground, if I can make a macabre pun. But complexity of argument can readily come back to its starting point, and Taylor, the champion of a complex argument about Dresden does precisely that. The aforementioned interviews ends thus:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think it was justifiable?

Taylor: Personally, though I can trace the logic of it, I have serious doubts. It is a ghastly example of how war depletes the moral reserves even of democratic nations. Goetz Bergander, who survived the bombing of his native city as an 18-year-old and has written widely about its destruction, has described the bombing in his characteristically forgiving way as "outsize." It was certainly all of that.

I think a similar moral cubbyhole has long obscured clarity in argument, especially among liberals, about the events that ended the Pacific War in 1945. It has been argued that the Japanese were ready to surrender, but either we needed to give them time or we needed to figure some way not to force unconditional surrender. There is no evidence that I know that supports this other than assertion. Significantly ... and this is a grave error in anyone seeking to understand military history ... no credit in this view is given to the implications of the fog of war. What the Americans knew was that resistance had not stopped and that large numbers of troops were being amassed in the South in preparation to resist the assumed invasion. That the Russians had entered the war likely had more impact on the Americans than the Japanese military leadership much of which was committed to a fight to the death of the last Japanese; why would they care whether that final plucked life was given up to a Russian or an American?

But once we credit a notion that the Japanese were ready to surrender before Hiroshima, or that they really surrendered after Hiroshima because they were afraid of the Russians and not the bomb, we avoid a grindingly difficult moral argument: did the A-bombs result in a net of fewer deaths; and, if so, were they thereby justifiable?

That is the moral crux of the end of Japanese war, and it should not be avoided.


A last note:

I have meant to write about this for a few days, so I append it here. There was a touching article in the New York Times entitled "My Sister's Keeper". It concerns aging colonies of lesbian separatists who have kept the faith, as it were, with that peculiar 70s ideology. I want to note that the lesbian separatists did damage to the gay movement, and they are not heroes of mine even if they have lived their lives courageously as they saw fit and so desired. The gay movement of the 70s was overwhelmingly male not because we rejected women but because women rejected us. They had lots of excuses ... all men are rapists, the gay boys have too much sex, we expected the women to make the coffee while we did the movement ... but only one argument is real. Feminism of the 70s was homophobic in a dominant sense, that is in its majority and in its actions. Lesbians active in the women's movement felt they had to hide or at least downplay their homosexuality. The separatists, while hardly hiding from feminism, hid from the world and proclaimed that isolation as liberation. They contributed nothing to our present freedom, and their absence weakened us both in the short term and in the long term. I wish them well in their retirement, but the record tells the tale.

Photos by Arod. The owl is from a window on Divisadero Street; the lion is from a Board of Education building on Van Ness; the window reflection shot is just off Market near Gough; the statue is from Golden Gate Park; the finger is from Hayes Street (I think) near Masonic; all are from San Francisco.