Tuesday, November 21, 2017

It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down....

Sorry, no picture.posting from my ☎(!), just trying to get this out of the nest.


I have to pick this up because it's a defense of the humanities, albeit a transactional one, since the purpose of studying the humanities is not merely to be able to distinguish the bullshit of Donald Trump or Roy Moore from truth:

Realistically, many if not most visitors to the museum won’t have a strong background in biblical history, theology, or related fields, making it difficult to discern where history ends and ideology begins. If they don’t already know, for example, that there is little historical evidence for the Egyptian exile, they may be convinced by the museum’s convenient placement of accurate historical information about ancient Egypt alongside the biblical account of Moses. They might come away thinking that the museum proves that Moses’s exodus happened just like it’s written in the Bible.

If they do so, it is because they have been failed — not just by the Museum of the Bible — but by educational institutions that have not equipped them with the tools with which to assess it. In the public imagination, the humanities have been so routinely undervalued. We have a vague cultural respect for “hard” science, for “STEM subjects,” but not for the humanities, which teach us to ask crucial questions like, Who is making this assertion? Who made this item? Why? or even, Why did someone decide to group all the objects in this museum exhibition together? These questions all fundamentally boil down to one bigger question: How can I tell when something someone is telling me is bullshit?

Without these questions, you end up with a population without the tools to process information about the intersection of faith, religion, history, identity, culture, and practice. You end up with people throughout the political and faith spectrums who, when it comes to anything to do with even the cultural or historical aspects religion, cannot tell valid questions and facts and historical truths from, well, bullshit.

I don't disagree that the humanities are valuable; all of my studies have been in the field known as "humanities."  But the simplest response to the Exodus story is to point out there is no "Red Sea" in Egypt today, and no evidence there ever was one.  There was an argument once, that what was meant was a "Reed Sea," but that entire argument turns too much on the Hebrew (or Greek, in the Septuagint) providing words as similar in those tongues as "Reed" and "Red" are in English.  And Exodus wasn't translated into English until the 16th century, so that doesn't make any sense at all.  Back to beginnings, then:  there is no "Red Sea" in the desert landscape of Egypt and there never was, else Egyptians would have built by it rather than along the Nile.  It doesn't take the careful study of the humanities and learning how to tell valid questions and fact from bullshit, to understand that.

But we have been failed by educational institutions that haven't equipped us with the tools with which to assess the Bible, or anything else.  Except who runs those institutions?  The people; the citizenry.  Few and far between are the secular universities that are truly private; the majority in this country, and some of the wealthiest (UT-Austin, hem-hem) are public.  Schools are largely public, too; the curricula set by professionals overseen and answerable to public officials elected by the public to do just that.  You want people to have the tools for assessment of things not measured by scales and meters?  Make the schools focus on something that isn't STEM, or think they have by adding an "A" to that acronym (what still predominates, is still in the majority?).  And by the way:  good luck with that.

Thinking is hard.  I'm more convinced by that every day.  I read the work of scientists who wander from their STEM fields into the humanities, and think because they are good at science they are good at anything (I still remember the lawyer who took a year off to be the general contractor on his home improvement project.  His fellow lawyers laughed behind his back, recognizing the hubris of someone who, expert in one field, thought he was expert in all.  I used to think that was a hubris peculiar to lawyers, whose work puts them in touch with so many fields of modern society.  Now I know it's just the hubris of education, usually a non-humanitarian education.  Outside of eleemosynary institutions, nothing teaches humility like the rigorous studies of art, philosophy, literature, and history.  You want to know how much you don't know, spend your time in those fields.).  Those wandering scientists think their knowledge is complete, is leading them to a grand unified theory that is only a few puzzle pieces away from being complete.  They know nothing of Godel or Wittgenstein, who look upon their efforts and chuckle and probably would echo Wonder Woman's words after the battle in "Justice League:"  "Children.  I work with children."  She means it kindly and bemusedly; I mean it seriously.  And it isn't hubris that leads me to observe it.

Thinking is hard, and it is not widely supported as a general activity.  Universities became cradles of humanistic thought because they were originally supported by churches, were in fact outgrowths of church efforts at what became known as scholarship.  But rigorous critical thinking is a challenge to the status quo; as long as the church sanctioned it, such practices were the church's problem.  Just to jump to the present day, who are critics of academia talking about when they complain that colleges are hotbeds of "politically correct" thought and dangerous and radical ideas?  The Chemistry Department?  Engineering?  Anything remotely related to STEM?  If you can't figure it out, maybe you need a background in humanities more than you thought you did; except then you'd be exposing yourself to all those "dangerous ideas," and we can't have that, can we?

ADDING:  the discussion turned into a discourse on the Museum of the Bible which is the topic of the article I took the quote from.  William Saletan has been there, and where before I might never have been interested to visit it, now I am.  It sounds like it might be worth the time spent in it.

5 comments:

  1. "...they may be convinced by the museum’s convenient placement of accurate historical information about ancient Egypt alongside the biblical account of Moses. They might come away thinking that the museum proves that Moses’s exodus happened just like it’s written in the Bible."

    Well, sure, they might, just as they might presume from the ruins at Hisarlik that there was a great siege of Troy as Homer sang. But if I'm building a Museum of the Iliad my purpose might not be so much to prove the truth of Homer as to put some flesh and bones on a foundational epic with some stunning remaining relics of the past.

    So even if I may not have much sympathy with the particular religious viewpoint of the creators of the Museum of the Bible, I don't think it's particularly incumbent on them to flag the poverty of second-millennium sources or try to prove anything. What wasn't built of stone or engraved in stone has mostly been gone for millennia. It's the remembered saga of the Exodus, the confrontation with Pharaoh, the liberation of a people from slavery, the giving of a divine law to a newly-constituted people, that is the decisive beginning of a story that's still being lived out today. Carping about the lack of archaeological or written evidence of the migration of the Children of Israel certainly misses the religious point and pretty much obscures the secular point as well. Like the destruction of Troy, like the founding of Rome, like the defeat of Persia by the cities of Greece--these are the beginnings of great things that have made us who we are.

    Livy begins his history of Rome admitting that far antiquity begins in poetry and the daily interaction of gods and men, already for some an unsatisfactory state of affairs for a prose narration. And for those today who demand strict "historicity," the full rigor of German 19th century standards, that's fine. But whether "historical" or not, I increasingly find that the legend engages me far more than the fully verified scraps.

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  2. Everything hinges on "proved" in that quote you provided. I don't disagree with you, but I don't disagree with the quote, either.

    I can view the Bible critically, a la 19th century German scholarship, and still appreciate its poetry. In fact, the former enhances the latter. Perhaps I am odd in this. But it's a fair critique to say the archeological matter assembled for this museum is not being presented as history any more than fragments of the cross would be, or the ossuary of Jesus from a few years ago (I have a post on that somewhere in the archives). If those were included, would it add to the confessional meaning of the Crucifixion story? Or would it detract from the value of what is there that is authentic, and how it is presented?

    Honestly, it takes about 10 seconds to look at a map of Egypt and say "Hey, wait a minute!", and wonder where this "Red Sea" ever was, and why it isn't there now. The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea persist; where did the "Red Sea" vanish to? Once that was pointed out to me in seminary, I wondered why I never wondered it before.

    OTOH, at least they don't have any pictures of Charlton Heston in a robe. I still remember the painting of Davy Crockett defending the Alamo in a way that never happened in history (or if it did, no one survived to describe it), where Crockett looked surprisingly like John Wayne. No accident, as it was a gift from Wayne after his Alamo movie was filmed. That film is historically a crock, and anyway they were fighting for the freedom to own slaves, not to escape Mexican tyranny. I still remember the Alamo, though, even if I cringe a bit at what it really stands for in Texas history. I don't miss the painting, either. The place is now much more a museum than the shrine the Daughters of the Republic of Texas kept it for so long.

    In a day when museums more and more reflect the rigors of scholarship, and less and less places where the muse might visit, it's not entirely a bad thing to lament a museum of the Bible which blurs the former expectation, and reaches for the latter only to evangelize a very narrow and, I think, reductionist view of Christianity (as well as the Bible, which is as much Jewish scripture as it is Christian).

    I wonder how many exhibits will be devoted to the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, for example; and all the healings and the teachings about the lilies of the field. Again, I'm odd, but I find those stirring, too; much more so than the story of Moses and the tablets, and the golden calf.

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  3. It all comes down, I suppose to what a "Museum of the Bible" is. Not a history museum. Not a natural history museum. Not an art museum or library. Not exactly a Church.

    But to pass any sort of judgment on it we kind of have to know what it is. Surely no one would be silly enough to react to a display of Michelangelo's "Moses" with "Don't those rubes know that there's no evidence of a historical Moses?"

    Funny you mentioned possible New Testament exhibits. I see (only from looking at Amazon) that John Meier has just published the fifth volume of his "Marginal Jew" series, a study of the historicity of the parables. Apparently he concludes that only four can be considered historically genuine, a judgment that makes the Jesus Seminar look downright gullible in comparison. No Good Samaritan. No Prodigal Son. No Sheep and Goats.

    I know, of course, from reading his first volume many years ago that Fr. Meier makes a nuanced distinction between "real" and "historical," which gets lost in the shuffle. What is not historical may be real, and vice versa. Still, the more I think about the course of historical criticism, the more I picture Goya's "Saturn devouring his children."

    Love that golden calf. And not even Roy Moore has spoiled the commandments.

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  4. I just wonder why Moore didn't want to post the Beatitudes. "Blessed are the poor" too much for him?

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  5. As for Fr. Meier's scholarship, every academic wants to establish his/her bona fides. I take it all with a grain of salt because, after all, every pursuit taken to its logical end comes to Saturn and his children.

    I think its Godelian, somehow.

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