How to live. What to do.

Posted by Josh Friedlander | 2 Comments

	Maybe he was one of my favorite professors because he looks like the Platonic form of a professor, but I think it was his grumpy ideals (or that he once let me hand in a paper late).

Borrowed from Wallace Stevens, that was my former English Professor John Gordon’s title to a medium-length speech he gave recently to entering freshman at my alma mater.

Gordon was one of my favorite professors, particularly because he encouraged students to write the way they spoke. He really despises turgid academic writing and he was a valiant champion against the bullshit re-evaluations that are taught in comparative literature. As an expert on James Joyce, I imagine he felt literature was already difficult enough to comprehend and explain without one having to add a patina of scholarship to one’s work by writing papers on Lacanian analysis or discussing a work’s possible lesbian tropes. (Though, to be fair, I’m not sure he ever explicitly condemned that type of analysis, but it is the impression I got.)

In his speech, Gordon gives some useful advice, but it’s his historical section that I thought was worth reprinting. Basically, he notes (a la cultural/historical relativism), that just because we don’t burn witches, that doesn’t mean we’ve actually advanced as a species (as a civilization?). He notes that rather than trying not to repeat history, perhaps we should try not to overcorrect.

In his words:

A hundred years ago, many people at places like this believed in social Darwinism, eugenics and communication with the dead facilitated by the rapid movement of furniture. Two hundred years ago, it was bleeding and phrenology, the hot new science of measuring personality by head size and shape. About 300 years ago, they were burning witches for agricultural mishaps that probably resulted from the Little Ice Age around that time. Four hundred years ago, they were burning more witches for different reasons, along with heretics of all sorts, and the big new political idea of the day was the divine right of kings. And so on.

Now, one way of seeing this succession of follies is what used to be called the Whiggish way, to congratulate ourselves on having been born into the first period of history to be free of all such superstitious. Thank Providence for having made us so much smarter than everyone who came before. And think how much better still things are bound to get. In 1830, The Whig historian Thomas Macaulay wrote an essay describing how much better things had gotten in the last hundred years, and how they were likely to improve in the next hundred years, by 1930. He was partly right — anesthesia and airplanes had come into existence. But, the fact remained that in 1930 the world was in global economic depression. Stalin ran the Soviet Union. Japan had become a militarist state. In America prohibition was law and lynching was commonplace. China was in chaos. The wave of the future, it seemed to many, was the fascism being promoted by Mussolini and that fascinating young up-and-comer Adolf Hitler, and the world in general was dutifully trudging in mid-transit from the second worst war in history to the worst war in history. Nineteen-thirty was not a good year. All in all, 1830 was probably better.

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