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René Marie: a voice of independence

if you’re looking for something to add to your July 4th playlist, I have a recommendation at The Objective Standard: the marvelous, and sometimes controversial, music of René Marie. 

The Pharisaism of the Maryland cross case

Jesus’s attacks on the Pharisees were rooted in his belief that the Pharisees elevated the letter of the law over its spirit. They were concerned more with formal correctness than with spiritual justification. The Pharisees were hypocrites, said Jesus, because they taught about God but did not love God; they were blind because they cared more about the gold than the sanctuary. They cleaned the outside of the cup, and ignored its contents. They built and decorated the tombs of the righteous, and considered their religious duties to have been satisfied by such dull, secularized, rote actions. They cared about being seen in the marketplace, and about being seen as religious, but downplayed the religious significance of such matters in their hearts, for pragmatic, secular reasons.

We see this exact same attitude at work today in the conservative argument for maintaining religious symbols at the taxpayer’s expense. Justice Alito’s decision in the Maryland cross case today is a prime example. Consider the reasoning he adopts: yes, he says, the cross is a Christian symbol. But that’s not really all that important. What’s really important is its secular, worldly significance. “For believing Jews and Christians, the Ten Commandments are the word of God…but…[t]hey have historical significance as one of the foundations of our legal system, and for largely that reason, they are depicted in the marble frieze in our courtroom and in other prominent public buildings.” That “but” is quite a powerful one. It stands for the proposition that the cross’s religious significance can be disregarded or treated as irrelevant by comparison to the historical, secular significance of the cross as a symbol of the past. It is not the living faith that matters, but the dead stone.

“Even if the original purpose of a monument was infused with religion, the passage of time may obscure that sentiment,” writes Alito. “As our society becomes more and more religiously diverse, a community may preserve such monuments, symbols, and practices for the sake of their historical significance or their place in a common cultural heritage.” And it is that very obscuring—the very fact that the religious significance of a memorial has faded away—that is the sole factor he considers relevant in upholding the legality of the Maryland cross. Let me emphasize this point: the very reason why the Court today says that the cross can remain in place is because its religious significance has been “obscure[d]” by “the passage of time.”

Whatever one thinks of this as a matter of legal reasoning (I do not think much of it), it is surely sinful. It is precisely the sort of tomb-decorating, pragmatic, dead secularism that Christ preached most emphatically against. The cross to a believing Christian is not a dead symbol, the significance of which has become “obscured.” And here’s the point: for a Christian to argue that it is—to contend in court that the cross can be regarded as a dead monument instead of a witness, instead of a call to a living faith—is sinful. Worst of all, to make that argument for secular reasons—i.e., in an effort to keep a piece of stone in place at the expense of the taxpayer and to do so at the very cost of its religious meaning—is a disgraceful betrayal of Christ’s message. It is precisely the sort of thing Peter did: to deny the living faith for purposes of secular advantage.

I remain amazed that professing Christians could endorse taking this approach in court. I would have thought that, sooner than deny the abiding significance of the cross as a vital witness—sooner than to claim that the cross’s religious significance has been obscured by the passage of time—sooner than to transform the cross from a symbol of Jesus’s sacrifice into a government-established token of a dead Pharisaical recitation of spiritless, secularized, politicized faith, any Christian lawyer would have severed his tongue from his mouth. Apparently, I was wrong. All their works they do for to be seen of men. They love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi. Or Counsel, or Your Honor.

"Prologue to the 2020 Book of Fate"

I have a little poem on The American Scholar's "Next Line, Please" blog, which David Lehman was kind enough to call "Auden-esque." The challenge was to write a nine-line stanza in monosyllables that's a prelude or a prologue to something that has not yet been written, and with some organizing principle (in this case, a monorhyme).

Look your name up in the back
and it has all of next year’s facts:
stocks and sports; all the stats;
wars and crimes—and all of that
is just the start. The second half
tells how your hopes play out in black
and white. Viewed in pre-/post- fact,
they do seem dull. No choice at last.
Buy it, though. It sells out fast.

John White Alexander

This week in The Objective Standard, I take a look at a cool new book about one of my favorite artists, the too-little known John White Alexander.

My new book has arrived

...well, it'll be available July 3, but the author's copies came.

Let me tell you a little about this one. I decided to write this when I was a senior in college. I discovered Bronowski in my sophomore year when I found a copy of the book version of his 1973 documentary series, The Ascent of Man on my grandparents' bookshelf. A year later I got to see the miniseries (then only available in rare VHS copies) and in my senior year, I decided to write a biography of Bronowski. It had never been done before. I, of course, had no idea how to write a biography or a book of any sort. But I started heading to libraries to look stuff up, and reaching out to people who had known Bronowski. I got to meet Bronowski's widow, Rita, at their La Jolla home where the last episode of The Ascent of Man was filmed. (She even gave me a copy of Bronowski's hard to find book Nature and Knowledge.) The photo I took of her during that visit is in the final book.

I also got to meet Francis Crick. He bought me lunch, for goodness sake, and on the way back to his office (which had been Bronowski's) even told me about the then-newly discovered eyeless gene. Truly an experience I'll never forget.

Years came and passed, and there were many other things to do, including law school, writing my first book, getting married... and in all that time, I would now and then tinker away on this project. Particularly helpful were the librarians at many institutions who were kind enough to make me copies of archival materials and send them to me. Jennifer Toews at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, where Bronowski's papers were then kept (they're now at Jesus College, Cambridge) was particularly helpful. In 2009, and again in 2010, I got to have nice conversations with Lisa Jardine, Bronowski's daughter, whom (I can hardly believe it) I was able to help with her Tanner Lectures on Human Values and in a small way on her film, My Father, The Bomb, and Me. 

The fact that Bronowski's life had never been written before presented an immense challenge, in that I didn't even have a timeline to follow. Writing a biography of Frederick Douglass is simple, by comparison, because he wrote so much about himself and it's relatively easy to find out what he did when (although there are still some intriguing blank spots there). At long last, I found that new research sources weren't turning up anything new. Whenever I'd find something I didn't already have, it basically just reinforced something I already knew. Of course, a person could spend a lifetime writing a biography, since a biography takes up the whole space of a life--so I finally decided to knock off the research, finish the manuscript, publish and be damned. I know, oh, I know all too well!, how many stones I've left unturned. But you have to make the call as to how many more stone-turnings the audience can be expected to put up with. I wasn't prepared to attempt something on the scale of Dumas Malone or Robert Caro, and certainly readers weren't! I had to go at last with Bronowski as I saw and appreciated him--and particularly to keep in mind that my book is primarily about his ideas. Finding out, for example, precisely when he met Leo Szilard (which I still don't know) was less important to the story I wanted to tell than, say, the relationship between his prize-winning play The Face of Violence and the poetry of William Blake. 

That was another challenge: I could not expect most readers to know practically anything about Bronowski. Most biographies either tell you who the person was or delve into the significance of his or her ideas. I would have to do both--and I hope I have balanced the two in a thorough but non-boring way. Structuring the tale would present a real challenge. In this regard, I'm indebted (among many, many others) to Robert and Mary Bagg, whose book Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur is a prime specimen of the style I was aiming at. I read their book late in the preparation of the mansucript, but it helped immensely during the editing process to aim in the direction I wanted to go.

The experience has given me a whole new respect for writers such as, say, Peter Ackroyd, who turn out volume after volume of solidly researched, superbly written, reliable and interesting new material, which is both sound scholarship and compelling narrative. But at the same time it has made me immensely more skeptical of biographies. Having seen from this side just how much inference and detective work goes into telling a life story, and how easy it would be to get the wrong impression, I have come over the years to read biographies (my favorite genre) with a lot more skepticism than before. I will admit, for example, that I have no idea what Bronowski did during his trip to India in 1967, during which he advised the Indian government on its education policies. But as I said, I had to draw the line somewhere. Fortunately others, particularly Stephen Moss, are still working on their own projects on Bronowski's life. I can't wait to see what they find.

The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski was a labor of love. I hope very much that readers enjoy learning more about this fascinating man. He knew everyone, or was involved in everything, interesting in the 20th century--from the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Samuel Beckett (all of whom he knew; Bronowski's book European Caravan was Beckett's first appearance in a book), to the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which he witnessed first-hand as the head of the mission sent to assess the A-bomb's effects) to the poetry of William Blake (the understanding of which Bronowski revolutionized) to the founding of the Salk Institute (he was one of the first to join), Jacob Bronowski's life and ideas sound a fascinating range of subjects. I'm delighted that after all this time, I'm finally able to introduce him to you.

Update: Oh, I should mention: I've set up a separate Twitter account, @DrBronowski, where I'll be tweeting some interesting additional tidbits. Please follow!

Jerry Goldsmith’s Voice of Idealism

In my latest piece for The Objective Standard, I look at the beautiful music of Jerry Goldsmith, my favorite film composer.

The American Interest reviews my Douglass biography

In The American Interest, Allis Radosh reviews my biography of Frederick Douglass, along with David Blight's and D.H. Dilbeck's.