Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Jefferson’

Not many Americans read The Australian, the leading national newspaper Down Under. It’s a shame – they’re going to miss Janet Albrechtsen’s excellent profile of the man who has been called America’s leading humanist, born in what may be Homer’s birthplace – Izmir, Turkey. Stanford’s Professor Robert Pogue Harrison, a leading Dante scholar (we’ve written about him lots on the Book Haven), has taught literature at Stanford for almost three decades. His books include The Dominion of The Dead, where he explores how the living maintain a connection with those we’ve buried, and Juvenescence, where he considers how we are growing younger culturally, losing a very necessary reciprocity with our past.

Albrechtson writes: “Harrison is not part of the splurge of political podcasts waging war with the left or the right. One of the original long-form podcasters, before the word was born, Harrison started recording his meandering interviews, called Entitled Opinions, in 2005 in what he calls the catacombs of Stanford University’s radio station KZSU. He chooses “catacomb” deliberately. This is where, as he tells his listeners, new religions are born, his being ‘the persecuted religion of thinking.’”

A couple excerpts from the article:

Dead voices are writ large in Harrison’s life and work. He is concerned that the genius of innovation and change, now at speeds not seen over the course of human history, is breaching our connection with the wisdom of the past. “Genius liberates the novelties of the future, (and) wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down,” he writes in Juvenescence.

Harrison is too cool to be a ­curmudgeon. He recognises that being young is positive. “It’s ­vibrant, it’s energetic, it’s creative,” he tells me.

“But if we forget our cultural age and pretend like we’re children, then it’s really dangerous. And when you lose your cultural memory and connection with the past and with the dead voices that speak from the deep past, then you also, I think, lose the sources of rejuvenation. You can either rejuvenate or you can juvenilise. I don’t know how we can go forward into the future viably without a solid kind of foundation in the past.”

Harrison draws on Dante to explain the dynamic synergy between genius and wisdom. “Dante in the Middle Ages is in a deeply Christian society, and he becomes the first person to write a Christian epic in the first person singular. That was very radical. That was very new. That opened up a whole new genre for the future. But he did not just invent it like Silicon Valley start-up companies say they are all about innovation. He found his way into the new possibilities of a Christian epic by the systematic study of Virgil, and with Virgil, the epic tradition that came from Greek and Roman sources,” he says.

He points to the same intellectual synergy between genius and wisdom when the Founding Fathers created a new nation. “Thomas Jefferson used to translate the Greek Bible into Latin and the Latin Bible into Greek when he was in high school. President Garfield, a century later, when he wanted to amuse his friends … he would take two pencils (one in each hand) and write Greek and Latin letters – sentences – at the same time.

“The framers of the American constitution … would go back and pour over the annals of the history of Rome and where Carthage went wrong. The whole new nation of America, the new republic, was thought up very deliberately by this constant persistent reference to antiquities and its models of the future.”

***

He laments that education, especially the humanities, is deliberately trouncing dead voices. And he is unsurprised that humanities degrees at Australian universities have been penalised by a fee hike by the government.

He blames a cynical crusade over the past few decades where the humanities have become “more of a deconstructive enterprise rather than a reconstructive one. If we, the teachers, are the first ones to put into the tribunal all of the white males that represent the tradition, and invariably, when you put them in the tribunal, almost all of them are going to be indicted and proclaimed guilty, then it’s not unusual that governments should say, ‘Why should we fund a dead story?’”

What is a humanist? Obviously, Harrison is one. I’m not going to attempt a definition, but I will describe a characteristic. A humanist is someone who explores, explains, and inhabits literature, or philosophy, or history, or any of the other explorations are the essence civilization and human endeavor. They do this not (or at least not only) self-interested motives – a degree, a tenured appointment, a prize, or prestige as a PBS commentator – but because it is the world they inhabit, one that they wish to carry into the future by offering at least a single perishable link in an unbroken chain – not only for humanity’s sake, but also because it is their own lifeblood.

Read the whole thing here, if you can evade the paywall.

My friend Jane Leftwich Curry organized an evening at Santa Clara University, where she is a professor of political science, to honor the playwright, dissident, and first president of the Czech Republic (and last president of Czechoslovakia), Václav Havel, who died in December.

The Wednesday event served as my introduction to Havel’s plays as well as to the university itself – despite its proximity, I had never seen SCU, which has the old Santa Clara Mission at its heart.

During the evening, a few of the university’s alumni performed staged readings from 1965’s The Memorandum and the much later 2007 Leaving.

The first was distinctly edgier – at least in the excerpted version.  A deputy manager introduces a new “official” made-up language in the office, “Ptydepe.”  Of course it’s all part of a bureaucratic coup d’état, and the managing director finds himself being edged out.  In the second, a chancellor is leaving office – but does he have to leave the state villa, which has been his extended family’s home for years?  The play was made into a movie in 2010, marking Havel’s debut as a director.

“We, here in Silicon Valley, do not live in an authoritarian society,” said Janey, who is author of six books on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe. “But we have much to learn from this man who had spent his years as a dissident and a writer and overnight took over as president not because he wanted power but because, as he said, ‘You cannot spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have a chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.'”

She gave a few examples of his ingenuity from his life as a dissident:

“He was creative not only in outsmarting the police when he could but also in living his life well in spite of all the pressures on him. There are thousands of stories of this … one that comes to mind here in this setting, is that, when he was in prison with the Archbishop of Prague, he organized chess tournaments – not, as the archbishop said at his state funeral, because Havel really liked chess, but because it provided a cover for Archbishop Duka to say mass under the ruse that the prisoners were just playing chess.

Author Curry

“Havel also laughingly told a s story of skiing up the high Tatra mountains – a struggle as he was both a heavy smoker and a non-athlete. He did it so he could meet at the top, on the border, with Polish dissidents like Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik – neither of whom were any better skiers or athletes than he was and both of whom could match him as smokers. They came to share ideas and enjoy each other in the only place they could, a ski hut smack on the border of their two nations at the top of the Tatra mountains.”  It was a good gamble – “the Czech and Polish secret police were too lazy to ski up the mountains to catch dissidents.”

When he was sworn in as president to replace the man who had imprisoned him, some asked what he would say to departing president Gustáv Husák at the cocktail party that followed the ceremony.  “He thought about it and said he supposed they could talk about prison conditions as they had both served time in the same prison – Husak during World War II for being a communist, and he, under communism, for being a dissident. And so they did.”

The incident also illustrated a big theme in Havel’s life and leadership: inclusion, even extending to those who had harmed him.  “He assumed good and humanity in everyone, even though most Czechs and Slovaks kept silent rather than lose their peaceful lives.”

After the fall of communism, when questions arose about the controversial policies of  “lustration,” a government process to reintegrate former Communist into post-communist public life, “he reminded the nation that each and every one of them, himself included, had been part of making the communist system work. That the fault was shared by all and that each person had to account to himself for what he had done or not done. For Havel, then, the ultimate power was the power of the powerless.”

Steven Boyd Saum, editor of Santa Clara Magazine, also spoke – Saum is also attaché to the Honorary Consul General of the Czech Republic in San Francisco/Silicon Valley.

Saum hailed Havel as a man of “compassion and conscience.” He was “a bourgeois child” who, when denied a higher education under communism, became a lab assistant, a soldier, and a stagehand.  “Havel, the man, was a hero.” Arthur Miller called him “the first surrealist president.”

Saum compared him to Thomas Jefferson, in his understanding that loyalties work best when they are to neighbors and communities, rather than monolithic states.

Change occurred so fast in Czechoslovokia that dissidents like Havel quickly found themselves catapulted to power. The skills of a dissident didn’t always translate into the skills of a politician.  Havel believed firmly that when you change the system, people will change. He had respect even for the people who had betrayed him and his colleagues, or who had been silent during their persecution – “he stuck up for them.”

His first biographer Eda Kriseova wrote rather a hagiography. “The world needs heroes,” she said. “I am giving you one.”

(Another biographer, John Keane, author of Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts, answers questions here.)

Before I attended the Workcenter’s I Am America the other night, I stopped by Cubberley Auditorium, where Robert Harrison was speaking about the communication between the living and the dead.  How could one resist such an intriguing topic?

T.S. Eliot said that “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” But the program was tamer: “the most ancient vocation of poetry – whether lyric or epic – is to keep open the channels of communication between the past and the present.”

Alas, because of the 8 p.m. curtain on the other side of campus, I didn’t get much farther than Rush Rehm‘s introduction (he called Robert “the most valuable humanist at the university”) before I had to dash.  But Robert kindly left me an intriguing scrap of what he’d said, inspired by Plato‘s Timaeus.

It begins with Critias telling Socrates an “old world story” that he had heard from his grandfather, who was over 90. The grandfather had heard it from his father, who had heard it from Solon the sage, who had heard it from an old priest during his visit to the Egyptian city of Sais.

“Athens, he declares, is even more ancient in its founding than the city of Sais, but the Greeks have no memory of its origins, due to the annihilations of its former civilizations.  These annihilations, brought on by periodic ‘declinations’ of the heavenly bodies, unleash ‘a great conflagration of things upon the earth.’ It was one of these conflagrations that destroyed Atlantis, an ancient civilization of which Solon’s Greek’s have no memory, even though it was their forefathers who thwarted the transoceanic Atlantean conquest of Europe.”

The old man concluded: “and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.”

Then Harrison continued:  “Today we have the privilege of seeing this volcanic process at work up close, in technicolor, as it were, as the entire Christian-humanist civilization that slowly consolidated itself in the wake of Rome’s collapse unravels before our eyes.  It was said of President James Garfield that in moments of boredom or to amuse his friends he would take a pencil in each hand and compose sentences in Greek and Latin at the same time.

“If one considers that, as a student, Thomas Jefferson used to translate the Greek Bible into Latin, and vice versa, one realizes to what extent the ‘heavenly declinations’ have unleashed their fury upon the American presidency.

“It was not so long ago that a university professor in the classroom would typically leave Greek and Latin quotes untranslated. Then he began to provide a translation for the Greek but not for the Latin. Nowadays he must tell his students that there was once such a thing as the Greek and Latin tongues, that there was once a place called Athens, and so forth. Shortly the professor won’t know even that much. Oh he’ll know it, in a way, but he will not know what to make of it, and when you don’t know what to make of something you eventually forget about it.”