Friday roundup

 A good book review, in my estimation, is one that holds up on its own as a great essay and also makes me want to read the book in question. Juliana Geran Pilon has succeeded on both counts with "Athens and Jerusalem Revisited" at Law & Liberty.  It's a review of Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai by Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein and Gil Student. They re-examine the ground plowed by Leo Strauss regarding how philosophy (symbolized by Athens) and faith (symbolized by Jerusalem are the two indispensable pillars of the Western outlook:

Modernity is supposed to have elevated reason at the expense of faith; if so, the results are dismal. University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss explained that Jerusalem and Athens—the former rooted in faith, the latter in reason—constitute the twin legacies of our moral civilization. But fully grasping their inseparability takes “going beyond the self-understanding of either,” and asking: “is there a notion, a word that points to the highest that both the Bible and the greatest works of the Greeks claim to convey?” Strauss was convinced that “[t]here is such a word: wisdom. Not only the Greek philosophers but the Greek poets as well were considered to be wise men, and the Torah [first five books of the Bible] is said, in the Torah, to be ‘your wisdom in the eyes of the nations.’”

Conceding that faith could not be scientifically proved, as Baruch Spinoza had contended (1632-1677), Strauss nonetheless rejected the rationalist Jewish thinker’s bold claim to have repudiated the Orthodox belief in God as Creator. In the preface to his celebrated 1930 book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, he argued that Spinoza would have had to provide rational “proof that the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.” Without such proof, one “cannot legitimately deny the possibility of revelation.” If knowledge requires reason, revelation can at least justify belief.

It wasn’t much. But it proved sufficient for one University of Chicago philosophy student, Jeffrey Bloom, for whom Strauss “’broke the spell’ of secularism, giving my inner skeptic permission to take the claims of Orthodox Judaism seriously.” He thus decided to reach out to Orthodox Jews to learn how they explained faith to themselves, with help from Jewish scholars Gil Student and Alec Goldstein. The three became co-editors of a remarkable collection of intellectually stimulating, often quite personal, attempts to convey the basis of their own spiritual beliefs. Titled Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai, it is bound to help others, both Jews and non-Jews, in their search for higher meaning in a cynical world.

I like this point of Bloom's and the artful way he makes it:

Dismissing ubiquitous calls for “moral revival” as little more than “paper airplanes launched at the advance of secularism,” Bloom charges that “there is little thinking in the public square about how one could actually move from a secular outlook to a religious one.”

Anesthesiologist Ronald W. Dworkin has a piece at Hedgehog Review entitled "Medical Humanities and the Specialist," in which he argues for doctors' need to immerse themselves in art:

All novelists try to get closer to truth, and they do somehow, but perspective matters, and no one perspective accomplishes everything. It is the same for doctors. Relying solely on the machine perspective would have caused me to miss my patient’s diagnosis of early sepsis. At other times, however, the machine perspective is the correct one. Reading literature has helped to keep my mind nimble and my eyes always to be shifting their angle of view.

Reading literature also reminds doctors to keep their scientific systems of thought at bay. Many medical specialists are tempted to dwell in the world of pure thought, accompanied by their formulas and abstract classification systems. I myself have daydreamed of giving anesthesia remotely from a Caribbean island, applying my algorithms and equations, turning my precise dials and squeezing my syringes, while my patients lie somewhere in the universe, reacting ideally, as science and engineering predict they will, every time. But I know I would injure my patients if I gave anesthesia in this way, and for the same reason that a politician who consults only magazines, statistics, and committees makes lots of mistakes. The medical specialist, like the politician, must remain in constant contact with the living world to achieve anything.

Oliver Traldi, writing at American Compass, gives us three criteria for determining whether to listen to an expert:

The public will never be able to assess the validity of expertise on a case-by-case basis. Trying yields widely varied conclusions and thus eliminates any common starting point from which to conduct public debates—roughly the situation today. Assessing apparent expertise requires knowledge of a field’s inner workings, something almost no one has the time or inclination to learn. From the outside, it is difficult to infer what dogmas might contaminate a discipline’s standard training or what pressures might distort processes of hiring, promotion, and socialization. However, some general heuristics and defaults might provide a basis for at least some agreement.

First, a simple conflict-of-interest standard would make sense. Look at what people gain from giving their views, and from whom they gain it. Someone who stands to gain more personally from one view than from another should not be entitled to deference when offering the former. That does not mean the view is wrong, only that it must be defended on its merits rather than based on the identity of the speaker. A supporter of Joe Biden who declares that an embarrassing trove of Hunter Biden emails is fake may very well be correct and is entitled to make the case, but his listeners are similarly entitled to doubt his cogency or his sincerity. A supporter of Joe Biden who studies poisonous spiders for a living should be deferred to when he warns that the spider on your arm is poisonous.

Second, political stances should be inherently suspect. Experts can offer knowledge useful in evaluating the values-laden tradeoffs of politics and public policy, but that expertise does not make their judgment superior to that of any other citizen, and certainly not the democratic determination of a large group of citizens. This is not to say that no one can be a moral expert, only that technical expertise is not moral expertise. Plenty of people defer to religious leaders, community leaders, and even political leaders when it comes to questions of what to value and how to act. But in doing so, we should be aware that our moral experts will not be our neighbor’s. Identification of moral experts often depends on prior moral and political convictions, and disagreement on who the experts are will tend to mirror disagreement about the underlying issues.

Third, we should be far more skeptical of claims of knowledge-that expertise than of knowledge-how. In the latter case, people’s claims of expertise can be substantiated by their ability to deliver objective results. The surgeon with a track record of successful surgeries is easily distinguishable from the charlatan with none. Knowledge-that experts, by contrast, are laying claim to the truth. Sometimes they have it, and are guiding us as reliably as a pilot. Other times they are simply taking us for a ride.

As a historian, one of my favorite times and places  to learn more about is 1660s London. At Ordinary Times, L.D Burnett makes that the subject of an essay, focusing particularly on John Dryden:

. . . Dryden almost singlehandedly invented criticism—both literary criticism and cultural criticism—as both a genre and a paying job. 

Dryden’s works—his poetry, his plays, and his reflections on them—made the case and argued the case for the writer as cultural critic, responsibly and deftly wielding his pen to tell his age the truth about itself. “Using the epic past and his own poetic imagination to illuminate present realities was Dryden’s special gift,” Winn writes. “It sets him apart not only from the smoothly empty Waler and the pungently specific Marvell of the ‘Painter’ poems, but from the greatest poet of his century as well”—that is, unquestionably, Milton (177). 

While Milton made “glancing references” to recent inventions and current events here and there in Paradise Lost, “Milton’s choice of an epic mode deliberately limits such direct commentary on his own times.” Dryden, by contrast, preferred a “heroic” to an “epic” mode of poetry, “In Annus Mirabilis,” Dryden’s stirring poem about the disastrous year of plague, war, and fire, “he teaches us how to see the events of 1666 as both ‘Epick’ and ‘Historical’; his poem is both effective propaganda for the court and a moving vision of human suffering and triumph.” (177-178)

Throughout his career, Dryden straddled the shifting line between poet and pamphleteer, between aesthete and activist. Writing in conversation with his moment, rather than in an attempt to escape it, invigorated Dryden’s work, as did writing in conflict with other playwrights and poets whose different political commitments showed up in and showed through their own aesthetic choices.

Burnett discusses the fact that Restoration England was a time and place of lots of sexual mischief and interpersonal intrigue, not only in the theater and literature realms, but most of public life. During the pandemic, I reread The Diary of Samuel Pepys, which is basically a chronicle of 1660s London. His depictions of the plague and fire are cinematic in style. He also writes of going out on the town - dinner and a play - and seeing women he happened to know to be mistresses of Charles II. As I say, quite a juicy period.

At the American Enterprise Institute website, Sarah Lawrence professor Samuel J. Abrams warns that intolerance - ironically among those hustling "diversity" - continues to metastasize. 

Kat Rosenfield makes a similar point in her essay "The Paranoia Driving Office Politics" at UnHerd: 

A slip of the tongue? Ha! The only thing that slipped was the mask you’re wearing. That sound could only come out of your mouth if that word, in all its hateful and hideous glory, was already in your head.

Perhaps this is the natural outgrowth of a culture in which art and politics and opinions are increasingly seen as indistinguishable from one’s essential self. Matters of taste, or personality, now get swept up under the banner of capital-I-identity; you don’t just laugh at the sexist joke, you are the sexist joke. Even the silliest iterations of this phenomenon, like the obsession of certain young people with niche sexual and gender identities demarcated by bespoke pronouns and colourful flags, speak to a broader cultural impulse to make sense of things — and of other people — by slapping labels on them. Meanwhile, the idea that a person might contain self-contradictory multitudes, or that his taste in comedy, art, cuisine or decor says very little (if anything) about his character, cannot be borne in our present environment. The inscrutable nature of other people’s hearts is not an enticing mystery, but a source of horror: they could be hiding anything in there. The problem with this, of course, is not just that too many good people are saddled with permanent reputations for badness as a result of something as silly as a tweet, but that the cheapening of “badness” as a concept makes the perpetrators of actual evil much harder to identify.

There’s a paradox here: that in a moment where social media gives us unprecedented access to other people’s thoughts, we have become consumed by fear of all the things they might be thinking but not expressing. There’s a pervasive sense, perhaps owing to the inherent performativity of the medium, that signs of virtue cannot be trusted, but hints of vice should be treated with deadly seriousness, investigated, and prosecuted where possible. In the age of oversharing, it is the things we supposedly do not mean to reveal that are the most revealing.

And then there is my recent piece at Precipice entitled "Is Our Headlong Plunge Into Uncharted Territory Really Something To Celebrate?" The subtitle is "There Is Indeed A Basic Architecture To The Universe, And We're Flouting It."