Treason of the Intellectuals

 

A few days ago Ross Douthat, one of the regular columnists for the New York Times, published an essay entitled “The Academic Apocalypse: The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith."  I think that Douthat, who holds somewhat conservative political views and is a practicing Roman Catholic, is meant to offer a countervailing voice on an editorial page dominated by writers of a leftward drift.  Though I often agree with his ideas, my personal liking for him--not that we have ever met--is based in his intelligence and the courtesy and civility with which he and colleagues with very different points of view conduct themselves in the NYT podcast "The Argument."

 

Douthat’s column is a kind of review of, or response to, an anthology of essays published in the Chronicle  of Higher Education under the somber general title “Endgame”—as in the end of the line for literary study.  I have not yet read these essays.  I will, I suppose, though I probably don’t need to.  It is likely that  I could have written them myself, all of them, with all their differing perspectives; for one version or another of the central arguments, debates, laments, complaints or boasts they advance has been current during every stage of my career as a professor of literature.

            When I first joined the Princeton faculty in 1965, there was a bunch of emeriti geezers who used to sit around the coffee lounge of a morning in endless conversation about one of two cognate topics: how the Department was going to hell in a handbasket, and how much better it had been in the good old days.  I thought this was really pathetic, though I prudently held my peace, at least awaiting a tenure decision.  Then forty years passed, and something odd happened.  I noted that the Department had gone to hell in a handbasket, and that things had been different and a lot better in the good old days.

            The “endgame” analysis of literary study is not new, and my forty years of teaching were approximately the forty talked about in William Chace’s much noted essay entitled “The Decline of the English Department” published in The American Scholar, the magazine

of Phi Beta Kappa, in 2009.  Chace is a former English professor (modernism, Irish writers, that sort of thing) and the former president of three of our most prestigious colleges and universities.  Once he had no further aspirations along those lines, perhaps, he started writing a series of things in the genre of “At Last the Truth Can be Told.”  In this episode he began by noting “a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study”.  Heading toward the bottom line, there has been a marked decrease in the popularity of all humanities majors, but particularly I would have to say of the English major.  Forty years earlier about eight percent of all American undergraduates were majoring in English.  In 2003/2004 it was less than four percent.  Those are real statistics, but anecdote might be even better.  I was aware that in the year I retired (2006) there were just about half the number of English majors at Princeton as when I was chairman of the department back in the ‘Eighties.

            Douthat singles out for special praise an essay by Simon During, an Australian scholar of great ability who sees “the decline of the humanities as a new form of secularization, an echo of past crises of established Christian faith.”  Even without having read the essay, any Christian scholar would recognize the truth of the thesis.  While literary study cannot stand alone as the paradigm of the humanities, it does play an outsized role in the academy.  What are the “humanities?”   The word derives from the Latin phrase litterae humaniores, the more “human” or secular branches of writing as opposed to sacred texts, the stuff of “divinity” or theological study.  The introduction of humanistic study into the universities, which began as a supplement to “divinity”, soon enough went on to create a powerful alternative, even if its literary canon had a cutoff date of roughly the year 65 of the common era.  Furthermore there was in the cultural prestige of the litterae humaniores and the solemnity with which they were transmitted good reason to regard academic humanists as members of an hieratic class, and consequently to recognize that it may not be that Macbeth has suddenly become repellent but the way it is being taught or not taught by a secular clerisy that no longer “believes”.

In his decade-old essay Mr. Chace was aware of complex causality, but no less so of root causes: especially a want of professorial passion.    “At the root,” he wrote, “is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.”  Now this explanation was so right on, as we used to say back in ‘sixty-eight, that it immediately generated denial, indignation, and charges of bad faith from various eminences in the Modern Language Association.  The last thing the VP for Sales wants to hear is that his company is selling something that the “consumer base” doesn’t want to buy. 

But the term passion, which plays so prominent a role in Christian theological language, is deeply ambivalent.  It  may mean among other things an animating enthusiasm on the one hand or a blinding fanaticism on the other.   In 1927 the once celebrated French writer Julien Benda published a book entitled La trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) in which he indicted the intellectuals for their “treason”—not against the nation state but against European civilization—in having with their political passions encouraged the disaster of the Great War.  A wonderful scene in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) suggests that the chauvinism of cultural arbiters did more along those lines than an archducal assassination.

            The word clerc, still pronounced in England like the common surname, Clark,  is related to our words cleric and clergy, originally denoting someone with the learning uniquely characteristic of a churchman, a learning grounded in “moral virtue,” as Chaucer puts it.  He said that of the Clerk of Oxenford—he who would gladly learn and gladly teach, as a matter of fact.  Chaucer’s Good Parson, too, was “a learned man, a clerk”.

                       

            In what, precisely, did the treason of the clercs consist?  In a chapter called “The Great Betrayal” Benda actually produced a three-part enumerated indictment:  1. The clercs have adopted political passions.  2.  They bring their political passions into their activities as clercs.  3.  The clercs have played the game of political passions by their doctrines.  This third head had a particularizing subdivision:  (a) the clercs praise attachment to the particular and denounce the feeling of the universal, and (b) the clercs praise attachment to the practical, and denounce love of the spiritual.  The Treason of the Intellectuals made quite a splash back in the day, and it is still worth a read.  There was some lively debate as to whether its inspiration was from the left or from the right, but most people could see that it was an indictment of, or perhaps only a lament for, a debilitating crisis of faith.

Son ou Lumière

This essay will be about abused cats and singing rainbows.  If you have a low tolerance for astonishing coherence of this sort, I suggest you stop reading and turn to the op-ed page of your morning paper.  A current Netflix sensation is a series entitled “Don’t **** with Cats” in which my asterisks of course stand for the universal obscenity ubiquitous in the speech of the verbally challenged, and now used indiscriminately in more or less meaningless nominal, verbal, adjectival, prepositional, and interjectional forms quite without reference to pleasurable conjunction of any sort.   Well a while ago a psychopath mounted on the Internet a video of his demented act of asphyxiating two adorable kittens.  This barbarism outraged a vast legion of cat-lovers, which as it turns out is really the group with which you should not ****, since two of its more obsessive and cyber-fluent members spent a couple of years on-line tracking down the culprit, one Luka Magnotta, a youthful and very weird Canadian narcissist who had later escalated from kittens to college students, one of whom he murdered and dismembered, also on videotape.  Luka is now and permanently in prison in Quebec. 

“As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,” says Gloucester in King Lear.  “They kill us for their sport.”  Experts in abnormal psychology have noted that boys who torment animals not infrequently later exhibit other serious pathologies, including homicidal violence against fellow human beings.  But felines have always been in a special category as victims of allegorical slaughter.  I refer you to the well-known work of my friend Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History.  With this book we get somewhat closer to today’s actual subject—the ocular harpsichord of the Abbé Louis-Bertrand Castel—but only somewhat and only after briefly considering its theoretical antecedent, the cat-piano.  The cat-piano was supposed to work in the following way.  A number of differently voiced cats, carefully selected by a process of caterwaul-auditions, were to be affixed to boxes within a clavier-like instrument.  Instead of initiating the sound of vibrations from tuned strings, the action of the pianist, or rather painist, caused sharpened hammers to jab the cats, whose induced screeches of agony would paradoxically rise in a feline harmony of beautiful meowsic.  We must remember that through the eighteenth century the torture of small animals seems to have been widely regarded as an acceptable amusement, though we have good reason to hope that the cat-piano never got off the drafting board.

the (imaginary) cat-piano

The grotesque (or perhaps satiric?) idea of the cat-piano may well have derived from some of the acoustical speculations of the Jesuit genius Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), who in 1650 had published his amazing book, Musurgia universalis, a title I translate freely as “Everything Anybody Could Possibly Ever Know About Music”.  Two generations later this book made a big impact on another erudite Jesuit, the French mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688-1757).  From both the aesthetic and the scientific points of views many Enlightenment thinkers were concerned with the relationships among the human senses.  Diderot writes a letter about the blind, and another about deaf-mutes.  Rousseau invents a crackpot musical scale.  Other great minds try to squeeze out every drop of juice in the analogy between poetry and painting found in a line of Horace’s Ars poetica.  Here I can suggest another terrific book by another friend—Lawrence Lipking’s The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England.

Father Castel became fascinated with the relationships between vision and audition, seeing and hearing.  He became seized of the idea of inventing a musical instrument that would produce patterns of color rather than patterns of sound.  Castel was brilliant, bull-headed, and highly argumentative.  Voltaire called him “the Don Quixote of mathematicians” because of his propensity for picking arguments with great scientists of his age, especially Sir Isaac Newton.  Newton had done important work on the refraction of light, including identifying the “seven primary colors” as still conventionally catalogued.  Furthermore Newton had already proposed an analogy between the seven colors and the seven musical notes of the expanded scale of Guido d’Arezzo.

 

Sir Isaac Newton's correlation of the primary colors and the musical scale

Castel was still half-medieval in his essentially mystical view of the nature of physical reality.   His mind still danced to the mundana musica, the silent “music of the spheres”, as had the minds of Boethius and Dante.  That music should be studied primarily as a branch of mathematics seemed obvious to him.  He was a noisy anti-Newtonian on important topics of physics, retaining his commitment to René Descartes and his followers, but he enthusiastically embraced the idea of a “music” that would be visual rather than sonic, and in 1725 he published his ideas on the subject and set out to construct a clavecin oculaire, or harpsichord of color.  He had encouragement not merely from various theoretical physicists and mathematicians but also from his friend, the celebrated musician Jean-Philippe Rameau.

There are many references to the clavecin oculaire  or color harpsichord in eighteenth-century scientific literature, but it still remains shrouded in mystery.  Presumably the percussive action initiated by the keys, instead of being directed at taut wires or captive cats, would cause bands of colored material to rise and fall before the audience in richly orchestrated chromatic harmonies.  Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.  The documentary evidence as to whether this musical machine was in fact ever achieved, or whether any actual persons actually saw it perform, is ambiguous and contradictory.  Newton’s ideas were not widely accepted among French intellectuals in 1725.  Voltaire was one of the people who changed that.  In 1737 he published a kind of Newton for Dummies entitled “Elements of the Philosophy of Newton”.  By the time he published a second and expanded edition in 1748 the tide had turned.  The Cartesian loyalties of people like Father Castel were becoming old-fashioned, even quaint.  But in that 1748 edition, in a new chapter on Newton’s optics, Voltaire gave a plug to the clavecin oculaire.  That was a generous gesture from a man who hated Jesuits almost as much as they hated him.  I think Newton himself would have done the same.  I mean, it really is a great idea.

 Rimington's instrument and chromatic score

There have been various attempts to revive Father Castel’s idea, even without his deep ideological investments in it.  A minor British painter of the early twentieth century, Alexander Wallace Rimington, created a “color organ.”  He patented it in 1893, and performed on it before a large audience (viewership?) in 1895.  But by then many important questions about the transmission of light and sound had reached at least general scientific consensus.  With no semi-mystical revelations weighing in the balance and with the battle of the Newtonians and the Cartesians already but a distant memory, Rimington’s device was but a passing novelty, a flash in the pan, or perhaps a blur on the sounding board.

Anglo-Saxon

Anglo-Saxon King Rex in full regalia (Order of the Bathrobe) with his two sons Ed and Ward

A former student who studied Old English with me forty years ago or more has written me to ask “What’s with this war on the Anglo-Saxons?”  You may not know what he is talking about, but I do.  The term “Anglo-Saxon” has been declared politically offensive, as it supposedly offers aid and comfort to white supremacists.  Vigilant academics have resigned from obscure scholarly organizations with names including “Anglo-Saxon”; and the societies themselves are encouraged to change names.  Believe me, I hesitate to write about topics of political correctness.  In general, my idea of fun does not run to fruitless arguments with humorless adversaries.   Such arguments generate much heat and little light.  This is a risky topic, and I do not claim any special insight into it, but as it primarily manifests itself in linguistic terms, it does fall into a category that has long interested me and has occupied a good deal of my work. 

Political correctness aspires to sanitize language according to certain political canons rather as euphemisms aspire to sanitize language for other social purposes.  Most people don’t actually rest in a restroom, for example.   Contested terms currently include candidates for erasure such as slave and illegal immigrant.  According to the woke, the first should be replaced by enslaved person.  The latter should not be used at all since “a person cannot be illegal.”  The trouble with “Anglo-Saxon” is that the term “is being used by” white supremacists to advance a hateful agenda.  I don’t know whether that is even true, but it is the argument for censoring the term, and it is just as dumb as it looks.  Cars are “being used by” bank-robbers to pull off heists, but that is not a reason to get rid of cars or even to resign from the American Automobile Association.

White supremacy is no laughing matter, but a reaction founded in equal parts of ignorance and self-righteousness is nonetheless ludicrous.  The current academic leftist advocates of “identity politics” are of course not the first group to come up with spurious interpretations of ancient racial groups.  A good deal of German Romanticism indulged in semi-mystical attitudes toward an imagined originary ancient Teutonic race.  With Hitler the idea would move from the realm of the poetic to that of the homicidal.  The whole idea of “fascism”, to the extent that it can be coherently defined, is visually summarized in the rod-bundled axe (in classical Latin fascis, plural fasces), symbolic of the ancient Roman magisterial power to punish and execute criminals.  Mussolini thought his fascism had recovered the spirit of his imagined imperial Roman forebears.  

Who were the Anglo-Saxons?  They were a Germanic people (the Saxons), part of whom in the early Middle Ages migrated to southern England (Anglia, in Latin) and part of whom remained in Germany.  In time the “English” Saxons came to call their continental relatives the Ealdseaxe or “Old Saxons”.  The language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons was English.  Since it was an early form of a language that has undergone very significant historical mutation, scholars usually refer to it as Old English.  The Anglo-Saxons were people; the language they spoke was English.  Nobody told them it was Old.  I continue to think that the distinction between “Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English” (one a people, the other a language) is a useful one.  But both in common and scholarly discourse “Anglo-Saxon” has long since often been used to denominate the language as well; and it is no big deal.  It is preposterous that the term “Anglo-Saxon” should be indicted for crimes of “racism,” for that is the charge it faces.

            Practically all the societies of the old European world were slave societies, especially that of imperial Rome; but the English were freer than many others.  Nowhere in England was there the match of the slave exchange of Dublin.  The great engine of ancient slavery was military conquest.  The English word slave and its European counterparts recall the fate of the conquered Slavonic peoples (the Slavs).  Similarly in early English wealh means both a Welshman (i.e., a native Briton of the populations conquered by the migrating Saxons) and a slave, among other things.  Of course, Anglo-Saxons were often themselves slaves.  Perhaps the most famous early literary appearance of the “English” is the story of Pope Gregory coming upon some Anglo-Saxon children on offer in the Roman slave market.  “Who are these bonny kids?” asked the Pope in his native tongue, Latin.  Answer: Angli.  No, said Gregory, who was among other things one funny guy.  Not Angli but Angeli, angels, messengers, missionaries!  The rest is history.

            From the time of the earliest Germanic migrations to the British Isles there never can have been an Anglo-Saxon “race,” let alone a “pure” one.  The history of early England, written not only in but on its language, is one of persistent Celtic and Scandinavian admixtures.  After the eleventh-century Norman Conquest (remembering always that the Normans were originally North-men, i.e. Vikings) English monoglotism became an index of social inferiority.  There was not much social cachet in being an Anglo-Saxon at the court of Henry II.

            Nor did the supposed latter-day descendants of the medieval Anglo-Saxons always do all that well, incidentally, in the American migration that began in the seventeenth century.  It has been estimated that around half the English stock that settled in early Virginia arrived as indentured servants.  Indentured servitude—though far from the horror of chattel slavery—was hardly a privileged status.  It was a kind of contracted short-term bondage.  A person unable to pay for the sea passage from England could gain passage in exchange for agreeing to a seven-year period of uncompensated labor.  The model for this system would appear to be the biblical story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel.  The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished chattel slavery, implicitly continues to recognize voluntary servitude.

            A happy New Year to all.

Merry Christmas 2019

It is my assumption, and certainly my hope, that most readers of this blog will have something much better to do on Christmas day than to sit before a computer screen or squinch their eyes at a smart phone.   This thought has little to with whether you observe Christmas, whether you have ever even heard of Christmas, or whether you have actually arrived at the age of eye-squinching.  Something similar could probably be said of National Fisheries Awareness Day.

But I do celebrate Christmas, which is a big family event for us.  We are about to celebrate the holiday in a remote rural place where the “reception” is either poor or enthusiastic, depending on whether you speak of cell phones or grandchildren.   As Saint Lawrence once remarked, it’s always good to get off the grid for a day or two,  So, wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas, I shall hope to return to this page on New Year’s Day.

Annals of White Collar Crime

Surely you will remember Bernie Madoff, the perpetrator of the world’s most audacious Ponzi scheme.  He’s now in the hoosegow in North Carolina serving out the early years of a sentence of a hundred and fifty years.  Quite a few greedy rich people got snookered, but there were unfortunately more serious consequences as well.  The lives of various colleagues and family members lie in ruins.  One of his sons was driven to suicide.  Under these circumstances you may not be persuaded that Mr. Madoff got off easy; but history might suggest otherwise.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste…

I have in mind the sadder fate of the Rev. Dr. William Dodd (1729-1777), generally known to historians, to the degree he is known, as “the unfortunate Dr. Dodd”.  It was concerning this unctuous malefactor that Dr. Johnson made one of his most acute, if usually misquoted, apothegms: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

            The white collar of Dodd’s crime was clerical.  He was a celebrity clergyman with his own private chapel of ease frequented by urban gentlefolk, especially the female of the species.  The Anglican Church of his age was rarely overtly concerned with religion.  The great historian Lecky describes it as a kind of vague ethical improvements society and an admirable extension of the police force.  Though he was a popular sentimental preacher, Dodd’s greatest achievement was his celebrated Beauties of Shakespeare.  Unfortunately, he developed a liking for the good life, the expensive life.

            Already by the 1760s Dodd was known in some circles as “the macaroni parson.”  Macaroni is a great word.  It means (1) an Italian pasta; and (2) in adjectival form, a literary composition combining vernacular and Latin, as in “macaronic verse”.  Its most interesting eighteenth-century usage has disappeared, though it is preserved in a well-known popular satirical song, “Yankee Doodle":

            Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony;

            He stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.

Here “macaroni” means foppishness, the acme of high fashion, the imagined quintessence of the cool, the latest style of dress or speech—something along those lines.  It suggests foreign affectation.  The “macaroni parson” was the Apostle to the Fashionable, the Comforter of the Unafflicted.  To conduct convincing field work among the affluent demanded a lavish life style.   And though he anticipated some of our own celebrity evangelists in doing indubitably well by doing dubious good, he always needed more.  Among the plums of his early clerical employment had been a stint as tutor to the Earl of Chesterfield—big money there.  When in 1777 he found himself in debt, Dodd, in an apparently mad moment, forged Chesterfield’s name on a bond of £4200.  He apparently acted with an insouciance similar to that impelling Madoff, a legitimate multi-millionaire, to lust for felonious billions.  Like many notable crimes, Dodd’s peculation was discovered more or less by accident, but it was a fatal accident.  Even adjusted for inflation, forty-two hundred pounds was less than Madoff’s fictive billions, but it was way more than enough to get Dodd arraigned, tried, and sentenced to death in the twinkling of an eye.  Remember, these were the days in England when a man could be hanged for stealing a sheep.  And the forgery of financial instruments was a crime of nearly infinitely greater import than that.  The King, in solidarity with his principal legal officers, was utterly unyielding.  They knew that British prosperity was founded in commerce, and took the view that in a commercial country few crimes could be more serious than financial fraud.  Therefor the sentence of death must stand.

the Macaroni Parson in more fortunate days

            Dodd did have sympathetic friends, quite a few indeed.  Dr. Johnson rallied to his cause out of Christian charity and simple sympathy.  He had barely known the man, and of course acknowledged his folly and guilt.  He raised no theoretical objection to the capital sentence, but he was a man of great heart.  His biographer, Boswell, has several lively pages on the episode, which is doubtless why the case is still remembered so well and why we know that the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind.

            What Dodd’s mind so wonderfully concentrated on, of course, was how to stay alive.  Desperate circumstances invite desperate measures.  When it finally became clear that despite popular petitions, tear-jerking letters to the authorities, and the formidable eloquence of Samuel Johnson, Dr. Dodd was certainly going to swing, a new plan was required.  Since he could not avoid hanging, he had to find a way to survive hanging.  Now there’s a real challenge, and it gave birth to an epic crackpot scheme.   It is impossible now to know the degree to which various parts of the scheme were real as opposed to legendary.  But essentially the plot was for a group of conspirators, including a prominent medical man, to secure a safe apartment in a building near the site of execution at Tyburn Prison.  Dodd himself, as he approached the gallows, may or may not have been supposed to secret some kind of breathing tube into his mouth and throat, thus adding to the uncertain pleasures of pendulation those of a simultaneous endoscopy.  The idea seems to have been that death by hanging is not quick but rather leisurely.  Immediately upon the completion of the hanging, Dodd’s friends, waiting at the side of the scaffold with a horse-drawn carriage, were to take possession of the inert body and transport it swiftly the short distance to the safe house.  There the doctor and his assistants would revive the (only apparently) dead divine. 

Quite apart from any inadequacies of medical theory underlying their ingenious initiative, the conspirators had failed to anticipate the problem of traffic control.  Public executions were popular events in eighteenth-century London, and celebrity executions were huge popular events.  Thousands of hyped-up idlers and proletarians, not a few of them inebriated, surrounded the scene on all sides.  Every avenue was blocked.  The makeshift hearse could have more easily speeded through the Holland Tunnel at 5 p.m.  So the unfortunate Doctor Dodd stayed dead.

Family fun at the Tyburn Tree

An enterprising doctoral student should take up a study of the desperations of debt and its criminal consequences in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The title of the dissertation could be “Economic Crime and Punishment.”  The ubiquitous high-born lowlifes who never pay their tailors in timely fashion, if indeed at all, are only the beginning.  The pages of the English novel are practically crawling with deadbeats and ne’er-do-wells fleeing the bailiffs, dodging debtor’s prison, or being hauled off to some sordid “sponging-house”.  Conspicuous among such crawlers is Rawdon Crawley of Vanity Fair, a great novel set in the period of the Napoleonic wars.  Rawdon escapes with mere misery and an ignominious death; but there are worse things.  The last Englishman I know of who was hanged for forgery was a banker, Henry Fauntleroy  (1784 –1824), whose extravagant embezzlements actually destroyed one of London’s old financial houses.  Forgery ceased to be a capital crime in 1836, Reform being (as the historians put it) “in the air.”

 

School Daze

Though hardly less exercised about our current political situation than most of my compatriots, I rarely deal with explicitly political issues in these essays.  Most of us feel awash, if not drowning, in political commentary.  I have no special insight or authority in political issues.  Furthermore, most of my political ideas, which are often uncongenial to my family and friends, are unlikely to be of interest to a general audience.  But I sometimes make an exception regarding issues at the intersection of politics and education.  Do note in the first place that “intersections” are all the rage, and since I have spent most of what is now a long lifetime pursuing education as a profession as well as a private aspiration, here is an intersection I can perhaps occupy with some plausibility.

I begin with a possible factoid for which I have no solid source.   There are international statistics concerning student performance, presented in charts organized by nation states.  In terms of demonstrated ability in mathematics, American high school students apparently are tied with Italian students in twenty-eighth place.  If, however, you ask American high school students what country is tops in math education, a majority will answer “the United States.”  There is the man who knows he knows not.  Teach him.  There is the man who knows not, and knows not he knows not.  Pity him.

Within the last month we all got some very bad news.  Since it had nothing explicitly to do with disgraceful behavior by elected officials, the dysfunctionality of our legislative institutions, murder, mayhem, terrorism, or cultural vulgarity, this bad news was not prominently featured in our national press.  The bad news was that despite untold millions of dollars thrown at our public education facilities, and despite the substantial implementation of the so-called “Common Core” approach in our high schools, the actual test scores for English and math have on a national level either remained flat or actually fallen during the past decade.  The idea of the Common Core itself—which I champion at least with “two cheers” enthusiasm—has now been roundly rejected by the educational “experts” both left and right.

This is not really a left or right thing, however.  To force it to be yet another episode in the culture wars, or another aspect of racial politics, is actually to trivialize it.  The world is changing around us very rapidly.  The principal tasks of our public education system are two.  The first --not necessarily in order of importance—is to educate our young people to the point that they are capable of meaningful participation in our democratic political system.  The second is to prepare them for productive work that the real world is willing to purchase with adequate compensation to allow them to enjoy decent lives.  That we have been failing pretty abysmally at the first task should be at least hinted at by our current political regimes.  If a few phony ads on Facebook are enough to constitute “serious foreign interference in an American election,” the fragility of our democracy may already be approaching the fatal stage.  As for the contemporary workplace, it has changed dramatically from that of my young manhood, and unrecognizably from that of my parents.  High school Wood Shop and Home Ec are simply not going to cut it these days

The big gripe about the Common Core is that it is all about testing, which encourages “teaching to the test.”  I am no lover of academic tests.  And I suspect I have at least a soupçon of authority in the matter, as I have constructed and, God knows, had to evaluate, a very great many of them over the years.  There are often much better motivations for teaching and for learning than test preparation.  But the idea that tests, even bad ones, don’t actually reveal valuable educational data is pure poppycock.  For some years I was a member of the ETS committee that made up the Advanced Placement exam in English.  And while I acknowledge the sometimes risible extent to which our efforts were influenced by various “multicultural” enthusiasms, I never read a completed exam that left me in substantial doubt, within a menu of reasonably fine gradations, of the capacities of a student to do “advanced” work in English language and literature.

We can either honor that information or reject it on some other (probably political) grounds.  I have to say this for Bill DiBlasio, loathsome politician though he be.  He is capable of unsettling honesty.  When faced with the fact that black and hispanic students are grotesquely underrepresented among the admittees to the small number of elite high schools in New York City, his very straightforward solution is to get rid of the entrance exam.  That appears to be doable.  Supplying minority students with a quality primary school education that might prepare them for the exam on a competitive basis with their less pigmented colleagues is apparently not doable.

The crucial subjects in which American students are so conspicuously wanting on the international stage are the same subjects tested by the elite New York Schools: Math and English.  Math must stand for all the STEM fields, which are of ever-increasing importance in the “new” economy.  “English” must stand for all the arts of the old trivium—arts of literacy--reading, writing, and speaking well.  Though the STEM fields must claim a special priority, the skills of literacy remain indispensable for competent citizenship, not to mention a seriously fulfilling life.  I cannot presume to give advice about the math exam, but I can suggest a question that I think should be on the English test.  And if candidates know in advance that it will be there, so much the better.   The question arises in my mind for a somewhat curious reason; it was stimulated by comments I have heard or read in some of the currently abundant and polemical discussion concerning the pronouns appropriate to use of transgendered persons.  Advocated neologisms such as zee, shay, shim, they (singular) and zer are not without their cultural interest, and will perhaps offer the materials for a subsequent essay.  For the moment it is the concept of the pronoun itself that captures my attention.  So my hypothetical exam question is this: “What are the parts of speech in the English language?  Very briefly define their syntactical functions.”  One might suppose that asking an English-speaker that question is rather like inquiring whether an artist knows the primary colors, or whether a musician is familiar with Guido’s scale.  That is, the question asks for elementary, indeed foundational linguistic information.  But you might be surprised.  According to one report, published in the middle of the Iraqi war, only sixteen percent of American high school students, when presented with a world map, could find Iraq on it.

The Crown

Around here it is all about “The Crown”,  the terrific metonymic television series about Queen Elizabeth II recently launched into its third season.  It is brilliantly made, with superb acting by many people, including conspicuously Olivia Colman as the Queen.  (Claire Foy, who played the younger Elizabeth in the first two season, was also excellent.)  It is fully deserving of binge treatment, and if left to myself I would have probably finished off the series in a day; but that is not my spouse’s style.  The strict rationing is probably good for me, and certainly keeps Buckingham Palace in my unconscious thoughts throughout long days. 

 Queens au pair

This third series has a certain amount of particular interest for me.  It begins with the first premiership of Harold Wilson, immediately following my own years in Oxford.  I vividly remember many of the events its portrays, which are in my mind associated with the beginning years of my professional career.   Furthermore Wilson himself was a Jesus College man, certainly the college’s most prominent political alumnus, and he showed up there from time to time.  Also, it occurs to me that Ms. Colman somewhat resembles my mother in one of her distinctive facial expressions.  This invites me to participate in all the oedipal scenes involving Prince Charles a little more authentically.

PM Harold Wilson at the site of the Aberfan disaster

My enthusiasm for this show involves a kind of inner betrayal.  I have always been somewhat annoyed at the common American fascination with royalty and decayed aristocracy.  The enthusiasm of the Founders of our nation for republicanism was directly proportional to their loathing of hereditary monarchy.  But a decade had not passed until we were busy creating an ersatz aristocracy of our own, and we have never stopped. Think of all the seedy European bluebloods who infect the pages of Henry James novels.  Lord Grantham of recent “Downton Abbey” celebrity, is presented as a sympathetic character when in fact he is a jumped-up fortune hunter on Lend-Lease life support.  Once upon a time in this country Wallis Simpson was more admired by American women than Helen Keller.  But still…

I once personally met the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.  I believe it must have been exactly sixty years ago, when we were all younger, and when Americans were a little rarer in Britain and consequently somewhat less despised.  It was in a reception line; the Queen merely gave us a wan smile, but the Duke made a conceivably witty remark concerning the inadequacy of British heating.

            As a medievalist, I have to say that English majesty has been somewhat wanting over the centuries.  It is mainly downhill after King Alfred, a man of fine moral character, whom any humanist must admire for his emphasis on education.  I also want to give high marks to Edward the Confessor, Henry V, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Victoria, and George VI.  Needless to say, recognition of achievement is not in every instance synonymous with approbation of moral character.  But the incidence of royal mediocrity is quite high, as immortalized by Byron’s line about George III: “A better farmer ne’er brushed dew from lawn.”

It is quite odd, of course, to be watching an historical drama about people who are still alive and, if not quite kicking, at least still experiencing the motion of the molecules.  The actual Crown today is in one of its periodic states of crisis.  The Royals got a pretty good run out of their latest dynastic wedding, but now the bloom seems to be fading from the bush so far as Meagan Markle is concerned.  It seems not to have taken her very long to have exhausted her historical role as multicultural specimen and to have discovered that Buckingham Palace is not really much fun for a Valley Girl.  The Duke is ninety-eight and retiring, the Queen ninety-three and tiring; but everybody loves her to death and is understandably worried by the prospect of her moving on.   Prince Charles, entering his eighth decade of humiliation, a good deal of it elective, has decided at last to engage the full force of his septuagenarian vim and vigor.  Unfortunately one of the first tasks he must take in hand is sorting out his truly disgraceful younger brother Andrew.  Andrew was never a really close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, he tells us in a widely viewed interview that redefined moral opacity.  He seldom stayed in one of Epstein’s palatial homesteads more than three times a year.  And as for the woman who insists that he repeatedly bedded her when she was seventeen years old, it is all an inexplicable fabrication.  The photograph of him with his arm around her waist?  Photoshopped. 

            Since it’s a classic he-said-she said situation, we must perhaps give him the benefit of the lout.  But the fact is that she said it under oath and caution of perjury, and one is likely to arrive at a certain conclusion in pectore.  The whole episode is as sordid as it can be.   Its supporting co-star is Ghislaine Maxwell, tycoon’s daughter, socialite, dear friend of the Prince, best friend and lover of Jeffrey Epstein, and the most notable go-between or female pimp since Ovid’s Dipsas.   Dante’s Venedico Caccianemico is pursued through the Malebolge by “horned demons armed with heavy scourges”.  Ghislaine Maxwell’s pursuers are BBC reporters with microphones and video cameras.  That’s part of what is called changing social mores   It is no longer possible to pursue Jeffrey Epstein, hanged in his jail cell unhousele’d, disappointed, unaneled and, apparently, widely unknown.  Among the cast of hundreds who barely knew him are Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.  Prince Andrew is now under orders to keep such a low profile that, were it not for his Adam’s apple, he would have no profile at all. One of my favorite and probably spurious “quotations”—it has been attributed to many people from Gladstone to anonymous society matrons—involves a Victorian spectator’s reaction to a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra: “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen!”   So one looks forward to the television treatment of all this in season eight or ten, but in the meantime it’s a real headache for the real Crown.