Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

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Musings on the Humanities

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The humanities, we are now regularly told, are in crisis.  In colleges, enrollment in humanities courses has decreased as students flock to more “relevant” courses and majors.  Academic administrators, in turn, redirect resources to the areas that attract  students and that have the greatest chance of garnering grants.  Meanwhile, the students are doing this in part in response to their worried parents, many of whom have themselves little sympathy for the “irrelevancy” of the humanities.

I am not sure if there really is a “crisis” here, but there does seem to be a general malaise, a sense that the humanities is in need of revitalization.  Part of the turn away from the humanities to more obviously practical subjects is completely understandable as a response to the economy.  Nevertheless, the exercise of thinking through the bigger question of the role of the humanities in the twenty-first century can potentially be helpful.

There have been a stream of books and essays on this issue, and I confess that I have not read the vast bulk of them.  Until a serendipitous, long conversation with a colleague yesterday, I did not find the issue, in fact, to be terribly compelling.  Humanists complaining to each other humanists about their irrelevancy tends to be unattractive.

Yet in the course of this conversation and thinking about it afterwards, I realized that it is helpful for me personally to better articulate my own understanding of what it is I do, in the big picture.  Such a clarification could potentially have an impact of what and how I research, write, and teach.  I have not yet figured out these implications, but I do think that I have boiled down my understanding of the humanities to two points, neither of which I am sure are particularly new:

1.  Study of the human experience provides us with intellectual resources or tools that help us to lead meaningful lives.  This has always been a core mission of the humanities, and it remains no less so today: the humanities are about engaging with the essential issues of the human condition, the big questions.  The humanities do not have a monopoly on providing tools for a meaningful life, but they help to instill habits of mind (and perhaps even virtues) that I believe are far from “irrelevant.”

2.  We humanists are fond of saying that the humanities helps to develop portable critical thinking and communication skills that can be widely applied.  This remains true, but I think that we can also be more specific about the nature of those skills in today’s particular environment.  I was taken with Thomas Friedman’s argument in The World is Flat; to succeed in today’s global world we need to be intellectually agile, supple, and innovative. This translates into a specific set of skills.  We need to know (1) how to quickly sort and evaluate the massive flow of information to which we are all now subjected; (2) synthesize it;  and (3) create from this synthesis new knowledge.  Technical skill can be outsourced.  Study of the humanities helps to develop, again, habits of mind, that cannot be.

All of this needs fleshing out, but at least it’s a start.

As always, comments and thoughts are welcome!

 

Paul, Homosexuality, and Midrash

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Most scholars today believe that there is no concept of “homosexuality,” as we usually understand the term, in the Bible.  That is, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although clearly familiar with homoerotic sexual acts, do not know of the “homosexual,” a person who has an identity based on the gender of their sexual preferences.

Although there are remarkably few verses in the Bible devoted to homoerotic activities, there is an enormous scholarly literature on the topic, much of it driven by modern theological concerns.  I worked on this topic fairly intensively some years ago, and even then I wondered if there is anything new to say.

It’s been a while since I thought about this, but an insight emerged the other day in discussion in my undergraduate class, “Religion and Sexuality” (syllabus here).  I have not kept up with the literature so I’m not sure how new it is or whether it would hold up to more rigorous examination, but it is worth thinking about.

Leviticus 18:22 reads:

Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence

The verse is cryptic, leaving open at least four questions:

  1. What sex act is actually prohibited?
  2. Is this to be read narrowly as a prohibition against only an activity (or activities) between men, or is it to be extended to female homoerotic activities?
  3. What does “abhorrence” mean?
  4. More generally, what is the reason for the prohibition?

Now compare Paul’s primary statement on the topic, in Romans 1:26-27:

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged
natural intercourse for unnatural, 27and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse  with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Paul, as many have noted, is here reflecting some of the attitudes found in his larger Graeco-Roman context sprinkled with a healthy dose of Jewish condemnation against such acts (seen also, for example, in Philo).  But in class we were wondering if Paul should be taken more seriously in this passage as an exegete of Leviticus.  That is, Paul seems to offer answers to the questions posed above, even if these answers are themselves a bit slippery:

  1. The “act” is to be read broadly (although still unspecifically) as “acts” between men;
  2. The prohibition is to be extended to women;
  3. “Abhorrence” means “shameless,” a social category;
  4. The verse comes to prohibit acts that are “against nature.”

Paul thus takes seriously and wrestles with the meaning of the verse in Leviticus, ultimately offering an expansive reading of the prohibition.  In this way his reading mirrors that attributed to Jesus in Matthew 5:27-30 which extends the narrow law of adultery found in the Hebrew Bible (where adultery is defined as sex between a married woman and a man who is not her husband) to simple lust.  Both expand the scope of the sexual prohibitions.

Paul may not yet know the “homosexual”, but the comparision of his writing to the verse in Leviticus suggests that he is getting close.  Paul may bring “nature” into the picture in order to answer an exegetical question, and he may mean it to refer only to physiology, but he opened a door.  Later Jews reading only the Hebrew Bible would prohibit male homoerotic anal intercourse, but would be much vaguer and more wary of extending the prohibition, which floats without real rhyme or reason among many biblical prohibitions.  Christians though, drawing on Paul, would develop a more robust anti-homoerotic/homosexual position.

 

Digital Humanities Now

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Seventeen years ago, with the birth of the internet, we entered what historians are calling the “fourth information age.”  Yet, as Cathy Davidson notes, we in the academy are still very much part of the “third information age,” which began in the eighteenth century with mass printing and which spawned many of the institutions with which we grew up.  What will the university, and more specifically the humanities, look like in this new age?  What will we gain, and what will we lose?

The “digital humanities,” as it is now widely called, is very much a product of this new age.
There is no question that it is quickly gaining strength inside and outside the academy.  There is also no question that it opens enormous possibilities in research and accessibility; despite the ubiquity of the web and the amazing speed with which it has changed how we do business, most of its potential has yet to be tapped or in many cases even discovered.  Digital humanities could well be the primary or only kind of humanities practiced in the future.

But what is it?  As an evolving field (perhaps analogous to post-modernism before it got that name), the digital humanities, its shape and pressing issues, remains difficult to pin
down.  Are we talking about simply applying computers to what humanists do, or to a fundamental transformation of the humanities?

One way to get a pulse of the present state of the digital humanities is, as always, to follow the money.  There are a few – surprisingly few – major funders of digital humanities.  Except for the few universities with robust centers devoted to the digital humanities, most fund such faculty projects in a relatively ad hoc way.  The ACLS funds a few projects a year, as does the Mellon Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.  By far, though, the biggest funder of these projects is the National Endowment of the Humanities.  The Office of Digital Humanities is devoted to promoting such scholarship, and the centerpiece of their funding programs is their digital startup grants – about fifty of which were awarded this year.

Today, the directors of the funded projects met at the NEH in Washington to present their projects to each other.  (The full list is here.)  The session was open to the public, and I went.  The projects were presented in “lightening rounds”; each director had two minutes to present their project, with no more than three Powerpoint slides.  The experience of sitting through these staccato presentations was both fascinating and exhausting.  I cannot possibly summarize each of the presentations, but to my subjective eye most of the projects clustered around only five themes.  These, it seems to me, represent the directions in which the NEH is helping to steer the digital humanities in the U.S.  The themes are:

  • Creating Accessible Corpora: These projects usually seek to digitize a variety of material and make it publicly accessible.  This group, which might comprise the plurality, is the least innovative, although many of them look fantastic (like the digitization of restaurant menus by the New York Public Library).
  • Linked Data:  These projects take largely digitized materials located in different collections and seek to make them work together. Pictures from one database, for example, might be linked to pictures and GIS data.  Given the wide variety of data encoding, this is much harder than it might seem.
  • Crowdsourcing:  These projects call on their users to contribute to the project, often through transcription of digitized original documents.  They experiment with new modes of doing scholarship.
  • Visualization:  Several projects sought to visualize data in various ways.
  • Games:  These are attempts to create role playing games that help to convey historical experiences.

There were, of course, projects that did not fall into any of these themes, but what surprised me was how few projects were devoted to developing tools and to actually analyzing data.  It is almost as if these projects stand on the cusp, between the third and fourth information age.  Each will move things forward incrementally, but we still seem at least a step away from seeing the transformative potential of the digital humanities.

Two other quick thoughts.  First, the lightening round format was great.  Perhaps there were too many presentations, but these highly structured short presentations forced directors to get right to the point, quickly.  Second, I had never had personal contact with the NEH; despite my respect for their work, to me they were a faceless government bureaucracy.  It turns out that real people work there; that they are highly professional, organized, and knowledgeable; and that they really care about what they do.   It was reassuring.

If there was one top take-away for me today, it is that the field of the digital humanities is the next frontier.  Still unsettled, but full of boundless, maybe transformative, potential.

Now just a final word of self-promotion.  I have one advanced digital project, a collection of ancient inscriptions from Israel/Palestine.  I am also organizing a workshop in February entitled, “Ancient Religion, Modern Technology.”  More information can be found here – the call for papers is still open!

The Self and Science

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Several years ago I wrote an article, “‘And on the Earth You Shall Sleep’”: Talmud Torah and Rabbinic Asceticism” (Journal of Religion 83 [2003]: 204-225).  In that article, I compared rabbinic “asceticism” (which I broadly define as a set of self-disciplinary practices and training of the self) to similar techniques employed by contemporary Greco-Roman philosophers (as well as early Christians).  For both rabbis and philosophers, he entire point of these “ascetic” practices was to train or discipline the self.  My own essay builds upon the studies of Pierre Hadot, who argued that the function of the Stoic exercises performed by Marcus Aurelius and others was precisely to cultivate the virtue of self-discipline, which in turn is a prerequisite for knowledge.   The application of this insight to the rabbis was further extended by both Jonathan Schofer and Eliezer Diamond.  Self-discipline, for these ancients, was not a single act but a state of being.

Earlier this week I was pleasantly surprised to hear a story on the radio about the latest scientific research on willpower.  We have, it turns out, a single source of willpower.  Every time we resist a temptation – that is, exercise our willpower – we deplete our store.  And yet, like exercising a muscle, as we fatigue it we also strengthen it.  By engaging in acts of self-discipline we strengthen our willpower.  The piece went on to note that the practice of religion helps to “build up that self-control.”

Marcus Aurelius and the early rabbis may not have had access to controlled studies, but they were clearly onto something!

Between Us and Them

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Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a gentile;

Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a slave;

Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a woman

These three lines are recited daily as part of the series of blessings found at the beginning of the traditional Jewish morning liturgy.  They have also been extensively discussed.  Scholars have long noted the similarity of this triad to a similar daily thanksgiving attributed to the Greek philosopher Thales.  Over the past century liberal Jews have wrestled with, and in most cases abandoned, these three blessings; they are too at odds with modern sensibilities.

These three blessings are but a single, relatively insignificant reflection of the binary thinking of ancient rabbis, which in turn reflect much much wider cultural assumptions.  You are a “this” or a “that.”  A man or a woman.  One of us or one of them.  For the sectarians who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls, you (if a man) were a “son of light” or a “son of darkness.”  No “sons of beige” lived at Qumran.

In a funny way, we have not progressed all that far from this way of binary thinking.  In most of our thinking and our forms, people are male or female; white or “ethnic”; Democrat or Republican.  Sometimes we allow for other boxes as well, but these are often found on the spectrum defined by two poles that we define as opposites.

There is an article in a recent New Yorker describing a thought experiment offered by the philosopher Derek Parfit.  Parfit asks us to imagine if we were replaced, cell by cell, with those of Greta Garbo.  At the beginning of the process, we are clearly us, and at the end we are clearly Greta Garbo.  But what about the middle?  Who are we?

Parfit’s thought experiment is itself based on a spectrum anchored by a binary pair.  But it reopens an old philosophical problem of the “self,” creating an opportunity for imagining selves – us and others – much more fluidly.

Here is another thought experiment: what if we refused to classify others or even ourselves in terms of checkable identities?  How would our self-understanding change?  On the one hand, it is easy to subscribe to the idea that we should recognize people in all of their unique, idiosyncratic glory.  On the other, go ahead and try it.  It is not at all easy to conceive of ourselves, to articulate our identities, without using blunt, pre-supplied categories.

Language thus becomes an agent of constraint, creating and limiting the very terms of our self, and different languages offer different limitations and opportunities for self-understanding.  Am I the same in all languages?  If not, who am I?