I do believe that scholars working in the Humanities (Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, History, Cultural and Media Studies, Art and Literary Criticism, and cognate fields) face a dangerous threat of exhaustion unto death. Attribute the situation to any number of factors.

During the past century and a half the earth’s population has exploded, leading to a proliferation of new philosophies, theologies, religions, historical investigations, and artistic and literary productions. The sheer volume of potential objects for critical activity would overwhelm the capacities of any particular scholar.

Of course, disciplinary mastery has always been elusive, but today, it is frankly impossible. Given that the number of potential contemporary objects of study far exceeds the (already numerous) important objects that have survived from previous centuries and from antiquity, the balance of work to be done must focus on “contemporary” materials. And so, in this context the idea of a classical canon of important works is increasingly hard to defend to an academic audience — forget about successfully selling the canon to the next generation of readers, distracted as they are by hundreds of cable channels, tens of thousands of games, millions of websites, and the myriad options for textualized and mediated connectivity in the world of social media.

Coincident with this proliferation of potential objects of criticism, and the “contemporization” of discourse, there has been an inevitable fragmentation of academics into ever more numerous and narrow specializations. Increasingly, intellectuals find themselves separated into camps, pockets, and subcultures, talking either at cross purposes, or on parallel, non-convergent lines. Within the subdisciplines, the proliferation of work forces academics to turn from the objects that should properly occupy their energies and towards bibliographic and pedantic analysis of scholarship. Scholarship becomes scholarship on scholarship, and it seems ever less likely that we can expect synthetic work to emerge or find a broad, popular audience. Nobody is listening.

At the same time, economic practices have shifted dramatically, so that scholars are no longer in the economically privileged position of their great grandfathers. Scholarship is not a field dominated by men with wives and nannies for the children, maids for the home, cooks for their food and secretaries for their paperwork. Most scholars today lack such economic supports for their life of the mind. Instead, we labor along other servants in the service economy, being extremely lucky to have our summer vacations as the main thing that sets us apart from other typical dual-income middle middle class suburban/urban households, where children, housework, and the worries of everyday life constantly undermine “serious work.”

And beyond this, while a few exalted academics at elite schools still enjoy the leisure and economic support they need to do “research” (All Souls College at Oxford University springs to mind… it still exists), most scholars are teaching more credit hours, to more students, for less pay, with fewer teaching assistants, all the while dealing with a even greater emphasis on the culture of bureaucratic oversight for their work. Try saying the phrase “outcomes assessment” to any college professor you know and watch his or her brain start to melt inside the skull. It’s amusing.

Such mundanities are certainly not the only set of distractions for middle aged scholars like myself. We operate in the same informational matrix as our students; social media bombards us with the constant recommendations of (or banal updates from) friends, our work email inboxes overflow with “carbon copied” announcements of events and other chatter. My generation was the first to work through school with the burden of knowing about the psychological problem called “ADHD”; but this disorder seems to have been robustly adopted as a typical cognitive paradigm.

These words of mine today were inspired by a recent essay in Philosophy Now, on the “Death of Postmodernism.” I think if the essay is read correctly, it matters very little whether its author, Alan Kirby, may be correct that “Postmodernism” is a useful scholarly rubric or even a live movement in art and culture. (The “postmodern” already seemed like a dead issue when I first heard the term and tried to read the impenetrable postmodernists back in sophomore year of college, in 1989; my friends and I instead suggested that we should just be “postfuturists” and get over ourselves already). What seems important, instead, is to notice how exhausted Kirby sounds, as if he simply cannot fathom how we will ever, as scholars, come to terms with the technological transformations of text and reading practices that he so deftly identifies. He calls the new way of creating and reading texts “pseudo-modern,” which stretches the idea of “modernity” well past the breaking point, as far as I am concerned. Like me, he sees a bewildering variety in the modern show, text, and game, and also like me, he despairs at the undeniably vapid and shallow nature of it all. The fact that Kirby’s analysis turns on an apparent generation gap (speak for yourself, sir!) between today’s teachers and the supposedly different readers and consumers that make up today’s students highlights the same issue that I raise above: faced with ever expanding ranks of junior human beings, with their strange ways of talking and their unfathomable tastes in music and art, many of us in older generations are apt to freeze like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

I’d keep working on this little rant and give my suggestions about how I think we ought to deal with this desperate situation of our exhaustion, but I have to stop writing and take care of my 21 month old son, James.

But such a position amounts to support of no funding at all for government. It would be crazy for American politicians, who are paid handsome salaries and given handsome benefits at taxpayer expense, to oppose all funding for government. Right?

Rutgers philosopher Ernie Lepore writes about poetry in yesterday’s installment of “The Stone,” a philosophy “blog” on the New York Times. Something about the article rankled me and inspired this cranky response.

Lapore says the New Critics locate meaning, and the resistance of poetry to both translation and explanation, in a magical (or mystical) property of the words themselves, but his critique describes a pomegranate, examines an orange, condemns an apple, then recommends something that looks to me just like a pomegranate. Apples to oranges, Lapore.

He confounds words like “meaning” “interpretation” “translation” and “paraphrase” as if their mutual substitution could be accomplished without qualification. In general, he seems to think definitional meaning resides at the level of the word, or nearly so, and does not discuss combinatorial syntax, figure, image, denotation, connotation, nor manifest versus latent content. No mention of cultural identity, class, historical and geographical factors, codes or other vexed subtleties of discourse. Apparently he wrongly assumes these do not matter to his argument. Perhaps he thinks they can be easily disposed of in phrases like … “Linguistic expressions mean whatever they mean wherever they occur” — but that is just silly.

His article takes on the problem of explaining the truth behind the persistent ‘heresy of paraphrase’ … beginning with a witticism from Eliot … literalism, I’d call Eliot’s quip … as if New Critics all just thought that poetry means only what is said. He conflates the idea with translators’ complaints that languages resist full translation. (If languages did not resist translation, we’d all be effortlessly multilingual). And mixes in the notion, one I find typical of undergraduate writers, and unworthy of a philosopher, that interpretation can be accomplished by plot summary.

He ends up defending a simple distinction between articulation (“perceptible” or measurable qualities of the presentation of words) and lexical meanings. Poetry brings intentional articulation in to play, and that’s why it can’t simply be paraphrased.

He writes: “Of course, we can introduce a new expression to mean exactly whatever an old expression means but since poems can be about their own articulations, substituting synonyms will not result in an exact paraphrase or translation. To do so requires not only synonymies but also identical articulations, and only repetition ensures this end.”

Notice here that what he calls articulation is reserved by definition from “meaning” … but this simply cannot be the case.

He says “the poet wants to draw the audience’s attention to … articulations as much as to the ideas the words so articulated express” but also says poetry differs from prose only in that it can be more “about” its articulation.

Once you’ve admitted that the poet can take language and make it about its articulation, you’ve committed yourself to a robust and complex idea of meaning. It doesn’t matter if you jest, like Elliot, or dismiss complexities with a vapid gloss like “linguistic expressions mean whatever they mean wherever they occur, but in poetry (as in other forms of mentioning) the medium really becomes the message.”

No poem can “be about” something other than its meaning; meaning is the aboutness of discourse.

A paragraph or so earlier Lapore had blasted New Critics for claiming that “form shapes content” [his italics, ironically] a notion he mocks as both “quasi-mystical” and “magical” … utter nonsense. Only the color blind, the tone deaf, and the naive would insist upon the idea.

A poem’s unique articulations have been brought into its meaning; manifest features manifestly shape the content of discourse. Meaning cannot be found in a dictionary or thesaurus, and you cannot even look up the meaning of poems in books.

I think Lapore is right on the money to emphasize the importance of articulation as a key way of distinguishing poetry from prose; of course an older age was content to call this music, and under his analysis, we can still call it music.

Lapore implies that an interpretation and a summary of a poem amount to the same thing, and then ends up defending a ridiculous version of ‘the heresy of paraphrase’ on the allegedly new grounds that summaries leave out the music. He doesn’t actually care to interpret poetry, so he seems not to care without caring that his conflation of paraphrase and meaning would make interpretation, by his own account, more or less impossible for more “poetic” texts. Again, nonsense. (Also nonsense: that ‘interpretation’ is restricted to discovering “meaning” on his or my terms).

Meaning must be sought afresh in every utterance, as a dog finds water in a bowl, as a parent places a hand on a child’s forehead, as a student looks at the clock. Meaning is not strictly lexical or referential; it is critical. A worker opens the days newspaper, or a believer approaches scripture. All meaning is phenomenon; it resides in the lived, temporal, historical present — the appearance or presentation — of communicative action. This necessarily includes linguistic and paralinguistic features.

To talk about meaning in things, among other things and their meanings, that’s interpretation.

Beware of pomegranate seeds.

One single reliable authority can surpass a mass of experts? If only! If only such authority existed.

For the purposes of this little rant there is no reason to try to justify the unjustifiable. So let me state at the outset that I will go ahead and join prophecy to wisdom. My vision is for Biblical Studies.

When the history of the present era of Scholarship on Biblical Literature is written, one hundred, or two hundred years from now, it will likely be seen as an era of exhaustion. This is the era of criticism’s exhaustion. And of the exhausted critic.

Dominated by the exhaustive literature review, the exhaustive review of evidence, the exhaustive survey of theories, perspectives and interpretations, scholarship today puts the greatest and most elite scholars to work with great energy cataloging, compiling and critiquing … their own contribution to the subject of study. The bibliography and annotations are an art form unto themselves. Year by year, there is an endless parade of published work on subjects that interest Biblical Scholars… while the subjects themselves vanish in a fog of vague words about the published scholarship. No one has time to read any body else deeply, because there are too many conversation partners. And the primary sources are not read deeply, closely, or creatively enough.

We are examiners of interpretations. We splice and winnow and classify, anxious to include all, to miss nothing, to note precedent. We cannot proceed with any interpretation apart from the examination of other interpreters. We map carefully the entire landscape of critical discussion, and only then stake our own place in the field, often defining it by the slimmest and most subtle differences of discourse.

Acrobats of research, we ascend mountains of books, great edifices of commentary, surmounting the work of others by means of the slenderest toe holds and hand holds of criticism, on virtual cracks, muscling our way past overhanging cliffs of redundant reviews of reviews of reviews of evidence, determined to contribute but with no real sense of what needs doing. We climb it because it is there.

If this were all, it would be enough, but it is far from all. Having exhausted traditional areas of interpretation, Biblical Studies defines new fields, which are much more difficult to exhaust, such as the theoretically limitless project of Wirkungsgeschichte. Everything and anything can be subjected to Wirkungsgeschichte. It is endless. After the canonical, there is the pericanonical, heterocanonical, apocryphal, novelistic, polemic, heresiological, apologetic, historical…. there is art and architecture, music and graffiti, artifacts and locations, flim, television, the internet, text messages… there is no boundary. The scholar cannot relax, because ars longa vita breva.

Book after book is published. Yet, all literary art is dead. The scholar apologizes, as if for a fart, after a moment of levity is emitted into print. A well turned phrase is buried beneath a jumbled pile of shallow annotations. There are only a couple of poets, and they are writing about narrow, technical things.

Consider, as well, that greatest of achievements itself. The Bibliography. The longest, greatest bibliography — howsoever long or great — if it be on a specialized area of research, it resembles nothing so much as a chronicle of oblivion.

Why are we not more wary of publishing?

For each of us, in the end, after all, there is no ars, there is only breva vita. In this life there is limited energy available for scientific investigation — and family, friends, food, actual art, and everything else too. At journey’s end you must leave your learning behind you. It is useful to remember this, young scholar. There is no time for idle questions. Make sure your questions are interesting enough that the answers will matter after you are dead and gone. And all the usual advice about style applies too.

On my reading list:

Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976; paperback in 1977; LCCCN: 75-25456).

Eric Foner probably should have been one of my professors when I was at Columbia, but alas, Epimetheus!

I suppose most schools offer more opportunities than students can use. Nevertheless, I do have an old copy, originally used in one of Foner’s classes! and, during my time there: 1987-1991. It feels like a bridge to a past course not taken, even if it is not. (Julie Anglin, if you ever read this, I have your old copy.)

I am looking at Foner this week, but this post isn’t actually about this book. It’s about the idea of Liberty in early America.

Foner begins this outstanding book with an epigram from a seventy year old Thomas Paine (1737-1809), written in 1806, three years before his death:

My motive and object in all my political works, beginning with Common Sense, the first work I ever published, have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free.

  —Paine and Revolutionary America, frontmatter (p. vii).

These stirring, revolutionary words remind me well of the inscription inside the cupola of the Memorial of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) in D.C.:

I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

These words come from one of Jefferson’s many letters; in this case one of Sep. 23rd, 1800, to Dr. Benjamin Rush (see this copy on google books).

For both Jefferson and Paine, tyranny took forms both intellectual (especially in religious matters) and governmental. This is why the revolution they fomented ended up enshrining the principle of religious liberty, extending Roger Williams’ experiment with the “wall of separation” in Rhode Island to the rest of New England and the Colonies, via the First Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights, and placing alongside it freedom of assembly and of the press.

We may be sure that deist revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were sincere in their confidence that a right to freedom is granted to human beings from God, or, from “Nature’s God” as Jefferson refers to him in the Declaration of Independence.

In our course, it is illuminating to approach Paine and Jefferson as we do: immediately following the discussion of free will among Dissenting Christians, most especially the New Calvinist Edwards’ quarrel with Arminians as expressed in his book Freedom of the Will.

Edwards is against the idea of “free will,” but is no opponent of Freedom. To understand Edwards, I argue, you need to know simply that a human agent can be free, and can have a will, but cannot be said thereby to have a “free will.” The phrase “free will” predicates the property of a subject (a human self or “soul”), to a fellow property of a subject (namely: “will”). But properties are not like subjects; they can’t have their own properties. Now, human souls certainly have freedom, that is, liberty. Edwards defines Liberty (in ch. 5 of Part I of Freedom of the Will ) in congruity with John Locke. It is merely the ability to accomplish one’s will. When an action lies within someone’s power, and nothing impedes that action, there is liberty. So, unimpeded action is liberty. Edwards, following Locke, is not interested in any notion of an unlimited or unconditioned Freedom; rather, freedom is always limited by the world and the nature of persons. Freedom can be taken away (for example, by confinement, or, by tyranny) and it can granted again. For Edwards, God creates and sustains the power by which the human will (expressing, as it does for Edwards, the desire to do act on our understanding of whatever we deem best for us) can be expressed; that power to act, to choose action, is will.

Famously, the “Declaration of Independence” (see three drafts compared synoptically on google books) contains these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Notice that Jefferson doesn’t refer to humans being created free, but only that they are created equal. What the Creator gives is an inalienable right to liberty. This is stated to be self-evident. How can this right to liberty be detected? The answer lies in the proper understanding of liberty, and in observing in humans the power they have to secure it. And so here in Jefferson we are indeed looking at Locke again!

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is a phrase that is commonly asserted to bear an echo of Locke. And it does; in fact, Locke used similar phrases in various essays.

In Locke’s essay on The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), he writes (in the context of an aside in which he remarks on the fact that so few human beings follow the dictates of the Virtuous Life):

Mankind, who are and must be allowed to pursue their Happiness, nay, cannot be hindered, cannot but think themselves excused from a strict Observation of Rules, which appeared so little to consist with their chief End, Happiness, whilst they kept them from the Enjoyments of this Life.  
[see google]

Here it is clear that Locke regarded the pursuit of happiness (not happiness itself, but the pursuit of it) as a kind of fundamental right. This right (recognizable by a power to pursue it) is not and should not be impeded, even though we might wish that we ourselves and others would pursue rather Virtue than Happiness.

Locke himself argued for a rather more robust notion of the Natural Rights of humans than did Jefferson, who omits all of Locke’s talk of “property”; Locke again:

Man being born, as has been proved, with a Title to perfect Freedom, and an uncontrolled Enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the Law of Nature, equally with any other Man or Number of Men of the World, hath by Nature a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty, and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men, but to judge of, and punish the Breaches of that Law in Others, as he is persuaded the Offense deserves, even with Death it self, in Crimes where the Heinousness of the Fact, in his Opinion, requires it. (Of Civil Government [1689], Chapter VII, Paragraph 87).

Notice that for Locke in Nature we are born with Title (clearly, a Right) to Freedom, but also with a violent and potentially deadly Power that we need in order to secure Life, Liberty and Property from “Attempts.” I think it is this Power itself that gives evidence to the Title.

In the Lockean thought about Liberty that is more or less shared by Jefferson and Paine, the common element is Locke’s idea of the power of the human being to resist tyranny and oppression. It is a theory of government (and authority) that – tentatively – permits revolution (although it also admits of, and perhaps usually prefers less violent courses for remedying injustice and casting off shackles).

This idea of what “Freedom” is explains why God (or Nature’s God, as the Declaration names it, again in harmony with Locke) cannot simply give (and simply has not given) Liberty to us, but rather can and has given us a power (thought of as a right) to defend and pursue Freedom. (Perhaps also a duty to do so?)

For Edwards, this power to pursue happiness is manifest in individuals in the will itself, considered as the power to choose that course of action deemed best for us in our (limited, natural, human, fallen, corrupted) understanding. For Locke, Jefferson and Paine, the power is indeed manifest in persons, especially in their inalienable power to resist the oppressor. But it is also evident in a Free State, where the powers of humans are used to grant equality under a sovereign Law (written by a legislature that works with the consent of the governed), granting to individuals freedom from the arbitrary will of other persons, by actively defending them against such arbitrary opposition.

My favorite character among the first generation New England Puritans is doubtless Roger Williams. Williams became the founder of Rhode Island after his libertarian impulses in matters of religion and politics led him into conflict with the magistrates and divines of the Puritan theocracy at Massachusetts Bay Colony. According to Williams, the Massachusetts colony lacked a legitimate title to their real estate, since they had not received a title for it from the Indians. Protestant to the core, Williams was in the Separatist camp of Puritans, holding the Anglican Church of England in the same contempt he had for the Roman Catholic Church. As a Separatist Williams refused to work as a Teacher for, or join in worship with the Massachusetts Bay colonists, who were nominally Non-Separatists and maintained strong ties to England. Their worship, he believed, was invalid precisely because the believers had not withdrawn fully from mother Babylon (apparently, Williams did not consider the Atlantic Ocean to be wide enough).

And finally, Williams despised and vocally protested the theonomic politics of the colony. Cotton, Winthrop and the other colonists had attempted to create a Christian utopia, a state composed entirely of regenerate believers who were unified by sharing a pure belief system founded on the study of the Bible and authentic “ordinances” (pure worship of God), committed to sharing one another’s burdens, and guided by an enlightened aristocracy of elected magistrates. Their society was supposed to be one knit together in liberally shared brotherly love and voluntary charity, made possible by the presence of the Spirit of God among the believers.

While in good standing, the believer/citizens would enjoy what Wintrhop called “our liberties” (Examination of Anne Hutchinson, in Adams, 1894: 283). But to enforce conformity and obedience, the Massachusetts Bay Colony used trials, imprisonment, banishment (and worse). Their vision depended on an impossible homogeneity of conscience, and on the willing submission of the people to the established authorities; such uniformity was proved totally impossible already by the time of the “Antinomian Controversy” and the conflict of the authorities with Anne Hutchinson (1636–1638). From the moment he arrived in New England, Williams began challenging the religious authority of civil magistrates. Williams saw their union of civil and religious government as a bloody mess, another example, perhaps, of the “lamentable shipwreck of mankind” (Bloudy Tenent Underhill, 1848: 3). He argued forcibly for liberty of conscience, aka soul liberty, and vehemently against the “bloudy tenent of persecution” that led the colonists to use the force of the state to enforce conformity in matters of conscience.

Perhaps because of his strenuous objections to “forced worship,” and his commitment to the idea of the freedom of conscience, but certainly also because of his readings of scripture, he accepted the Baptist idea that only a voluntary adult believer’s baptism is valid. This further estranged him from his fellow Puritan contemporaries. In 1638, after being exiled from Massachusetts and finding his way to a site in Narragansett territory that would later become Rhode Island, he founded the town of Providence, and established the still-extant First Baptist Church in America. Later he left the church and became a kind of seeker, convinced that no true visible church of Christ was possible in this world

Remarkably accepting of difference for a man whose religious scruples were so intense, Williams even lived and journeyed among the Narragansett Indians. He was the first to publish a study of the Algonquin language and Native American customs, beliefs, and practices: A Key into the Language of America (1643), which book made him famous as an author as well.

Prior to Williams’ founding of Rhode Island, no place on earth had ever been established in which an explicit separation of civil and religious powers and identity was maintained. But Williams did it. He established a state that was explicit about its tolerance of those of Jewish, “Turkish” (Muslim), and even “anti-Christian” beliefs. It was a bold experiment, one that was later expanded to include all of the states in the New World, under the bill of rights adopted in the newly independent United States of America (1791).

During the English Civil War, which pitted the forces of Parliament, sympathetic to Puritans, against the Royalists who naturally enough supported the Church of England, Williams happened to be back in the motherland trying to secure a fresh charter for Rhode Island. From Williams’ perspective, one imagines, all of the world, and especially Christendom in it, and especially England and New England, was guilty for spilling the blood of men in conflicts that essentially boiled down to differences in conscience, to scruples in religious belief. It was in this context that Williams published his most famous book The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed in a Conference Between Truth and Peace (London: 1644) — a literary masterpiece of early American political theory and an outstanding example of the instrumental rationalism of Puritan thought, prizing as it did all Truth established through reasoning based on the Bible as God’s revealed Word.

The theology of separatism espoused by Williams’ leads him to describe the church of Christ as a pure, cultivated “garden” that is separated out from the world and worldly matters — described in contrast as a “wilderness.”

Thus, also in 1644, in one of several tracts written against letters by John Cotton (Mr. Cotton’s Letter, Lately Printed, Examined and Answered,), Williams defends the practices of the Separate churches, who desired a clean break with what they saw as the impurities of the churches of England.

He writes:

First, the faithful labours of many witnesses of Jesus Christ, extant to the world, abundantly proving, that the of church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type, and the church of the Christians under the New Testament in the antitype, were both separate from the world; and that when they have opened a gap in the hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down God the wall itself, removed the candlestick, &c., and made his his garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if he will ever please to restore his garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto himself from the world, and that all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the world, and added unto his church or garden. [Sidebar: The garden of the churches of both Old and New Testament, planted with an hedge or wall of separation from the world. When God's people neglect to maintain that hedge or wall, God had turned his garden into a wilderness.] (Underhill, 1848: 435)

It is most important to notice that Williams puts the church at the center of the circular wall of separation; the concern is not so much the sin of government messing with religion, as it is the sin of the churches breaching God’s hedge to meddle in civil affairs.

Nevertheless, his image of a “wall of separation” has helped to define generations of American thought. Every wall works both ways. What the church is counseled against doing (seizing worldly power), the government can be prohibited from doing (seizing spiritual power). The image of a “wall of separation” gets sealed in our memory by Thomas Jefferson, who uses the phrase in his 1802 reply to the Danbury Baptist Association:

I contemplate with sovreign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and state. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of rights of conscience, I shall see with with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Conscience conflicts with authority; according to Williams this is a root cause of bloodshed and oppression of the innocent. Jefferson links adherence to separation of religion and government a greater possibility for human freedom will in general wider quest for maximal human freedom.

But are humans free? American thinkers next struggle to make room for themselves within Calvinism.

For Monday’s class we’re reading John Winthrop’s radical theonomic treatise “Modell of Christian Charitie” (1630). I don’t have time right at this minute to comment fully; perhaps I might be able to claim, enigmatically, that Gov. Winthrop’s political philosophy combines Solomon, Big Brother and Marin Luther King, Jr. (He is a perfect text to be reading in a class on MLK day; since we have to hold classes.)

Winthrop envisions a transparently unified society of believers whose mutual love for one another is unlimited, based on the golden rule, and on the conviction that human wealth belongs to God. Society among the brethren is commitment to take care of one another’s bodily and spiritual needs, withholding nothing, if necessary, of one’s own substance, if it could help preserve the life of a “brother” (sic; there is little talk of sisters). In Winthrop’s world, as much as they can, the rich help the poor and the poor help the rich. They need each other to show forth the glory of god and embody His virtues.

Although property, as such, remains under the control of the individual (except in extraordinarily perilous circumstances), for Winthrop, those who have real faith will not count their goods as their own, but will make giving, charity, love, the center of all action.

I look out the window and think how this might be applied today. I don’t have to look far. It is unthinkable, for example, that Winthrop would suffer the homeless to sleep in the streets or to go without eating. (He would probably arrest them for idleness and then have them fed and given blankets). But.

In Winthrop’s society based on a radical interpretation of brotherly love as the first law, the catch lies, I think, in the concept of the “brother.” Practicing banishment for doctrinal squabbles and disagreement over authority, the 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony sought to keep obedience and conformity central to its definition of brotherhood. The society Winthrop believed in would be governed by a harmonious continuum between church membership, membership “in Christ,” and citizenship, between doctrine and sovereign law. The charity he believed in would be voluntary and absolute, guided by the light hand of the magistrates who were there to make sure everyone in the society was worthy of such membership. His vision could only work if, as he so vehemently claimed it was, the love of Christ was actually really among them; so long as the society was full of true regenerate souls, united in one faith and all recognizing themselves as belonging to one body, his vision made sense. Yet in practice, many disagreed, many did not get along, and they strained one another’s commitment to love of neighbor. Regular banishments were used to try to purify the community; doctrinal conformity was enforced with the courts.

All in all, it is a visionary speech with an enduring and tragic appeal.

The edition we are reading comes from a publication of 1838; it was taken from a manuscript and printed in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Vol. VII; p. 31-48); see it on google books.

It must be assumed, with respect to almost any topic a human person can give name to, that a Wikipedia article on the subject represents the bare minimum of what an educated person ought to know of the subject. In case after case, I have found Wikipedia informative — and profligately so in some subject areas. My own experience with Wikipedia suggests that it always surpasses the print encyclopedias in breadth, and that it quite often surpasses them in depth as well.

Wikipedia frequently serves as a repository of reference terminology and raw data, and usually offers a decent entry level discussion of the topics it treats; and what topic is not treated in Wikipedia? If there is an admixture of ineptitude or bias (other than the inevitable systemic and endemic ones) in Wikipedia articles, it can usually be detected fairly easily and corrected for by further investigation.

What I tell students is Wikipedia can profitably serve as a starting point for research, especially if it is used in conjunction with other, more traditional encyclopedic sources. But I also teach that further investigation is always mandatory. I may even encourage students to read multiple Wikipedia articles on various aspects of a topic before beginning their investigation in earnest. I thereafter direct them to the more advanced sources I typically want to see being used. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with Wikipedia — and there’s a lot about it that’s right! — but woe unto that student who allows research to start and end at Wikipedia.

Finally it should not have to be said, yet it must be said, so I will say it: Wikipedia, like any source, must be used ethically and responsibly. One must not cut and paste from Wikipedia (or any source). One cannot cite, repeat or even imitate phrases or passages from Wikipedia without properly marking them as quotations. Whether it is the lowly Wikipedia or the most respected scholarly tome, you have to cite the sources you consult in footnotes and bibliography whenever and wherever such sources contribute to your presentation of a topic. But y’all knew that already.

See Philip Hallie, “Magda and the Great Virtues”.