A particularly humorous anecdote I ran across from the life of Leonardo da Vinci:

When the wine-grower from Belvedere found a very unusual lizard, Leonardo made wings for it out of the skin of other lizards and filled these wings with mercury so that they waved and quivered whenever the lizard moved; he likewise made eyes, a beard, and horns for it in the same way, tamed it, put it in a box, and used the lizard to terrify his friends.

I’m low on sleep and so you get this kind of post.

In New Testament studies, readings of a book or author (1 John, say, or Paul) are, as far as I can tell, generally judged on the basis of (1) the sense they make of the text itself, (2) their grounding in the relevant sociohistorical context, and (3) their impact on broader readings of the NT. So a reading of Romans will be considered a good one to the extent that it does a good job of explaining Romans, with as few unanswered questions or cheap moves (e.g. ‘I know what I just said contradicts what I said before, but really it was Paul who was contradicting himself) as possible; to the extent it makes sense within whatever it is people are believing today about the context of Romans (when it was written, what was going on in the wide world of Rome, why it was written, what the culture around the recipients was like, etc.); and to the extent that it helps to makes sense of the Pauline corpus as a whole (this point is what allows N. T. Wright, for example, to criticize Ernst Kasemann’s Romans commentary on the charge that what Kasemann says about justification in Romans could not be said about justification in Galatians). Of course there are other criteria that are sometimes brought forward, but these seem to be the main ones.

I’ve noticed that in philosophy, the criteria for a good reading of a book or author (the Republic, say, or Aristotle) are nothing like the criteria used in NT studies. I’m sure there is someone out there trying to read Plato on the basis of sociocultural trends in the fourth century BC, but generally the main criterion of a good reading of a philosopher is the quality ascribed to the philosopher in question. So a reading of the Republic will be a good one if it makes Plato out to be a better philosopher than other readings make him out ot be. Discussions of an ambiguous sentence will proceed not on the basis of which reading the text best lends itself to, and certainly not which reading is best explained by historical data, but which reading makes the argument work best – even if it makes more linguistic sense to read the sentence otherwise. An exception I can think of is scholars who put a lot of stock in this or that theory about the chronological order of Plato’s writings, and use that data to interpret what Plato meant. But by and large, I see less language about ‘what Plato meant’ in a certain section and more about what makes the argument of the section work better.

I would be interested to see how it would turn out if this method were applied, mutatis mutandis, in NT studies. Or is something like it already used? A prominent feature of the way philosophers often read other philosophers is that the philosopher being read often turns out (surprise!) to have the same views as the philosopher doing the reading. Is something like this behind certain fears about typological and allegorical interpretation? Could interpreters forgo talk about ‘what Paul meant’ in favor of some other interpretive goal?

One of the best news pieces this weekend is Deborah Solomon’s , interview of Karl Rove in the NYT Magazine, mainly for this interchange:

Do you like Joe Biden?
I think he has an odd combination of longevity and long-windedness that passes for wisdom in Washington.

The interview almost makes me like Karl Rove, just because he’s witty throughout. Our political process could use a bit more invective.

Adam Nossiter has an article in yesterday’s New York Times on the American South’s reaction to Obama’s candidacy and election. The gist of the piece is that southern whites, who are backward anyway, are afraid of blacks, so it’s a good thing those states don’t matter in elections anymore.

Of course much of what Nossiter says (and insinuates) is correct. Maybe it’s a cheap shot to mention that the people interviewed are standing ‘in the parking lot of the Shop and Save’ or had to talk ‘over the country music on the radio’ in a barber shop ‘decorated with hunting and fishing trophies’. Maybe it’s a little over the top to call Alabama ’shackled to the chains of yesterday’ (quoting a U of Alabama professor). And maybe it’s because I live in a university town, but I have trouble believing that the majority of southerners are as bothered by Obama’s ethnicity as the people Nossiter interviews. But even so, I can’t deny that Nossiter did interview real people, who did say very backward things about Obama (e.g. ‘I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things’). Unfortunately, it’s a good deal easier to find people who will say that sort of thing down here than it is in other parts of the country.

As disappointed as I am with the southerners whose views are represented in the article (what happened to the South of I’ll Take My Stand, anyway?), I remain equally disappointed with the reaction to those views. What’s on display in Nossiter’s article is the same old culture war stance that makes some southerners (and, more broadly, many evangelicals nationwide) so ineffective and backward. The go-to political move in recent American political discourse seems to be to present a particular group as the Impediment to what really needs to happen, which in turn justifies a good deal more than seems appropriate for a ‘civil public square’ (such as Nossiter’s barely veiled mocking of southern culture, or certain evangelicals’ tendency to label their foes as antichrists or tools of Satan, etc.). It’s true that the South needs to grow up in certain ways, but the way to achieve that end is not to create a culture war machine and point it in the general direction of the Tennessee River. The old attitude of ‘first take the log out of your own eye, and then…’ would be beneficial for all parties.

I would expect Bill O’Reilly or the Family Research Council (have you seen the ‘letter from 2012′ the FRC recently released? Disgusting.) to resort to the tactics of the culture war. But for one reason or another, I’d come to expect a little more class from the Times. It’s not that their data is wrong (people really think those things) or their assessment is off (the South really will matter less in politics, and maybe that’s a good thing until we can get our act together). But what’s on display in Nossiter’s article is the socially acceptable equivalent of the fear-mongering that Sarah Palin and groups like the FRC deploy against their culture enemies. That’s not charity and it’s not good politics.

If we rejoice, with Nossiter’s article, that the South is finally obsolete enough to leave behind, it’s possible that only Southerners will feel the ill effects. But that’s no way to treat your neighbors. Critique is one thing, but selecting a particular region, ideological group, ethnic group or social class as the big bad wolf doesn’t accomplish anything, except sell newspapers.

One thing that can lead to esotericism among intellectuals (particularly, but not exclusively, young intellectuals) is a gnostic vision of community, according to which community formation is pretty much a matter of (your) agreement (with me). But, if I may borrow a distinction from arch-Wittgensteinian Stanley Cavell (which he doesn’t really use for this purpose), community is not a matter of agreement but attunement. This mutual attunement is a matter of common life (practice, desire, history, heritage, ‘culture’), of speaking the same language (literally and metaphorically). Think about what it’s like when something you find hilarious fails to move or even offends a friend. You don’t say you disagree about the joke, but that your friend just doesn’t get it. (If you did say you disagreed, you would mean that you disagreed about why it was or was not funny, or about what in general makes for a funny joke, etc. But the failure to find the same things funny is not registered in not agreeing, it’s registered in not laughing.) It’s the “get” and the “it” (each undefined and hard to put your finger on) that make for attunement. Agreement is a good thing, but it arises out of a prior attunement (at least logically prior); which is to say, agreement arises only within community. It does not create community, anymore than explaining a joke to your unimpressed friend brings about quite the same guffaws as come from someone who gets it the first time.