Online Conversation | Breaking Bread with the Dead, with Alan Jacobs

[Music] welcome to all of you joining us for this afternoon's trinity forum conversation with professor allen jacobs on his new book breaking bread with the dead the reader's guide to a tranquil mind the poet w h auden once wrote that art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead our guest today who is among the world's foremost scholars of auden takes his counsel quite seriously if not literally in his compelling book inspired by auden breaking bread with the dead he seeks to show his readers that engaging with the often provocative strange even unsettling writings of the past offers us not only the possibility of broadening our outlook or deepening our understanding but also growing and thickening our reserves of resilience imagination and empathy what he refers to as our personal density at a time when virtually all of us must fend off an hourly onslaught of superfluous information and navigate a social media landscape shaped by algorithms that steal attention and withhold context as well as populated by legions of clueless yet cruel trolls it's tempting and understandable to seek tranquility or at least relief by retreating to the familiar but our guest today argues for exactly the opposite approach to forego retreat in favor of an adventure into the long ago and far away to begin a conversation with and be challenged by interrogate and argue with voices from the past who have something to say as well as something to give and to both extend and receive the sort of intellectual hospitality that expands our world and ourselves in a matter that leaves us both more internally robust as well as tranquil it's a provocative claim and a counter-cultural even controversial approach and there are a few who can make it with the wisdom eradication or literary elegance of our guest today dr alan jacobs allen is a scholar of english literature a writer and a literary critic who serves as the distinguished professor of the humanities at the honors college of baylor university having previously taught at wheaton college for nearly 30 years a prolific author and a wide-ranging thinker he's written for publications as broad as the atlantic harper's comment magazine the new yorker the weekly standard and the hedgehog review among many others as well as publish 15 different works in literature theology and cognitive psychology including how to think the book of common prayer a biography the year of our lord 1943 which we discussed with alan just a couple of months ago and of course his brand new release breaking bread with the dead a reader's guide to a more tranquil mind which we've invited him here today to discuss alan welcome thank you so much sherry it's great to be here well it's really good to have you so of the many books you have written i'm betting this is the first time you've written what you called a self-help book and you make the interesting argument that engaging with old books even with their often unjust racist or otherwise retrograde assumptions or arguments instead of being triggering actually helps one stay tranquil in the here and now so why would old books promote serenity yeah um thank you that's a first of all thanks for the wonderful introduction uh which i think shows um that you get exactly what i'm trying to do in the book and and thanks for this question i i think that um first of all i do want to say that i really am kind of serious when i call it a self-help book uh there are many many different reasons why one might study the past um thousands but i really am focusing on why it might help our uh what i call our personal density to improve our increase our temporal bandwidth and the idea uh we can talk about those terms maybe a little later on but the idea goes something like this when you are engaged with the works of the past you are dealing with difference you are dealing with people whose whose whole world is different than yours people with different experiences with a different outlook with different ideas and but and you're doing so in an environment that you control we all know how difficult it can be to try to maintain our patients we certainly don't have any shot at serenity we're just trying to maintain our patience when we're dealing with people who we strongly disagree with but when it's the voices from the past and we are visiting their world uh and and we assume the posture of of visitors of guests then we can i think get a little bit of distance on our emotions they're not going to talk back to us they're not going to fight back they're not going to do anything that will hurt us if if the encounter ends up being a little too intense for us well we can just close the book and go away and then come back to it later on when when we've calmed down a little bit it is it is uh training in encountering difference but in a way that we have enough control over that it it doesn't have to agitate us and frustrate us but maybe if we do that for a while we can get a little better at dealing with our immediate neighbors as well well let's talk a little bit about those terms and what you mean by personal density and how it is either formed or thickened yeah so that that phrase comes from the american novelist thomas pension it's in one of his novels uh called gravity's rainbow which is an extraordinarily difficult novel excuse me and um he uh there's a character in gravity's rainbow he's a german engineer uh named kurt mondelgen and he talks like a german engineer and at one point he says uh he coins what he calls mondogan's law and one of the con conceits of of uh gravity's rainbow is that everybody knows it that it's all it's totally famous even though of course thomas pension is just making it up and um and mondelgon's law goes like this personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth and what he means is that if you have greater temporal bandwidth what he calls the the width of your now he says then what that does when you're when your approach to your everyday life reaches into the past and imaginatively reaches into the future then that increases your personal density and and i think maybe one of the best ways to understand what he means by personal density is to think about what the apostle paul says when he warns christians against being blown about by every wind of doctrine and i think if you're on if you're on social media all the time if you are on the internet all the time then the the winds of doctrine as it were the winds that of of public opinion are blowing really really hard and it if you if if that's where you spend your whole life you don't have the personal density to resist that the harder those winds of public opinion blow then the farther you are going to be carried away by them and so when mondogan says when this character says uh personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth he's saying that the more you understand about the past the more you understand about human experience and by the way this was equally true of space understanding other cultures is extremely valuable even when they're in our own time but because we have a kind of a global culture now getting into the past is the way to get really really alien experiences and that gives us some perspective on our own moment and when we have that perspective on our own moment then we are able to judge things from a more secure and stable position we have the personal density that allows us to do that and we're not just simply being blown about by every wind of doctrine that's the core idea i think probably many of our viewers are wondering about something that you sort of alluded to which is can this kind of density be achieved through not just by going back but by going more uh reading more broadly reading outside the western canon and choosing books written by someone other than dead white males finding those of women and people of color both dead and alive does it have the same um i guess potency and increasing our density i i mean first of all i think that's a very valuable thing to do i i uh i taught for many many years i taught a course in african literature and and um i i love teaching that class and i would be happy to give you know book recommendations to people who want to study it because it is a way of stepping outside of our own experience but even even when um even when you're reading um a writer like chinua achebe or wooly soyinka or bessie head from botswana they may be from a different part of the world but they're still people whose experience is a 20th century and 21st century experience and it has a lot in common with our own it's it's recognizable in a lot of ways and and one of the fascinating things about reading it is that sort of tension between sameness indifference like oh you know you're experiencing some things that i'm familiar with but because you are african in a very different way because you're from botswana or from nigeria or from wherever it happens to be and and so there are there are definitely differences but there's also a kind of a commonality which results from um the globalization of experience which in turn results from the globalization of media right so there is there's for instance a great story in wali shayenka's um autobiography one of his several works of autobiography called ake which is the name of the village that he grew up in in in central nigeria and he you know they listen to the radio and on the radio they hear about this terrible man named hitler and they start talking about you know what's going to happen when hitler invades nigeria they you know he he and his fellow children are all convinced that hitler is going to come and attack them at some point and you know it's it's a very different way of encountering hitler than you would have had if you were living in the u.s or in europe but it still is the recognizably the same world they're listening to the bbc they're listening to to um international english radio and therefore it's a different world but it's very recognizable you move far enough into the past and it gets almost unrecognizable right these these people who are whose experience day to day is so different than ours whose core assumptions are so different than ours that it's uh there's a strangeness there that i think is the most valuable part it's the most valuable part of the experience is finding what's strange and trying to encounter something that you wouldn't find anywhere else that you're not going to hear from day to day and that i think is where you can really start building that density so you're a professor and uh we hear a lot about students objecting to certain old works uh feeling triggered and the like and you've actually made the argument that our information overload now is not unrelated to um how easily we feel triggered by or defiled by old works i'd love for you just to discuss that a little bit more yeah i so we we live in uh there are two phrases that i borrow from sociologists to describe our moment one is uh uh hartmut rosa is a german sociologist who talks about social acceleration the sense of of of things continue not not just going fast but getting faster and faster and faster and our difficulties in keeping up and uh a french thinker named paul verillo who who says that the peculiar thing about that experience is that we all feel that we are at a frenetic standstill which i think is a great phrase a frenetic standstill that we're we're we feel like everything is just moving a zillion miles an hour but we're actually not going anywhere we're just kind of stuck in place and i think that's because we everything is coming at us so fast we're getting so overwhelmed by the information that we hardly have the opportunity to do anything except just kind of deal with it um i was writing something about this a few weeks ago and i was uh i was i was writing the the phrase the fire hose of information and then i looked down and looked at my screen and i saw that i had written the dire hose of information and i think that's actually a pretty good word for it you see we're we're dealing with the dire hose and when that's happening right the mo our first and and very rational response is to practice a kind of triage that like battlefield triage okay well this i'm gonna deal with and this i'm gonna set aside for later and this i'm gonna totally ignore and so when you're having all of that information somebody comes at you with an idea that's very strange or that at least seems to be offensive then you're like nope nope not doing that ruling that out not going to deal with it not going to listen to it and it's really just kind of self-preservation you know that makes you the that gives you that that um desire to get away from the thing especially if that thing feels like it is defiling you in some way like this is offensive and disgusting and and no i'm not going to deal with that you know and you'll hear people say sometimes life's too short to deal with stuff like that and you know i sort of i get the feeling i get the feeling but we need actually to be able to discern the difference between ideas that are truly offensive and ideas that only seem to be offensive because we actually haven't understood them yet and that is what stepping back and stepping away from the dire hose allows you to do and you know as it is with like any of us who've had children know that you it doesn't work just to say no to children you have to be able to give them an alternative you have to be able to say don't do this but do this instead and adults are exactly the same you tell them get off of twitter get off of facebook get off of instagram well i mean you can say that but what are they supposed to do instead and what i want to suggest is stay away from those things long enough to read something from the past peacefully quietly at your own pace i mean just the very act of reading a book itself being disconnected from the internet while you're reading that's already a step in the right direction and then if it's a voice that's going to tell you something you would never in a million years hear uh on on twitter and instagram and facebook then that's added value it's just so good in so many ways for enabling us to get out of the dire hose and to then when we come back to it be maybe a little more balanced and a little more able to make discerning judgments rather than just have emotional reactions let's talk a bit about how one actually reads and you gave a bit of advice to your readers that some people might consider a little bit unexpected which is you said that so often people are given are encouraged to read all books to set aside their assumptions you know to enter into the text and enter in the world of the old text and you said i think this is bad advice and you advocated for something that you call double reading what is double reading and how can we do it yeah i i i've always thought that that it's bad advice when people say you should suspend your judgments uh you should you should set aside your own personal beliefs when you're reading the works of the past but if you're setting aside your own judgments and you're setting aside your own beliefs then how are you going to learn anything from those works that is going to be able to affect you no you need to keep your own your judgments in in play but all of them not just some of them um so i'll give you an example in in a cla i am i am so so blessed to be able to teach old books um all the time and um in in my class the other day i was in one of my classes we were reading jane austen's mansfield park and that's not a super old book but it's you know a couple hundred years old that's that's long enough to make it a somewhat different world uh than the one that we live in every day and it was really interesting to work with my students over one of the characters in that book sir thomas bertram because sir thomas is very much a kind of patriarch of the old school you know he is a man of dignity he is a man who values his family's social standing um he he disparages any ideas that would challenge the existing social order um it would be easy to make a kind of of uh you know bogeyman out of him but i think all of my students recognized that he's an intensely human character because during the course of the story he comes to realize how many bad decisions he made in the raising of his children and at the end of the book he really has to struggle with this sense of failure that he he did so much wrong that he can't fix um and he but he takes comfort in the good things that have come about um and uh and and tries not to be made miserable by the bad things and he's just an utterly admirable character even if he happens to hold a set of views that those of us who are more democratically a lot you know inclined might not like we might not want to live in a society as hierarchical as the one that he lives in and that's totally fine for us to think that the hierarchical structures of that society are not politically and socially ideal but let's also not set aside our ability to recognize how wonderful it is when a person is actually able to say i messed up i did not act wisely and i need to act more wisely in the future how often do we even hear that right i mean that's not the most common thing that we hear from anybody these days um and that by the way i think is also a little bit related to social media in the sense you put yourself out there as having a particular position you know that a thousand people might retweet it and and so then the inclination when you're challenged is to try to double down um you know and justify yourself and defend yourself to see an example of a proud dignified man who has to go back and sit in his room and think i was foolish i was unwise that's a really powerful thing to see and it's something that we can admire even if we don't share his politics and so it's the the the idea is not suspend your beliefs but keep all of your beliefs in play if you are democratically inclined and you don't think that a society should be that hierarchical keep that in play but also keep in play your belief that it is good to acknowledge with humility your own sins and shortcomings and that way you can have a really complex and nuanced understanding of the text that actually helps you to have a more complex and nuanced understanding of yourself that's how i think it works anyway so in addition to writing books about pedagogy and old books you've also written a fair amount about social media and i'm curious uh the extent to which you would believe that the medium itself has something to do with our our lack of density we're getting more and more of our information from social media right we are as a whole reading less reading old books less reading novels less reading for pleasure less we comprehend what we read less and we are more uh we are tending towards social media that are themselves quite ephemeral i think of snapchat where it is an image that disappears um to what extent is the medium itself contributing to our lack of density as opposed to the content yeah yeah i one of the things that people will often say is that you know technologies are neutral it's just how we use them and that is simply not true uh no technology is neutral none um every techno and and i'm talking about knives and forks right and not you know a knife is not neutral a knife is something which is designed for a particular purpose and it is easy to use it for that particular purpose and it's hard to use it for another purpose right fork similarly we can say it makes no sense to say well go ahead and eat your soup with this fork because after all technologies are neutral it's just how you use them no you can't eat your soup with a fork right it will the liquid will pass between the times of the fork this is reality and so every technology has affordances uh as the students of technology call it that is it uh it it affords certain possibilities and it either disables or sidelines other possibilities so social the the especially twitter i think uh what it the affordances of twitter are to reply immediately and to share whatever you find most striking whether you find it striking for good reasons or for bad reasons and so that's what creates you know it was a it was a terrible day for humanity when one of the engineers at twitter created the retweet button um because what that does is allow um some really nasty stuff to spread at an incredibly rapid pace and when everybody in your feed is retweeting the same thing you think that that is a lot bigger than it actually is you think it's you think the idea is more prominent than it actually is you have no ability to discern what's really commonplace and versus what's rare you're just you're just at the mercy of whatever is the dire hose is is sending you so one of the things i've noticed is that since i've since i've gotten off social media and i i do most of my uh i do most of my news reading on a weekly basis um i subscribe to the economist and one of the things i love about the economist is that at the beginning of each week of each issue it's got this little list of here are the main things that happened in the world over the past week and and that's often how i find stuff out and sometimes i discover that between one issue of the economist and the next that some of my friends who are on social media have been through about four cycles of outrage about something you know where they were really mad about something and then they found out that the thing they were really mad about wasn't true and then they got really mad at the person who told them about the thing that they found out wasn't true and then something else comes across that makes them even angrier than they were before and then they forget about the former thing you know and they've they've been through this cycle like four times and i have no idea what's going on i'm just completely um yeah it's i i mentioned to you before we got started that um if my son hadn't texted me this morning i wouldn't have known that the president has has contracted uh coven 19. and you know what it would be totally fine if i didn't know that it would be totally fine i mean you know i will i'll find out in next week's issue of the economist and so what what this is encouraging is bite-size um pieces of information you know with the scare quotes because it's often not information it's misinformation processed instantaneously and then replaced almost immediately by something else and that that affordance that those those affordances really have a paralytic effect on our minds because that's that's what virilio means when he talks about frenetic standstill is that i can't i can't even fully process the first thing before the next thing comes along and then i can't process that before the third thing comes along and this idea of being able to slow down your reception of information read it in in much bigger chunks set it down and think about it pick it up and read it again make notes in the margin or write in a notebook you know this just that slowness of that that is in which you are not consuming but rather you are reflecting there's the old um uh in in medieval uh certain medieval theologians um said that the thing to do with scripture is to uh do what cows do you chew the cud you chew it uh you you swallow it you fetch it back up again chew it some more um and and the idea is that you're continually masticating right um and when you have something that is of substance or something that is a value something that is beautiful it rewards that kind of repeated reflective attention and i i think that makes you for it's it's pacifying it gives you a certain degree of peacefulness and serenity what i call in this book tranquility and it makes you less vulnerable to the social media tsunamis they can wash over you without without blowing you or washing you away because you have the personal density to withstand them before we go to questions from our viewers i need to ask one of the things i've loved about your book is it's clearly a work of intellectual hospitality describing intellectual hospitality you know both the invitation to give our attention to voices from the past as well as the invitation to join in a conversation that began long before we did but for um for anyone now we have an excess of not only legitimate claims upon our time and attention but an excess of invitations both from the ephemeral and from the substantive and worthy and it can be very difficult to prioritize what we give our attention to you've made this in many ways your life's work how do you decide what invitations to accept first uh you know i don't that's a really hard question to answer or it's not hard to answer it's hard to answer in a way that's useful to somebody else i think what what i have done over the years is to try to pay attention to my own patterns of behavior and to you know i i have a i have notebooks i i i keep track of what i read and what i think about what i read and i try to go back and revisit those and and and what i've gotten better and better at over the years is developing a kind of a sixth sense for what i need to listen to now and what i can set aside and i just don't know that there's any way to do that except by learning from your own experience right to be able to say well you know i heeded this invitation how did that work out um and and just kind of build up a a whole body of knowledge based on your own history so i think it's not enough just to read but also to find a way to interact with what you read and record that in such a way that you can see your own history there is a um there's a one of the 17th century puritans is recommend recommends keeping a um a spiritual diary or journal which i don't do i don't do at least not in the sense that he was talking about and he said i need that so that i can see my life in frame from time to time which i think is a really interesting word like you you you step back away from your experience and you know how you know when you have um if you go to a museum and you're looking at a painting sometimes you realize you're standing too close to be able to see it and then you have to back up and find that right distance so that you can take in the whole picture well that's what a kind of a record of our experiences as readers allows us to do with our own lives our own experiences to step back and see that pattern and once you are become more aware of the patterns that you have then you can become a better judge of what it is that you need to do in the future and again i think that's a matter of personal density i feel that having gotten out of the dire hose i am better able to make decisions that are meaningful and appropriate for me um i've just got more time to think about what it is that i want to devote my attention to and i'm not letting somebody else determine what i should uh be giving my attention to so that may not help anybody in specific ways but i think it does maybe suggest the kinds of kind of personal practices we need to have that will help us to learn from our own experience and not just have that experience great so our first question comes from viewer michael lundy and michael asks this sort of controlled time travel you advocate echoes c.s lewis's admonition to read old books i think c.s lewis actually advocated reading at least one old book for every new one how does this help understand the nature and dangers of the ever-narrowing now-ness of today's radicalized political tone yeah i think i think if if i'm remembering rightly lewis said that the ideal ratio is three old books for every uh one new one so he was he was very committed to the old yeah and louis's view was was this that um uh there's a lot that i could say about this um uh so let me try to to summarize it uh as as best i can there's uh there's a passage in in one of one of his books where he says um that uh and he actually uh the the historian uh alfred north whitehead makes exactly the same point in his book science in the modern world both he and lewis say that the most significant beliefs of a given period are not the things that they argue about it's the things that they don't argue about because everybody agrees um that is the the the key i was i was i was actually telling my students this the other day and i said we have these incredibly intense political arguments but we never have arguments about whether or not we should have an absolute monarchy it's not that you know that just isn't on the table because there is just kind of this agreement that whatever kind of government that we have some sort of representative democracy is what what we ought to have and and that's we don't we don't have to argue about that because that at least we agree on and i think the great thing about or one of the many great things about going back in the past is the ways in which it enables you to realize among other things how much we actually do have in common there are there we may think we have absolutely nothing in common but that's because we're only aware of the things that we're arguing about not the things that we take for granted and so i i think that in a strange sort of way recognizing the the the radically alien character of many thinkers of the past ought to enable us to have a little bit more charity towards our neighbors and to find some common ground maybe not as much as we would like to have but something on which we might be able to build or at least to have a conversation rather than a shouting match so jay wyland asked how does music and other word works of art add to our density um yeah that's so i am uh i i used to um uh one of the little parlor games i like to play is to ask people if you could lose if you had to lose either your eyesight or your hearing which which would you give up and uh to which people almost always say how about if i've lost one ear and one eye no no no no that's not how this works um and i i is even though i am the most devoted reader imaginable and i don't do audio books um i i would have to have my hearing because music is so vital to me and um and then i would learn how to use audio books at that point but i i love uh music is so that is one of the great sources of tranquility for me the reason i would and in fact i could could have written a book just recommending that but um i i i think that the particular value of old books see the the value of music is that it it takes me out of the realm of words and ideas altogether into and i'm thinking of pure music here and i'm thinking of instrumental music it takes me out of that world all together the world of ideas and debates and and and conflict and it certainly gives me other kinds of conflict but it's it's so different than the verbal interactions and the textual interactions that we have all the time that it's really really valuable but what's so great about old books is their power to let us hear the voices of people who are so different from us who are articulating ideas that we would never think of experiences that we've never had and yet who are recognizably human um just give a quick example of that there is there is uh this is a story that i've told i think in three different books because i i love it so much when when machiavelli was exiled from florence he his political allies fell out of power and he lost his place and he had to go out and live in the countryside outside of florence and he talks about how he would go out into you know walk around in the fields but then he would end up kind of gravitating down to a nearby village and there'd be a little you know tavern in the village and he would get into arguments with the agricultural workers so he's basically getting in these shouting matches with the local rednecks and then he says but then i would you know i would embarrass myself i would behave ridiculously he said then i would go home and i would take off my working clothes and i would put on my robes and i would go into my study and there i would encounter the great thinkers and artists of the past and they would receive me with hospitality and treat me as an equal and he said and this is what i was born to do or do you know not arguing with the local drunkards down at the tavern that wasn't getting him anywhere but but it's interesting because he kind of says i couldn't resist it i can't resist getting into that sort of thing and that was the equivalent it's the 16th century you know uh tuscan countryside version of twitter where he's he's having these these fights but then he finds no there's real dignity and there's real communication to be had in exchanging thoughts with these people and that i think is the really distinctive thing about old books as opposed to music or the visual arts or especially old book old music and old art those are all wonderful incredibly powerful things i would love to talk about them at more length but i especially like the idea of the voices from the past and the particular humanizing effect they can have upon us so heather black asked what is the role of humility within this framework for reading of the past i think if you you know if you go to the past really willing to hear really willing to hear you may find yourself with the humility to take seriously ideas that you would never take seriously if they were presented to you by someone of your own time and place it's it's not necessarily that you would come to agree but it you you you can imagine a human context in which someone might think of these ideas there's an example i give in the book of just this absolutely wonderful writer dorothy osborne she's um uh i think the greatest letter writer in the english language and is just an amazing she's like jane austen uh 150 years before jane austen because she was writing in the 1640s and 50s but all of her writing is letters to her fiance and she actually speaks really disparagingly of women who write she says i you know if i didn't sleep for a fortnight it wouldn't come to that she has she's just this is a terrible thing to her and then when she gets married then that's it no more writing because she's with the person she loves and she doesn't need to write the letters anymore and it's just it's such a strange experience because on the one hand i'm reading her and i'm thinking you're one of the most wonderful writers i have ever read i wish you had written novels and she's like no i don't care about any of that stuff you know i only wrote because i had to and i had to because i was separated from the person i loved and then once you know we shared the same bed and sat at the same breakfast table then i didn't need to write letters anymore and that's just on the one hand i'm thinking oh how terrible you know the world needs your gift you know but on the other hand i'm thinking wow how interesting that someone would think that way that you can't imagine anyone today thinking it's just fascinating to reflect on how she might have come to see things that way even if i regret it which i do um and i i think just that i think that encounter when you have a real encounter with the past it almost forces you into position of humility where you're having to listen to something that you didn't really even plan to listen to and yet there it is so stephen wutz asks what authors have most increased your personal density i think um the the most important writer for me uh in my life has been w.h auden and i have been enormously privileged to be able to uh to study his work to write about it to edit i've edited two of his books um critical editions of of his books and i've got another one that i'm beginning to work on now and i think i think one of the reasons for that is that auden was um his his best critic who is also his literary executor edward mendelsohn said alden was the first major poet to be completely at home in the 20th century he didn't spend his time longing to live in some other time in some other place as t.s eliot had done and as ezra pound had done and as william butler yates had done he was he was a 20th century person and he knew it and he was at home but because he was at home in the 20th century he felt free to draw on the wisdom of all the ages and so his uh just trying to understand his poetry and understanding what it was he was reading and where you know where these ideas came from and what he's drawing on that has been an education in itself and i think it's a great example of what the previous question was about is the humility auden has in in relation to the writers of the past has probably done more to shape my own desire to have a similar humility i just he he has just meant the world to me and i i'm so grateful that i discovered him it was in i didn't really discover autumn until the very last course i took in graduate school and then i had to try to sort of restructure my whole my dissertation and everything to try to spend more time with him and he has really been great company uh over the decades for me so our next question comes from eric bateman and eric writes do you and if so how do you see your book jumping the gap between self-help for individuals and help for our common public life many of the issues around cancer culture especially in the university have to do with questions of the public good is it okay for professors to ask victims of abuse to read texts that might bring up painful memories is it okay to give disproportionate public attention to authors with problematic views etc does breaking bread with the dead have anything to say about these sorts of bigger questions i certainly hope so and in fact it was written specifically because of this context [Music] and i i don't i don't talk about it that directly because i don't want to put people on the spot and i don't want people to feel that they're being judged but there are certain passages in the book that i quite consciously intended as a response to the impulse to cancel that arises from a feeling of defilement um and so uh the the primary example of that is the chapter of my book that deals with frederick douglass and especially with his great speech um that he gave in 1852 i think on what the meaning of the fourth of july to the slave and it's it's just an amazing amazing speech because of of the way that he embodies all of the virtues that i am trying to commend in in my book when when douglas says he says what i look at these the the the founders of of america and i hear the celebration of what they have done and uh on this fourth of july and he says it's a day of festivity for you but it's not for me it's not a day of festivity for me and it's not a day of festivity for him because the lack of courage on the part of the founders meant that he was born into slavery and meant that that his escape from slavery was very uncertain and um he he says i i can't rejoice on this day because while i have my freedom uh many many millions of people with my color do not have theirs and but then he says but you know what i read the works of the founders and i listen to what they said and i realize as he puts it they were great in their day and generation they were truly great um and that balance right they were great in so many ways and yet they fell short in ways that have been catastrophic for people like me i mean you know you could you could it would be so easy for douglas to say i have nothing good to say about these people and yet he sees them as people whose ideals were exactly the ideals that they should have had at a time when many people did not have those ideals the problem is that they did not live up to them as fully as they needed to and so the balance there between uh acknowledging the validity and indeed the necessity of the ideals and also acknowledging the ways in which even the best people don't live up to their ideals that is such a model of charitable engagement on the part of someone who could claim this sorry this is just too painful for me this is this just there's too much pain here no he doesn't do that he like looks at right in the eye and i wouldn't demand that anybody do that but i think he's a great example and i think sometimes if people think i've been in situations like this with students before where they have said i don't think i can read this book because this is really painful to me and you want to take that seriously and sometimes i've said let's read something else and sometimes i've said okay don't read these parts of the book but read the rest of it and sometimes we've come to an agreement that they're going to read it even though it's painful and we're going to talk through it i think in that kind of situation especially in a university setting or any sort of teaching setting everything literally everything depends on whether there is a relationship of trust between the student and the teacher you can get students to read almost anything if they know that you care about them and that you wish them well and that you want to do everything you can to secure their well-being if that's if they know that about you then then they'll go with you into some difficult places um and it won't always be easy but it's usually really rewarding for for all of us if we have that that mutual trust that's great so our next question comes from chris baca who asked a little bit about the perhaps contrarian nature of a self-help book that instead of talking about mindfulness in the moment he looks for and chris asked do you see the notion of expanding one's temporal bandwidth as being at odds with some of the current notions about living in the present and if so why yeah i think i think that a lot of people who talk about living in the present think that they are endorsing mindfulness but they're actually misunderstanding the concept of mindfulness and they're misunderstanding the concept of living in the present right that the the um if what you are doing is uh cultivating a kind of silent meditative um embrace of the world around you then you are getting yourself out of the dire hose right if you're if you are con if if instead you're you're texting and you're receiving text and you're and you're doomed scrolling is another word that people use uh these days and you're continually engaging that you're actually not in the moment you're not in the moment you're you're not present you're actually always waiting for the next thing waiting for the next thing right and genuine mindfulness is uh is nothing like that and genuinely being in the present is nothing like that there is um there's a sermon i think about this uh so often it's a sermon that rowan williams gave about 20 years ago where he talks about prayer as being like bird watching that if you're a bird watcher you know that you might sit there all day and nothing will happen right you'll never see any of the birds that you came to see nothing will happen and you have these long long periods in which you know that nothing will happen and he said but in those in those periods what you do if you're a an expert bird watcher is you keep your mind and i love this phrase he says both slack and attentive that is your mind is kind of quiet it's not tense it's not working things over but it's still attentive so that when something does come within your field of vision you will recognize it and he says that he thinks that's what prayer is like being in the presence of god is like this it says you you might have a long long period in which you're waiting on god and nothing is happening but then that moment comes and and and god is present and your mind needs to be slack but also attentive to be ready for that when it happens that i think is real really being in the moment and that is really being present but that is a discipline that is very difficult to achieve it's something that i'm certainly not very good at but in a paradoxical sort of way breaking bread with the dead is something that helps me to that that is the the habits i learn of patience and forbearance and reflectiveness and um not just going with immediate responses or instinctive responses but having more considered responses taking setting something aside for a while to think about it then coming back to it all of these things are slowing me down and they're giving me more patience and that is actually all really really good training for prayerfulness meditativeness uh being genuinely in the moment so in a strange sort of way if you want to be truly present then it's really good to prepare for that by spending a lot of time in the past that's great many years ago i wrote a book that i called a theology of reading and in that book i talked about thinking of books as our neighbors as temporary neighbors and um and to read them uh with jesus's great two-fold commandment in mind that the the the summary of the law is to love the lord your god with all your heart with all your mind with all your strength and to love your neighbor as yourself and loving your neighbor in books is easier than loving the neighbor who is actually right next door and maybe is a little obnoxious in more ways than one but i would really encourage you to think of treating books as your neighbors and encountering them as practice for loving your more immediate neighbors if you think of it as a kind of a training in charity then encountering old books can be even more enriching to you that's great alan thanks so much for joining us today thank you so much for inviting me thank you to all of you for joining us for the past hour have a great weekend [Music] you

Channel: The Trinity Forum

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Id: La_iR22-VCs

Length: 56min 17sec (3377 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020