Body Heat and the uses of nostalgia

Let's stick with Jameson a while (see Part 1 if this doesn't make sense to you). He singles out Body Heat for discussion in his essay because it is a nostalgic film. That's important because, as he correctly notes, it isn't self-evidently a nostalgic film. On the surface it looked like anything but when it came out (it is now necessarily nostalgic because it is an old film).

Here is a nostalgic memory of my own. They used to sell a lighter that looked like a revolver. You'd pull the trigger and a flame would ignite at the tip of the barrel. It looked like a gun but it was something else. Jameson's point is that a lot of movies produced in the 1970s were nostalgic even though they look like they are something else.

All by itself, that's a good point but not a terribly original one; lots of people made it at the time. Nor do I think it is terribly difficult to see; as proof, I offer the fact that I saw it and discussed it in previous posts on Body Heat. What makes Jameson interesting is that he claims that the nostalgia is a form of pastiche and that this resorting to pastiche says something about the era that produced such films.

... in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is is to imitate dead styles, to speak through masks and with the voices of the styles in an imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. (p 18)

And you can see how this will tie to Jameson's Marxism. This sort of argument suggests that the ideology of what Jameson sincerely hopes is "late capitalism" is no longer up to justifying the existence of consumer society.

It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though we were unable unable today to focus on our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history. (p 20)

The key phrase here is, "as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience". If that is true—which is to say, that we have ended up in nostalgia not willfully but because of failure to be able to do anything else—then this is indeed and indictment of our culture.

One powerful hint that this might not be the case is Jameson's hesitancy in making the point. He has so hedged his argument so with the use of various conditional claims that it is easy to suspect that he doesn't believe what he is saying. Let's analyze that argument a little. The key point here, it seems to me, is that this nostalgia is just a delusion; that the sort of take it offers on the past has no rational use. If we can demonstrate that there is a willful rational activity in this sort of nostalgia, we will have an answer to his argument.

First a caveat: we cannot destroy Jameson's position. If a century of economic, cultural and political failure, to say nothing of the greatest mass murder in history, are not enough to make Jameson and others see the futility of Marxism and related types of command and control politics, nothing we can say will. The most we can hope to do is to show that there is a way to read a film like Body Heat as a achieving a meaningful "aesthetic representation of our own current experience".

Next a reminder: Jameson is not making a new point for a Marxist. If anything, his argument is a cliché of Marxist thought that can be traced back to Marx himself:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

We might say that Marxism begot modernism. What I mean by that is that modernism tries to deal with the past in an objective way just as Marx did. (This is another essay for another time, but I would argue that what Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner and modernism have in part is that they are all attempts to reform and restate the Enlightenment project in an efforts to revive it.)

Historians sometimes make a distinction between history, which can be documented, and "the past", which can only be told, that can help us here. For example, in late antiquity we find tribes in the Balkans who claim to be descended from a mighty warrior who came south from what is today Sweden. Now there is some truth embedded here and there in this sort of story. The people of the north were mighty warriors who were feared and respected by those on the European mainland. It is even possible that some might warriors did come south and establish communities. It is even possible, although extremely unlikely, that a tribal group we find moving into the Roman empire from the Balkans in the late fifth century actually is descended from a community founded by a mighty northern warrior. But, and this is the important thing, even if this extremely improbable thing were true, there is absolutely no way of tracing it in history.

In any case, it wasn't true. The story of being descended from a mighty northern warrior was a story whose value was in the telling. The telling of stories like this allowed these people to bond as a people (a process historians call ethnogenesis) and the measure of the its worth for the people who used this story was not its historical accuracy but its effectiveness; if the story inspires people to bond together and to work effectively as a people, then it is a good story, a good use of the past.

Modernists rejected the possibility that the past could have any use independent of what could be done with it objectively. Think of how James Joyce, in moving through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man rejects all the mythologies of Ireland. After doing this, he returns in Ulysses with a mythology from Ancient Greece that is picked and applied in a way that is artificial. Joyce doesn't expect that you will see Leopold Bloom as Ulysses. Quite the contrary, he expects you to be jarred by the contrast and so see how little Bloom has in common with a Greek hero. He is using the mythology in an objective way; it is only because you can see it from the outside that it is of any use.

We might imagine another version of the story where a cousin named David Bloom reads Homer and chooses to embrace the manly ideal in Homer and try to become like Ulysses. A modernist would only tell that story to demonstrate how pathetically the old cuckold would fail. His purpose would be to be objective, that is outside the myth; for the modernist, the person who tries to internalize the values of the old story can only be deluded. At the very most, the modernist might admit that these stories tell us something about human psychology because they exist as archetypes in our subconscious.

What the modernist cannot admit is that these stories might serve valuable moral ends. That they can inspire and guide us to be better men. And that, I will argue next week, is exactly what the story of Body Heat proposes to do.

Intentional story telling

I am preparing tomorrow's movie post and the movie I have picked is not a neo noir whereas every film I've discussed on Thursday all summer has been neo noir. It has a lot in common with them and a big commonality is the lying. The narrator of this story is so deeply embroiled in his lies that it may as well be a neo noir.

Anyway, that got me thinking about one of the points The Last Psychiatrist is so good at: intentionality in story telling. We often tell stories that, on their face, seem to make one kind of point but actually betray a completely different purpose.

And we almost always do this when we tell a story intentionally. That is the story that is told not to divert or titillate but a told with a purpose. A doctor who specialized in alcoholism gave a great example of this sort of lie and how it gets revealed once. A guy made an appointment to see him and when he sat down he told the doctor that he'd had a recent drinking experience that had really bothered him. And then he said this,

Doctor, I'm not an alcoholic. I hadn't had a drink in seventeen years before this happened.

And the doctor said, "I knew he was an alcoholic as soon as he said that. Only an alcoholic would remember exactly how long it had been since his last drink."

The alcoholic does not actually know he is an alcoholic in the same sense that he knows he owns a blue shirt. But the fascinating thing is the way the story betrays conflicting intentions. He says he isn't but he is obviously worried that he might be and is trying to deflect the narrative from the conclusion he doesn't want it to run to. That intention is right in the telling of the story and in who he chose to tell it to.

Anyway, the movie for tomorrow is A River Runs Through It, and it is that kind of story. The things Norman Maclean tries to hide are more interesting than what he reveals.

A story confirmed

You live long enough, you end up telling stories long after you are able to recall the actual experiences that they are based on.

That sentence is a little abstract, so let me explain. A long time ago, I hung around a yacht club here in the province. I hung around several of yacht clubs along Lakeshore in Montreal and in West Quebec. Anyway, this one club had a girl whose name was unfortunate. I can't tell you what it was because, unlike other girls' names I may have cited here, hers was an uncommon enough combination that it wouldn't be at all hard for someone to make the connection to the real woman.

Put it this way, if your last name was Carr, you wouldn't name your daughter Iona Carr (say it out loud) would you? Well, imagine that you had a last name that would make the perfect stripper/porn star name if you matched it up with a certain first name. No reasonable, caring parent would do that to their daughter would they? Well, they did. And the girl in question grew up to have the body type and personality to go with it when she hit thirteen. That's the story I have been telling anyway.

I couldn't tell you what exactly she looked like anymore. In the story she was a brunette, had a beautiful body and owned more bikinis than anyone I knew then or since. Whether she owned many other clothes was an open question because you hardly ever saw her at the club in anything but one of those bikinis.

She made a good story. I always brought her up when unfortunate names came up in conversation, which happens in my life every few years or so. (the last time it happened, a bunch of friends were sitting around having coffee on Sunday afternoon and one of the group, reading the newspaper, happened to notice the obituary of a Major Harry Dick.)

Although I keep her story in my repertoire, it's now more than thirty years since I knew her; although the story is well entrenched in my memory, the actual experiences are gone. And sometimes when I've telling it lately I've seen people's faces while they are listening to me and I've thought, they don't believe me. And then I'd wonder, is it true? Could I prove it? And I know that there are other stories that I and others I know tell that have subtly changed over the years. They've been streamlined and improved. Sometimes certain facts come to light that show me not only that these stories have drifted away from the truth, sometimes they show that the stories have come to have a point exactly opposite to what follows from what actually happened.

This story about this girl and her name started to feel too good to check, as the old journalists' joke had it. And I thought, maybe she didn't actually have that name. Maybe one day we were all sitting on the rocks at the yacht club drying off after swimming and someone said, maybe she even said it herself, "It's a good thing you weren't named X." And I, to improve the story, started telling it as if it was actually her name and eventually forgot that it wasn't.

Except, it seemed to fit other memories of that period. This particular yacht club was a bit of a budding grove in those days. There was a whole flock of girls who were just exquisite and I remember some of them talking about her. Having another girl who is a little too wild or a little too obvious in her manner to tell stories about is a very important part of every teen-aged girl's life, and I remember that this girl was the one that played that role at the club. She was a couple of years younger than the girls I knew best but I think I remember them talking about her with a certain tone. No sordid details were ever trotted out—that just wasn't done in those social circles—but the implication was always obvious enough.

I also think I remember looking at her and thinking I saw certain characteristics in her; I thought I saw a flirtatious, teasing attitude. I think I remember seeing her and other boys, several other boys, and something about the way they interacted suggested that they were familiar. And then there were all those bikinis. In those days the vast majority of women wore one-piece suits—to wear a bikini was a fairly aggressive fashion choice, to own an entire drawer full of them was like slapping people in the face with your sexuality.

Part of it, again I think, was that her family had a cottage within walking distance of the club. On a hot summer day, it made all the sense in the world for her to pull her bikini on and walk down to the club. Other girls who drove or rode their bikes wouldn't feel quite so comfortable dressed like that. And maybe she went up the hill with a boy now and then and during the week her parents worked and they weren't at the cottage except on nights and weekends. Yeah, that's it; I remember. Or am I imagining? I never went up the hill to her cottage.

She was also richer than most—a relative term because everyone at the club was comfortably in the upper middle class (go ahead and hate us for that if it makes you feel better). But to own a summer place on the shore where the yacht club was located was really something. In those days the upper middle class dressed differently and—as odd as this will seem today—girls in it were more willing to emphasize their femaleness (not just their femininity) than the working-class girls in town, who would often put T-shirts on over wet bathing suits the second they stepped out of the water.

Anyway, given that I only have these facts from the story I have been telling and can't call up any memories from the time, was she really like that or did that image get imposed on her because of that name?

Another funny thing about living long enough is that you start to get a sense of how the stories turn out. I know how most of the other girls who were just ripe to budding those few summers many years ago lived their lives since. I know what kind of stories they had. But hers I don't know. She was one of those people who just disappears out of your life.

I do know that some of those other girls-now-women—the ones whose stories I do know—have lived lives that were not unlike the ones implied for the girl with the unfortunate name. But what about the girl herself? Well, I'm sorry to have to report that her father just died. I saw his name in the obits just the other day. This story had begun to haunt me and when I saw his name, a name I could not have produced out of my memory five seconds before seeing the obit, I suddenly "remembered" him. And clicked on the obit and read it. He had only one daughter and she was the one. And yes, she had that name. She's married with two sons now and she didn't keep her maiden name. I wonder if she hated it?

I wonder how much of the rest of the story I think I remember is true? I have to admit that—as sorry as I was to see her father has died—I was also relieved to see the obituary because it confirmed my memory. Not because I think my memory is fading. I was relieved because I had some of my faith in stories reaffirmed.

Love

We might stop and note here, again, how little importance Austen attributes to love. We think love is all you need.

If Frank's story were a Hollywood movie, the central question would be, "Is Frank really in love?" because Hollywood always takes it that two people who are really in love are good persons. Love, we think, is a good and pure thing that guarantees the goodness of everything it touches. The lover in a movie might hurt the one he loves but, again because he is in love, he will do what it takes to fix the situation. In Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen blows that illusion to smithereens. As we will see, Willoughby really is in love and that is not enough.

Do stories serve too many purposes? (3)

Here is a weird thing Tyler Cowen says: "We are biologically programmed to think in terms of stories."

Think of what that means. There have been millions upon millions of human beings who have lived and died and over those millions upon millions of cases thinking in terms of stories proved to be an adaptive trait. So much so that we are all biologically programmed to think in terms of stories.

If you set out to test the claim that thinking in terms of stories is a good thing, you could not come up with a better test. There isn't a computer on earth that could run a model to test that assumption as completely and convincingly as evolution has done for us.

Is it any argument at all to say—as Cowen has done—that stories can be wrong and provide examples of this? It might be if we could demonstrate that in some situations stories consistently and systematically mislead us. (Does Cowen deliver on that? I'll get to that later.)

But such an argument, if it could be made, could only apply to specific situations that would have to be carefully described. It would be like an optical illusion—"if I put a straight stick in the water it will appear to be bent because ...." An optical illusion that applied at all times would be more like the fact that we see things in terms of discrete colours instead of as a continuous variation of shades. You might even say, in some contexts, that seeing discrete colours is to see things "not as they really are." But, outside of a physics classroom, what possible practical use would such a move be?

Meanwhile, it's very useful to see colours. It's not just an accident that we are evolved to see the world in colours or in terms of stories.

Morals of stories

A few of the examples of stories that Tyler Cowen gives are really morals that might be drawn of stories. He gives far more story tags than story morals but it is our tendency to draw morals from stories that bothers him the most. He doesn't like "stories" such as "we have to get tough", "it's a conspiracy", "it's good versus evil", "my job is really important", "it's good guys against bad guys", "buy this car and you will have beautiful romantic partners and a fascinating life".

He has three kinds of objections to morals we draw from stories:

1. They are too simple.
2. They have to serve too many purposes
3. They can be used to exploit us in advertising and propaganda

I'll take these one at a time over the next few posts. But first a reminder, none of the above are actually stories. There are a lot of conspiracy stories. The number of possible conspiracy stories may be infinite for all we know. We never tell the conspiracy story we can only tell a conspiracy story. We never tell the good versus evils story we can only tell a good versus evil story.

Story elements

At least one of the examples Tyler Cowen gives—the first example he gives—is really a story element. "A stranger came to town" is not a story but an element you find in a lot of stories. It's a useful thing to the person making a story because an alienated figure upsets normal social conventions. Orphans were a popular elements of stories in the 18th and 19th centuries for the same reasons. Putting a single person into the midst of a bunch of married people or starting someone in a couple and then having her lover/husband suddenly leave her are both useful elements.

Some things that can be story tags can also be story elements in different cases. A story that can be described as a quest story is one in which the quest predominates. But you can also have a story in which a quest is an element. Cowen identifies far more story tags than story elements (and that is telling) but many of his tags could also be elements. Animal House is not a journey story but it includes a journey.

Story tags

A lot of the examples of stories that Cowen gives are really just story tags. What's a story tag? It's a word or phrase that identifies a type of story.

Words are not things. When I say the word "table" I do not have to have a picture of a table in my head or even be thinking of or even be aware of all the possible examples of tables. I use the word when it is appropriate for the particular activity I am doing. "Set the table for dinner please." "Please check the figures in this table against the source." "I'd like to table this motion."

So it is with "story". And so it is with types of stories. "Rags to riches" is not a story it's a tag that identifies a whole lot of stories of a particular type.

Here is how tags work. Think of "table". You come to visit me and while I am opening the wine I say, "Go take a look at the table I bought today, it's in the back room." And you go confident that you will no trouble figuring out which piece of furniture to look at. You aren't going to spend a half hour studying the wing chair by mistake. But you also have no idea what the table will be. You don't know what colour it is, you don't know what it is made of, you don't know if it has three, four five or six legs and you don't know if it's a table to eat off or one to put knick knacks on.

The same is true if I say, I am going to tell you a rags to riches tale. You have to sit and listen to the story to know what it is.

A scary word

Okay, let's all sit down because I am about to introduce an incendiary word into the conversation. A word that frightens children and evokes an image of moral monsters. But I don't want anyone to think of it that way. I want to convince you that the word actually means something common and familiar. It occurs in the following sentence and I think you'll spot it right away.

The kind of moral argument that Tyler Cowen is pushing is called nihilism.

Okay, I know what you are thinking but nihilism is a pretty common and familiar position these days. This song is nihilist and so is this one. Lennon's song in particular has become the inspiration for a charity; it's not Mein Kampf. You could even say nihilism is the opposite of that book which describes life as a struggle.

What makes john Lennon, Peggy Lee and Tyler Cowen nihilists? It's a negative quality. These songs argue—and they both make a powerful and influential moral argument—that certain kinds of beliefs undermine our ability to be happy. Nihilists do not refuse to believe in anything at all. They believe in trees, rocks and glasses of orange juice just like everyone else. But there are certain very big moral organizing principles that they want to encourage us to give up on. They think that we can find freedom and happiness by doing so. Tyler Cowen is a nihilist in that sense.

His real target in that lecture is not stories but certain big moral ideas. Over the next few posts I'll try to prove that to you.


PS: A pedantic philosopher point. If there is one thing people think they know about nihilism it is that Nietzsche was a nihilist. He was not! If we put Tyler Cowen in a time machine and took him back to meet Nietzsche, Nietzsche would hate Tyler Cowen with a passion that would not be pleasant to contemplate. The last thing in the world Nietzsche wanted was for people to accept their messes.

The metaphors compared (2)

Tyler Cowen has picked his metaphor well just as Oakeshott did. If we look at it a bit, I think you will see that it is a brilliant metaphor.

We can leave a mess just like we can leave a park but we don't do so with the same attitude. A park is a place we visit and no one will condemn us for ignoring the park for a while. It's very different if we ignore a mess. And when we talk about leaving a mess we say things such as "running away from the mess".

Tyler Cowen is an economist and he is very interested in behaviourial economics. A mess is a good metaphor for him because our economic lives are not like history. We live here in the mess. There is a moral obligation to "face the mess". With the park, the moral of* the metaphor suggests we go to this place and act frivolously. With the mess, the moral of the metaphor suggests that we are trying to escape something if we can't face our mess.



* And yes, after praising Cowen for several posts, I just slipped the first critical jab in here like a picador quietly stirring the bull up for slaughter. The sharp implement was "the moral of".

The metaphors compared (1)

So we have a park and a mess. Let's think about what those two metaphors imply starting with the park.

A park is somewhere you visit and a place you can leave at will. There is a lot of stuff in a park; there are benches, paths, grass, trees, shrubs and play areas. When we exercise our opinions like a whippet we trace a line of convenience across the park and ignore the vast majority of stuff there. Like Cowen's stories, the whippet excludes a whole lot of territory. He is more interested in grass and paths because that suits what he likes to do (which is to run very fast). Likewise, we exercise our opinions by running them through the parts where they can travel easily ignoring the more complex and difficult terrain.

The historian Oakeshott admired the most was a guy named Frederick William Maitland. Maitland didn't write stories, he painstakingly went over source material looking for details that didn't fit stories. His most famous work as an historian was to pour over ancient parliamentary rolls and prove that the story of the English parliaments was NOT what everyone thought it was.

That's all good stuf and I'm with Oakeshott (and Cowen if he wants in) when it comes to history. But history is something we only do sometimes. We can leave history just like we leave the park and get back to our real lives.

Another metaphor

Okay, I'm going to try and make a very complicated point here and I may be hard to follow. I want to draw something about Cowen's idea of a mess out and I want to do it by comparing him to someone else who has an approach similar to his. The point of the comparison, though, is to highlight something unique to Tyler Cowen and not what he has in common with this other guy.

The other guy is an intellectual historian and philosopher, now dead, named Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott came from a school of historians who distrusted stories. They did so specifically because they distrusted a specific type of story called Whig history. What exactly that is doesn't really matter here. The thing that matters is that he doesn't like stories.

And he has a metaphor too. I'm going from memory so this won't be verbatim but Oakeshott says that history is increasingly a place where we exercise our opinions like we exercise whippets in the park on a Sunday afternoon.

Whippets are very lean, fast dogs sort of like greyhounds only smaller. Imagine you are looking down on a park from an upper story and every once in a while one of these dogs flits across the park, tracing a line, running very quickly—and then its gone.

The epistemological metaphor

When we talk about what knowledge is, we fall back on metaphors. Everyone does it. Plato, famously, used the metaphor of sight. To know what a thing is, you have to be able to see it clearly. Plato has been hugely influential. Most of us use that metaphor at least some of the time. Other people have compared knowledge to food, you have to chew it up and digest it to really have it.

What is Tyler Cowen's metaphor for knowledge?

Well, he is a post-Kantian; I know another confusing concept. What I mean by this is quite simple though. Cowen thinks what distinguishes what we really know from what we think we know is how we organize it. It's the way that knowledge is organized into a mental filing system that helps me determine what I really know versus stuff I am uncertain about.

The most important thing Cowen wants us to understand about knowledge is that it doesn't naturally organize. It sits there scattered all over the place and he wants to save us from believing knowledge is more organized than it really is.

The moral claim

Tyler Cowen also claims that stories make us unhappy. Because stories lead us to imagine our lives in certain ways, they also try to lead lives that are appropriate to these stories. But, Cowen asks, are our lives really like that?

When asked to describe what their life was like, Cowen tells us that most people defined in terms of stories. The most common example of the stories people saw their lives in terms of a journey (51%), a battle (11%), the seasons (10%), novel (8%), a race (5%), a live performance like a play (5%), or a carousel (4%). There are a few undecideds and "other" as well.

Very few people, Cowen points out, see their lives as a mess. And yet a mess is, he insists, what it probably is. He goes on to ensure us that this could be a good thing; that we would be happier* if we just accepted that our lives are messes. That's the moral claim. We just make ourselves miserable pretending that our lives are journey's when they are actually messes and we should stop doing that.



* I can't help but notice that the specifically moral argument he uses is more akin to Aristotle than typical modern morality. Modern moral arguments tend to be about making the right choices. But when people just talk about what really matters to them, happiness always looms large just as it does for Cowen here.

The epistemological claim

Cowen thinks stories mislead us in two ways.

First, he thinks they mislead us because they simplify matters. Stories, he says, cut out a whole lot of information. If you want to tell a story about Jesus, Alexander the Great, or Anne McCreary who lives at 231 Westmoreland Street, that story requires you to leave a whole lot of stuff out.

He's right about that.

Second, Cowen thinks stories can beguile us. He thinks they can present life in a light that is so compelling that we forget to pay attention to details that run counter to the story. Details we really ought to be paying attention to. I'm not so sure he is right about that.

What does Tyler Cowen get right?

I like to argue with people I think are very smart and who have something intelligent to say. I do this for selfish reasons. I think I learn more when I challenge people who strike me as intelligent and who maybe even intimidate me a bit. I am onto Tyler Cowen right now because I want to use his arguments about stories to get a better grip on the way Jane Austen uses stories.

Here is the question I am going to start with. What are the strongest parts of Cowen's argument? Or, to put it another way, here I am a Jane Asuten fan and , therefore, a guy who puts a lot of weight on stories—who thinks stories (especially her stories) are important and good ways to understand life—what is it about Cowen's lecture that should most shake me up? I think there are two things. There is an epistemological argument and a moral argument.

Okay, some may want to bail right now so as to avoid anything that features the word epistemological. It's a simpler and more complicated word than it seems. The simple aspect is all we need to know to get going on Cowen. Epistemology is about knowledge. It's about distinguishing what we really know from what we just think we know.

A lecture about stories

Tyler Cowen is unquestionably a very smart guy. The video below shows him talking about stories at a TED talk. He makes some very good points in the video but they aren't about stories. In fact, I'd argue that he doesn't have a very good grasp on what stories are at all.

That's the uncharitable way of putting it. A more charitable way would be to say that this video shows a kind of mistake that is perennially attractive to very smart people.

On to Sense and Sensibility

"We have never finished Hamlet, Marianne; our dear Willoughby went away before we could get through it. We will put it by, that when he comes again.... But it may be months, perhaps, before that happens."

Lines like this are so pregnant with meaning you could spend a lifetime on them. Not all the meaning can have been intended by the author. For example, some Shakespeare scholars nowadays argue that Shakespeare himself never finished Hamlet. That he wrote one play and then rewrote it and kept tinkering with it until he retired.

In any case, we have never finished with Hamlet. It comes back again and again. It really came back in Austen's lifetime. (Shakespeare, although always recognized as an exceptional writer, didn't become "Shakespeare" until the Romantic era.) The line above has been called Hamlet's walk on part in Sense and Sensibility. I think it's more than that. Buckle up, I'm going to make an audacious claim. I think that just as Austen ended up using the story elements from a Radcliffe novel to make a different sort of story in Northanger Abbey, in Sense and Sensibility, she takes the story elements of Hamlet and makes something else of them.

Before doing that, I have to explain what I mean by "story elements". I'm going to do that explanation by picking a fight with a guy named Tyler Cowen starting today.

Cultural appropriation

One aspect of McCloskey's comment I did not deal with yesterday is what might be called the cultural appropriation argument. I didn't do that because I think cultural appropriation, while a high crime to the modern intellectual class, is no offense at all.

It occurred to me while I was waking up this morning that this will not seem as obvious to others as it does to me so I will explain. First, here is where McCloskey made a cultural appropriation argument,

Christians (starting it appears, with Jesus himself but certainly including the writers of the Gospels) mined the Hebrew Bible (called so by people who do not want to insult the Jews by calling their book the "old" testament) for anticipations of the coming of Christ, especially for example the book of Isaiah."

Note the possessive above: "their book." Short version, I don't think it is any insult to anybody for Christians to use Jewish scripture or to call it the Old Testament. (I have another factual objection to "old testament". As Benedict 16 says, the covenant between God and Israel was never revoked; it is still active and, therefore, there is nothing "old" about the old testament.)

But, to return to the more general argument about cultural appropriation, I have three kinds of objections here. I have an historical objection: given what we know of the historical origins of Jewish scriptures, objecting to cultural appropriation is not a cogent argument. I have a moral objection: I think most of our piety about cultural appropriation is misplaced. And I have a pragmatic objection: one of the markings of a healthy, thriving culture is that it freely makes use of good cultural ideas it can acquire from other cultures it comes into contact with.

I'm going to focus only on the historical aspect here (although the other two arguments will be hinted at).

Every thing we know about the archeology of the region where the scriptures were written tells us that these scriptures were created by wholesale borrowing of tales and concepts from other nearby cultures. The book of Genesis, to take an example that, as McCloskey put it, even slightly sophisticated biblical students know about, appropriates and rewrites the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish.

Archeologists digging up ancient Canaanite temples have discovered that these were built to the same layout and rules as described in the Bible. And there is no doubt whatsoever about which came first. The ancient Israelites appropriated much of their religious thought and practice from others. The beloved psalm that the King James beautifully, but inaccurately, renders as "If I forget they O Jerusalem. may my right hand lose its cunning," began life as a Canaanite hymn.

Further, there is no reason to think that the great warrior tales that make up the story of the David are anything but common tales of heroic behaviour that were brilliantly put together to make up the books (originally just one book) of Samuel. This process was not unlike the way similar tales were put together to compose the Iliad.

And "compose" is the right word. Just as the great classical composers did not invent new melodies but composed existing materials into great symphonies, the Jewish scriptures take religious concepts and stories from all over the ancient middle east and compose them into a new vision.

This composition was done, I believe, under the inspiration of God and he used this moment to give the world, which already knew him imperfectly, a new and better idea of who and what he is. Exactly how novel is an open question. There is certainly foreshadowing of the new vision in the elements these ancient scribes put together (how could there not be) to make up the new scriptures. But there is also something special that does not exist before.

To take a well-known argument, the first of the two creation stories in Genesis borrows the structure and cosmology of Enuma Elish but it changes crucial details of the moral theology of the earlier tale. In Enuma Elish, Marduk the great warrior who defeats the older generation gods, finishes the story by creating humans. He does so in order that these humans can be slaves to his bother and sister gods. In Genesis, God has no predecessors and creates human beings as an act of love. He creates us so that we may flourish and be happy.

That Christians would appropriate and read Isaiah in a new way— in a way that fills out our understanding of God and his interaction with the world—strikes me as entirely acceptable.



To anticipate some questions. Yes, I there there are limits on appropriation. We should adhere to copyright law. (Although I think current copyright law is excessive: Mickey Mouse should have been in the public domain for decades now and it is insane that initialisms can be copyright.) It would also be wrong for me to take the life events of one of my neighbours and make a novel out of them, unless I disguise them so well that no one can figure the origins out. On the other hand, I think public figures surrender much of this right to privacy. Joni Mitchell might, for example, feel a little peeved at the way her life and character were apparently used to create Jane in the movie Laurel Canyon—I say "apparently" because the makers deny this—but, however peeved she may be, I think she should not have any moral or legal argument against it. Likewise, I think it was a travesty that a British court sided with Stephen Spender against a novelist who had used Spender's life as a basis of his fiction. By extension, I think that the culture of any people becomes public property.