Michael Zank

Is it me, or is the world changing more rapidly than it used to? By world, I mean “everything:” nature, politics, social norms, means of communication, even restaurants open and closing.  Could be me, of course. Getting older does a number on the body, one’s pace, one’s ability to absorb information and to bring it into some sort of cohesion. There seems no time to do that. Our lives are too cluttered to pause and think about it all for a moment. Worse, the parameters by which one used to make sense of the world seem to have become dated, superannuated, no longer sufficient to explain or understand just about anything. One’s sense of certainty, grounded in a delineation between what is certain and what is doubtful, has given way to an array of verities of doubtful use. The ground under one’s feet shifts and there’s no terra firma in sight onto which one might step, nothing to recommend to those coming after us, setting us all adrift. We are those polar bears now.

Perhaps we are merely catching up with the dissolution of the spirit heralded by the giants of modern thought: the Nietzsches, Freuds, and Foucaults. In the post-communist era, utopia has lost its appeal, history its meaning, and society its cohesion. In the age of neo-liberalism and neo-Great-Power-imperialism, the rights regimes proclaimed in the wake of the defeat of fascism have been destabilized. In the US, the integrity of the vote, of public health and collective trust in science, civil rights (including voting rights) and reproductive rights that until recently had been considered constitutionally sound are being dismantled. Civility is dismissed as weak, replaced by a regime of the naked self-interest of the rich and connected. The fossil fuel industry and its cronies are going for broke. Weapons industries – subsidized by tax dollars – are thriving. Mass protests against the self-destructive path of humanity either fizzles or is crushed by brute force.

The moral universe may be as deficient as it has ever been, but the technological means by which we destroy ourselves and one another have greatly increased. This is where the greatest, most tangible acceleration is taking place and there’s no one to stop it. It seems as if we have already relinquished ourselves to the prospect of posthumanism: a world without fear and hope, an afterlife of pure entertainment, a technologically perfected soulless system that can equally sustain itself on Mars as on Earth because it no longer depends on our bodies, our opinion, or our assent.

As I am writing this, I realize that I was wrong to think that any of this is new. Novelty is not new. It has been with us forever. Our laments and fears have always been the same. So perhaps the only thing that is new is the depth of our hopelessness, our lack of confidence in the self-righting powers of the human spirit, our helplessness in the face of the human desire to return to zero, to destroy itself and take every bit of organic life with it to the moment it first appeared on our planet? This, too, is not a new insight. We already have a glimpse of this desire for self-destruction, this denial of the will to live, this drive toward death, the desire for the quiet moment where everything is arrested, no fire burns, no wind blows. We are moving in the world of myth and religion, of wrestling titans, frenzied Bacchae tearing their own infant children to pieces and reveling in their blood. The old eat the young, feeding and feasting on the time that remains. Life and Death are twins.

There is a strange comfort in the knowledge that there is nothing new under the sun, that what was will come again and that what will be has long since been. This is the wisdom of the old and of the ancients. It is our privilege, the one we earned by being around for a little while, to think this way. For we are also part of this ever changing, never different world. We are the same in the different. Perhaps this is what the human mind does best. It is the calm in the storm, the anchor in all that is adrift.

There. I said it. I hate museums. I just didn’t know until now that I hated them. It took understanding why you might want to hate them for me to acknowledge the aversion.

I don’t always hate museums, and there’s always something to do in a museum. For instance, you can go to the café on the ground floor, or in the annex, or somewhere else, which is always very pretty and inviting, stand in line, mess up the coffee machine, eat bad cheesecake, get in a fight with the staff because they served you a cold sandwich that was supposed to be hot … Just kidding. Museums are wonderful places, of course. Especially art museums. There is usually a LOT of art. Sometimes, museums only display very few works. That makes them easier to take in. If there’s a lot, it can be overwhelming, which is usually the case. There is usually a lot of white or other plain colors. In the new museum at the former Tacheles in Berlin Mitte (Oranienburger Straße) there is a lot of graffiti in the hallways, and the background to the images on display is grey. Kind of dark. There are always things to read next to the artwork, so you know what you are looking at. Clearly, art cannot be trusted to speak for itself. Come to think of it, the whole thing is more like a zoo for artwork. Makes one wonder whether the art on display was trapped, tranquilized, and taken in boxes to a safe and protected space (“Don’t touch the artwork!”) where it can do no harm, while still entertaining the visitors and their children. Perhaps someone should do a comparative study on art-museum and zoo education and how they have changed over time. Animals are no longer supposed to be confined in inhumane ways. Perhaps artwork will be next? Let it roam free, liberated from explanatory labels, grey or white walls, and far from the uncomprehending gaze of the unwashed. Or the washed, for that matter.

Two visitors at the National Gallery in London (September 2022)

And the poor guards? Imagine spending a whole day standing around or walking on marble along a confined and preordained route, much like the panther in Rilke’s poem, in standard issue shoes, not really looking at the art at all, but making sure that people behave. Kind of like a zookeeper. It does not seem to be a fun thing to do with one’s life. Miriam always talks to some of the museum guards, and she’s long thought it would be great to do an art piece on museum guards. Would that need to be guarded, too? What she means is this: if we only look at the artwork and ignore the people that are there to make sure the art on display is safe from curious touchers, tomato-juice-armed environmentalists, and random vandalists, there is something wrong with that picture.

Which brings me to something I read that made me think it’s ok to hate museums. In Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, there’s a particularly dense chapter on Hermann Broch. I knew the name and thought of him as a novelist, which he was, but he was also someone keenly interested in science, and he developed a theory of knowledge that reached for some kind of “earthly absolute.” (I spare you the details, mostly because I am not sure I understood them myself.) What I learned from that essay is that Broch harbored profound contempt for the idea of l’art pour l’art, that is, turning the aesthetic experience into an absolute value among other absolute values. In the extreme case, to think of art as an absolute value can lead, as Arendt remarks, to an appreciation of the beauty in using men as human torches, as Nero did when Rome was aflame. You get the point. This reminds me of the year-end presentation by one of our son’s fellow students in a little private start-up junior high school. As her subject, she chose to speak about Hitler and how he was a painter and simply wanted to make the world a more beautiful place. Cringe we did. But she understood something. Broch sees the l’art pour l’art movement as the beginning of kitsch. In other words, art that has become independent of all other values and makes itself an absolute cannot be distinguished from kitsch.

I am not sure he’s right. But the thought struck a chord. I thought, what if that is precisely the effect of a museum, which warehouses collections upon collections and puts them on display, restoring and preserving them for posterity, yes, but without being able to say, why? This struck me as particularly perverse in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, which we visited recently twice in one week. (Full disclosure: the second time I went right to the café where I got into a fit with the staff because of a sandwich.) The gallery, part of the erstwhile Prussian state holdings, was established by the generosity of private collectors, most of them wealthy Jews, who in the 19th century, must have bought thousands of works especially from Italy and the Netherlands. For someone interested in the history of painting, particularly in portraits, this is one of the best places to visit. Here you can study the history of Western painting from the early Middle Ages down to the 19th century. They have something from every significant painter and from every school.

If art is of absolute value it cannot be measured by anything else. Ethics for example. Or truth. Of course we loathe the attempt to make art subservient to politics. But the idea that there is a connection between l’art pour l’art and kitsch is intriguing. If art is meant to produce something that is beautiful, and only beautiful, rather than something good, where the beauty is the end and not a by-product of, say, the attempt of representing something truthfully and honestly, it is in danger of losing the ability to be distinguished from kitsch. So it’s not the technical perfection or the mastery in the use of space or color that are in doubt, but the fact that art belongs in context and in relation with other things of value. It cannot be an end in itself. Art can also become kitsch when it is infinitely reproducible (museum stores, anyone?). Religious paintings taken out of their sacred context and placed in a museum to illustrate the “progress” in style, perspective, or technical mastery of another sort are kitsch. Kitsch means trivial. By cordoning off their collections and by conferring on art their stamp of high cultural approval, museums contribute to the commodification of art. That is, their kitschification. Owning an original Picasso says something about the owner, not the painting. It says, I can afford an original and don’t need to make do with reproductions.

We need to ask the question anew when art is not kitsch. I wouldn’t seek the answer to this question in a museum.

By “modernity” in the singular I refer to any and all varieties of modernity as manifest in a plurality of “modernities.” “Modernity” as such refers – in this project – to phenomenal worlds or worldviews situated in both continuity and difference from various medieval and ancient antecedents and that are thus structured by shifts in worldview indicated in epochal transitions, e.g., from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican view of the world, or associated with transformative processes,  e.g. “secularization.”

By religious structures of modernity I refer to the transformation of premodern religious norms and forms into specifically modern concerns, patterns, symbols, value systems etc. This project aims to guide, as well as gather, research into the presence of the religious in the secular, of the premodern in the modern, namely, as constitutive elements of various modernities. The project thus builds on, as well as broadens, Max Weber’s example of uncovering the Protestant character of modern capitalist production and extends, as well as subjects to critique, his method of searching for religious elements as constitutive of specifically modern phenomena.

This research cluster is conceived within the context of the Graduate Program in Religion at Boston University, specifically the specialization in Religion in Philosophy, Politics, and Society. It interdisciplinary in that it draws on philosophical, and more broadly humanistic, as well as social and political science theory and puts them in conversation.

A note on “secularization:” Historically speaking, “secularization” refers to the forced transfer of assets owned by the Church into the hands of the laïcistic state in the wake of the French Revolution. It became a useful metaphor in descriptions of the profound changes that spiritual and symbolic assets once associated with religion entered into the “possession” of the laity, whether this was in form of art and literature, or in form of institutions such as modern state-run schools and universities. This grand transfer of religious inheritances into the hands of new and novel forms of social organization and modes of expression is the very subject of this research cluster. I nevertheless suggest to use the term secularization sparingly, as it seems to imply that what came from religious contexts is now no longer “religious” in that it has been secularized. The transfer of agency, however, may not in fact have changed the “structure” of what has been transferred, claimed, or inherited which therefore remains open to investigation. By focusing on the possibility of identifying “religious structures of – rather than in – modernity” I hope to stimulate the generation of new questions and perspectives on “secularization” and the putative “secular.”

Finally, by “research cluster” I mean a loose association of individual projects (dissertations, conferences, lectures, journal articles, etc) conducted by graduate students, post-graduate fellows, and faculty that grow out of and significantly relate to sustained conversations that will stake out the intellectual profile and approach that is here only briefly adumbrated.

Moses Mendelssohn famously argued that mixed sentiments are aesthetically more profound than simple ones.  Profound does not mean pleasing. Pleasing requires something pleasant, but mixed sentiments are not as pleasant as simple ones. A mix of joy and sadness can hardly be more pleasant than joy, pure and simple. Whatever strength joy confers, or expresses, is diminished by sadness. Why then praise mixed sentiments?

I believe that mixed sentiments elevate us. Simple sentiments presuppose attention to things that are simple. Complex sentiments are attached to, or evoked by, complex matters.

Imagine you are God. You look down from your heavenly abode and you see all the things that occur on this earth, let alone other earths for which you may be responsible. Do you think you'd be happy? The gods are happy only if they don't really care about us down here. A God who cares cannot be happy. But, assuming that God does not manipulate or force us to act one way or another, he may not always and only be sad. Sometimes he may be pleased. Or rather, since He is God, and for Him there is no time (time attaching only to temporal things), he must always and forever be both, sad and happy. Mixed emotions bring us a little closer to God.

There is a wonderful rabbinic story about what went on in Heaven as the Israelites shouted for joy when their Egyptian pursuers drowned in the sea, riders, horses, and all. The angels, so goes the story, wanted to join the chorus of jubilation. Perhaps it was Miriam's timbrel that proved irresistible. But the Holy One, Blessed be He, immediately shushed them and said, how can you be jubilant as my creatures are drowning?

Today, Israel celebrated its 73rd Independence Day. It is a joyous occasion for all who take pride and comfort from Israel's existence. Among them is my father-in-law who just turned 100 and who saw what people do to Jews who don't have what it takes to fight back. Israel is strong, and that is good.

Many of us who take pride and comfort from Israel's existence are also haunted by the fact that Israel's independence means catastrophe to the Palestinian Arab community. Can we keep both of these facts in our minds at the same time? Not at the same time, perhaps. After all, we are not God. But perhaps one after the other. And then, perhaps, our sense of joy will be mitigated by sadness. 

May this be more than an exercise in aesthetics. There is nothing sublime or beautiful, says philosopher Immanuel Kant, that is not also morally good.

Purim, as I see it, is a Jewish version of Mardi Gras. Or perhaps it's the other way around. In any case, it is not in the Torah of Moses and it wasn't commanded at Sinai. It was instituted, according to the scroll of Esther, which provides the legend of Purim, by the Persian Jewish community, in the days of King Ahashveros or Ahasuerus, presumably a reference to the Persian shahinsha Xerxes (5th century BCE), to celebrate the rescue (after a casting of lots, hence the Persian name of the festival) of Persian Jewry from the evil plot of Haman. Heroine of the story is Hadassah Esther (Ishtar) who braves the great king by approaching him unbidden and, by doing so, she risks her life for the sake of her fellow-Jews. There is also her good uncle Mordecai, a loyal subject to the same king who earlier discovered a plot against the same king. The Book of Esther is the only canonical biblical book not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Hebrew version does not mention God at all. The Greek version adds a prayer, while the Hebrew version plays out entirely on the human plane.

Timed to announce the coming of the First Month of the Jewish calendar, i.e., Nissan, whose New Moon is associated with the birth of the Messiah and which culminates in the Passover, Purim has much in common, in terms of its place in the seasons of the solar year, with Mahdi Gras, which marks the beginning of Lent and leads up to Easter. These liturgical similarities are not coincidental. Both Jewish and Christian celebrations hark back to earlier times, when the natural cycle – and human dependence on the mercy of the gods – was the essence of religion. Both Jewish and Christian celebrations obscure the agricultural origins of these moments in cyclical time by means of narratives about divine providence and salvation in history.

Purim is the only holiday where, as the talmudic rabbis suggest, a man is to drink to the point that he begins to confuse hero and villain of the story, Haman and Mordecai. How so? When the scroll of Esther is read in the synagogue, people are supposed to make noise whenever one of these characters is mentioned. You are supposed to cheer for Mordecai and hiss or boo when Haman appears. Sometimes both appear in the same sentence. It is easy to get confused in the emphatic expression of opposite emotions in short order. It doesn't take much alcohol to become too sluggish to quickly make the right response.

I once attended a reading of the scroll of Esther at the synagogue of the Satmar Hasidic community in Meah Shearim. Men and children had dressed up. Some looked ornate in their usual Satmar garb, others – especially some of the boys – looked burlesque. As I was trying to find the place in the printed edition of Esther I was handed, a boy dressed as a voyager on Star Trek, complete with a noise making laser pistol, passed me by a number of times. It seemed like everyone around me was moving and making a lot of noise. I stood out by the fact that I quite obviously neither belonged nor had any sense of where we were in the reading. After a while, the boy in the space outfit took pity on me. He took the book out of my hands, leafed for a moment, then gave it back to me, this time opened to the right place. It was a gesture of kindness and inclusion.

In that spirit: Happy Purim, everyone!