#western civilization

While we’re swinging for the fences, here’s Lewis Lapham pondering the unfathomable immensity of the cosmos: “Isn’t that kind of the fun, the looking into the vast darkness ripe with wonders that will never cease? The limitless expanse of human ignorance … rouses out the love of learning, kindles the signal fires of the imagination. We have no other light with which to see and maybe to recognize ourselves as human … To bury the humanities in tombs of precious marble is to deny ourselves the pleasure that is the love of learning and the play of the imagination, and to cheat ourselves of the inheritance alluded to in Goethe’s observation that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth. Technology is the so arranging of the world that it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing. Machine-made consciousness, man content to serve as an obliging cog, is unable to connect the past to the present, the present to the past. The failure to do so breeds delusions of omniscience and omnipotence.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image Credit: Autopsy of the First Crocodile, Onboard, Upper Egypt, by Ernest Benecke)

It’s not just that the concept of Western civilization is bankrupt, racist bullshit … it’s that it’s much fresher bullshit than you might think. Kwame Anthony Appiah provides an excellent primer: “European and American debates today about whether Western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the West … If the notion of Christendom was an artifact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of Western culture largely took its present shape during the Cold War. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that premodern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe—something that few stalwarts of Western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called Western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if Western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image Credit: The Plumb Pudding in Danger, James Gillray)

Chabon, Lethem, Eggers, Saunders, Whitehead: the literary luminaries of the nineties made their names on a fantastical escapism, more determined to entertain than they were to provoke. Now that the world’s gone even more to shit, Sam Sacks wonders if their appeal has worn thin: “the central dilemma of the nostalgist’s aesthetic: Can a novelist both recapture the innocent pleasures of storytelling and at the same time illuminate the complex realities of experience? In stable and prosperous times, truth and entertainment can overlap. But periods of crisis wedge them apart, and being faithful to one compromises the other … I find myself missing ambivalence—a quality that rarely squares with entertainment. There must be precious few readers who don’t already feel well disposed to tales of World War II heroes, fugitive slaves, and Abraham Lincoln.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Ilustration: Nathan Fox)

Literature loves a hoax—the Daily itself may have perpetrated one as recently as yesterday, though you didn’t hear it from me. Clifford Irving, who’s responsible for one of the great written ruses of the past fifty years, isn’t given the credit he deserves as a creative liar. Paul Elie tells his story: “Irving, while living in Ibiza in 1971, concocted a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire tycoon. Irving, a Manhattan-born author of three novels that had sold poorly, saw it as a low-risk, high-adrenaline stunt, a kick at the pricks of New York literary society. It was the kind of thing a writer could try and hope to get away with in the days before the Internet laid all—or most—fraudsters bare. That ‘stunt’ turned Irving into the Leif Erikson of literary hoaxsters. (The forged Hitler Diaries would not appear until the 1980s.) Irving got advances upward of $750,000 from McGraw-Hill; fooled the publisher, handwriting experts, and Life magazine’s editors; and stirred the publicity-loathing Hughes to comment—all of which seems to surprise him even now. ‘I was a writer, not a hoaxer. As a writer, you are constantly pushing the envelope, testing what people will believe, and once you get going you say, They believed that; maybe they’ll believe this … ’ ”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image Credits: By Nick Cunard/Rex/Shutterstock (Lehrer), Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images (Albert), Schiffer-Fuchs/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images (Frey), Steve Helber/A.P./Rex/Shutterstock (Erderly), from Bettmann/Getty Images (Irving, Cooke).)

Arthur Hacker [English. 1858 - 1919]
A female nude at her toilet. 1918

Canaletto [Italian. 1697 - 1768]
A Venetian capriccio view of an oval church beside the lagoon c. 1742

Laurence Alma-Tadema [English. 1836 - 1912]
The Baths of Caracalla. 1899
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In this specific painting, the scene depicts a reconstruction of the baths of the Roman Emperor Caracalla (176-217), which was imagined by Alma Tadema, and can still be found in Rome. His paintings were also based on his archaeological photographs and travels.

Lawrence Alma Tadema’s work was inspired by the civilizations of Greek, Rome and Ancient Egypt. He imagined the daily lives of these civilizations with their architectural ruins and came up with detailed compositions with exact accuracy.

Paul Delaroche [French. 1797 - 1856]
Central portion of “L'Hémicycle des Beaux-arts” c.1841-42
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The center figure with the laurel wreaths is an allegory of the arts, the woman in green is an allegory of medieval art, the woman in red sitting next to her is an allegory of ancient Greek art, directly across from her is a male figure that is an allegory of ancient Roman art, and next to him is a woman in red who is an allegory of the Renaissance. The other figures from left to right are: Germain Pilon, Pierre Puget, Giambologna, Ictinos, Apelle, Phidias, Philibert Delorme, Baldassarre Peruzzi and Erwin von Steinbach.

Raphael [Italian. 1483 - 1520]
Saint Catherine of Alexandria. c. 1507 - 09

John William Godward [English, 1861 - 1922]
Summer Idleness: Day Dreams, 1909

Juan Pantoja de la Cruz [Spanish. 1553 - 1608]
La Reina Isabel de Borbón. c. 1620

Carl Heinrich Bloch (Danish, 1834 - 1890)
The Wedding at Cana, 1870

Carl Heinrich Bloch (Danish, 1834 - 1890)
In a Roman Osteria, 1866

John William Godward [English. 1861 - 1922]
Oracle of Delphi, 1899

Ary Scheffer [French - Dutch. 1795 - 1858]
Atelier De - Mignon
Mignon regrettant sa patrie
Mignon aspirant au ciel. Mid - 19th century

Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau (American, 1837 - 1922)
La Confidence, c. 1880

Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau (American. 1837 - 1922)
La captive. c. 1893

John William Godward [English. 1861 - 1922]
At the Thermae. 1909

Dominique Louis Féréol Papety [French. 1815 - 1849]
The Odalisque. 1839
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Slavery gave rise to the figure of the Odalisque, that is the beautiful, white slave girl, a figure of quintessential beauty.

In the late 18th century Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the father of physical anthropology, the father of scientific anthropology, an 18th century German scholar, assigned the name Caucasian to the people living in western Europe, to the River Ob in Russia to northern Africa, and to India. He called the people in Europe, over to India, well into Russia and North Africa, Caucasians because they were the most beautiful in the world. Blumenbach enjoyed a scholarly reputation that gave his designation enormous heft and it got picked up very quickly.

Immanuel Kant stated that the Caucasians, the Georgians, the Circassians, sell their children, particularly their girls to the Turks, the Arabs, and the Persians, for reasons of eugenics, that is, to beautify the race. The idea of the beauty of Caucasians is linked with the idea of the slavery of Caucasians. Before the Atlantic slave trade to the western hemisphere shaped our ideas about what slave trades are all about, there was slave trade from this part of the world, that goes back to before the reaches of time.

Herodotus writing in the fifth century BC, writing about the enumeration of taxes and tributes paid to the Persian kingdom, collected from the lands it had controlled and the lands even far away in the distance. He said that the voluntary contribution was taken from the Colchians, that is the Georgians, and the neighboring tribes between them and the Caucasus, and it consisted of and still consists of (that is in the 5th century BC) every fourth year 100 boys and 100 girls. This was before Herodotus could even see the beginnings of it. Herodotus also mentioned the tribute from the southern most part of the edges of the Persian world and that was for the people called Ethiopians, what they owed was gold and ivory, people were not mentioned. So, the Black Sea Slave trade was the slave trade in the western world until the 15th century when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and cut the Black Sea off from western Europe. At that point, 15th century, the Atlantic slave trade becomes the western slave trade.

Daniel Edward Clarke, our Cambridge don, also located Circassian beauty, in the enslaved. “The Cicassians frequently sell their children to strangers, particularly to Persians and Turkish Seraglios.” He speaks of one particular Circassian female who was 14, who was conscious of her great beauty, who feared her parents would sell her according to the custom of the country. The beautiful young slave girl became a figure, and she had a name; Odalisque. She combines the powerful notions of beauty, sex, and slavery. Ingres, Jerome, Powers and Matisse specialized in Odalisque paintings.

The figure of the Odalisque faded from memory as the Black Sea slave trade ended in the late 19th century, and the Atlantic slave trade overshadowed that from the Black Sea. Today, the word slavery invariably leads to people of African descent. Americans seldom associate the word Odalisque with with slavery in the Americas. Today many American painters use Odalisque figures, Michalene Thomas for instance who has done a series of what she calls American Odalisque. But the phrase and the figure of the Odalisque has lost its association with slavery. And now in American art history and in contemporary American art, Odalisque simply refers to a beautiful woman, usually unclothed.

If you want to learn more, listen to professor Nell Painter of Princeton University in the YT lecture “Why White People are Called Caucasian.”