Response to "Nat Whilk"

Well, I guess Dr. Nat Whilk Ph.D of Cambridge, Massachusetts really showed that Roger Stritmatter of Coppin State University a thing or two!

Who is Nat Whilk? It’s not exactly clear, actually. She appears to be Amazon’s version of a Twitter troll who delights in levelling savage personal attacks against writers and scholars who are simply and honestly skeptical of the traditional attribution of the plays and poems of “William Shakespeare” to a litigious grain hoarder who was born of illiterate parents, raised alongside illiterate siblings (in a densely illiterate Elizabethan backwater), and sired illiterate children.

According to Alexander Waugh in his hilarious “Shakespeare in Court” (2014) – available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book (and highly recommended) – Nat Whilk is a bit of a Stratfordian scold and cyber Javert bent on vanquishing Oxfordian heretics.  Waugh observed: “‘Nat Whilk’ insists on remaining anonymous, abusive and veiled behind her blogger’s pseudonym.”  Five years on, Whilk remains anonymous (so far as I can tell) and abusive.

Incidentally, I do not know whether Waugh actually knows who Ms. Whilk is (but is too much of an English gentleman to “out” her) or if he is just guessing at her gender.  But I will follow his lead and refer to Whilk as “her” and “she.”  Until she has the courage and integrity to confront honest scholars like Roger Stritmatter publicly – without the shield of anonymity – I can only guess.

Let’s begin with a concession. Professor Whilk, who appears to have genuine academic credentials as well as access to literary databases like Early English Books Online (EEBO), has identified a possible sampling error in some of the data used in Stritmatter et al.’s recent book. That book, containing contributions from Gary Goldstein, Robert Prechter and Bryan Wildenthal, is titled “The Poems of Edward de Vere, 17^thEarl of Oxford . . . and the Shakespeare Question, Volume I: He that Takes the Pain to Pen the Book” (hereinafter, Poems of de Vere).  The ecstatic pleasure Whilk takes in calling out this apparent error, to my ear, sounds unsettlingly orgasmic.

What is the (possible) error?  It appears that in researching the relative rarity of certain words and phrases that appear both in Shakespeare and in de Vere’s uncontested juvenilia, Stritmatter et al. may have searched through only a portion of the data that is available through EEBO.  If so, it is a good bet that at least some of these common words and phrases were not as “unusual” among Shakespeare’s / de Vere’s contemporaries as the authors assessed in their study.  If one searches through fewer source texts, it stands to reason that one will fail to turn up other (perhaps numerous other) extant usages.  To the extent this error occurred, Stritmatter et al. undoubtedly experienced a pang of very human professional embarrassment when they realized it.  

On a recent episode of the podcast “Don’t Quill the Messenger,” Stritmatter acknowledged the possibility of some search errors and announced his intention to publish a revised and updated edition of the book. For what it’s worth, he noted that Volume I’s publication was somewhat rushed towards the end in order to ensure the book would be available to the public before the annual commemorations of Shakespeare held each year around April 23^rd. This likely also explains the copy-editing errors that pop up here and there.

However . . .

The glee with which Whilk dances on the authors’ graves over this data sampling error is all out of proportion to the materiality of their “rarity” analysis to the overall argument.  More on the relative insignificance of the possible data sampling error below.

But first, let’s survey the book Stritmatter et al. actually wrote.

Stritmatter’s book is an exhaustive and admittedly subjective comparison of Shakespeare’s verse (mostly early Shakespeare as it turns out) with de Vere’s known poems.  Orthodox scholars usually contend that de Vere was a lousy poet who sounds nothing like Shakespeare.  Stritmatter et al. are simply asking: is that really so? Thus, their book is fundamentally an analysis of the 450 parallels with Shakespeare’s language that they have identified in just twenty-one of Oxford’s short youthful poems (totaling only 548 lines). (Poems of de Vere, p. 24.)  As they note, this works out, on average, to “almost one such passage for every line in this early de Vere poetry.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 24.) (emphasis in the original)

Professor Whilk regards the dearth of de Vere’s youthful output as a reason to slip the shiv to the long-dead nobleman – dismissing his “tiny oeuvre” in a tone that has the ring of an attack on the size of the poet’s manhood.  Elsewhere, she implies that de Vere was too stupid to come up with the Latin phrase “Finis coronat opus” on his own, sneering: “I’ll bet his secretary thought of that, and spelled it for him.”  Whatever beef Whilk has with the authors’ scholarship, what on Earth did the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford ever do to make her so mad at him?  Personally, I would not want to be known for bragging about how much smarter I am than Edward de Vere.  That way lies civil commitment to an institution.

But I digress. Although Whilk attacks the authors as “pompous,” just listen to how cautious and generous they are in describing what they are up to in studying these poetic parallels:

“[R]esearchers should take care to consider the range of possible causes of any given parallelism, which could result from coincidence or from influence as well as common authorship . . . [I]t may sometimes be difficult to distinguish one cause from the other, especially on the basis of limited data.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 8)

Stritmatter et al. acknowledge that poets who sound so similar as to possibly be the same writer might, in fact, be nothing more than members of a “shared speech community” who “borrowed or parodied one another.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 8)

They caution that “excessive weight should not be individually attached to the vast majority of these parallels, many of which are commonplace phrases.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 10) (emphasis in the original). 

They acknowledge “[t]here is doubtless ample room for reasonable debate (which we welcome) about whether any given parallel properly belongs to one category or the other – or perhaps, in some cases, lacks the significance we perceived . . .  We welcome constructive critical feedback on all aspects of this edition.  A great deal of subjective discretion has likewise gone into defining the scope of each of the parallels.  We make no claim of numerical precision.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 22) (emphasis mine).

They quote J. Thomas Looney’s observation about the growing persuasiveness of circumstantial evidence as the number of “coincidences” piles up.  They then wrap up their general introduction with this: “To the extent the materials contained in these two volumes have gone beyond ‘simply interesting’ or transcended being a series of merely ‘remarkable’  coincidences, to reflect a series of ‘extraordinary coincidences’ that may generally be accepted as ‘conclusive proof’ is for every reader to judge.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 25).

In short, each reader is invited to make up his own mind as to whether or not the youthful de Vere sounds anything like (the mostly early) Shakespeare.  That really is the essence of this book.  Paraphrasing: “We see 450 parallels to Shakespeare in just 548 lines of Oxford’s poetry. We think these two poets sound an awful lot like the same guy.  What say you, dear reader?”

At the end of the book, Stritmatter et al. sum up their reasoning:

“[N]o special probative weight should be attached to any particular parallel or parallels in isolation from the larger fact pattern.  Some may be part of the common idiom of Elizabethan poetics while others clearly have a more idiosyncratic value . . . what ultimately matters is the large quantity of different types of parallelisms, including use of particular rhetorical figures when combined with parallel syntax or vocabulary.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 185) (emphasis mine)

Simply put, the analysis rests on both the quantity of the parallels as well as the idiosyncratic quality of so many of those parallels.  To their ears, at least (and to mine). It is not, strictly speaking, a computerized stylometric study.  Such studies are notoriously corrupted and compromised by the GIGO phenomenon. (At this point, the reader will not be surprised to learn that Whilk attacks Roger Stritmatter personally for not having “a clue how stylometric analysis is done” – something he has not undertaken – making sure to drop some impressive-sounding stylometric jargon like “pause patterns” and “adjacency networks.”)

Do you disagree with the authors’ conclusions – based as they are on their interpretation of the cumulative weight and quality of their evidence?  Wonderful! They welcome your constructive critical feedback.

And now behold, Ms. Whilk’s constructive critical feedback: Stritmatter et al.’s analysis is “naïve and impressionistic” and based on “a sad little list [eh hem, 450 items long!] of banalities.”  Their idea of what constitutes a parallel “beggars belief” as Whilk proves conclusively with “just one” example. (Seriously, there’s just one. Her other examples address the “rarity” issue.)

So perhaps the example she cherry-picked is – in all fairness – one that the authors conceded might “lack the significance we perceived.”  (Poems of de Vere, p. 22). Fair enough, Ms. Whilk.  There are another 449 included in the study.  I think a disinterested reader who is not bent on enforcing Orthodoxy, or eaten up inside with loathing for Oxford (and Stritmatter), or seething with confirmation bias would see at least some of these resemblances as . . . I dunno? . . . uncanny?

Tellingly, Whilk ignores the parallels between Shakespeare and de Vere’s dry private correspondence – a subject mentioned throughout the main text and addressed squarely by Gary Goldstein’s essay.  Whilk does not mention Goldstein at all except to include him in Professor Stritmatter’s “crew of fellow cultists.” (Maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to get the feeling that Nat Whilk is not a very pleasant person to be around.  Just imagine committing a grammatical faux pas at her dinner table.)

Reader, you be the judge.  Is the following example from Oxford’s then-unpublished correspondence a mere coincidence? 

Oxford: “It is my hap according to the English proverb to starve like the horse, while the grass doth grow.”  Shakespeare (in Hamlet): “Ay, sir, but while the grass grows – [trails off] the proverb is something musty.”

Oh yes, the data sampling error.  I almost forgot about that nothing burger.

As noted above, the heart & soul of the authors’ case is an interpretive comparison between de Vere’s uncontested juvenilia and canonical Shakespeare – irrespective of the “rarity” of their shared language in the larger contemporary sources.  A total of 450 parallels are discussed.  The accumulated weight and quality of the evidence is indeed impressive.  (By the time I got through the discussion of E.O. 21 I wanted to shout: “Enough already! I get it! Sweet mother of Jesus, give it a rest, Stritmatter!”)

Now, peppered throughout the discussion, Stritmatter et al. occasionally notice how a small number of these 450 shared phrases also appear to be unusual for the period.  They count a subset of 34 phrases that are “rare” or “somewhat rare.” In other words, less than 8% of the parallels are also assessed as unusual.

Incidentally, the expression “unusual common phrases” – is excoriated by Whilk as some sort of ridiculous oxymoron.  It is actually not that confusing or mysterious: a subset of phrases that are “common” to Oxford and Shakespeare are also assessed to be “unusual” (i.e. rare) in the contemporary sources as a whole.  Whilk understands this full well, of course, but she seems incapable of resisting any attempt to paint Stritmatter as a clown. (Is there something in the Cambridge water supply, perhaps?)

The point of noticing the “unusual” phrases is of course to enhance the more central argument that the number and quality of the parallelisms suggest identity of authorship.  If these poets sound like the same writer and very few other writers sound like them, then it naturally increases the likelihood of common authorship. By how much? It is impossible (and ultimately unnecessary) to quantify with mathematical precision.

Contra Ms. Whilk, however, the authors’ incidental observations about whether a phrase is rare or commonplace do not constitute “the very foundations of [their] research.”  Take out all discussion of those 34 “rare” or “somewhat rare” specimens and the basic argument is unaffected.

Thirty-four out of four hundred fifty.  (You are supposed to drop your jaw in disbelief at this dramatic statement.)

Moreover, we should ask a question Whilk basically glosses over: has the possibly smaller data set actually resulted in a systematic over-counting of the number of unusual phrases?  Whilk more than implies as much.  Indeed, she declares the study is “hopelessly, irrevocably, fatally flawed.”

If it is really that bad, then one wonders why she doesn’t show her work.

I assume that she must have access to the full EEBO database because real scholars from Cambridge Massachusetts are state-of-the-art whereas amateurs from Coppin State University work with stone tablets. Did she check all 34 of the cases assessed by Stritmatter et al. as “rare” or “somewhat rare” and attempt to quantify just how over-stated their assessments might be? This is not a terribly high number of searches to perform and she seems, if nothing else, highly motivated to expose the authors as a contemptible frauds (or buffoons).

For example, the book notes the “extreme rarity of the phrase stricken deer.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 72) (emphasis in the original). An “Appendix A” shows that the authors’ search of EEBO turned up exactly zero occurrences of this phrase – except for Hamlet and E.O. 9. So here we have a case where Stritmatter et al. is claiming, based on a possibly inferior data set, that Oxford and Shakespeare – and no one else – used this phrase.  If a more complete search of the data would show numerous hits by other writers, do you have any doubt, dear reader, that Whilk would have beat Stritmatter over the head with that information?

So why did she fail even to mention the “stricken deer” example given it is one of the book’s most “unusual common phrases” (i.e. zero other hits)? Could she be drawing a tight little box around her dogmas?

Whilk focuses her critique on the book’s “statistics.” (Does this presumed English major know that counting is not the same as doing statistics?) Totally non-smugly, she claims: “what the good doctor needs is a freshmen tutorial on using EEBO.” (The “good doctor.” Spare me, please.)  And yet her tutorial contains a glaring bait and switch. (Said bait and switch comes almost immediately after calling Roger Stritmatter a “flat-out cheat.”)

Here it is.  Did you catch it?  She quotes the book’s “smug” (?) argument that “none but Oxford and his alter ego ‘Shakespeare’ ever ‘associate . . . the behavior of the “haggard hawk” with human emotions or situations.’”  But in order to blow that embarrassingly incompetent argument out of the water she relies on search results for the single word “haggard” – not the two-word phrase “haggard hawk.” Her search results impressively show, indeed, that the single word “haggard” was commonly used in connection with human emotions or situations. "Chair" was also commonly used to describe an object one sits on.

What the devil is going on here?

I will not pretend to know what the revised “statistics” (i.e. counts) will look like after better searches are run for all 34 of the “unusual common phrases.” I suppose we will find out for sure only when the honest scholar Roger Stritmatter publishes the revised edition of his book. No crystal balls here, but I don’t expect the results to be all that different. Otherwise, Whilk would have done those searches and let us know.

In the final analysis, of course, none of this has all that much to do with the “very foundations of his research.”  The authors may keep the few pennies of my money that Jeff Bezos disbursed to them and I will happily keep their very interesting and valuable book – already littered with my yellow-highlighting and marginalia.

It is honestly a crying shame that Ms. Whilk felt compelled to attack Roger Stritmatter so viciously over a relatively minor error that is not at all central to the argument.  Throughout her review, she calls the book and/or its authors all of the following: pompous, credulous, incompetent, childish, larcenous, delusional, willfully blind, unintelligent, flat-out cheats, smug, ridiculous, oblivious, and not playing with a full deck.  She opens her smear job in this totally non-pompous way: “Oh dear. Another futile assault on Shakespeare’s authorship by Dr. Stritmatter, Ph.D . . .” as if Professor Stritmatter walks around flouting a doctoral degree that he really never earned. (Later, we get this: “he supposedly studied for his doctorate.”).

I’ve been an avid amateur student of the authorship question for over twenty years.  Maybe that’s because I am one of those many Oxfordian lawyers trained in evaluating evidence.  I’m not 100% positive about this but I think I’ve read a time or two over the years that Oxfordians are a bunch of “snobs.” Have I been reading that incorrectly (or backwards) all these years?

Compare the tone of the authors’ disagreements with Professor Stephen May.  May is a recognized Stratfordian expert on Edward de Vere’s acknowledged early poems.  Here are two examples of how they discuss those points of disagreement: “conceding May’s reasonable premise” (Poems of de Vere, p. 188) and “given his record of fairness” (Poems of de Vere, p. 189). It is true that on one occasion the authors take the gloves off and offer the opinion that Professor May is “profoundly mistaken” – oh no you di’ int! – but that’s about as rough as it gets. (Poems of de Vere, p. 186).  

So let’s get something clear. I am the one being nasty here – not Stritmatter et al. But that’s only because Whilk asked for it.

Is there motive in Whilk’s savagery? It turns out that the evolution of Professor May’s scholarship offers a clue.  The authors note that May once had a favorable opinion of de Vere’s poetry.  In 1991, he described Oxford as a poet who “create[d] a dramatic break with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court up to that time.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 185).  And yet, by 2004 May seems to have joined the lousy poet chorus – arguing that “Oxford’s verse [was] . . . without distinction [in] the mid[16^th]-century tradition of Tudor poetry.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 185.) (emphasis believed to be Stritmatter’s).

How does one go from praising Oxford’s poetry as revolutionary for its time to denigrating it as “without distinction” in just over a decade? It seems at least plausible to me that threats of ridicule and professional ostracism from real scholars like Dr. Nat Whilk Ph.D might have accounted, at least in part, for this 180^o change of opinion.  This looks to me like what we lawyers call a good old-fashioned woodshedding.

Incidentally, May’s transformation has an interesting coda. By March 2017, in correspondence with Gary Goldstein, he was offering as one possible explanation for the “verbal parallels” between Oxford and Shakespeare the theory that Oxford’s published poems were “available for Shakespeare to plagiarize.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 160).

Oh dear. Does the case for Will Shaxper of Stratford now rest upon his being a plagiarist?  A plagiarist of Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, no less?

Chin up, Oxfordians!  Nothing is truer than truth.

As noted above, Stritmatter plans to revise and update Volume I before publishing Volume II.  Volume II will perform a similar analysis on several other early poems whose attribution to Edward de Vere is more contested by scholars than the twenty-one poems contained in Volume I.  I look forward to both the reissue and the new volume.

Alas, however, I fear we can expect more of the same savagery and nastiness from Dr. Nat Whilk Ph.D when those volumes appear.

That noise you hear is the loud & plodding footfall of a re-gendered Javert as she fanatically pursues apostates from received orthodoxy.

The honorable thing would be to apologize to Roger Stritmatter and his colleagues.

The rational thing to do would be to open her mind to evidence and arguments that challenge her religion.

Being Javert, there’s no hope. 

Richard Wood, Colorado Springs

__________________________________

Here's "Nat Whilk's" review of the book on Amazon.com to which I have responded:

Nat Whilk

1.0 out of 5 starsSisyphean

May 8, 2019

Format: Paperback

Oh dear. Another futile assault on Shakespeare’s authorship by Dr. Stritmatter, Ph.D., who keeps trying to shift the paradigm—Mount Everest—with spades of wet tissue paper. A self-driven Sisyphus, he’s labored mightily to roll his Big Rock up the hill, to drop it on the Orthodoxy. It’s his dream to squash us flat. He is joined in his futile labours by a crew of fellow cultists—“an hundred Sisiphi at once, rowling so many restlesse stones”—but chiefly here by Gary Goldstein, Robert Prechter, and Bryan Wildenthal. The volume as whole is marked by that peculiar Stritmatterly blend of pomposity, credulity, and arithmetical incompetence.

Dr. Stritmatter has long insisted (against all evidence) that the markings, by a series of unknown hands, in a Geneva Bible once owned by the Earl of Oxford, mirror Shakespeare’s scriptural allusions. Not so. They are almost an anti-match. Whole swathes of Shakespeare’s most alluded-to verses, chapters, even books, go unmarked, while huge tracts of the Apochrypha, which the poet-playwright barely noted, are a thicket of Xs and underlinings.

In this new rock—er, book, Stritmatter’s arithmetic remains shaky, but here at least he's more or less comparing text to text. He has discovered Early English Books Online, “the definitive online collection of early printed works in English, and works printed in England” from 1473 to 1700. It includes over 132,000 titles, which is virtually everything. What he hasn’t discovered is how to use it. He hasn’t a clue what to look for, or how to structure a search—and that ignorance (as we shall see) proves fatal to his work.

His methods are naive and impressionistic, merely what MacDonald Jackson has called the “uncontrolled accumulation of parallels between a disputed work and an authorial candidate whom the scholar favours.” True stylometic studies go much deeper, into pause patterns and word adjacency networks. By comparison, this stuff is childish dot-to-dottery. For all his pseudo-scholarly posturing, Stritmatter hasn’t a clue how stylometric analysis is done: he appears like a stargazer trying to refute astrophysics, armed only with a cardboard mailing tube for a telescope. It’s no wonder he’s ignored. Nothing daunted, he sets out to show that “there is Salmons in both” Oxford and Shakespeare. And of course, he finds what he’s looking for. He’s assembled a sad little list of banalities that appear both in Shakespeare’s work and in Oxford’s tiny oeuvre (which is plumped out by larceny from other poets), calling these bitlets “unusual common phrases” Unusual and common? “That is, hot ice, and wondrous strange snow.”

And to this reader, very tragicall mirth.

Stritmatter’s conceit of what a ”parallel” might be beggars belief. To take just one: he matches “I have little and seek no more” with Shakespeare’s “Little joy I have / To breathe this news ... I speak no more than every one doth know.” That modest ellipsis conceals a cut of eight-and-a-half lines [!] of blank verse. This goes beyond mere wishful thinking into the realm of the delusional.

And as for his statistics—Seriously, what the good doctor needs is a freshman tutorial on using EEBO. He has no idea how it works. I have been through his tables, tested dozens of his figures. All of them are undercounted, some drastically. Some of his results are obvious oversights (or flat-out cheats); others, perplexing.

To begin with, he’s bad at searching. Sometimes he appears to be ignoring variant spellings; nearly always, variant forms. For example, Stritmatter tells us that “EEBO returns only ten hits in ten records (1473-1623) for the search ‘world afford,’” and 34 in 29 records for “world affords.” Hey, what happened to “affordeth”? Did he deliberately ignore it, to suppress the numbers? Or is he absolutely ignorant of Early Modern English verb forms? Counting all variant spellings and grammatical forms of “world afford,” there are 151 instances in 128 books. But wait! What about forms like “will afford”? Or “can scarcely afford”? Since Strimatter counts Shakespeare’s “The spacious world cannot again afford” among his “strongest parallels” with Oxford’s “That world affords,” we must look at “world NEAR afford.” The score leaps to 475/347. I wouldn’t call that rare.

As a rule, his searches are designed to gerrymander, to draw a tight little box around the earl and the playwright, excluding all others. “An EEBO search ... (1473-1600) returns only four hits in three sources for the term ‘haggard hawk,’” he crows, proving to himself the rarity and exclusivity of the motif. The actual count is 21 hits in 16 records. He smugly claims that none but Oxford and his alter ego “Shakespeare” ever “associate ... the behavior of the ‘haggard hawk’ with human emotions or situations.”

Oh, really? A search for “haggard” on its own, unlimited by “hawk,” from its first appearance in 1566 to 1580, turns up 176 hits in 26 books. Turberville’s 1575 book on falconry accounts for 128 of those. There’s one in a glossary. All the rest— 47 hits in 24 books—refer to human bad behavior. Indeed, the earliest use in English that I found described a human, not a hawk. As noun and adjective, the word caught on at once, and remained a commonplace for “wild, strange; froward, contrarie, crosse” people, especially women: “the haggarde disposition of his mistres”; “the straunge and haggarde nature of loue”; “she is not of haggards kind, Nor hart so hard”; “those which are so coyishe & wilde, or so haggarde like”; “Yee haggards straunge, therefore adiew / Goe seeke some other for thy mate”; “For Haggard like, she will not stoope.” Oxford’s imagery is unexceptional.

But there’s something more than willful blindness going on here. Stritmatter finds only 14/14 hits for “When I am alone.” In fact, there are 24/24 from Chaucer onward, including one each in Oxford and Shakespeare, and one in his precious Geneva Bible. Esther xiv.16, speaking of her crown: “I hate this token of my preeminence, which I beare vpon mine head, ... I abhorre it as a menstruous cloth, and that I weare it not when I am alone by my self.” Unmarked, of course: the entire chapter is as virgin snow.

But I digress. Alternate spelling accounts for only one of those ten missing hits. What is happening to his results?

The key to the riddle is found in one ridiculous set of parallels, foregrounded proudly. In a 1602 letter, Oxford uses the Latin proverb “Finis coronat opus” (“The end crowns the work”). I’ll bet his secretary thought of that, and spelled it for him. Stritmatter is thrilled that Shakespeare uses three different versions of that proverb in his work, even though not one of them is Latin. In the Folio version of 2 Henry VI, there's a typographically mangled version of the French, “La fin Corrone les eumenes [les oeuvres].” The Anglo-French “the fines the Crowne” appears in All’s Well That Ends Well; and “the end crownes all," in Troilus and Cressida (1609 & 1623). The English and French appear nowhere in Oxford’s poetry or letters; the Latin, nowhere in Shakespeare.

Indeed, until the later 17th century, as far as I can tell, the French proverb appears in print only in Shakespeare (1623) and in G. D. L. M. N.’s The French alphabeth (1592), where it comes with a handy translation: “La fin couronne l'oeuure. The end doth crowne the worke.” That book, whose pseudonymous author is G. Delamothe, was published by Shakespeare’s Stratford contemporary Richard Field, and may have given the playwright that proverb (and perhaps a name in Love’s Labours Lost?).

Shakespeare’s use of "the end crownes all” is the very first recorded in EEBO, though a translator of The Ship of Fooles (1509) simply and succinctly writes “For the ende crowneth.” Shakespeare’s “The fines the Crowne" is unique.

Nonetheless, Strit's absolutely thrilled by the coincidence.

“By any measure this proverb is rare before 1623. In the Latin version, [only] Henri Estienne (1607), Edmund Bolton (1610), and Gerard Malynes (1622), use ‘finis coronat opus’ before the publication of All’s Well in 1623.” Wait, what? What happened to the anonymous author of A dialogue or speaking together of two personages (1582), William Watson (1602), Otto van Veen (1608), Thomas Milles (1608), Sir Edward Hoby (1615), and Crispijn van de Passe (1615)?

Three out of nine.

You will note that Shakespeare nowhere uses “work.” Nevertheless, it's “The end crowns the work" that Stritmatter looks for, not the "The end crowns all” “In English,” says Dr. Stritmatter, “only Sébastien Michaelis (1613) and George Hakewell {Hakewill, actually] (1621) are known to do so [include that proverb}.”

What!? I find 27 titles that do so.

The first is by Daniel Tossanus (1583): “the end crowneth ye worke.” Among other items, the list includes G. Delamothe’s The French alphabeth (1592), as noted; that terribly obscure play The Spanish tragedie by Thomas Kyd (1592: “The end is crowne of euery worke”); John Bodenham’s, Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the muses, which is a commonplace book, for heaven’s sake, a list of popular sententiae (1600); George Chapman’s inconspicuous Homer (1611); Constantia Munda, in the gloriously titled The vvorming of a mad dogge: or, A soppe for Cerberus the iaylor of Hell (1617); the great jurist Sir Edward Coke (1618); and Charles Fitz-Geffry (1620): “But the end is the Crowne of the whole work; and the last Act (if any) carrieth away the Applause.”

Oblivious to the end, Stritmatter writes, “Evaluating this evidence honestly requires assessment of prior probabilities.” No. Evaluating this evidence honestly requires the ability to reason and to count.

Three out of nine. Two out of twenty-seven.

What the devil is going on here?

Only part of this grievous deficiency comes down to Stritmatter’s unintelligent search tactics, though a badly stated search will miss variants like “end doth crowne “ and “crowne of euery worke.”

The truly devastating error lies elsewhere, at the very foundations of his research. From the screen shot on p. 11, and by exactly which authors’ names he didn’t find, I could tell that he’s been using an incomplete, perhaps antiquated version of EEBO, EEBO lite. As he should have known—he supposedly studied for his doctorate—EEBO comprises two collections. EEBO-TCP Phase I is freely available to everyone who searches, on any device, from anywhere. It is not tied to any provider. But EEBO-TCP Phase II is “available only to EEBO-TCP partners.” Buried deep in the Help pages is the quiet bombshell: “Your institution may not be subscribed to all EEBO subsets.”

It appears that Coppin State is not.

EEBO-TCP Phase II accounts for three-fifths of all the titles in their database. So Dr. Stritmatter has been merrily searching away, without realizing that his corpus is missing more than half its texts. He’s been calling the winners of an election, in which three-fifths of the ballots have been randomly destroyed. He’s not playing with a full deck.

That noise you hear is the thunk-thunk-thunking of the Big Rock, bounding down and down and down the hill to the very bottom, and into the swamp.

This study is hopelessly, irrevocably, fatally flawed.

The honorable thing would be to withdraw the book, with refunds and apologies.

The rational thing to do would be to stop rolling that stone.

Being Sisyphus, there’s no hope.

Trump-Russia: An Assessment

With the country (and the world) two full years into the Trumpian captivity, a pause for reflection and taking stock is in order.  How quaint seem the initial hopes that the gravity and solemnity of the nation’s highest office would tame this monster’s worst instincts and traits!

Cheeto Head entered office under a cloud of suspicion that has become a storm.  For reasons that are still being sorted out, Trump managed to make it all the way to election day (and shortly beyond) without the country learning about the existence of a counterintelligence investigation into his campaign’s complicity ("if any") with Russia’s theft – and Wikileaks’ disclosure – of the DNC-Podesta e-mails.

Only after we were stuck with him did the world learn of some truly alarming possibilities – not the least of which was the scenario sketched out in the raw HUMINT collected by Christopher Steele.

I read those raw HUMINT reports the day Buzzfeed published them and immediately thought to myself: “Jesus Christ! If even ten percent of this stuff is true . . .” 

A very highly placed Kremlin insider, one Oleg Erovinkin, is now widely believed to have been a key source for Steele’s reporting.  When he turned up dead shortly after Buzzfeed published Steele’s misnamed “dossier,” I concluded along with the rest of sentient humanity that a bit more than ten percent of that raw HUMINT is probably all too accurate.  Steele, an experienced former spy and a Russia specialist, estimated that his unnamed Russian sources are only about 75% accurate (with 25% feeding disinformation).  In the intervening two years, none of the key claims made by those sources have been disproved while many have been confirmed.

The worst version of what happened to us in the summer and fall of 2016 is almost beyond imagining: active collaboration between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, with Trump’s full knowledge and consent, in exchange for some combination of political and financial rewards flowing both ways.  For the Kremlin: a more favorable policy towards Russia (something I would have strongly favored in any other normal context) and the lifting of economic sanctions, Magnitsky and otherwise, against Vladimir Putin and his cronies.  For Trump: clandestine and illegal help with the election and a business deal for a Trump Tower Moscow worth as much as hundreds of millions.  (The very recent reporting that Michael Cohen’s cell phone was pinging cell towers in Prague at the very time that Steele’s sources say Cohen was in Prague arranging payments to Russian hackers will, I think, if ultimately confirmed, prove to be game, set, match for Donald Trump.)

Getting to the bottom of this possible conspiracy was – and is – of utmost importance.  Could there be any greater threat to national security than an American President compromised by, or beholden to, a country that has been a geopolitical competitor for a century? That much should have been obvious and uncontroversial to everyone – especially flag-waving Republicans.  And yet, on a long list of depressing events that have transpired over the past two years, watching about one-half of my fellow countrymen take the view that Trump-Russia is not even worth investigating is at the very top.

The public knows much more today than it did two years ago.  The reasonable conventional wisdom is that the Special Counsel knows a great deal more – none of it good for the President.  And yet, just the public scandals that have come to light since the Narcissist-In-Chief became the world’s most scrutinized man are so numerous and convoluted that careful and conscientious news consumers are at risk of drowning in a tsunami of confusing details.  Second on that long & depressing list is the realization that single scandals of comparatively minor seriousness used to end political careers abruptly, whereas, in Trump’s case, we learn almost weekly of new major scandals – any one of which would have been a political death knell in normal times.  Yet, there he remains, rage tweeting his bile at all who challenge him, to the shame and embarrassment and genuine risk to our country.  Third on the long & depressing list is the degree to which even harsh critics, to say nothing of the general public, are growing numb to all of it.  Stay awake, people!

Modern partisan warfare perhaps makes too much of the exasperated trope “what if [the other guy] had done that?!?”  But in Trump’s case, it really seems more than fair to wonder what would have happened if any of his predecessors had done any one of the following: (i) paid hush money to a porn star weeks before an election, (ii) received $400 million in illegal tax-free transfers from his father, (iii) disclosed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office the day after firing the FBI director for insufficient “loyalty,” (iv) paid $25 million to settle a civil fraud case alleging the bilking of consumers with phony get-rich-quick schemes (Trump University), (v) ran a private charity as an illegal tax-free slush fund, (vi) established secret back-channels to Russian and Emirati officials during the presidential transition, (vii) received $30 million in campaign contributions from the Russian-infiltrated National Rifle Association, (viii) collected unheard of sums of money for his inaugural fund, the sources and destination of which are now shrouded in suspicion, (ix) hired the most corrupt cabinet possibly in American history, (x) praised neo-Nazi thugs after one of their number murdered an innocent protester, (xi) accepted millions in private profits paid by foreigners to his various businesses in violation of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, (xii) covered for a grizzly murder ordered by a foreign tyrant, in this case, Mohammed Bone Saw, (xiii) sided with Vladimir Putin’s denials of election interference while publicly calling into doubt the contrary assessments of his own intelligence experts, (xiv) hired illegal immigrants at one of his golf resorts under circumstances involving forged immigration documents (per reporting just this weekend), and (xv) generally demonstrated consciousness of guilt with his repeated and unprecedented attacks on the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Special Counsel investigating him.

The above is just a partial list rattled off from memory as I sit here at my keyboard.  Yet even this partial list is enough to take your breath away.

These swirling scandals – some related to each other and others probably independent – all appear to have financial greed & corruption somewhere at their core.  Americans are learning in depressing detail what the New York business world has known for decades: at root, Donald Trump is a common thief on an uncommon scale.  Shame on major press outlets like The New York Times for not reporting during the election the business community’s open secret that Donald Trump is almost certainly a career financial criminal. Want to be depressed by how the New York establishment enabled Donald Trump for decades?  Read this. 

Welp, better late than never, I suppose.  With all we now know, the chances that the sitting American President has not been up to his eyeballs in white collar crime, very possibly Mafia-related (first Italian, then Russian), for his entire adult life seem vanishingly small.  His three oldest children, Don Jr., Eric, and the truly God-awful Ivanka appear to be chips off the old block.

Disclaiming any crystal balls, 2019 is shaping up to be the Year of Reckoning for one Donald John Trump, his spawn, and the cast of cartoon characters surrounding them (e.g. Jared Kushner, Roger Stone, etc.).  I think financial corruption exposed by the New York Attorney General’s office or the federal prosecutors in Manhattan will get this rogue’s gallery before Mueller does.  But I think Mueller will eventually get them, too – leaving the theocrat Mike Pence to mind the store for about a year as history’s greatest ever lame duck.  Our nation will then have a great deal of soul searching and house cleaning to do – that is, after the collective hot showers, the initial celebrations, and the orgies of schadenfreude.

Certain cable news outlets, Democratic partisans, and anti-Trump Twitter celebrities have received a great deal of grief and criticism for following every twist and turn in the Trump-Russia saga at the expense of other important stories.  I do not agree with this criticism.  The media landscape is broad and diverse.  There are plenty of news organizations reporting other news.  It is the easiest thing in the world to follow the BBC on Twitter.  As already noted, the worst possible version of Trump-Russia is truly staggering.  The story deserves all of the investigatory attention (Mueller, SDNY, NY AG, incoming Democrats) and all of the news coverage it is receiving.  We can walk and chew gum at the same time, people.  News consumers, like yours truly, who want to be informed about other important stories know how to turn off MSNBC and to open an issue of The Economist or any other reputable newspaper that continues to cover world and national events as before.  The national conversation can endure a few Trump obsessed outlets.

There is one point of criticism that the CNNs and MSNBCs of the media landscape perhaps deserve.  There has been a tendency to treat each new major revelation as the “turning point” or the “walls closing in” moment. (YouTube progressive gadfly Jimmy Dore recently highlighted this hilarious video mash-up of such coverage.)

Contra Jimmy Dore, however, there have been some actual major turning points.  The most significant of these, in my view, was the raid on Michael Cohen’s office earlier this year and the former Hannity lawyer’s subsequent decision to cooperate with Robert Mueller. 

There are good reasons to suspect that Michael Cohen has his own connections to Ukrainian mob figures from long before he ever met Donald Trump.  His relatives in Queens have been long suspected of connections to Ukrainian mobsters.  And his recent TV lawyer, Lanny Davis, has represented a Ukrainian oligarch with close connections to the notorious and violent mobster Semion Mogilevich.  Indeed, one wonders what else could explain the strange fact of a long-time Clinton loyalist coming out of the woodworks to represent someone like Michael Cohen.  Did he need to be managed?  Or warned?  If there is anything substantive to Cohen’s reputed Ukrainian mob connections, then his unwillingness to cooperate fully with the SNDY investigation on the white-collar-crime side of things, as opposed to his more robust cooperation with Mueller on Russian collusion, makes perfect sense.  Three years in prison is certainly preferable to seeing your family get whacked as revenge for ratting out routine money laundering.  (Consider, in this context, Trump’s tweet calling Cohen a “rat” – a classic mob term.)

I am an unapologetic Russophile.  The summer after ninth grade (1982), I took a six-week class in the Russian language that first gave me the Russia bug. In college, I majored in something the U.S. Air Force Academy used to call “Soviet Area Studies” and minored in the Russian language.  I have a lifelong fascination with the country, its history & culture, and its unique and important geopolitical position between East and West.  The woman I love most in the whole world grew up in the Soviet Union and is now a dual Russian-American citizen.  I traveled to Russia with her in the summer of 2017 and found it to be as fascinating a place as I could have ever hoped.  St. Petersburg must be on everyone’s short list of the most beautiful cities in the world. You have not known hospitality until you have had three Russian ladies of modest means try to force copious amounts of food and vodka on you.  You have not known sensual pleasure until you have spent time in a rural Russian banya (sauna). Long term, I wish for better relations between our countries.  NATO expansion was a grave error and an unnecessary stick in the eye to a justly proud nation having ample historical justification to worry about invasion.  I fear the New Cold War being pushed by the West’s militant Russophobes (some of whose scholarship I actually greatly admire, e.g. Anne Applebaum). Garry Kasparov’s raving and ranting -- to cite one example -- is just interminable.

And yet . . . and yet.

Russia has been poorly governed for much of its history.  It is currently an authoritarian kleptocracy.  (Its citizens all know this, by the way; they are not stupid; they just greatly prefer the present regime to those that came before.) And although even corrupt kleptocracies can have legitimate national security concerns (as Russia certainly does), any Americans who conspired with Russian intelligence to interfere with an American presidential election are traitors who must be prosecuted and punished. If, in the process of smoking out these fucking traitors, American law enforcement uncovers decades of financial corruption by Donald Trump and his family – so much the better.  At its core, Trump-Russia is a financial scandal and very possibly a mob scandal.

I look forward to seeing the President and his children in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits before this time next year.

No predictions, though.  Time alone will tell.

Sympathy and Greeting

Anyone who has ever opened an issue of The Economist or Harper's Magazine or the New York Times Sunday Book Review has surely seen the ubiquitous advertisements for "The Great Courses." Despite their relentless and even remorseless advertising -- I get a paper catalog in the mail about once a week, now -- I've been a fan of this company and its courses for years. Recently, my kids surprised me with a one-year subscription to "The Great Course Plus" as a Father's Day gift -- giving me unlimited access to hundreds of courses for free until next June.

All of the professors and courses are great but it would be tough to over-compliment Professor Robert Bucholz and his course on Modern European History.  Though recorded in the mid 2000s, and thus somewhat dated given recent developments (especially Brexit), I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Professor Bucholz's closing lecture on the "Meaning of Western Civilization" is so good, and so inspiring, that it really ought to be taught and rote-memorized by high school students across our fruited plain.  It is, among other things, a devastating rebuttal to those who push the dangerous idea that STEM and bean-counting are all that students need to learn to be successful and productive in the global marketplace.

I quote the majority of that final lecture below:

________________________________________________

So the book on Western Civilization at the close of this course is that it faces some challenges.  All of which should raise the question for us of where the past 500 years of Western history have actually gotten us.

In this course, we’ve seen the inhabitants of Europe change dramatically but not, I think, completely. 

For example, after years of struggle, Europeans shattered the Great Chain of Being and the assumptions behind it.  They embraced humanism, toleration, and the scientific method and revolution. They abandoned the role of subject for that of citizen.  They created societies of ever widening opportunity and intellectual curiosity. They gave birth to societies, in the Americas and in Oceania, that trumpet their openness and their hostility to hierarchy. And yet, Europeans themselves continue to value hierarchy, status, and tradition in ways that Americans often find puzzling.

Europeans profited from commercial, financial and industrial revolutions. They created great trading empires and industrial complexes and by the 19^th Century the wealthiest societies the world had ever seen. But these left in their wake many victims: Native Americans and African slaves abducted from their homes and used as farm machinery; urban workers reduced to the level of economic cogs in the great machine of national prosperity.

Europeans sought to exploit half the world in unregulated capitalism. But . . . yet . . . eventually, they recognized the inconsistency of that exploitation with Western ideals of freedom and equality and self-determination. 

And here, I think, we begin to get a sense of why the West is different.

In 1994, Bernard Lewis wrote: “In setting out to conquer, subjugate, and despoil other peoples, the Europeans were merely following the example set them by their neighbors and their predecessors,” that is, they were no different from any number of other civilizations which had preceded them on the planet. “The interesting questions are not why they tried, but why they succeeded, and then why, having succeeded, they repented of their success as a sin.  The success was unique in modern times – the repentance in all of recorded history.”

Imperialism, sexism, and racism are words of Western coinage not because the West invented these evils, which are (alas) universal, but because the West recognized and named and condemned them as evils and struggled mightily to weaken their hold and to help their victims.

In short, the West is seemingly, uniquely, capable of self-criticism and so of reform.  Europeans have in their history embraced hierarchy and intolerance, racism, sexism, imperialism, totalitarianism, and greed.  But also liberalism, romanticism, feminism, socialism, realism, and democracy in an attempt to build something better.

The experience of so many revolutions, so many movements, suggests that perhaps the real theme of this course is a persistent, inexorable, restless rejection of the status quo. When that didn’t work, they picked up stakes and they built alternative Western civilizations in the Americas and in Oceania.

At home, their experiments with one-Europe government, whether by Charlemagne, the Pope, Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler, or the EU, have largely failed because of nationalist impulses.  But as this course closes, they have restrained those impulses to the point where another general European war seems unthinkable.

Note the latest Balkans crisis. But note that unlike in 1914, it did not precipitate such a war.

Why?

In part because Western Europeans seemed to be long past the notion that anybody could gain anything from that kind of a conflict.

This was addressed by one of the heroes of the Velvet Revolution, Vaclav Havel at the Charlemagne Plenary Address in Aachen.  Charlemagne is, of course, a great symbol of European unity.  It could be argued that he practically invented Europe in the Middle Ages.  Aachen, his capital, also known as Aix-la-Chapelle in France, is another symbol of the idea of Europe coming together. He delivered this address on the 15^th of May 1996 and in it he said:

“Humankind is entering an era of multi-polar and multicultural civilization. Europe is no longer the conductor of the global orchestra but this does not mean it has played out its role and has nothing to say to the world anymore. A new task presents itself, and with it, a new substance to Europe’s very existence. Europe’s task will no longer be to spread, violently or non-violently, its own religion, its own civilization, its own inventions, or its own power. If Europe wants, it can do something else – more modest, yet more beneficial. Through the model of its own being, it can serve as an example that many diverse peoples can work together in peace without losing any part of their identity. Through its own behavior it can show that it is possible to treat our planet considerately, and to think also of the generations that will succeed us. It can demonstrate that it is possible to live together in peace with other cultural worlds without a person or a state having to renounce themselves and their truth in the process.”

Now I know that neither Lewis nor Havel actually denied the critique of Western society. Europeans have behaved with rapacity and gross insensitivity to other peoples – as those peoples have often behaved to each other. What is unique to European civilization is its willingness to confront its own sins, to renounce them, to make amends for them. Admittedly, it has done that slowly and unwillingly and only partially. It has, and is doing so, still today.

Now, it’s a theme of this course that, wherever we come from, we in America are all Europe’s children – Europe’s heirs. Perhaps because we are so young, we in the United States seem to be allergic to any suggestion that we might ever have done something wrong. To ask the very potentially fruitful question – a very Western question – “why do they hate us?” has been branded as somehow justifying the hate. 

In this, I think, the Europeans are ahead of us. Stripped of their world hegemony, brutalized by their own internecine wars, forced by war crimes trials and secret police files and video footage to confront their own multifarious failings, they have resolved not to repeat them.

Can we, their heirs, make a similar claim? It seems to me that someday, sooner or later, we will have no choice.

Admittedly, in an age of global terrorism, all this progress seems to be cast in doubt. Can Western civilization, and in particular, civilization so open to self examination and doubt live with and survive the continuing challenge of non-Western civilizations?

I think that it can.

But only if we, its students, continue to embrace that part of the Western heritage which has always emphasized the freedom of the intellect, the dignity of the individual, rationality as antidote to superstition and jingoism, a healthy skepticism.  And finally, the notion identified in their different ways by Lewis and Havel: that other peoples and cultures are valuable in their own right.

That’s how we survive: by flexibility and rationality and recognizing the inherent value of others. And we’ve known that since at least the Peace of Westphalia. That, I think, is the meaning of the West – the meaning of Western civilization.

Now admittedly, other meanings are possible. In the midst of defending these principles, we could very easily become the mirror image of our enemies and revert back to an unthinking submission to authority, intolerance, jingoism, superstition, and suspicion – in an attempt to find something safe and comforting to believe in, to hide in.

Certainly Western history, certainly European history provides plenty of precedents. But I would like to think that if the experience of the last 500 years has taught us anything it is that those solutions are temporary, and in the long run, destructive.

So that is, I think, what the West can teach us.

  

But what of civilization itself? What of history? What are their meanings?

Well before I address that, I feel compelled to issue a variation on the disclaimer that I offered at the very beginning – in the first lecture of this course.

Let me say, that it has been a very great privilege for me to share with you my version of the story of modern Western civilization. I fear that over the course of these 48 wide-ranging lectures it is not unlikely that I have offended with my omissions and my errors and my biases.

For the omissions, I plead that we only had so much audio and video tape and the crew in the studio can only stand so much of me.  For the errors, I do apologize most heartily. This course demands knowledge of everything from deliberative bodies, to diseases, to Dreadnoughts.  I still have much to learn. One of the most frustrating things about being a professor is that you spend most of your life out on a limb. And too often, that limb breaks. 

But I would argue that another essential duty of being a professor is to profess – to tell the truth as he or she sees it after years of study in his or her discipline. And so I cannot offer an unqualified apology for my apparent biases.

I promise you that I have tried my best to be objective, fair, and balanced. But like any human being, I’ve most likely failed. After all, it should hardly be surprising, that after studying and teaching Western civilization for, well, maybe four decades – ever since my beloved grandfather gave me my first model airplane kit and I started reading that little history about how this plane was used and what it meant to the history of the West – well, I’ve developed some opinions and some sympathies and some convictions that you have been exposed to, for good or ill, in the course of these lectures.

In fact, I’ve come to believe, that such opinions are part and parcel of this course for this course is not simply a course on the history of Western civilization. It is a course in civilization itself.

And so I stand here, as a student of civilization, as a man who aspires to be civilized someday myself, to profess that there are lessons to be drawn from this history. There are lessons to be drawn from civilization. Lessons, in fact, in how to be civilized. Like Martin Luther, standing before his Emperor “I can no other, God help me.”

The lessons of civilization are, I believe, to be found in a few simple principles.

War is a terrible thing. You had better be sure you know what you are doing when you engage in it.

Certainty is a wonderful thing when deployed in defense of the defenseless and the down-trodden. At all other times, it is suspect.

Power does not last – even superpower. Art and culture do. So do cruelty and generosity.

Most people never got to be kings or queens, dukes or duchesses. Most people were underdogs caught up in vast historical forces beyond their control. We should, I think, resist the temptation to think that we are somehow different – immune from the political, social, economic, or cultural tidal waves of history. We are all swimming in that same ocean. We should not laugh at our predecessors, even at their most ridiculous, for someday we too will look ridiculous to our successors. We should spare a thought for the underdog.

Finally, as I proposed in the lecture on the Holocaust, this course should remind us that civilization is fragile. It has certainly broken repeatedly. That’s because, as I said then, it is not a building, or a book or a law. It is not a theorem or an opera. It is a daily and conscious act of respect and consideration for others. An act of veneration for what the past can tell us. An act of critical thinking and skepticism. Of openness to new ideas and other cultures. And of a quest to make ourselves something better than we are. That act is born of what we learn and it is sustained by what we teach our children.

Another way of putting this goes back to something a great teacher used to say at my Alma Mater Cornell.

If you’ve enjoyed these lectures, one of the things you may have enjoyed about them, is the enthusiasm that I feel for history and for the academic life in general.  I suppose I first identified that enthusiasm – I know that I always had it, I just didn’t know what it was – when I was an undergraduate student at Cornell University. Now, if you’ve ever visited my Alma Mater, you know that it is visually and aurally the university from central casting.  It’s got lovely leafy quads. It’s got imposing towers “reared against the arch of heaven” as the Alma Mater would have it. There’s ivy everywhere.

And tucked away, in all sorts of spots probable and improbable, all sorts of statutes and plaques and benches that are intended to commemorate the glories of learning while giving the scholar a place to rest his weary bones.

I suspect that every Cornellian knows what I’m going to say next.

If you were to visit my Alma Mater, you might find yourself drawn to a particularly beautiful spot, facing west, under the library bell tower.  There, as so often at older academic institutions, you would find a bench, and on that bench, an inscription:

To those who shall sit here rejoicing,
To those who shall sit here in mourning,
Sympathy and Greeting,
So have we done in our time.

Now I’m told – I was never actually able to take a course from him – that Professor M.H. Abrams, the editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the author of The Mirror and the Lamp, a seminal text for understanding those English romantic poets we talked about in Lecture 25, that he used to end his survey of English Literature by saying that here, in that inscription, was the meaning of all art – “Sympathy and Greeting, So have we done in our time.”

Now with apologies to Professor Abrams, I will go him one better. Here is the meaning of the entire inheritance bequeathed to us by civilization. Here is the meaning of human history itself.

Greeting – because civilization is the means by which the generations communicate with each other. It is a sort of greeting card from past generations to the present. And what does that card say? Well it says: “We lived and died. We loved and hated.  We struggled, and won, and lost all the while “rejoicing and mourning” as you do now. Don’t forget us. Listen to us.  You might learn something. You might learn what happens when people think that their religion, their political system, their culture is the superior or only way – as in the Spanish Inquisition or the Reign of Terror. What happens when people pursue material wealth at the expense of all else – as in the slave trade or the industrial revolution. What happens when they become drunk with Nationalism or the desire for vengeance – as in 1914 or the Balkans or what used to take place regularly on the Franco-German border every generation. What happens when they choose Order or Security over Freedom – as in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars or Germany in the wake of the Depression. What happens when they embrace new knowledge, remain open to new ideas, and fight for justice – as in the Scientific and Rational revolutions and countless reform movements. And what happens when they don’t -- too often to name."

Sympathy – because if you pick up anything at all from the history of civilization it should be a kind of Sympathy for all those human beings who have gone before. I don’t think that you can study history, I don’t think that you can listen to that Greeting for very long without developing a compassion for those who fought the good fight of life before us. Especially those who struggled against injustice or great odds – serfs, Levelers, industrial workers – or those whose death came unjustly or too soon – slaves, Holocaust victims, and all those dead soldiers and sailors in all those wars we covered.  History should in particular give its students a strong sense of justice and injustice if only by exposing them to all the best and all the worst that human beings have done for and to each other since the beginning of time.

But Sympathy, too – on a deeper level because history reminds its students that their way is not the only way. Other times and other cultures have had their own ways of ordering the universe, the state, the family, relations between the genders, the business of getting and spending. Indeed, if the first half of this course is all about how Europe became modern, the second half is about how European’s modern experiences have rendered their attitudes and behaviors so different from ours in America at the dawn of the 21^st Century.  

We often wonder why we don’t understand.  Well, it’s helpful to learn to understand that past in order to explain that present.

Thus Sympathy – as taught by history, also implies a kind of humility, a realization that we in the West do not have all the answers, that other cultures have much to offer, that other people have their reasons for doing what they do.  The end result of such understanding is what Havel meant by living "in peace with other cultural worlds without a person or state having to renounce themselves and their truth in the process."

Now that does not mean automatic approval of every truth. This is not an argument for relativism – cultural or otherwise. This kind of Sympathy does not mean that we do not condemn the slave owner, the concentration camp guard, the terrorist. But it does call us to that most difficult of intellectual exercises – to try to understand the experiences and motivations of those who hate what civilization loves – if only so that we may more effectively discredit their hatred.

Now as you know, humankind still retains the power to destroy civilization as we know it in about the time it has taken me to deliver this lecture. Should that ever happen, it will be due to a failure of Sympathy.  The politician who presses the button, the gunman who takes one life, the terrorist who takes many can only do so by a failure of human Sympathy – a failure to hear the Greeting of history, a failure to listen to the lesson of civilization.

And so you see, I’m arguing that this course – enjoyable as I hope it has been – is much more than a way to pass the time.  It is rather a toolkit for any citizen of the West, a survival kit for any citizen of the world. It is essential equipment for those of us who wish to become civilized and remain so – in a world which is dangerous and complicated but also beautiful and round and very delicate and rather small.

It seems to me that we dare do no less.

We can no other.