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I've already thanked Sarah Palin once on this site. In that instance, it was for giving Tina Fey such a wonderful character to play.

I'm indebted to her once again, this time for a remark that she made during last Thursday's vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden [click here to see a transcript.] I've already quoted the remark in my post "The Seagull": it's her reference to John Winthrop via Ronald Reagan:

But even more important is that world view that I share with John McCain. That world view that says that America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here. We are not perfect as a nation. But together, we represent a perfect ideal.

I'll be opening tomorrow's lecture on on John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630) with a clip of Palin's remark, eventually circling back around to her inspiration, Ronald Reagan.

"A Model of Christian Charity" was delivered on board the ship Arbella on the eve of its reaching Massachusetts Bay. I prepared the way for Winthrop during last Wednesday's lecture by discussing, once again, the New Testament appropriation of the Old, exemplified by the relationship between these two passages:

Leviticus 24.19-20: "And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him: breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again."

Matthew: 5.38-39: "You have heard that it hath been said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth': but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thyright cheek, turn to him the other also."

I spent a little bit of time talking about Matthew's emphasis on Jesus' life as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, with particular reference to Isaiah 53, which was part of the class's assignment from Isaiah. I presented St. Paul (via Romans and 1 Corinthians) as a quasi-cosmopolitan thinker who offered the Gospel of Christ to both the Jews and the Gentiles: "[God] will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith" ("Romans 3.30-31). And I discussed the tension, in St. Paul's writing, between his emphasis on love and his emphasis on the Passion as the most important aspect of the Gospels. For Paul, it is love that explains the importance of the Passion: Jesus died because of God's and his love for humankind, but I asked the students to think about what it means to stress the way Christ died over the way he lived, the suffering over the teaching. In Paul's hands, it is compatible with a cosmopolitan message. In the Puritans' hands, it becomes something else.

I'd be willing to bet that Sarah Palin couldn't tell you who John Winthrop was, but she sure knows who Ronald Reagan was. And I'll end tomorrow's lecture with a brief discussion of Reagan's appropriation of Winthrop's appropriation of Matthew's image of the "city on a hill." I'll talk about the ways in which Winthrop puts community ahead of the individual and argue that the sermon is designed to harness individual energies for the good of the community. Reagan, however, reverses the message and transforms Winthrop into a spokesman for individualism. In a speech given to the Conservative Union in 1977, after Jimmy Carter won the White House, Reagan argued that the Republican party "must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than insuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society."

If the Republicans could manage to bring this about, Reagan concluded, "then with God's help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon us." Indeed, Reagan goes further, transforming Winthrop into a rugged individualist: "What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free."

Tomorrow's lecture is, in part, about symbology: I'll discuss what the symbols that we associate with Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity tell us about the ways in whcih these religions present themselves both to believeres and to outsiders. And I'll close by showing how the meanings of symbol like the "city on a hill" shift as it circulates through history and culture.

Wednesday's playlist was: Santana (with Eric Clapton), "The Calling"; R.E.M., "It's The End of the World" (even though I didn't really get to Revelation); and (gotta love that Christian hard rock) Petra, "Onward Christian Soldiers."

Tomorrow's playlist is: Moby, "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters"; Loretta Lynn, "God Makes No Mistakes"; and two by U2, "In God's Country" and "God, Part 2.

And for you Tina Fey fans, here's the latest:




The main subject of tomorrow's first lecture on the New Testament is going to be the question of how the model of culture as the interplay of dominant, residual, and emergent forms can help us to understand the relationship between the New Testament and the Old, particularly the way in which the New appropriates, reconstructs, and reinterprets the Old.

A key exhibit, I think, will be the Sermon on the Mount, which I will contrast with the account of the ten commandments in Exodus 20 and  the famous passages about justice -- "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth " -- in Exodus 21 and Leviticus 24.

I also want to start thinking about the implications of choosing to emphasize one aspect of Christ's life and death over enough. Specifically, what kind of Christianity flows out of an emphasis on the life and teachings of Christ? And what kind of Christianity flows out of an emphasis on the martyrdom and resurrection of Christ?

We're using Matthew as our base text: the students are supposed to read the whole gospel in order to get a complete life of Christ. Matthew is probably the most accessible (and familiar) of the four, and it contains the Sermon on the Mount. And i hope to use it to pave the way for my discussion of John do Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" next week with its invocation of the "city on a hill." I'm supplementing Matthew with the openings and passions from each of the other three gospels, as well Mark 4 on the necessity of speaking in parables and Luke 6 (The Sermon on the Plain).

Because the students seem to be having trouble reading the language of the King James Bible, I will probably read passages aloud. Certainly the beginnings of the gospels, with special attention to the different priorities evident in Matthew's and Luke's different approaches to the task of introducing the life of Christ. And, to convey a sense of the different source materials on which the evangelists drew, the different annunciation and nativity accounts.

The strategy for the course's treatment of the New Testament is to talk about the gospels tomorrow and about St. Paul and Revelation on Wednesday. Next week will be devoted to Puritan and contemporary interpretations of the Bible, which will also give me a chance to answer any questions about either Testament that have arisen.
 
On the playlist for tomorrow: Prince, "The Cross"; Lauryn Hill, "Forgive Them Father"; Joan Osborne, "One of Us."

[Illustration: The Four Evangelists on a page from The Book of Kells, illuminated manuscript, ca. 8th- or early 9th-century CE; probably made on the island of Iona in Scotland by Irish monks.]

Well, it happened: one of the moments to which I always look forward whenever I'm teaching a lecture course.

It's been my practice for quite a while now to play songs before and after each of my lectures that are somehow related to the day's major ideas. Sometimes the lyrics are important, but sometimes it's just the title of the song or even the name of the band. For example, Genesis's love song "Follow You, Follow Me" was one of the songs I played before Monday's lecture on the Book of Genesis, and while you could argue that the song's lyrics could be about love of God rather than earthly love, I chose the song because of the band's name (and because the song reminds me of high school). The recessional tune, however, I chose for the lyrics: Bruce Springsteen's rendition of "Jacob's Ladder."

I started this practice years ago when I was lecturing on the eighth floor of NYU's Main Building (now Silver Center). I found that the elevator lines were so long that I had to be there at least 15 minutes early or else walk up the eight flights. The latter would put me in an ill humor, but I wasn't so crazy about being that early to class either. So I decided to play tunes to amuse myself and perhaps give the students a subliminal incentive to get there early themselves. I never said anything about it, but I did start noticing that there were more students there ahead of time than there had been before. And on the days when I happened to be too late to play the songs -- or if I neglected to bring the songs -- I'd see some disappointed faces and a few scowls. My wife calls it "feeding the rat": creating expectations that then need to be satisfied day after day -- or else.

The songs generally reflect my tastes in classic and indie rock, but I'm always on the lookout for new music to play. And invariably, at some point during the term, without prompting, a student will ask if he or she can suggest a song to be played. And that's the moment to which I look forward. It gives me the sense that I'm getting the students to be invested in the course in a way that's different from the way they're invested in their other courses. (I'm probably fooling myself, but, hey, a guy can dream!)

So the playlist for Wednesday's lecture, which focused on the Books of Jonah and Job, was:

Paul Simon, "Jonah"
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, "Jonah"
Warren Zevon, "Poor, Poor Pitful Me"
Bruce Springsteen, "The Promised Land"

And the second tune, "Jonah" by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, was suggested by one of my students, Ethan Kilham. Thanks, Ethan.

I spent a lot of time during Monday's ConWest lecture talking about the "Documentary Hypothesis" formulated by the nineteenth-century German philologist Julius Wellhausen that suggests that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) are not, as tradition held, authored by Moses as the result of divine revelation, but rather a compilation of four different sources by an editor.

The sources are referred to as:

• J (refers to the Deity as "Yahweh," "Jahwe" in German)
• E (refers to the Deity as "God," "Elohim" in Hebrew)
• P (Priestly material, Leviticus)
• D (Deuteronomists)

The editor is often referred to as R (the "Redactor") and thought to be Ezra, the author of the Book of Ezra, which offers an account of events related to the ending of the Babylonian Captivity by Cyrus the Great.

In the context of my course, talking about the sources of the Old Testament is useful because it helps to make the case for the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism and thus Christianity. Ezra is described as a "scribe in the law of Moses" during "the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia." He is is descended from a line of priests, and it seems likely that what Harold Bloom calls (in The Book of J, his attempt to reconstruct the earliest source for the Pentateuch) the "normative Judaism" according to which Ezra shapes the Pentateuch is marked by Persian influence. Bloom asks:

How are we to proceed when nearly all writing that has survived reflects the canonical choices and redactions of normative Judaism? . . . The normative tradition in Judaism did not censor; it simply ignored what it disapproved in its own backgrounds. Archaic Judaism is all but totally unknown to us. We know the rabbinical Judaism that has been dominant since the second century C.E., and we know, more or less, what that Judaism judged to be the chain of tradition that extended from Ezra the great Redactor to the Pharisees and then to Akiba, central among all the second-century rabbis. What we do not know is the Judaism that was available to the Yahwist, and the history, or the mythology of that Judaism. All that I can see is that the Yahweh of the Yahwist has very little to do with the God of Ezra or the God of Akiba.

Paul Kriwaczek adds (in In Search of Zarathustra):

Unfortunately the only record we have of relations between the Judean exiles and their Achaemenid rulers is contained in the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah, a rather tortured account of the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in Jerusalem, so badly confusing dates and names of kings that generations of scholars have argued about whether Ezra or Nehemiah came first and when and how the walls of Jerusalem were repaired and the Temple rebuilt. What does seem clear is that both Ezra and Nehemiah were important personages in the Persian royal court in the fifth century BC - Nehemiah was cup-bearer to the king  - and that they received permission - and financial support  - to return to the land of their fathers and carry out a religious revolution, forcibly imposing their version of true Judaism on an astonished population.

This year I've asked the students actually to read The Book of Ezra and instead of excerpts from Jeremiah, they're reading the sections of Isaiah (40-55) that deal with the Babylonian Captivity. Together, these selections help them to see the links between the Zoroastrian and Judaic traditions.

The other reason to talk about the sources of the Pentateuch is to make problematic the idea that the Bible is somehow "literally" true, since it is full of contradictions. Few people seem to remember that the story of creation is told twice, once by the P source (Genesis 1-2.3) and once by the J source (Genesis 2.4-3.24). Although both firmly establish a monotheistic tradition, the two sources differ in certain details, such as the order of the creation of the plants, beasts, and humans, as well as in style, and in their presentation of the deity: P's God is transcendent, but dispatches humans as his agents in creation; J's God is immanent, engages in dialogues with Adam and Eve, but tends to treat them as if they are children.The P source refers to God as "God," while the J source calls him "Yahweh" ("Lord" in the King James Bible that we're using).

One of the things I plan to emphasize again tomorrow is that the expulsion from the Garden only becomes the great "Fall of Man" in the Christian tradition; Judaism stresses the fact that the descendents of Adam remain God's chosen people and that he engages in dialogue with them, even if he often needs to punish them.

My favorite part of Monday's lecture, however, was looking at the story of the Flood, which I presented as a mash-up of two different stories, which differ fairly radically in their accounts:

• P has one pair of each kind of animal; J has seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean animals. ("Clean" here means that they are approved for sacrifice.)
• J says the Flood lasted forty days and forty nights, with an extra couple of weeks for drying out; P describes a year (370 days) - see 7.11; 8.14.
• P has Noah send out a raven; J has him send out a dove.
• P is concerned with ages, dates, and measurements in cubits; J is not.

What's interesting here is that there's little attempt to reconcile the two stories, which are mashed together. The whole tale makes little sense, until one realizes that it is a mash-up. You can separate out the two versions quite cleanly, and each is complete and makes sense on its own.

That, of course, hasn't stopped interpreters who reject the "Documentary Hypothesis" and cling to the belief that there is a single author with a single intention.(The "documents" after all don't really exist, but hypothesizing their existence offers the best way of accounting for the textual problems of the Pentateuch.)

Here, for example, is one person's attempt to reconcile the conflicting figures:

Based on my reading in the NIV [New International Version] and further study of some of the original words, it seems pretty clear to me that the author's intention was to communicate a story that went like this:

The rain, subterranean water flows, and rising water levels lasted for forty days, after which point the earth was covered with standing water to a depth of  about 20 feet over the mountain tops. At some point after the forty days of rain, God sent a wind to begin to dry the water up. The water level then gradually receded until, on the 150th day, it was low enough that the ark ran aground on the peak of a still-submerged mountain. (And, incidentally, the text doesn't say specifically that it was Mt. Ararat, it says it was on the mountains of Ararat. The word is plural and refers to a range rather than a single mountain.) The water level continued to abate, so that by the 224th day, a number of mountain peaks were at last visible. After that, the water level continued its same, gradual decrease for another forty days, at which point Noah sends out the raven and the dove. Seven days later he sends the dove out again and it returns with the olive branch, so Noah knows that the water no longer completely covers the ground. By the 314th day, there was no longer even any water standing on the surface of the ground, and by the 370th day, or so, the soil itself, even below the surface, was completely dried out and returned to a normal state.

This would put the dates as follows:

• 40 days, length of rain and rising water level - Verse 7:17 41-149 days, water dominating all land, but gradually receding - Verses 8:1-3
• 150 days, waters have abated enough that the ark runs aground on a submerged peak - Verse 8:4
• 224 days, tops of mountains are visible- Verse 8:5
• 264 days, Noah sends out dove - Verse 8:6
• 271 days, dove finds land - Verse 8:10-11
• 278 days, dove doesn't return - Verse 8:12
• 314 days, there is no more standing water covering the ground's surface - Verse 8:13
• 370 days, the ground is utterly and completely dry, finally having returned to a pre-flood state - Verse 8:14

The Mets' bullpen blew another one this afternoon, this time against the Braves in Atlanta. Leading 4-2 going into the bottom of the seventh, the bullpen gave up one run in that frame, and four more in the next. Carlos Delgado hit a two-run homer in the top of the ninth to make the final score look a little better. Scott Schoenweis took the loss. Here's what espn.com had to say:

Down 4-3, Atlanta struck in the eighth against Scott Schoeneweis (2-5) and three Mets relievers. It was the latest collapse for a beleaguered bullpen missing injured closer Billy Wagner. The relievers have a league-high 16 blown saves since the All-Star break, the worst in the NL. Schoeneweis has lost three games since Aug. 26 and the relievers have a woeful 2-8 record since Aug. 11.

The Mets lost ground to both the Phillies, who now lead the division by a game-and-a-half, and the Brewers, who now trail the Mets for the wild card by only a game-and-a-half.

I suppose, though the Yankees would trade places with the Mets, at this moment. They won the final game at Yankee Stadium tonight over the Orioles, 7-3, but they're about to be eliminated from the playoffs by the Red Sox, whose magic number is just 1. I'm sure that at the start of season the Yankees expected the final game at the Stadium to be played in October and to end with another World Series win.

It could still happen at Shea. Or next Sunday could be the last game. We'll see.

On a more hopeful note: msnbc.com is reporting tonight that, with five days before the first presidential debate, Obama is widening his lead in the national polls as a result of McCain's less-than-convincing response so far to the economic crisis:

McCain faces the daunting task of trying to square his long history of advocating corporate and financial deregulation -- the sort of loose controls many blame for the turmoil on Wall Street.

Obama seized on that during a campaign appearance at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida.

"There's only one candidate who's called himself 'fundamentally a deregulator' when deregulation is part of the problem," Obama said.

McCain now says more controls are needed to prevent a repeat of the turmoil that sent the stock market plunging, as he tries to recover from a series of gaffes this week, starting with his Monday assessment that U.S. economic fundamentals were strong.

National polls indicate that McCain's edge in the U.S. presidential race has slipped since the market upheaval. The latest Gallup Poll daily tracking survey also showed Obama ahead, with 50 percent to McCain's 44 percent. Last Sunday, a day before stocks took a dive on Wall Street, McCain and Obama were in a statistical dead heat with McCain's 47 percent against Obama's 45 percent.

Appropriately enough, I've been thinking about the making and breaking of covenants this evening, as I prepare to lecture tomorrow on the Old Testament. I'm always struck, when re-reading Genesis and Exodus, by how much of the books are about property: wives, servants, cattle, sheep, and land. And all that attention to detail! God sure knew what he wanted in an ark, both the big kind (Genesis) and the little kind (Exodus)!

Tomorrow's playlist: Genesis, "Follow You, Follow Me"; Peter Gabriel, "Here Comes the Flood"; and Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band, "Jacob's Ladder."

The subjects of my second Con West class on Zoroastrianism are going to be Zoroastrianism's approach to the problem of evil and its stress on the importance of free choice. I'll most likely be using excerpts from the Gathas (included in the Zoroastrian liturgy known as the Yasna) to illustrate these points. I'll probably also discuss two Zoroastrian symbols: the fire and the Faravahar.

Here's an excerpt from one of this week's readings, S. A. Nigosian's The Zoroastrian Faith: Tradition and Modern Research that gets at these subjects:

According to ancient Iranian belief, Ahura Mazda was the wise lord, the all-knowing sky god, and the supreme creator. He was also intimately associated with truth, sovereignty, mysterious power, light, and sun. His nature was best expressed in the cult of fire (atar). The ritual attached to the sacred fire existed before Zoroaster, who adopted it and made it the outward symbol of truth (Yasna 43.9). In fact, Zoroaster taught that, for an individual to exercise free choice intelligently, Ahura Mazda gave his pure mind and his flaming fire of thought (Yasna 46.7). This fire was an enduring, blazing flame bringing clear guidance and joy to the true believer but destruction to lovers of evil (Yasna 34.4). It was through the energy of fire that Ahura Mazda assigned judgment to truth-followers and to
evil-followers (Yasna 43.4, 47 6).

Zoroaster saw humanity divided into two opposing parties: the truth-followers (ashavant), who were just and god-fearing; and the evil-followers (dregvant), among whom were classed all evil rulers, evil-doers, evil-speakers, those of evil conscience, and evil-thinkers (Yasna 49.11). But this basic dualism that Zoroaster saw here and now on earth he projected to the whole cosmos. He came to see that this fundamental tension existed both in the material as well as in the spiritual spheres. Over against a transcendental good mind stood the evil mind; over against the good spirit stood the evil spirit; and so on. Yet, on every level, a choice had to be made. This insistence on freedom of choice was the marked characteristic of Zoroaster's teaching. In fact, what stood out in Zoroaster's principles was not the ethical dualism of good versus evil but the importance of the individual as an arbiter between them. Each individual was ultimately faced with making a choice between good and evil, truth and falsehood.

I think it's that combination of ethical (not to mention cosmic) dualism and freedom of choice that interested Melville and led him to include Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick. I'm looking forward to exploring that in greater detail this year than I've been able to in the past.

Today's playlist: the Brazilian jazz man Eumir Deodata's arrangement of "Also Sprach Zarathushtra"; U2, "The Unforgettale Fire"; and The Doors, "Light My Fire."

The camera then turns to McCain, who's looking into the audience and pointing and then says, "Zoroastrian . . . yes . . . thank you . . . good to see you." Clearly, someone was standing up in the audience and identifying himself or herself as a Zoroastrian -- if you happen to read this and it was you, let me know who you are! But I think Joy Behar may have been  mistaken when she said, "That's one vote." I suspect rather that the Zoroastrian in the audience was so flabbergasted to hear the religion mentioned in the same breath with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, that he or she had to stand up and be counted.

Zoroastrianism, you see, is a dying religion: a survey conducted in 2004 by the Fezana Journal, published quarterly by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America estimated the number of Zoroastrians worldwide to be fewer than 190,000 and perhaps as few as 124,000. Zoroastrianism can only be passed down patrilineally,and it doesn't accept converts. And, apparently, more and more young Zoroastrian women are marrying outside the faith.

The applause by the audience at The View suggested not only the audience-members agreed with the point that Goldberg was trying to make, but also that they were far more familiar with "wiccans" than "Zoroastrians." Most of them, I am sure, would not know that Zoroastrianism is the oldest monotheistic religion in the world, that it predates Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that it influenced all of them and the ancient Greeks as well. The religion evolved from the pagan fire-worship that Zarathushtra encountered throughout Persia, and in Moby-Dick, Ishmael refers to Persia as "the home of the fire-worshippers."

My students in Con West are going to know this. They've been reading Paul Kriwaczek's In Search of Zarathustra: Across Iran and Central Asia to Find the World's First Prophet (2003), a journalistic account of the influence of Zarathushtra that moves backward in time. (Kriwaczek adopts Nietzsche's spelling of "Zarathushtra," dropping the second "h.") They've also read some excerpts from scholarly studies by Mary Boyce (Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices) and S. A. Nigosian (The Zoroastrian Faith: Tradition and Modern Research).

One of the things I'm planning to stress this year more than last is the cosmopolitan nature of Zoroastrianism as practiced by Cyrus the Great and Darius I. The Persian Empire (which at its height rivalled ancient Rome and the Chinese Han dynasty) encompassed not only Persians and Medes, but also Babylonians, Bactrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, and Scythians. The Old Testament Book of Ezra relates that it was Cyrus who ordered the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and who ended the Jews' Babylonian captivity.

This year I will show a picture of the famous "Cyrus Cylinder," which was placed in the walls of Babylon in 539 BCE and discovered there in 1879.


Now housed in the British Museum, the Cylinder bears inscriptions written in Babylonian that promise a just and peaceful rule by the Persians. The text relates that Cyrus has promised to restore the gods of Babylon, especially Marduk, the patron god of the city, who had been rejected by the previous king, Nabonidus. The Cylinder claims that Cyrus has restored temples in neighboring countries and has allowed the return of their exiled peoples and and their gods.

As a further emblem of the Persian's propensity for toleration, I'll be using the story that Kriwacwzek relates from Herodotus about how Cyrus came to power by overthrowing his grandfather Astyages, the king of the Medes. After dreaming that his daughter's loins would produce a vine that would overshadow all of Asia, Astyages was told by his soothsayers that his daughter's son one one day rule in his place. So he ordered his nobleman Hapargus to murder the boy, but Hapargus could not bring himself to do it, instead leaving the boy with a poor herdsman. Cyrus eventually came to the king's notice, and when the story of his childhood was revealed, Astyages exacted revenge on Hapargus by killing Hapargus's thirteen-year-old son and serving the boy to his father at dinner. When Hapargus discovered what Astyages had done, he chose not to seek immediate revenge but to bide his time. Eventually, he helped Cyrus to the throne. Cyrus, however, chose not to kill Asytages: instead, he let the old man remain in court for the rest of his life (where, I suppose, Cyrus could keep an eye on him). According to Herodotus, Cyrus showed similar restraint toward other conquered rulers.

In Cyrus's day, Zoroastrians were far more cosmopolitan those around them. Today, that cosmopolitanism seems likely to ensure the demise of the faith. In article called "Zoroastrians Keep the Faith, and Keep Dwindling" (September 6, 2006), the New York Times wrote that "Zoroastrians' mobility and adaptability has contributed to their demographic crisis. They assimilate and intermarry, virtually disappearing into their adopted cultures."

Kriwacwzek's book, however, suggests that the influence of Zoroastrianism remains strong throughout the Western religious tradition. One Islamist politician from Tajikistan tells Kriwaczek:

[The] faith lives on into the present. Zoroastrianism is the ideology of the future. Do you know what Zoroastrians believe? That the world is a battleground between good and evil and it is the duty of eveyrone to foster good and fight evil. Zoroastrianism failed in the end because it came to early in history. It is an idea for now. . . .

The world has become a very small place. For the first time we really can speak of a world community. To secure our future we must find a humanist philosophy. And Islam, supported by the message of Zoroaster, offers that philosophy.

Tomorrow's playlist comes from songs that I used last year: the opening of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (of course), Bruce Springsteen's "Fire," Jimi Hendrix's "Fire," and the Rolling Stones' "Play with Fire."

Some years ago I began to play songs before each of my American Literature I lectures. I was teaching on the eighth floor of NYU's Main Building (now the Silver Center), a building that wasn't really designed for the number of students that flooded into and out of it at the beginning of each class hour. If you didn't arrive well 15 minutes before the start of class, you'd find yourself waiting in long elevator lines. So I'd usually take the stairs, a good form of passive exercise, but (as you can imagine) I would often arrive on the eighth floor not only winded but in a rather ill-humor.

So I thought that it might be fun to play some music to cheer me up. Then I though that if I got there early, I could play several songs, which might amuse both me and those students who had gotten there early. I didn't say anything about it, but the songs were linked in some way to the day's subject. The students soon began to catch on; indeed, I would be met by disgruntled looks on those days when I happened to arrive too late to play the songs I'd prepared. Eventually, one of the students asked if he could make some suggestions for future lectures.

Playing songs before class thus became one of my standard practices. It meant, of course, that I was creating an amped up rather than a contemplative mood before class, but I suppose that suits my style at the podium. And I figured that it might serve as a subliminal suggestion to students that they should be sure to arrive at the classroom early. I also play one song as the students are leaving.

My selections tend to reflect my own prediliction for classic rock, so I'm always pleased to have new suggestions. One of the questions that I was asked on the questionnaire that I circulated at the end of Monday's lecture was: How did you find so many songs with "cosmopolitan" in the title? The answer is a 180 GB iTunes library. I sometimes find myself using keyword searches to find songs that I didn't know I had.

So here are the playlists for the first three lectures in this year's Conversation of the West course.

LECTURE ONE: INTRODUCTION
Opening: Bonnie Raitt, "Something To Talk About"; Dire Straits, "Once Upon a Time in the West."
Closing: "The Pretenders, "Talk of the Town"

LECTURE TWO: APPIAH AND COSMOPOLITANISM
Opening: Erin McKeown, "Cosmopolitans"; Nine Black Alps, "Cosmopolitan""; Al di Meola and Leonid Agutin, "Cosmopolitan Life."
Closing: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?"

LECTURE THREE: LOOMINGS (Introduction to Melville)
Opening: Corm, "Call Me Ishmael"; Toby Goodshank, "Call Me Ishmael"; Call Me Ishmael, "Seeing Stars."
Closing: Led Zeppelin, "Moby Dick."

Monday's lecture is about Zoroastrianism. Any suggestions?

Before Monday's lecture, the instructor who teaches in my room during the previous time slot asked me what songs I'd be playing. "Songs with 'cosmopolitanism' in the title," I replied. "Oooh, we don't like cosmopolitanism," she said, going on to explain that she and her teaching assistants were all classicists, and they felt that cosmopolitanism was being used to justify the acquisition of antiquities on the black market by collectors. She had particular animus toward Appiah: "He's gone over to the dark side." I suggested that if nations operated according to a theory of cosmopolitanism there might not be a black market in antiquities in the same way that there is today, but she wasn't buying. So I told my class that there were those on NYU's faculty who thought of Appiah as a version of Darth Vader, suggesting to them that they realize that both Appiah and cosmopolitanism are controversial and that they should give his arguments close scrutiny.

At the end of the class, I had the students fill out a questionnaire, asking them what they thought the most important point made in lecture had been, whether they had any questions about the lecture, and whether they had any questions about Appiah's book. Here are my favorite responses:

I really appreciated how he had his own set of beliefs, but he respected and cared about those of others. He learned from them. That is rare. [This makes me sad.]

Is the world eventually going to be a cosmopolitan society? [Wouldn't it be pretty to think so.]

Why did Appiah say that a lot of philosophy books are not useful? [A bit of an oversimplification, I think.]

Appiah's ideas seem so logical that I find it hard to consider cosmopolitanism controversial, despite his deconstruction of the terms he defines. [Clearly not voting for McCain-Palin.]

I wonder what race his wife is ... [Read the acknowledgments, but why are you asking?]

Some of the queries, however, I'll address at the beginning of the class, particularly one about cosmopolitanism as an elitist perspective (I opened the door to that myself in class by referring to Tim Brennan's critique of Salman Rushdie), one about the limits of cosmopolitan theory, and another about Appiah's attempts to be prescriptive.

I'm also going to a few moments in the text that will help me to introduce Moby-Dick, since the ostensible subject of the lecture is the "Etymology" and "Extracts" sections and Chapter One, "Loomings." These will include Appiah's argument about the value of storytelling (p. 29); his suggestion that "what it's reasonable for you to think, faced with a particular experience, depends on what ideas you already have" (p. 39), as a way of reintroducing the idea of the "horizon of expectations," which I discussed in the opening lecture; and Appiah's invocation of Hilary Putnam's maxim "Meanings ain't in the head" as a way of talking about intertextuality.

I plan to talk more about the nature of "meaning" and to argue that the "meaning" of a literary text arises through a complex negotiation between author and reader thorugh the medium of the text. I want to stress that meaning is a collaboration between between author and reader and to do that I'll use a device I've used before in my American Literature survey: I'll show a set of clips from the film Shakespeare in Love that show how Romeo and Juliet is produced not by a solitary genius but by a writer who transforms the materials of the everyday world around him and works in collaboration with other writers (such as Marlowe), actors, and indeed the entire culture around him. And I'll suggest that Melville is doing something similar.

Shakespeare will arise again when I call attention to the story of Melville's meeting with Hawthorne and his statement, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," that "Shakespeare has been approached." The other thing I'll show them in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" is Melville's description of the "great power of blackness" in Hawthorne, which "derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance."

And of course, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, I'll have to end with that uncanny moment at the end of "Loomings," when Ishmael makes his joke about his role in the script that the Fates have written:

And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States."

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

Whoa. Cue Led Zeppelin.

Tomorrow I'm lecturing on Kwame Anthony Appiah's book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), which works marvelously in the context of Con West because of his stress on the importance of "conversation." I'd spent part of the time during last Wednesday's opening lecture preparing the students for the concepts that Appiah discusses. Naturally, therefore, my ears pricked up when I heard Rudolph Giuliani's ad lib about cosmopolitanism during his address to the Republican National Convention that evening:

Governor Palin represents a new generation. She's already one of the most successful governors in America and the most popular. (Cheers, applause.) And she's already had more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket combined. (Cheers, applause.) She's been a mayor. (Laughter, cheers, applause.) I love that. (Cheers, applause.) I'm sorry -- I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough. (Laughter.)

(Altering tone of voice.) I'm sorry, Barack -- (laughter) -- that it's not flashy enough. (Laughter.)

Maybe they cling to religion there. (Cheers, applause.) Ooh. (Extended cheers and applause.)

I'm thinking about starting the lecture (after a five-minute "in-class exercise" i.e. "quiz" about Appiah's book) with this clip of Giuliani's remark from You Tube. It's shot from behind so it makes him look particularly trogolodytic:



The lines about cosmopolitanism don't appear in the transcript that was circulated in advance to the media. Maybe it was the heat of the moment: driven by the desire to gain the approval of the diehard Republican audience in front of him, the overwhelmingly white crowd that had eagerly embraced the caricature of small-town values embodied by Sarah Palin, Giuliani disavows his connection to New York City and indeed all of urban America. Giuliani's remark puts me in mind of a comment that Thomas Frank makes in What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004):

Kansas today is a burned-over district of conservatism where the backlash propaganda has woven itself into the fabric of everyday life. People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City.

Like the conservatives that Frank describes, Giuliani transforms "cosmopolitan" into a scare-word, glossing it in his next remark as "flashy." Personally, I find it hard to believe that Giuliani could actually believe that being mayor of a town like Wasilla, Alaska (current population 7,025 according to www.cityofwasilla.com) is really akin to being mayor of New York City (current population 8,274,527). Or that he really feels more of a connection to Sarah Palin than to the average New Yorker. But like most of the speakers at that convention (with the possible exception of the nominee, John McCain), Giuliani was pandering to the crowd and willing to say just about anything.

I'd imagine that most of the students in my course are liberals, but I don't intend to take that for granted. Indeed, I'm going to pause for a moment and openly admit my politics -- I'll be wearing a Barack Obama lapel pin so it should be obvious -- and then explain why I don't try to hide my politics in the classroom. I'll tell them that I believe that literature and all forms of storytelling (including history and philosophy) are inherently political, because they are about the ways in which human beings relate or fail to relate to one another and exercise power over one another. My goal is to enable my students to recognize the political aspects of discourse and to be able to make informed, critical arguments, either for or against the theory of cosmopolitanism that I'm presenting. They're not going to be graded on the extent to which they agree with me: they're going to be graded on the quality of the arguments that they're able to make about the ideas we've discussed and the texts we've read.

What I'll try to make them see is that if Giuliani really believes that "cosmopolitan" means "flashy," then he's misunderstood not only the concept but also what is so special about the city of which he was once the mayor. Because cosmopolitan doesn't mean that you're well-traveled, or that you eat all kinds of different cuisines, or enjoy a variety of highbrow cultural forms: it means that you aren't afraid of difference, but rather see difference as an opportunity for personal growth. The cosmopolitan values the things that all human beings all share by virtue of being human -- what some thinkers call the "universal" -- but finds excitement in the differences that can be found in different human cultures. Cosmopolitanism," Appiah writes, "is universality plus difference." For the cosmopolitan thinker, as I constantly repeat, difference is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be embraced.

Once again, I'll be using both Raymond Williams's model of dominant, emergent, and residual cultures, and George Lakoff's account of "framing" to help the students understand Appiah's argument that "cultural contamination" is the natural tendency of all cultures, which left to their own devices never attempt to remain pure but rather constantly change and adapt through contact with other cultures and peoples. And finally, I'll be stressing a concept which is particular useful when you're a lecturer who tries to be spontaneous: what Appiah calls "fallibilism," the idea that because no human being is perfect, we must be open in our conversations with others to having our mind changed and to admitting that we are mistaken. We need to listen as well as talk to others, to persuade but also be open to being persuaded. That's the mark of a true cosmopolitan. Far from being flashy, the true cosmopolitan is humble before the awesome richness and diversity of human experience.