Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz has recently been released by the Folio Society in a wickedly expensive (and sold out) edition that features illustrations by artist Eliot Lang. The art for the frontispiece, which shows the martyrdom of St. Leibowitz by flame and noose, hangs over my worktable.
A veteran of World War II’s European front, Miller never forgave himself for bombing St. Benedict’s monastery of Monte Cassino. The monastery has managed, however, to continue long after Miller suicided. Its Arch-Abbot still presides. A Mother Superior who hosted my friends and me at a Benedictine monastery in the Appenines is buried there. She cooked for us, showed us the third-century Constantinian ruins of San Vincenzo, and led us through an archeological excavation of its crypt while we talked happily about how its iconography resembled that of the cave churches in Cappadocia. It was an extraordinary interchange of conversation, cultures, and glorious countryside.
After going on hiatus in 2006, my writing has returned. To me, it seems very sound. However, I also suspect that it is unfashionable, grounded as it is in history, literature, and my life experiences rather than any prevailing ideology. I can ascribe this, in large part, both to living in the current time as a woman and to my liberal arts education, a type of training that remains as satisfying to me as it is currently beleaguered. In the wake of the November 5 elections, I suspect this siege is only likely to intensify. Like the era of St. Leibowitz himself, we may be on the verge of a great Simplification.
Putting away the polysyllables for now, I think we are engaged in a great uncivil war. More than that, we are fighting a rearguard action against a great simplification such as occurred in Leibowitz long before Brother Francis broke his Lenten fast by eating lizards in the Utah desert outside his monastery of Sanly Bowitts. In the course of his isolation, he ran into a certain Hebrew-speaking hermit who helped him find a fallout shelter that contained the relics of one Isaac Edward Leibowitz, techie, martyr, and inspiration for the monastery in which Francis resides.
From the fury of the Fallout, oh Lord, deliver us.
The rest of us might well pray to be delivered from the rancor of the Simpletons.
At any time.
A Brief Circle Around Hard Times
Although A Canticle for Leibowitz is set in a dystopian future, I find that it casts me back into the past, specifically to the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria. On June 8, 793, it fell under an attack that now is said to have ushered in the Viking Age. Lindisfarne had been minding its own business of prayer, study, preservation of learning, and illumination of manuscripts.
The monks of Sanly Bowitts had a similar mission. It has not been altogether stamped out even now.
Let’s look at our own community of SF readers, artists, writers, viewers, and critics circling the wagons against the literary mainstream. Right now, and possibly because I am still wondering what’s going to happen to us all in the next four years, terms I had managed to ignore are assaulting my ears. Words like hatewatching and shitposting reinforce the intellectual snobbery that pits SF against the mainstream, the right against the left, and the proletariat against the professoriat — not to mention the lumpenprofessoriat, which accounts for a great number of the social justice types. Their current performances before volatile and sometimes immature audiences make me nervous. They can, and have, turned violent and self-justifying all too easily before an audience of the ill-taught, self-taught, and resentful. Simpletons, whether at universities or the ballot box or the dinner table, remain Simpletons.
Looking back to the student insurrections of 1970 and thereabouts, I see similarities. I really thought that President Nixon was going to shut down the universities. Today, I read of ambitions to dismantle DEI, to reduce faculty sizes, and to gut general education curricula in favor of courses that current-day administrators hope will lure ambitious and terrified students into class and to major in advanced spreadsheets and temporary technology. The goal seems not to be understanding the world and how to cope with it, but to pr0pel students into middle management right away, or before their student loans come due.
In 1970, I swore to become a booklegger or memorizer, as in Leibowitz or Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Even now as my memory is rustier than the steel trap it once was, it wouldn’t be hard for me to brush up my Shakespeare and finish memorizing Hamlet.
Let’s say I memorize Hamlet once more. Once I have my main text under my belt, I can go back to Chaucer. And Old English. And everything else I learned in nine years of humanities education from the B.A. to the Ph.D. These days, advanced liberal arts studies are the sort of education that causes some people to berate me for intellectual privilege and others to make finger-rubbing “show me the money” gestures like a bunch of hoo-mon Ferengi. Social Justice Warriors lecture me on how outmoded my views are, while, 180 degrees apart from them, state representatives and nervous college administrators slash the majors that formed a lingua franca in the West (now productively joined by studies of other cultures).
In the present time, I tend to look back at the preservation of humane studies after the destruction of Lindisfarne, the insulation of the monasteries in the Middle Ages, attacks like the bombing of Monte Cassino. Nevertheless, they survive.
This has been a fast circuit around several centuries and forward to what I hope is an unthinkable future. I do hope that those of you with some training beyond Wikipedia will hold off on your “gotchas” until I have finished explaining my theory. That means I have to start with the liberal arts as they were known in the Middle Ages. Scholars of the time held that there were seven liberal larts. They were divided into the trivium, which consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Don’t get me wrong. None of these seven “arts,” or even Theology, which the schoolmen considered the Queen of the Sciences, are going to get ambitious undergrads an internship at Goldman Sachs, an apprenticeship in welding, or even an adjunct position at Columbia, where all hell is self-righteously breaking loose again. But my own exposure to the liberal arts does help me see what has happened, what’s happening now, and what may be coming for us if we are not watchful, careful, and prepared to defend ourselves.
To me, given this sort of training, currently fashionable majors in advanced spreadsheet, STEM, or various types of (plug in your favorite fashionable ideology) studies majors are training, not education. In the case of the Studies majors, I might even call them indoctrination. But they do not get to tell me “my way or the highway.” It’s been my experience that liberal arts training does create a workaround in the all-important business of finding and keeping jobs. For example, I was a medieval scholar. I worked on Wall Street and reached the rank of Vice President. I write fiction. I have paid off my student loans without parental help and am now retired. This means I get to say such things without fear of reprisal beyond the occasional nastygram.
Will my background — or my polemics — hurt my writing career? As Joe Haldeman once said, I don’t have a career. I have the next story and the next after that and the obligation to write them as well as possible. As for publishing them, I have heard stories that there’s no room for the likes of me in the publishing “club.” I hope they’re wrowng. If not, I’ll survive. I come from a long line of survivors.
Back to Leibowitz
In Canticle, after the Diluvium Ignis, or flood of fire, you may recall that there was a great Simplification as ordinary people turned on the eggheads whom they blamed for the nuclear attacks. “Simpleton,” which is what they were called, replaced “Citizen” as the title for ordinary and extraordinarily resentful people.
Leibowitz was a tech who was caught and hanged and burnt. In the frontispiece of the the book’s Folio edition, his noose becomes a halo. He is wearing his glasses. He is smiling and holding a cup. This Leibowitz is not saintly, heroic, or exalted. He doesn’t even seem to be in obvious pain.
These days, fastidious and brittle critics would probably call A Canticle for Leibowitz “problematic.” That is the intellectually timid way of criticizing without specifying what you’re condemning. Leibowitz contains references and material that provoke controversy, trigger people, and maybe even offend them. Too much religion, especially a form of Catholicism and Judaism. Opposition to euthanasia even after lethal dosages of radiation. Not enough women. Warfare, cannibalism, disrespect for a lot of authority.
I can even hear Social Justice types complaining that the book is elitist in the way I heard affluent, indignant parents at a college graduation complain that the graduation speaker, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, insulted them by using words they didn’t understand. (They never thought of looking them up.)
The book does require a certain amount of intellectual apparatus that made students angry at the insecurity that evoked when I taught it in 1977. You don’t need to know Latin, Hebrew, how fallout works on the body, chant, or monastic history, though they’re all pretty useful. The presumption, however, that advanced studies might assist the ordinary reader in this era of TLDR (too long, didn’t read) is one that evokes resentment at those damn snobbish liberal arts. Given Google, there’s no reason why one cannot look these things up fast.
Cliches about Liberal Arts–
Some of Them Are True
About those liberal arts…these days, some people remind us that they fostered critical thinking, not denunciations and rude bumper stickers. They provided a kind of Rossetta Stone for learning. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
But those who do learn history, who remember it, are destined to fight it, like the historian Marc Bloch and author of the magisterial Feudal History. An assimilated Jew, a scholar at the Sorbonne, and a partisan, Bloch joined the French Resistance during World War II and was killed by the Nazis. He was my inspiration throughout what we used to call the Troubles. I look back to him now.
And then, there were the code breakers in Bletchley Park, who included mathematicians like Alan Turing as well as linguistic scholars. We also owe a debt of gratitude to the bilingual Dineh whose language helped win the war. They all saved the world a lot. Not learning about them means not learning about why they fought and what they fought for. That’s not just insulting to them and their work. It’s dangerous. History may come round again.
Translation Can Mean Protection
History doesn’t just repeat itself. It provides modes of translation. If you can learn Old Norse, you can explain how a hedge fund works, although the structured bond funds are a little crazy, even to the people who manage them. I spent years doing precisely that. And, because of my training as an SF reader and writer, I was able to talk with the physicists and mathematicians — referred to as “quants” — who constructed the more complicated models.
Liberal arts training also shows the people who survive courses that require 1,500 pages of reading per course a week or passing a summer boot camp course designed to drag you through a language requirement have learned that it is not magic, but work, to learn new things. The work, however, is no harder than anything else we’ve been through. You can pick up familiarity with a new field, a new geography, a new (or ancient) language, at least enough to cherry-pick what you need for a manuscript within a summer.
Only two types of people really should take offense at this: the people who don’t want to learn a damn thing that doesn’t bring immediate return and the gatekeepers with a vested interest in making learning seem harder and less pleasurable than it actually is.
Translation: Case Studies
My last book, Hostile Takeovers, before I went on “sabbatical,” was hard science fiction set in the Asteroid belt. Yes, I know that I have no business dealing with hard SF. Not with a Ph.D. in medieval English. But I do know at least a trifle about securities, regulations, and how the industry works. The question was how to adapt the securities industry to outer space. Trades will not be instantaneous. Signals will weaken and dissipate. Trade information can be hacked on its way to its end user. What’s important in securities will be very different. So will Earth. And solar flares can disrupt it.
The idea of taking 40 years of financial services information and extrapolating it into outer space struck me as fascinating. And, after all, it was just learning things. When I started to learn how to use the internet, a very fashionable term was Boolean search. Years ago, I proved expert at hunting through the type of card catalogues now preserved online, or at sitting on the floor in front of a bookcase full of dusty hardovers, chortling to myself, and picking out whatever looked interesting.
Plus, I know how to contact experts in the fields that I needed to know more about. Despite reprimands that a NASA Ph.D. far outranked a curious Ph.D. in English and therefore was much too important for me to bother, I emailed him. His information, cheerfully provided, let me design a system that could take a trade that began on Earth, transmit it past Mars and into the Asteroid Belt and to its end user at a base on one of the gas giants’ major satellites. Of course, the trade messages had to be encrypted, sent out, compressed and cleaned as they moved further and further away from the issuing entity. Possibly, they needed to be picked up by interim stations, which I called Bloomberg Boosting Units after a terminal and the former New York Mayor who released it, and hardened before they arrived at their final destination to be cleaned, decrypted, and passed along for action. Moreover, they had to be timestamped GMT, as a sort of universal signifier.
Doing that was a hell of a lot of fun.
So is writing about the Silk Roads, which I have crossed in research and in narrative several times. I actually have been told, however, that it is cultural appropriation for me to write about the Han Chinese, the T’ang Dynasty, or the Tarim Basin.
So what does that leave me?
Must I be restricted to writing about the Midwest, or the Northeast, or Jewish culture in New York City, which means I collide against currently chic prejudices about the likes of me. Maybe I could write about the Ivy League, but that would subject me to rebuke on the left and sneers on the right. I never realized how many people would attack me because I’d completed an academic program that can best be described as boot camp with bad sherry. Attacks, however, do not invalidate.
It isn’t just useful to work up a new field for a new book. It’s empowering, even fun. So much for the characters, mostly men, I am sorry to say, whom I’ve run into since 1989 when I first went online. Used to trying to talk down to women, these fugitives from various Gamergates tell me to “educate myself.” That is supposed to be a final judgment, after which I am supposed to slink into a corner, cry, and make them a sandwich. NFW.
These characters also try to invalidate what I learned by the sweat of my brow, the nerves of my body, and constant blows to my ego, financial fear, and psyops. I am no longer progressive enough to fit in at Mount Holyoke, my undergraduate school, or Harvard, my graduate school. But I was a damned good medieval scholar long ago, and I’m still a fine writer, even if I say so myself.
Yes, I know. Self-deprecation is as much a sin as self-praise, and I have just perpetrated both in the same paragraph. I confess that self-deprecation is a sin that women like me are prone to. Probably, preemptive putdowns are the result of socialization to protect us from being put fiercely in whatever “place” the bully du jour, whether male, female, classmate, manager, influencer, or any other would-be tyrant wants us to occupy.
In general, that is not a very nice place. I am quite familiar with scrambling out of it. And self-praise brings on the bullies even more rapidly. It is a privilege limited to other people, until they too are brought down in our current age of Schadenfreude. People seem to enjoy other people’s humiliation by name-calling, gaslighting, or any other type of verbal abuse they can muster before they start hitting.
I am not yet done with my writing, with my education, with annoying the algorithms, the bros, and the tradwives. Even if I had to lodge an EEOC complaint about ageism years ago, with luck and care, I have years yet. I want to make more of my life, even when the “okay Boomer” types haul up the ice floe Uber and suggest I slide on board.
Not damn likely. Let them borrow their own phraseology and just go…educate themselves.
