It is one of the pleasures of old age to look back over the years and recall what one was doing 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 years ago. This morning, as I lay in bed at about 4:30 AM trying to snatch a few more moments of rest before getting up, I found myself reflecting that this is almost to the day 30 years since Esther Terry invited me to join the W. E. B. Dubois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts and thereby changed my life.
Fifty years ago at this time I was preparing to launch a new
undergraduate interdisciplinary major at the University of Massachusetts to
which I gave the name Social Thought and Political Economy, or STPEC (“stepick”),
as the UMass computer renamed it. In the fall, I shall travel to Amherst one
last time to join in the half-century celebration of that program, which still
exists and flourishes in the Pioneer Valley.
This fall, it will be 60 years since the Cuban Missile
Crisis, through which the world lived while I was teaching at the University of
Chicago. I had for some while been deeply engaged in the campaign for nuclear
disarmament and was terrified by what was unfolding in the Caribbean. At one
point, I received a call from Marc Raskin (Jaimie’s father), who was the
in-house critic on the staff of McGeorge Bundy, Kennedys National Security
Advisor. Marc asked me what I was doing about the crisis. I replied that I had
loaded up our VW bug with dried food and a Geiger counter and had reservations
on flights to Mexico and Canada, depending on which way the wind was blowing.
He was quite disapproving of my self-protective measures and suggested I should
be doing more. I asked what he was doing, since he was actually in a position to
have some effect. He leaned close to the phone (or so it seemed to me) and said
in a soft voice, “we are trying to reach the Pope.” I recall thinking to myself
that if that was the best that the office of the National Security Advisor could
do, then we were all screwed.
Seventy years ago, I was a sophomore at Harvard, taking
Willard Van Orman Quine’s graduate seminar in mathematical logic and Harry
Austryn Wolfson’s course on the philosophy of Spinoza.
Eighty years ago (though I confess I have very little memory
of it) I was in 3A at PS 117 in Jamaica, New York. I should explain that in New
York City in those days children entered public school twice a year, in
September and in January, depending on when they were born. They graduated 12 years later in June or
December. If you were, like me, a December baby this meant that you would have
to wait six months before going to college but since only 5% of young people
went on to college, it hardly mattered. If you entered high school in January,
as I did, and were one of the handful aiming for college, you
had to accelerate and get out in 3 ½ years to avoid losing six months. Both I
and my wife, Susie, who was then my girlfriend and who was born in January, did
just that so that in the fall of 1950 I could start at Harvard and she at
Connecticut College for Women.
Later this morning, I have one more gig, in an undergraduate
Afro-American Studies course at the University of Alabama. I shall spare them my superannuated maunderings.
4 comments:
your " superannuated maunderings " is very refreshing and it is furthermore one of the reasons why I read your blog. You know that this combination of theoretical thinking and interspersed private stories in your lectures about Kant and Marx are like the salt in the soup.
I have read many biographies of philosophers in my life. I have always been interested in this connection between thinking and a lived life. There is a short anecdote by Heidegger that I read in Hans Georg Gadamer. Gadamer asked Heidegger what Aristotle's life had been like. The answer was: "The only thing you have to know is: He was born, he thought and he died." Well, not the only thing this man was wrong about.
Mention of Marcus Raskin’s comment about calling the Pope during the Cuban Missile Crisis reminded me of the Duck and Cover drills we were sometimes subjected to in grammar school in the 1950s. I remember being puzzled about all this one time when I noticed that we kids had to hide under our desks, while the teacher didn’t take cover but instead stalked around the classroom making sure that we were doing as we were told to do. What puzzled me (I think) was that when we had fire drills, everybody (including the teachers) had to clear out of the building and move way out into the school yard. That seemed sensible enough, since I understood well enough what fire was, but there was something amiss about the D&C drills—since if the nuclear blast and radiation were coming for us, the teachers would have been exposed. I remember one casualty in those drills: one of the kids was wearing a polio leg-brace and he got it stuck under or on the desk in the mayhem. And (maybe another time) one of the boys laughed and said he could see the underpants of the girl beside him, and that started a fight. We also had Civil Defense (CD) placards all over the place, and some drills involved taking cover (without the ducking) in the cavernous school basement, where democratically we and the teachers would be safe from the effects of the Bomb. Backyard fall-out shelters were popular too. In retrospect, all this made about as much sense as our National Security apparatchiks calling the Pope.
In 1963 or so, in high school, 4 students in my home room class refused to do the drill. The drill was to go out into the cinderblock corridor and sit on the floor, being sure not to sit opposite any windowed door. I was one of the four. The others were Lenny (a Japanese-American), Donna (one of the few Black students in the school), and Mark a member of the DuBois Club. I was probably the least politically informed of the group, but thought the drill was silly. (I observed that any glass from a door would melt before hitting us.)
This earned a letter home to my parents, which made them nervous (it is relevant that my parents were in their late 50s/early 60s and had lived through some stuff). They asked me about consequences and I said that it seemed the school would send a letter home. And that seemed to be it.
Prof. Wolff, I've seen all your lectures in You Tube. I really appreciate your series of lectures on Kant's. "Critique of Pure Reason". Although my specialization is English Literature, I'm really interested in the intersection of Philosophy and Literature especially since I handle Literary Theory and Criticism in the undergraduate level. I also enjoyed your lectures on Marx. I hope you would deliver a series of lectures on Spinoza. I'm just hoping. Thank you, Sir.
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