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The Education of Henry Adams with Leah Libresco Sargeant | America 250 · Christians Reading Classics

0:18
SPEAKER_00: Until the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge and helpless to find it.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: He would have liked to know how much of it could have been grasped by the best informed man in the world.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: Then he, meeting Adams's guide to the exposition, showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos and explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine house, carefully kept out of sight.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: But to Adams, the dynamo became a symbol of infinity.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the cross.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: So wrote Henry Adams about the 1900 World Fair in Paris in his memoir, The Education of Henry Adams.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season two of Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: The theme for this second season is Classics American Christians Should Read in honor of America's 250th.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: I am Nadia Williams, book's editor for Mirror Orthodoxy, and the author of the book Christians Reading Classics, out this past fall with Sandra Academic.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: And today it is my delight and privilege to talk about the education of Henry Adams, focusing on the chapter The Dynamo and the Virgin with Leah Labresco Sargent.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: She is the author of three books, including most recently The Dignity of Dependence.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: So, Leah, welcome here.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me on.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: So we'll connect back to the dignity of dependence later in this conversation, and I was actually seeing all sorts of connections as I was reading this chapter.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: But first, a little bit of background about Henry Adams.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Just imagine, what would it be like to be born in a family that boasted not one, but two previous American presidents, as well as various other politicians, diplomats, public policy shapers?
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Such was the burden that Henry Adams, born in 1838, had to bear.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Henry was the son of Charles Francis Adams, the third son of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States of America, and the son of the second president, John Adams.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, Henry, perhaps some would say was an underachiever because he just became a journalist, historian, and novelist.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: But he cared deeply about knowledge.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: So in 1918, aged 80, he published his memoir, The Education of Henry Adams.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: And in it, he connected his life story with that of his country.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: His project was welcomed by his peers and contemporaries.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: It was an instant bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to start with a couple of general questions for you, Leah.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Like, first, why should we read memoirs and autobiographical books like this one?
3:52
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, of course, you wrote a memoir about your conversion.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: So clearly you appreciate memoirs.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: But let's hear it.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Why is the genre worth it?
4:00
SPEAKER_00: I actually would strongly contest whether or not I've ever written a memoir.
4:04
SPEAKER_01: I've written nonfiction books where I include kind of my personal encounters with the ideas or the prayers or my attempts to put something into practice.
4:11
SPEAKER_01: But for me, memoir always requires a certain amount of self-disclosure and a narrative centered on oneself that uh to be honest, I'm not sure if my life can sustain.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: And I've never really been interested in writing.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: Um, a memoir is something that requires not only vulnerability on the part of the author, but an unconsented to vulnerability on the part of their friends, family, etc.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: And I always edit and curate and want to say, how did I respond to this beautiful idea or this practice?
4:42
SPEAKER_01: But I'm, you know, using myself to look forward and out.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: Memoir does look in and pulls in everyone around you.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: And there are certainly memoirs I've enjoyed.
4:51
SPEAKER_01: H's for Hawk is probably one of my favorite um contemporary memoirs, but I wouldn't dare write one.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's fair.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: Although I do think uh you bring personal details really well into your writing and especially in talking about your faith, your family.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: Well, so what about Henry?
5:12
SPEAKER_00: Would you say this is a memoir?
5:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, more so than mine, but in many ways, he's also a sort of intellectual and political flanner.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: You know, he's inviting us to sit alongside him as he looks forward and backwards and what's going on around him.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, certainly his voice and his impressions are indelible.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: And I think one thing that's very fun about reading memoir from another time is you get a very different sense not only of what they're responding to, but just of the expectations around self-presentation.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: That there's both more self-deprecating humor than you might expect naively thinking about something from this period, but there's still a very elevated tone.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: You know, you would never mistake this for a contemporary work.
5:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I enjoy that a great deal.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was struck by the use of the third person.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Like I've never read a contemporary memoir, I think, with third person narrative.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: Like he did this.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Like, even in this excerpt I read as we opened, he talks about like he attended this exhibition.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: It's got that reporting quality to it, that he's relaying something to us rather than inviting us fully inside, even though he gives us a great deal of his emotional and intellectual life in his telling.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: I like that.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: So that's sort of a journalist writing about himself almost like a research subject.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: So, why do you think this book, this work of Henry Adams, is worth reading for American Christians in this year of America's 250th?
6:40
SPEAKER_00: Like what makes it an American classic?
6:43
SPEAKER_01: You know, I think it's two things.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: One is that it's wonderful to get a strong sense of America at a different time than either the founding or right now.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: So you're kind of tracing the arc of how America comes to understand itself, the different cleavages.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: Um, I got great advice from someone once of just if you're going to write op-eds or commentary on the present, you need to be reading outside your time.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: Because without that, it's easy to be swept away by whatever the current political question is or the sense of is now the worst, best, most time ever in American history.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: And one thing I really enjoy is that whenever I read deeply in a particular period of the past, it restores to me a sense of density.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: That life has always been, even outside the information age, as dense with incident and personality and clash as it is right now.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: But what could sustain an entire 600-page nonfiction book on one particular conflict is, you know, a few paragraphs or a sentence in my history book.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: And having those experiences of the denseness of history in just a few chosen spots for me most recently, the Panama Canal, a big nonfiction book on that, you know, restores me my sense, even for those moments I don't delve deeply into, that I could go arbitrarily deeply into them.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of a pitch for lots of parts of history and books from just other parts of the history of America.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: But for this book in particular, what I think is wonderful about reading Henry Adams at this anniversary is Henry Adams is, by virtue of his family, by virtue of his times, seized by the anxiety that I think we naturally bring to these anniversaries.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: He admires and reveres the founding.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: He has a sense that America has slipped from a peak, and a sense that perhaps he and his generation are not equal to the demands placed upon them in a way that their forefathers were.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: And he's exploring this question both in the earlier sections that we're not discussing in detail, but just even of his own education.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: He's kind of asking the question of, well, what has Harvard formed me for?
8:44
SPEAKER_01: And what did it form people for?
8:45
SPEAKER_01: And am I prepared to be any good to anyone?
8:48
SPEAKER_01: And if not, whose fault is that really?
8:50
SPEAKER_01: Is it mine or is it other people's?
8:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, similar questions we ask about today's college students.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's good to see that anxiety was there nearly from the start.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: That part of being an American is an anxiety about whether we live up to the ideals of America, in what ways we fall short, and whether those are structural, personal, educational, cultural ways.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: I like that.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: And just the whole idea.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Before there was God and man at Yale, there was God and man at Harvard.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Very much.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: The Henry Adams edition.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk more specifically about the chapter that um we focused on The Dynamo and the Virgin.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: So what does Adams even mean by these terms?
9:32
SPEAKER_00: So, like walk us through his argument here.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'm going to give a little bit of background of when I first read this as I do, um, flipping in my own copy.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: So I read this as part of a seminar in college called Political Philosophy as Education.
9:45
SPEAKER_01: And we read this, we read The Emile, we read some Locke.
9:49
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so this is his whole thing is always very concerned with ways of knowing and relating to the world and his own possible deficiency in doing that.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: He's got the sense very much too in this chapter of that he might be nearly missing something important, like someone who can almost hear a conversation in the next room, but he's not fully in it.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: And what is he going to do?
10:09
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, in this, he goes to the exposition, he sees dynamos, you know.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: I I love the description.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, the planet is right after the section you picked.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: The planet itself seemed less impressive in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel revolving with an arm's length at some vertiginous speed and barely murmuring, scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's breast further for respective power, while it would not wake the baby lying close to its frame.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: Before the end, one began to pray to it.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: Inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: Then he encounters something that we're now both used to in some sense.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: We have electricity, but we're at a great remove from you don't go visit the dynamos that power your home.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: And he has an experience of the sublime, you know, that awe mingled with terror in response to it.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: And he's really trying to connect this with the possible awe or terror one could experience with respect to the Virgin Mary.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: And again, I think without this chapter, I was so struck by this, and I read it as an atheist at the time, you know, as someone who longed to build big things, who wanted more room for this kind of awe at physical forces.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: To me, it was strange that he would naturally connect this to the Virgin Mary.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: But he says, you know, uh the knife's edge along which he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the 12th century, divided two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation.
11:48
SPEAKER_01: Supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love, the force of the virgin was still felt at lords and seemed to be as potent as x-rays.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: But in America, nearly Venus nor Virgin had any value as force, at most as sentiment.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: No American had ever been truly afraid of either.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: And so he's got this mystery, he's encountered this new power that's clearly going to reshape the world.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: And for him, it connects it back to this power that has clearly shaped the old world, but not, as he considers it, the new.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: And he's looking along both, looking forward to the future, looking back at America's inheritance or, you know, lost inheritance, to wonder who am I in relationship to these large things?
12:30
SPEAKER_01: How is it I can feel or absorb their force, but not know them fully?
12:36
SPEAKER_00: And that's striking because it leaves you wondering like to what extent is this a Henry problem?
12:42
SPEAKER_00: And to what extent is this everyone else?
12:44
SPEAKER_00: And of course, he's convinced this is America.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: Like my voice is the voice of America.
12:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he very much always takes himself as metonymy for his age, you know, that he's exceptional in reporting that this or being kind of seized with confusion about it.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: But he often writes those describing something like, as you know, as like a mediocre Harvard student yourself, right?
13:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, and he's someone who also wrote um a book about Chartres, you know, which is again not written from the perspective of someone who is a full believer, but is clearly stuck somehow.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: There's something that captures him in those moments, you know, that's now coming back to him here.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: And he can't fully resolve it.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: He's not able to move past the claim of the virgin, but neither can he assent to it.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: And that's striking.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: So his own family background is um, of course, kind of a bag baggage to go with all of this.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: So he hails from this prominent Unitarian family.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: John Quincy Adams, his grandfather, the president, um, attended church faithfully every week.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: He read his Bible.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: He was well known for that.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: And then by the time we get to Henry's generation at the end of the 19th century, there was this joke about Unitarians that they believed in at most one God.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: So, how do we read his faith in this chapter?
14:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, on the one hand, as you noted, he seems to be kind of confused.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: But do you think we can read real spiritual longings here?
14:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, he reminds me of another American writer who's not known as a man of faith, but has kind of a few startling experiences that never fully reshape his life.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: And yet that pull is there, and it's Mark Twain, who's that's what I thought you were gonna say.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: Okay, go ahead.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
14:28
SPEAKER_01: You know, irreverent.
14:29
SPEAKER_01: He's a satirist, he loves slaughtering sacred cows.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: He's not that personally religious in his actual life, but he has this unusual fascination with Joan of Arc.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: He writes a book about her that's played much more straight than anything else he does.
14:41
SPEAKER_01: He had an awe of her.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: And because it was almost, you know, in the way that you get your friend who loves dolphins, you get them a dolphin chotchke, wherever you get, his friends are throwing a party for him and they think, oh, he loves Joan of Arc.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: Let's have some girl dress up as Joan of Arc and come in.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: He'll love it.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: It'll be funny.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: And so they do this.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: This young woman comes in dressed as Joan of Arc at Mark Twain's party.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: And when she comes in, he nearly overturns his seat.
15:05
SPEAKER_01: And it's so clearly a joke gone wrong because for him, in that moment, it's not a joke at all.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: He reacts as though Joan has simply arrived.
15:14
SPEAKER_01: So there's some part of him that really believes at some level that the reality of her presence, that she could burst into his life, will he or nil he?
15:23
SPEAKER_01: And you know, then it's more shocking almost that there's just a girl dressed up than that the saint hasn't come to him.
15:29
SPEAKER_01: I think that Henry Adams has an experience very similar to that at Chartres, where there's some space in him that's ready to receive it, but it's not enough.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's still never enough for him to walk fully away from, which I think also makes him interesting.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: He's, you know, always taking himself as metonymy for his own times, but I think this is interesting the context of the project of the new evangelization, um, as it's sometimes called within the Catholic Church, which is different from what you may think of as the old evangelization, which is evangelizing people who have never heard of Christ.
16:02
SPEAKER_01: The good news is new news to them.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: But for Adams, the good news is old news.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: You don't, it's not shocking to talk about Christ, though it might be shocking to fully believe.
16:13
SPEAKER_01: He's certainly aware of the Virgin, but her power is startling and under acknowledged.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: And we are trying to speak to people who, like Henry Adams, can say, Well, I I've heard this before, I recognize the name, I know who the cathedral's about, but can still be startled by the encounter with her.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
16:32
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16:37
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17:19
SPEAKER_00: I was thinking about the Puritan legacy, which is a very different sort of Christianity.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: And then for both of them, it sounds like there was this fascination with an angle that they had not experienced before, something different, an old, maybe an older Christianity, you're more European.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: And so it's appropriate to see this fascination with the dynamos in Paris.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: The Puritans have more of a suspicion about large motive powers outside oneself, I would say.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: There's less of the ecstatic there.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: And there's clearly his description of both the virgin and the dynamos deeply touched by the ecstatic.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: The sense you could lose yourself in this, that it has a force you would respond to that could reshape your life.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: Again, we he talks a lot about the laws of attraction or magnetism, that this is something that you can see either as almost malign in that it can reshape your path, or if you think about magnetism, this is something that reshapes your path because you are responsive to what it is.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: It acts upon you because you are made for it.
18:22
SPEAKER_01: I think that's always the question when we respond powerfully to art, to technology, to religion.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: Is it something hijacking the natural capacities we have for awe, for the sublime?
18:35
SPEAKER_01: Or is it in fact the thing these capacities are made for?
18:38
SPEAKER_01: Or do you concede that that category exists at all, that there is something we're made to respond to with awe?
18:44
SPEAKER_00: And that's something that I was thinking in reading about the modern technological kind of attractions for us right now.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: So um, like various scandals about AI, the whole idea of uh AI confessions or AI pastors, AI, just um so many different varieties of AI combinations with church that have all been really just icky.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: Um I guess I wanted to ask you like if you had been Adams' guide at this exhibition, what would you have said to him?
19:16
SPEAKER_00: Because it seems like his guide is just kind of encouraging this false religion.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: It's like, yes, the dynamos are great.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: Be awed by this.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I would also be awed by them.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: They're really cool.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: I think part of it is how do you connect as a Christian that awe at nature and the awe at what we can do as subcreators within God's creation, with still a reverence for the creator.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: You know, for me, this often comes uh, well, actually, I'm reading a book right now that's wonderful and I think gives you a sense of how to approach this.
19:48
SPEAKER_01: It's called The Perfectionists, and it's about precision.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: So each chapter is going by powers of 10, a different scale of precision in the history of how finally we've been able to divide and create things.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: And for me, reading that book, you know, you can read this as a purely human triumph.
20:06
SPEAKER_01: Here's how humans have mastered the world.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, here's how we've pushed further and farther our capacity to divide, to measure, to um carefully construct.
20:16
SPEAKER_01: But for me, that awe is always a mingle that, wow, what a gift to have the world.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: What a gift that the world is responsive to our intellects, that the physical laws are discernible by us.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: Look at this unfolding story of coming to know what God has done and to see how much it costs us to be creators as well, you know, to work at those minute scales becomes almost farcical, you know, to try and figure out how do I work at the level of an atom?
20:41
SPEAKER_01: How do I catch the shadow of this thing that God knows intimately?
20:44
SPEAKER_01: So I guess that's the pitch I would make him, you know, for you worked slightly for the actual example in front of him.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, as a scientist, as an inventor, you're both thinking new thoughts.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: You're the first person to ever have thought of this, right?
20:58
SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, you're always getting to turn over one more leaf in the book God has written, where he's waiting, excited for you to finally see something he has known from the dawn of time.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: And now finally you get to participate in his joy.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: That's beautiful.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: And I think about this the con the entire context of an exhibition was to just glorify the work of people.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: And to give a sense of just how the future is an exciting unfolding story, which I think is part of what we miss in these days.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: We have all the anxiety of Henry Adams.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: But there's there's less of a sense of, you know, even as we also commit new sins or old sins and new configurations, that there is still this unfolding awe at the world, at creation, and our ability to do good.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: You know, we live in an age, you and I, where when each of us were born, and until very recently, there was almost no cure for cystic fibrosis.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: You know, we'd extended lives, but your life would always be marked in this permanent challenging.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Way.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: And in the past five years, we've come up with a cure for almost all cases.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: And it's a full cure, and people live normal lifespans.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know what other dynamo-like things are going to unfold that reshape our sense of what's possible and give us greater ability to care for each other.
22:19
SPEAKER_01: But I really don't write off that we will have these continued breakthroughs that we are capable, if we choose, of ordering to each other's good.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: So dynamos that serve people instead of dynamos that we worship as false gods.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: I like that.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: That's an important distinction.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: So to talk about a little bit about this bigger picture of this autobiography.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: So for Henry, this is his lifelong educational journey.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: He's the student who never left school, at least in his mind.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: And so writing an autobiography, um, it's not about family or people.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: It's first and foremost about here are the things I learned at each different stage in my life.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: Um and it seems like he has this interest in analyzing religion and kind of just collecting data about it.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: And yet he never seems fully convinced.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, and even right now, there does seem to be a general concern in Christian circles that education, especially in secular institutions, will destroy kids' faith.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: And I was thinking in your case, by contrast, you converted in college.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: So do you relate to Henry's questions, this lifelong quest of trying to figure out what he believed?
23:33
SPEAKER_00: Or were your questions completely different?
23:36
SPEAKER_01: You know, for me, I didn't come into college with active questions about Christianity.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: I was growing up in the middle of the four horsemen of new atheism period.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, I didn't find Christianity very interesting, but I met Christians who turned out to be interested in college.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: And so I thought I had to learn more about Christianity so that I could get my friends and debate group to stop being Christians, which is, you know, of course, what you would do for someone you love.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: And so that led me in where my need was not, I have this pull, this something that's attached to me that I have to resolve at least at first.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: It was just, okay, I've learned that some of the kind of takedowns or refutations of Christianity that I learned are not sufficient for my friends.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: Their faith is more sophisticated, more interesting.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: So I've got to learn more so I can refute it.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: And as I did that, eventually I did get entangled in the way that Adam seems to be entangled, um, where it wasn't that I thought it was true, but it was just dangerous enough that it could possibly be true that now I needed to answer it fully for myself so that I could move on.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: My my bet certainly wasn't that it was true or I would have lived as a Christian at that time, but to walk away from it would have been negligent until I'd fully put it down.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: And Adams is not this kind of debater.
24:53
SPEAKER_00: He's it it's not like he's on a uh quest to convince anyone.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: It's more like he's trying to figure it out for himself and never really fully does.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: There's something in that feeling of the sublime, especially at Chartres, that he never has a non-Christian answer to.
25:11
SPEAKER_01: It's just that in lots of other parts of his life, it's not pierced in the same way.
25:15
SPEAKER_01: So you feel like if he could just stay out of Chartres and maybe stay away from the dynamos, which awakened the same idea, he could live a normal, untroubled, not particularly Christian life.
25:25
SPEAKER_01: But occasionally that normal life is interrupted by the sublime and the normal life doesn't have an answer to it.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: So we focused a lot on his religious thought, but um, any tips you want to give somebody who's a first-time reader of Adams in approaching this book?
25:41
SPEAKER_00: Anything else they should pay attention to?
25:43
SPEAKER_01: You know, I would say, first of all, if you're picking it up for the first time and it doesn't feel like a smooth read to you, try reading it out loud.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: Um his he's a storyteller and he's got an unusual way of telling stories.
25:55
SPEAKER_01: And if you feel stuck because it's very different from other books you're picking up, read it aloud to someone else.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: And I would say also, you know, it's a very long book.
26:04
SPEAKER_01: So if you want to poke around in it in this anniversary here, and especially if you have small kids, you have my permission to pick out individual chapters and kind of mess around.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: So I would definitely read a little bit, maybe of the first few chapters up through Harvard College.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: You have a sense of who does he consider himself to be, and then pop around and see what you might be interested in.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: Um he's a good person to spend time with.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: I think that's a great assessment.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: And I find that the chapters are very self-contained.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: So those episodes.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: So he is an easy one to like hop around and enjoy.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Well, let's switch gears now and talk about your newest book, The Dignity of Dependence.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: And uh regular mere orthodoxy readers, if you're listening, you've read the forum about this book, including Leah's own response essay in the fall print issue of the journal.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: But for those listeners who perhaps have missed the forum, shame on them, or haven't read haven't read Leah's book yet, definitely shame on them.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: So would you like to tell them, like, what is your mission in this project?
27:10
SPEAKER_01: I would say my book is bringing together two claims, hopefully in a kind of cruciform shape.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: And the first claim is that women's equality with men is not premised on our interchangeability with men.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: And the second claim is that it is dependence, not autonomy, that forms the basic pattern of human life, a good human life.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: So can you unpack this a little bit more?
27:33
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, I think we see in a lot of different domains the sense of how do we justify that men and women are equal in dignity?
27:40
SPEAKER_01: I think many people do have the intuition this is true.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: That then when there's a little bit of a push on it, you're saying, well, how do I justify this?
27:47
SPEAKER_01: It's easiest, especially in a kind of secular, non-philosophically sophisticated context, to say two things are equal if they're the same.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: If men and women are basically equivalent, then the only excuse for teaching them, treating them differently is sexism.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: But when you kind of start from that point of view, basically equivalent, therefore sexism is trivially wrong, well, then everything that's a genuine asymmetry between men and women threatens to upset not only your refutation of sexism, but your actual ground for considering men and women of equal dignity.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: And there are more and less subtle ways in which men and women are obviously not fully interchangeable.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: You know, some ways are overlapping bell curve kind of ways, like height.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: Men are on average taller than women, even though you can find individual women taller than individual men.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: There are some personality traits that have a similar distribution.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: But then there are the really blatant asymmetries, like the ability to become pregnant, or, you know, more precisely, being the kind of person ordered towards this capacity.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: So whether or not you hope to have a baby, whether or not you hope to have a baby and don't succeed.
28:58
SPEAKER_01: I really love that C.S.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: Lewis understood this.
29:01
SPEAKER_01: He wrote to the Van Awkkins, who wrote A Severe Mercy, which is this beautiful love story and conversion story, that they chose not to have children because they thought having children would upset the basic equality of their marriage before their conversion.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: Because being a mother and being a father would differentiate them enough that then they wouldn't be fully united.
29:21
SPEAKER_01: And Lewis says, not that politely, but in the tones of a friend, like, you guys are idiots.
29:26
SPEAKER_01: He says the experience of being denied a child is also gendered, and it's one you did not and could not share with your wife.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: So the choice to forgo children for fear they would upset the fundamental equality of your marriage still implicated the fundamental asymmetry of your marriage, and to boot you didn't have children.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Double curse.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: In a lot of ways, I thought your book was a good conversation partner with Henry Adams, who lived this very intellectual life, like all brain.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it seems like at times he forgot he had a body.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: But you advocate for remembering that we all have bodies and they matter very much.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: And it's especially natural for women, um, through the capacity to have children, pregnancy and motherhood.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: But you argue that men also need to grapple with their need for dependence.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: So can you explain a little bit more about this?
30:23
SPEAKER_01: Part of the way I frame this is if I'm right, that what people are at their core is dependent, and we kind of can pretend to autonomy or pass for autonomous for certain periods of our life.
30:34
SPEAKER_01: But eventually, my claim is you'll get caught.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: You might be able to pass for a period of time in the way that, you know, two kids in a trench coat could pass for an adult briefly, but something is going to happen that unravels this.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: So what is it?
30:47
SPEAKER_01: What's going to get you caught?
30:49
SPEAKER_01: Everyone gets caught as a child, but we kind of allow that.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: We say, okay, well, being a child is an apprenticeship in becoming a full human being.
30:57
SPEAKER_01: You obviously aren't autonomous, you aren't real in this sense, but we'll give it to you on sufferance.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: Now, note, we give it to you on sufferance once you're born.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: Prior to birth, a baby in the womb is not any more or less dependent than a baby immediately after delivery.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: The difference isn't in degree of dependence, it's that after delivery, that baby's need can be answered by someone who isn't his or her birth mother.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: But the baby hasn't changed in character by being born.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: But after birth in the US, we say, okay, you're not autonomous, but you're going to be one day.
31:33
SPEAKER_01: We believe in you, we'll give it to you.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: So the question is when after that, when you've become an adult, whether you think that's at 16 or 22, or who knows, when everyone can reasonably expect you to appear autonomous, what exposes you?
31:49
SPEAKER_01: My claim is, though anyone could be exposed any moment by illness, stability, et cetera, women tend to be exposed earlier.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: And that happens a lot through the experience of fertility.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: The knowledge that your body could host someone else, that your whole life and your plans could be upended by someone else's need, which itself makes you needy as you answer it, is a different experience than for men who, if they're in good health, and especially if their lives are narrow, they're not married, their parents are in good health, or estranged, either one, can't be interrupted in as many ways that aren't chosen, versus women are desperately aware of how interruptible we are.
32:35
SPEAKER_01: So I think for men, no less than women, because we are embodied, we are in fact dependent.
32:40
SPEAKER_01: We not only have a body, but we are a body that breaks, that requires other people.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: But even more than that, because men and women are insoled, because we are the created uh sons and daughters of God, we are all profoundly dependent on Him for redemption, for regeneration, for conservation and being.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: So even at your healthiest and least attached, you remain at your core a dependent human being, but you are one who might not be caught by anyone else.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's a striking way to put it.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: So I think about again, Adams gallivanting around the world, traveling.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: And the only mention we get, for instance, in this chapter that we discussed of any other person is just the guide to the exhibition.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: It's like that's it.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: That's the only people who are visible in the narrative.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: And you don't have a sense of anyone he's left behind.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: It's all about his life of the mind.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: But even um even for life of the mind for women, it's going to be different.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: So in your case, uh, you wrote a book while pregnant and then uh welcoming a baby.
33:52
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
33:53
SPEAKER_01: I literally did last edits on one of the chapters, the last chapter I'd written.
33:59
SPEAKER_01: I maybe logged those edits at around 1 p.m.
34:02
SPEAKER_01: And by 4 p.m.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: my water had broken.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: That's excellent timing, Leah.
34:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's always been like this for me.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: Whenever I've had a baby, and I I've not really pushed it strategically, but I have some project I wrap up and then my water breaks immediately afterwards.
34:19
SPEAKER_01: Which is worrying for my husband because he had to finish his grading since he's a teacher, and he's like, I don't know if this will work.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: Like, does your body understand when I'm done with my grading?
34:27
SPEAKER_01: Because I don't want you to finish your project while I'm still in the middle of the thing I have to do before the baby is done here.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: So it's again that embodied life.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: Very much so.
34:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: And and that's one thing about Henry Adams reading him today, perhaps, that would be less relatable to us.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: And if it is, that's probably a good thing.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know that it's less relatable to a lot of readers.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: I think there is a real horror of embodiment, especially as we've made more progress in medicine.
35:00
SPEAKER_01: I think an enormous blessing is that we live in a time where there's so much more help for medical distress, for the vulnerable, for diseases.
35:09
SPEAKER_01: But it means it feels like the normal state of affairs is that our body answers well to our will.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: And anything else is our body going wrong.
35:18
SPEAKER_01: Not that our will is not and should not be absolute over our bodies.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: And again, even as you might get cures for a disease, antibiotics for an infection, surgery for a difficulty.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, and each of those is good.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm never telling people forego a way of healing the body God gave you in the time you have.
35:37
SPEAKER_01: It's important to remember that you will still get caught as someone who will die.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's wonderful each time to be safe from the brink if it's possible, but you can't in each of those moments kind of conclude from them, and I am never ordered to die.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: Or, and when I die, it will be things going wrong in a way that's unfair and unjust to me personally.
35:58
SPEAKER_01: The Christian claim is that dying is truly, in some sense, something going wrong, or would be without God working to heal the rift that we ourselves are made.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: But there's nothing unjust about our dying.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: There is something sad and tragic about it, but it's a tragedy that is redeemed ultimately.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: And that's um, and that's a beautiful truth to remember that um, yeah, our bodies are not idols, but also our brains are not.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: And uh and that's a beautiful response to Henry Adams.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: So I want to conclude with our usual concluding question.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: What is a classic book, whether American or any other, that you wish you had written?
36:40
SPEAKER_01: And why?
36:41
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's a it's a classic of mathematics.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: It's Flatland by Edwin Abbott, um, which is this book about a square that is visited by a sphere, and he lives in a 2D world and comes to understand a little bit of 3D world.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: And there's a very complicated society with a fair amount of sexism in that time.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: Um worth it anyway.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: But it's a profoundly generous book because the whole book is written as a way of both the author working out what it would mean to try and understand four dimensions as a three-dimensional being.
37:18
SPEAKER_01: And he does it by setting it through a two-dimensional being struggle to understand three dimensions.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: And I love it because it's generous to the protagonist, who sometimes exceeds the sphere in his insights, even though he's a more limited being, because he is learning how to stretch his perceptions, the sphere believes he knows everything and doesn't need to do it.
37:37
SPEAKER_01: And it invites us, the reader, to be willing to look foolish as you struggle with a new idea, I think, for the sake of breaking through to that higher understanding.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: And it just leads you to look at the whole world, going, like, well, what would this object be if it's a three-dimensional slice of a four-dimensional solid?
37:56
SPEAKER_01: So I like it very much.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it's up there for me.
38:01
SPEAKER_01: It's not as good, but it's up there with Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, which I wouldn't aspire to have written.
38:05
SPEAKER_01: I love it, but I couldn't do it.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: Of just taking something that seems very abstract and mathematical and making it relational and both beautiful and funny.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: And Leah, I always like your off-the-wall reading.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: But it's beautiful.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: Again, once you explain it, it makes sense.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: But every time I look at your lists.
38:26
SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate that you know let me pitch you on well, what's a classic American work?
38:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's this one chapter of a very long book, and most people haven't heard of it, but I believe it's a classic, and it will be now that it's on this podcast.
38:40
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
38:40
SPEAKER_00: And it's Henry Adams.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, who who can be more classic than a family member from two presidents?
38:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.