Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2001/10/01/tdr_interview_jeffrey_hart.php
Monday, October 1, 2001
The Dartmouth Review: You use the word 'strangeness' quite a bit in your new book. Do you find any strangeness in the de-emphasis of Moses' family, though he is given the Ten Commandments, which includes 'Honor thy mother and father?'
Jeffrey Hart: Right. The strangest strangeness occurs first in the very beginning of the Book of Exodus where they talk about his birth and they do not mention the names of his parents. I think the meaning of that is there's always something strange about Moses. He is put in a floating basket by his mother to be protected from the Egyptians, but he is rescued by an Egyptian and in effect brought up at the royal level by the princess who rescued him. So in the beginning he's a rather ambivalent figure. He's a Hebrew, of course, but he's been brought up as an Egyptian. And a lot of that is the key to his character. He has come to know the Egyptian polytheistic system so intimately that he comes to hate it, which is not only a hatred of the polytheism but of the whole structure of the priesthood, the politics, the pharaoh and so on connected with that system. Strangely, the princess gives him over to his mother to raise. So he's also raised as a Hebrew. So we have a man on the edge of both cultures, I think, and this tells us a lot about him.
TDR: Given your classification of 'Thou shalt not kill' as more aptly 'Thou shalt not commit murder,' should Americans be more spirituality comfortable with a strong military response to the September 11th tragedies?
JH: Definitely. When Moses came down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments, he was carrying of course the Sixth Commandment 'Do not murder.' If it had been 'Do not kill,' he could not have killed the worshippers of the golden calf. He killed three thousand right there. And all the way to the Jordan River he fought his way across, through the Canaanites and so on, and the massacres were terrific.
TDR: One of your colleagues and friends, Bill Buckley, ran for New York City mayor once. Any thoughts on Guliani staying in office past his elected term?
JH: It's a very bad idea. He might win a write-in but he should not change the law in the middle of the game. George Washington could have become Julius Caesar after he won the American War of Independence, but he went home to Virginia. King George III said in doing that he's the greatest man in the world. We should keep our elections intact. If we want to get rid of term limits, which I think would be a good idea, we should do it in an orderly way.
TDR: You write of areté with regards to Greek heroism in your book. Is there a modern areté of sorts that gentlemen can aspire to today?
JH: I think it's a diluted version of it. We'd be rather shocked, I think, by a Greek warrior of the late Bronze Age, by his strutting arrogance and aristocratic haughteur. But the gentleman is kind of moving away from that, but not altogether away from that.
TDR: Lovejoy noted that we admire the 'pastness of the past.' Does the Campus Left have any fondness of the old Dartmouth of pre-coeducation, tolerated ROTC, and schooling in the classics of the West?
JH: None on their part. In fact, they hate it. Lovejoy was really talking more of an aesthetic emotion of an old object or, in Virgil, that sense of the pastness of the past, the fact of mortality of the ever-retreating past. Lovejoy, I think, was talking in that aesthetic way rather than in a traditionalist way.
TDR: Socrates is to have said of a text given to him by Euripedes, 'What I understand is splendid, and I think what I don't understand is splendid too.'
JH: Socrates was talking about the so-called 'pre-Socratic' philosopher Heraclitus, and had been handed a copy of one of Heraclitus' many books, which have been lost mostly. And Heraclitus is a very difficult, not to say dark, philosopher. So Socrates was, I think, being funny at that moment saying what I can understand is marvelous and what I can't understand is marvelous.
TDR: In your book you say oral texts that have come from an oral tradition can be considered accurate, because accuracy is most essential for such a tradition. Why was the story of Christ's resurrection finally written down thirty years after his death?
JH: Because if you look at First Corinthians 15, an enormously important passage, Paul writes in a public letter to the Christians in Corinth that three hundred of you saw Jesus, whose name was probably Yeshua, after he rose from the dead. And then he goes into a very specific way in which they could testify to that fact. And then he says, most of you are still alive, but some have gone away. And the reason they began to write it down is that the witnesses were dying and the facts might get lost.
TDR: C.S. Lewis has remarked that Jesus, Socrates, and Samuel Johnson are the three most recognizable individuals in history.
JH: I'd add Hemingway.
TDR: And Herb Cohen, again as you note in your book, has said Plato and the Prophets are the most important sources of modern thought.
JH: Certainly.
TDR: Is there any similarity between the theme of money in The Great Gatsby and the professional and financial aspirations of undergraduates?
JH: That's a really good question. Gatsby did not want material wealth; he wanted money to transform reality and go back five years to when he first met Daisy. His goal was not material. I think the student who goes into investment banking and makes a lot of money wants to live in Greenwich, Connecticut. Now if that's an ideal aspiration, it might well be, it's still not one that he shares with Faust who is pursuit of Helen of Troy or Gatsby, who is in pursuit of Daisy five years before the fact.
TDR: You write on many works in your latest book. Where should someone who wants to trump the cultural catastrophe start? To what books and perhaps which Dartmouth professors should students turn?
JH: I think all the books that I write about are in some way or other contained in the Dartmouth curriculum. And I think, for example, Charles Stinson in Religion is extremely learned and able with the Old Testament and New Testament. The romance languages must be offering a good course in Dante. Peter Saccio in the English Department is an excellent lecturer on Shakespeare. And we go on into the modern novel, and there I think you just have to look around.
The thing undergraduates have to recognize is there's great variation in the capabilities of Dartmouth teachers. Some are excellent, some are not. And the grapevine is awfully valuable. An upperclassman or somebody's who taken these courses can talk to the underclassman. I think you have to feel your way that way because the quality of the faculty is very uneven, though often good.