Micah Mattix

In Scientific American, Monica R. McLemore, an associate professor of nursing, tells us that the work of E. O. Wilson, who died on December 26th, is “problematic” because it was “built on racist ideas.” What evidence does she provide? Not much other than a reference to Wilson’s seminal Sociobiology in which he argued that biology played a role in behavior: His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms.

We have the kids home for Christmas — a son back from college in South Carolina, a daughter from Germany, a daughter and son-in-law from British Columbia for a three-week visit, and our youngest, who has been with us all year but who is as happy as a peach in summer to have her siblings home. We’re happy, too. Yesterday morning we were reading around the fire and started chatting about pastors and the emphasis in the Protestant church on feelings and niche theology. It is sometimes held that if one feels a certain way or espouses certain esoteric ideas, then one is a “mature” Christian.

In this week’s New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews two books that defend a Great Books curriculum — Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation and Arnold Weinstein’s The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing. He doesn’t like either. Both authors claim that great works of literature shape our lives for the good and that this sort of moral or personal approach to texts is undervalued at modern universities, which, in turn, are more concerned about vocational training and marketable skills. English and comparative literature departments — are there any of those left? — emphasize specialization and ignore wisdom.

Tom Stoppard, libertarian Hannah Gold reviews Hermione Lee’s biography of Tom Stoppard in The Nation. I haven’t read the book, but I want to. Gold does a fair job in the first part of the review of providing us with a basic outline of Stoppard’s life and discussing Lee’s approach. In the second half, she turns to Stoppard’s politics and what she sees as a weakness of his work: In a speech delivered by Jake Milne, one of the journalist characters in Night and Day, which Lee posits "sums up the author’s views," Stoppard argues that "Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.

I won’t say “Au revoir, Notre-Dame.” That’s a tad overdramatic. But something will be lost if the diocese in charge of the cathedral’s interior goes through with its recently approved plans to “modernize” it. For those of you who haven’t been following the story: French authorities have approved a proposal to revamp the interior of Notre-Dame Cathedral despite opposition from 100 cultural figures and criticisms saying the changes would “Disneyify” the historic landmark. The French National Heritage and Architecture Commission offered a favorable opinion to the proposal following a meeting on Thursday, December 9, giving the plan a green light to proceed.

Racist little free libraries This piece in the New York Times is really something, and I mean that in the worst possible sense. Erin Aubry Kaplan lives in Inglewood, “a mostly Black and Latino city in southwestern Los Angeles County,” and she decides to build a Little Free Library, as they are called, in her front yard so neighbors walking by can borrow a book. She builds one because she loves books, but because in our puritanical times nothing can be as simple as that, she writes that she also put one up “to signal to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about improvement, and could carry them out in our own way. There are organizations that help people build these little libraries, but I did mine independently.

An unconvincing case for cancel culture In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim reviews Erich Hatala Matthes’s Drawing the Line: What to Do With the Work of Immoral Artists From Museums to the Movies. While not a defense of cancel culture per se, Matthes attempts to provide a framework to help answer the question of which artists should be “canceled” and why. All cultures censor things. They have always prohibited certain works from being published or viewed, but this has almost always been because the works were inherently damaging, or so it was claimed, and usually to the young.

On national holidays In the podcast this week, I talked to Thomas Kidd about the first Thanksgiving. One thing I asked him was whether Thanksgiving was a national holiday or a religious one. His answer was both. I thought about this question again after my wife told me that my daughter, who lives in Canada, was thinking about celebrating Thanksgiving with her husband and some friends this week. If you have ever lived overseas for a significant period, perhaps you’ve done something similar: gotten together with a few expats or some long-suffering locals to eat some turkey or touch off a few fireworks on the Fourth. It sounds like a good idea, and it can be fun, but most people give up on it after a few years. We did.

The pleasures of detective fiction In the latest issue of The Lamp, B.D. McClay writes: “Detective stories have long been thought of as ‘smart’ genre entertainment, something people openly profess their enjoyment of no matter how status-anxious they are.” It’s true that most people are happy to admit to enjoying detective fiction. The same goes for science fiction, which is surely more “respectable” than romance. Yet, however quick people may be to admit to these pleasures, for some, they remain guilty ones — or at least mere pleasures.

Back at the desk As you can see, if you are reading this, I have decided to bring Prufrock back thanks to the persuasive powers of Dominic Green and Matt Purple at The Spectator’s new World edition of the magazine. I’ll be sending the email three times a week (tell your friends to sign up here), writing a weekly column (read the first one), and hosting a weekly podcast. Send tips or suggestions to micah@thespectator.com. Hate mail should be sent straight to Dominic at editor@thespectator.com. The miracle drug called poetry If you read stuff online, you’ll learn, among other things, that poetry is a miracle drug — balm for all sorts of problems and conditions, irritants and itches.