Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life: Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor
#2231 - First aired July 31, 2022
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, locked down at home and facing an uncertain future, scholars Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor embarked on an extended conversation about living and dying in an imperiled world. The result is A Friendship in Twilight.
Segment A
DAULT: Welcome to Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault. We're delighted to welcome to the show today Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor. Jack Miles is professor emeritus of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine. A former Jesuit, he's the author of a trilogy about God in three classic scriptures, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning God, A Biography. And he was the general editor of the six-volume Norton Anthology of World Religions.
Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion at Columbia University and professor emeritus at Williams College. He's the author of more than thirty books, including most recently Intervolution: Smart Bodies, Smart Things. His art has been exhibited at the Massachusetts Museum for Contemporary Art and the Clark Art Institute. Today, we're talking about a recent book coauthored by them both, called A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life. Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor, welcome to Things Not Seen.
TAYLOR: Glad to be here.
DAULT: So, I wanna start out with a question about the very structure of this book, because it is a book written in letters back and forth between the two of you. It's an epistolary document. It was begun in the Ides of March, right after COVID hit. And it ends in Epiphany, right after the January 6th insurrection, when the capital was stormed by right-wing zealots who are trying to stop the election of President Joe Biden. But I wanna linger on this question of the letter, because I'm aware, Professor Taylor, you have done a lot of work with Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida was very cautious about the written word and particularly how we can trust a letter which can be written while someone is alive and arrives after they have met their demise.
I'm also aware, Professor Miles, that the Catholic tradition, the Christian tradition, is an epistolary tradition, whether we think about the epistles of Paul, the apostle Paul, or the Catholic epistles, or we even think about some of the writings of the saints. Oftentimes these were delivered by letter, and so I wanna ask you both, as we begin, what did you think that you were doing with these letters, and did you have any hesitancy about using letters as a way to communicate these ideas to one another? Professor Taylor, I'll start with you, and then I'll turn as well to Professor Miles.
TAYLOR: It's a very good question. I mean in part, I think the decision to write letters grew out of our long, long correspondence. Jack and I have been friends for over fifty years, and over the course of that time, the means of communication has changed from old-fashioned postal letters to phone to what we now have with the internet. I think letter writing is a lost art largely because of email, and there's different style of communication online, as we all know. It's quick; texting is even quicker. It doesn't give time for reflection in between and the like, so the letter format really grew out of an extension of almost daily emails for many, many years, longer.
But I'd say you, you mentioned Derrida, and as you suggest, his whole philosophy is built around the distinction between speech and writing in different ways. There's a lost art of handwritten letters. I always tell my students and my children that you have to know when to write a note by hand and not email. And one of the things which is always curious about Derrida, I knew him quite well for a long period. And we communicated in various ways. He would never type his letters to me. He would always handwrite. And his handwriting was indecipherable. And I would ask him repeatedly, just type them, so you have to—he wouldn’t. So, the whole notion of the hand, and after all, the word manuscript comes, is a derivative of another word for “hand.” So as you suggest, it’s a long… But letters have a different rhythm; they give you time, more time to compose. And we not only through the—I mean, we dedicated ourselves to write a letter and a response to each other, every day. From the middle of March through the election. We ended up with seventeen hundred letters. There’s a different rhythm to writing, to receiving, that goes with the letter. And I think that that gives more time for reflection.
DAULT: Well, and Professor Miles, let me turn to you and ask a similar sort of question. As you embarked on this process of writing what as Professor Taylor’s just said is a voluminous amount of correspondence, what did you think that you were doing, and did you have any hesitancies about it?
MILES: Mark proposed sometime around the initial, you might say, outburst of the pandemic that he and I might write something together. This is something we had toyed with over the years. I couldn't think of anything better than an intensification of what we had already been doing. In a way it was a kind of dialing back the usual quick and dirty format of an email or a text message to something that has more the shape of long typed letters or even earlier long handwritten letters. And, hesitancy, yes, there was hesitancy on my part in one way. I was hesitant with regard to whether what we would produce this way would be publishable.
I'd rather thought it wouldn't be. And then there was an, there's another consideration which actually originated with Mark. He advises his students and his own children as he's coaching them on how to write, to always know where you are headed before you begin. And as we got started, he commented to me that this was a departure from his own rule; he didn't know where we were headed and at, and we were deep into our correspondence before we agreed on a time for it to end. It could have gone on; it could even resume, and we are back now still to the older form of shorter communication. We've exchanged a couple of messages already today.
DAULT: If you're just joining us, this is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault. We're speaking today with Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor. We're talking about their recent coauthored book, a set of letters back and forth to one another during the pandemic, called A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life.
MILES: Let me make one other comment; I’m picking up on what you said earlier about the importance of the epistolary form in Christian tradition. Paul knows to whom he is writing. He's thinking about the situation of the different communities he addresses his letters to. He knows they are all, they are all Christians. They are all, whether that term was even in use, they are all followers of Jesus in some way, and he and they have that in common. Well, if you know that you and your correspondent have something in common, whatever it is, that will shape you in what you send to that recipient. So, Mark and I are mutually stimulating. I know that I can say things to him that, and he will immediately understand them, that would take a long song and dance to make understandable to someone else. In that sense, these lectures are intellectually unguarded. We presume a lot, and that, that will make them difficult for some people to read, but very stimulating for certain others who may share some of our shared background in philosophy, theology, Christian tradition.
TAYLOR: That raised another interesting point. Insofar as we at least entertained the possibility of publication, during the, from the outset, it was also the case that we did not know for whom you write, and, you know, on the one hand, we wanted this to be an authentic exchange between ourselves in which we were not self-consciously writing for the audience, and yet at the same, there's always an awareness that if these letters were published, readers were always looking over our shoulders and listening in on this conversation, which of course is precisely part of the purpose of [inaudible, 9:43].
DAULT: Well, this brings up something that I've, I really wanted to ask as I was reading this book, because I've read both of your individually authored works, and I'm a fan, and for a long time back through graduate school and seminary. But I was aware that as I was reading this, that you two had a longstanding engagement of writing to one another. But I was also aware that I was reading something that was more akin to a set of open letters that you were doing a, this was the intimacy that you had been practicing for decades, but it was also a kind of performative intimacy. And I wonder what changed or what shifted for both of you as you were engaged in this, how it felt different to be writing these letters, as opposed to, for example, the ones that you said that you've already exchanged a couple of times today as we're recording this, like, those are more private correspondences, but this was a more kind of public correspondence. Talk to me about that difference as well. I wonder, Professor Miles, if you might comment on that.
MILES: I was skeptical about eventual publication, deeper into the correspondence than I think Mark was, but straight through to the end of the correspondence, I would write my letter very swiftly and go back and really make very minimal changes in it and then send it off. So it, the letters were not in that sense heavily studied with some imagined public in mind. I only thought about the one recipient I knew I had.
DAULT: Professor Taylor, if you wanna pick up on that, how did things shift for you knowing that this was a kind of public intimacy that you were engaged in?
TAYLOR: Well, I mean, I think teaching and writing have always been very closely related for me, and research for me has been important in this regard, too. I regard education as a conversation, an ongoing conversation, and indeed I understand scholarship itself to be a conversation. That is to say, I often refer to the figures who have shaped my thinking as my ghosts, and I carry on a conversation with them, and I know they speak, continue to speak through me in ways of which I am aware, and of which I am not aware.
So this, I mean, Blanchot, Maurice Blanchot, the great French writer, has a book whose title is The Infinite Conversation, L’Entretien infini, and that's what I regard teaching, writing, thinking indeed, in certain ways, life [is] about, and part of our purpose, or my purpose, I should say, is, Jack and I have spent our lives thinking and reading about matters of philosophy, religion, and culture and art in various ways.
But the payoff for that study for me has always been, not so much just what Heidegger calls scholarship, but thinking, that is, the reason to study these figures is to know that where we have come from and how they have shaped us, but it also to learn how to deal with the existential problems that we all have to deal with in our lives.
And that's, in our conversation back and forth, my conversation back and forth with Jack, that's what we're trying to do. I mean, we were—you forget what it was like in March of 2020. We did not know at that time how bad it was going to be. We did not know where it was going to go. Right? And in the midst of that, and I was teaching two full load, but on Zoom at that time, and trying to figure out how to work through all of this with students who were rattled by it as well. So, I mean, I, I think when you get down to thinking philosophically in this way, not just doing scholarship, but it's already an intimate conversation with students, I mean, if you push them there. So I always saw the con-, our conversation, Jack says, I always—my intended reader was always Jack.
But what we were doing in this conversation was trying to make sense out of all this, given all that we’ve read and studied over the years, which is what I tried to do in teaching. And like, so, having others listen in on that conversation was just another way of drawing them into the conversation that is teaching and writing.
DAULT: If you're just joining us, this is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault. We're delighted today to be speaking with Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor about their recent book, A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life. We'll be back in just a moment.
Segment B
DAULT: Welcome back to Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault. If you're enjoying these conversations, please go to our website, thingsnotseenradio.com. There you'll find ten years of these sorts of interviews and conversations, all available for free for your listening pleasure.
We're delighted today to welcome two authors, Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor, who have cowritten a book of letters back and forth to one another through the time of COVID, called A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life.
Well, I wanna pick up on something that you both write back and forth to each other about in your book, A Friendship in Twilight. And it's a, it's a comment by the former editor and now sort of, historical raconteur, John Meacham. And he says that the, the pandemic has put the Enlightenment itself on trial. And you had an interesting conversation about that, but I wanted to go a little bit deeper with the both of you, because as I read that you sort of looked at what Meacham was saying with both some openness, but also some skepticism about where he was going with that sort of thought. And so I wonder, Professor Miles, if you could talk to us a little bit about how you interpreted this phrase from John Meacham, that Enlightenment itself was on trial in the pandemic.
MILES: I took it to refer strongly to the fact that science born in the Enlightenment was no longer revered or respected or accepted, that the president of the country was openly skeptical that this disease was different from the flu. And similarly, it is science that has identified climate change as an existential peril for the entire planet. President Trump dismissed that in a news conference in the Rose Garden as a Chinese hoax, and in one of his campaign speeches, he called it bullshit. So that would be at the top of my list of reactions to John Meacham’s comment.
DAULT: Professor Taylor, you raised it. So I wonder how you were thinking about it as well.
TAYLOR: Right. So I would completely agree with everything Jack has just said, but I would complement that also with the political side as well. I mean, Meacham is, after all, a presidential historian. That's his bread and butter. We started, obviously, wrestling with this biological virus, you know, its complexity, and all of its intelligence, actually. But as the days, the weeks, the months wore on, and as our correspondence continued, it became clear to us that we were dealing with a political, and with the media virus as well, and that these were all interrelated in certain ways. So not only is the Enlightenment put on trial because of the skepticism about science, and even more so since our correspondence ended with the recent Supreme Court decisions, right? I mean, going back to the Middle Ages, and going, someone who, you know, engaged in witchcraft trials for one of the most consequential decisions from the court in history. But the principles of the Enlightenment that informed the rise of democracy and indeed the very formation of our country, we’re dissolving in [inaudible, 18:33]. Right. So you had this intersection of these different infections, if I may use that word, that play off of each other.
I mean, the virus created political instability, which enhanced the spread of the virus. I mean, it was that kind of intersection that, you know, that I really saw sort of at work in that little comment Meacham—
MILES: Yeah, I would note that, and we do note in our, especially in our later letters, that skepticism about vaccination and skepticism about climate change and trust that the election was tainted by fraud, all these became merged as tokens of membership, identity tokens creating a new community around these denials, and you know, this reverberates very strongly in the attitude of the country toward the news.
Trump's most brilliant move was coining the phrase “fake news,” which seems to have traveled the world, and dictators all over the world are using it to disarm critics and also disarm any attempt to publish criticism when it arises. This is a change; in the even very recent past, there was the news, and then there was competing commentary about the news. Now it is all commentary, and the division enables a mass rejection of plain fact.
DAULT: I wonder if I can stay with that for a moment because, Professor Taylor, there's a point where you, you're riffing on the 1970s movie Groundhog Day, and you begin to liken the COVID pandemic and the virus itself to almost a being with sentience. That kind of we're not thinking about one individual virus, we're thinking about something that almost works with kind of collective consciousness or sentience. And as I'm hearing you talk about this, Professor Miles, I'm hearing a similar kind of sense of malevolent sentience to, you know, some of these forces in the news, some of these political forces. Now when I'm making those parallels, those are mine, I'm not quoting you. So I'm wondering, as I say this to the both of you, does that feel solid to you? Or would you say no, this analogy only stops with the pandemic. It doesn't extend to these other matters as well. So I would open that to both of you to sort of see what you think about that.
TAYLOR: I think it's completely apt. I mean, I think this is a really complicated issue. It's at the heart of a book I'm writing now. You know, I think that at least since the time of day we've had an anthropocentric philosophy that is sort of the foundation of the [anthropos? Anthropocene? 21:19]. And Descartes’s foundational gesture, of course, was to separate mind from matter and to locate intelligence solely in the human mind, not even in animals, right? So you have a completely anthropocentric view of the mind and of consciousness. I think that is thoroughly mistaken. I do not, I mean, there's been an enormous, and it's been surprising to me, there's been an enormous revival of what's called panpsychism in analytic philosophy. I do not agree with panpsychism, but I do think that the only way to understand something like the virus is in terms of information processing, as it involves a quasi-consciousness in that one of the, one of the arguments that I make—I have diabetes. So I’ve thought a lot about immunity and autoimmune disease. That's what intervolution is, is all about. And one of the ways in which I tried to understand the political problem in the United States is as an autoimmune disease. That is, what is happening, what happens in autoimmune disease is the body turns against itself and destroys itself. And the reason it destroys itself is that it misinterprets the molecules that identify self as invasive others and destroys those cells. So too, in the body politic, the body politic has turned against itself and is destroying itself.
And that is a certain kind of information process. There are other ways in which you can understand social, economic processes like that. So I think it, I mean, part of what addressing the problems of climate change entail is a more expansive notion of cognition that shows our embeddedness in these natural processes without which we cannot live.
MILES: And the way that cognition is embedded at the level of an entire population is through social media, which might well be characterized as the virus. We use that term. We talk about messages going viral. Someone spoke to Trump, some journalist spoke to Trump fairly recently. He was not so much lamenting that he's not in the White House with the power of the presidency any longer, but that he's no longer on social media. Well, his perception is correct. That is where his strength lay, but he was only an accelerant, because the population itself by this process of a constant mutual exchange entirely apart from the traditional media and the responsibilities that go in basic reporting is reverberating on our national life in extremely [inaudible 24:04] ways.
TAYLOR: I should make one footnote to this, though. The reference to Groundhog Day was not accidental, because part of what triggered all of this reflection of me was during all of this time, I live in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and my study is in a converted barn. And I am at a constant war with the groundhog, right.
MILES: An actual groundhog.
TAYLOR: An actual groundhog, and that freakin’ groundhog is smart. And he repeatedly outsmarts me, and, you know, he is under, you know, tunnels under my barn. And so, it's really interesting, because one of the things that happened during the pandemic, if you will remember, is that the atmosphere became clearer, right. In certain cities that were, where there was less traffic and the like, animals that had not been there before came into the, returned to the city and the like. And, I mean the whole virus itself is a function of the interaction between the human and the animal and the [map?, 25:07], right? And in this process, I mean, when you look at climate change and what we are doing, right, the whole relationship of life is one of parasite and hosts. And we are parasitic upon the earth, but in this relationship, we become the invasive species that is destroying the very body upon which life as a whole depends.
DAULT: Professor Miles, let me stay with this, but shift tack just a little bit, because I'm aware that you were raised in the Jesuit tradition and you've done some thinking in that tradition, you've been shaped by that tradition. I'm thinking now of Ignatius Loyola, and his sort of characterization of the world as being filled with benevolent and malevolent spirits. And so, how far can we push this? Are we really talking about something that is not simply anthropomorphizing institutions and viruses, but are we actually looking at something that could have that kind of malevolent spiritual dimension as well? Or would you not be willing to go that far?
MILES: Not really, but I, and you know, and as general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Religions, I did step in to see to it that the passage from Saint Ignatius Loyola that was included was his meditation on the two kingdoms from the spiritual exercises, in which a vast army is gathered on a great plain reporting to Christ the king, who has also God the divine warrior, and another vast army is reporting to Satan. It is natural for human beings to personalize evil and fight it off best when they can do that. One reason we were massive in immediate mobilization against Osama bin Laden after the attacks on 9/11, look how that transformed air travel in our country was that it was personalized; we had a real, real villain there. There, there isn't a single villain for climate change, and that makes it very hard to mobilize against it. So I don't mind demonizing opponents to a point, personalizing the conflict to a point. But the final victory always has to come, not when you defeat your enemy, but when you turn your enemy into your friend and ally.
DAULT: That's very powerful, and I'm glad that our listeners could hear you make that shift, because I think oftentimes, particularly when we're thinking about radio, in particular AM radio, where this show lives, oftentimes that's a place of antagonism and drawn polarities. And you're talking about sort of reaching across that divide. But I'm also struck here because we've gone into a very metaphysical realm, gentleman, and I'm struck now, I'm thinking now with the very last line of the book, A Friendship in Twilight, and it's a line that you write, Professor Taylor, and if I'm recalling correctly, it's something to the effect of ghosts may not be holy, but they're certainly real. And I was very struck by that, and you've mentioned ghosts in this conversation as well. I wonder how is a listener in the twenty-first century to take a statement like that? How do you mean that when you say something like that?
TAYLOR: So it goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about the formation of one's thinking and one's personality. We obviously are shaped by those around us, and intellectually and culturally, it's a series of artists and writers. You know, for me it's Derrida, it’s Heidegger. And it's various kinds of artists. And their work—I do not believe in a personal afterward. But I do believe that each of us in a different way lives on in those who come after us, in a certain way, and I believe that the way in which we carry on the conversation with those who come before us change those who came to change what they did, that is to say, people did something different because of [Marx? 29:04]. Right. I also think, that I always tell my students, I said, I will ghost you. Right? That is to say, you know, I will haunt you, because if you rattle their cages enough, right. Which is what I think education should be. Right. They will be [inaudible, 29:24] forth in ways that they understand. And one of the difficult things about teaching eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds, I mean, I teach graduate students now, is that many of the problems and questions that I wanna think through with them, they haven't gone through enough life to think about. But the wager is, my wager is that when they do encounter those moments, which they might reflect back on some of those ideas that we discussed. So it's that now there's one final question. One final point in this. What makes this secularized notion to the afterlife, if you will, that I have interest in, is to think about the implications of human extinction for that notion of death. That is to say, I don't believe in [inaudible, 30:13] immortality, but I do believe that we live on in those who come after us. But what happens when the human race as a whole disappears? Which of course it will eventually. It's just whether we are accelerating that process by what we're [inaudible 30:26] now.
DAULT: As we move towards our next break. I just wanna note the movement that has happened in this conversation, because I think it was extraordinary. So we started out talking about anthropomorphizing the virus as perhaps a kind of malevolent, maybe even spiritual force. And then in the process of thinking through that, Professor Miles, you offered a sense of, but at the end of the day, that malevolence can't have the final word, we have to find a way to bridge and create friendship in the midst of that enmity that we might have. And then, Professor Taylor, you shifted us to the hopefulness in education, and I heard Hannah Arendt sort of ringing in the background. You're, you're hopefully teaching in the rattling of these cages that something will haunt your students moving into the future so that they will be moved to do something better than what was handed on to them. I found that moved profound and extraordinary in terms of its hopefulness and its brightening of the darkness that I brought into the conversation. So I just wanna, I wanna acknowledge that and thank you both for that, and I wonder as I say that back to you before we go to break, do you have any sort of thoughts on that movement? And it seems to me that movement is a very natural one between you, maybe born out of these many decades of writing to one another.
TAYLOR: Look, it's, I mean, one of the things that I reflect on in one of the letters, early, on, when this initially broke out, was trying to figure out, how am I gonna deal with this with my students? And I decided, because I was teaching courses, one was philosophy of religion, and the other is what I call recovering place. And in the philosophy of religion class, I decided that I would teach The Plague, which I had not, Camus’s Plague. But one of the questions I wrestle with all the time, given the kinds of materials that I teach, is the question, how far into the darkness dare you take young people? Because it is possible that they won't come back. That has happened. And yet, if you are dishonest, they know it, they smell it. Right. So it's about, it's a, it's a balance. You know, I think despair, dread the like, are fashionable; they're academically fashionable. Hope is not, in certain ways. But the way I put it most concisely is when I look at my children, my grandchildren and my students, you know, hopelessness is a luxury we cannot afford. Right. There has, you have to give young people hope, faith in spite of doubt. I mean, there's a certain way in which one must have hope in spite of hopelessness [inaudible 33:00], and holding those two somehow together.
MILES: I have, I have a somewhat different only somewhat different way of engaging these questions. Certainly the question of the extinction of the human race is a provocative one and completely relevant. I was deeply impressed many years ago by Bertrand Russell's essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” and a companion essay written around the same time. He said, he wrote, and this is a near quote, only within the framework of these truths, meaning scientific truths, and only on the firm foundation of despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. So forget about hope for Bertrand Russell; the only available firm foundation was despair. But he was brought to, to this by his reliance on the firm foundation of the truths of science, and the truths of science are established by scientific truth, but there is no scientific truth for the thesis that only scientific evidence counts as evidence. So, all that we can understand, and he was deeply impressed by the fact that eventually earth itself would perish as a planet, because the sun would eventually go dark. But what lies beyond even what the James Webb telescope has now shown us, we cannot know this. So I begin on the firm foundation of ignorance. And what we cannot know, certainly within the scope of our own lifetimes, but quite possibly within the scope of the lifetime of the human species, that when it does go extinct, important questions will not have been answered and perhaps not even raised. And so thinking past that point and trusting that the key questions may never be asked, though this doesn't give you a very specific hope, it strips away the option of despair.
DAULT: If you're just joining us, this is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault. We're speaking today with Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor. And we're talking about their recent coauthored book, A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life. We'll be back in a moment.
Segment C
DAULT: Welcome back to Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault. Each week on our program, we bring you a rich conversation about culture and faith. If you're enjoying these conversations, please go to our website, thingsnotseenradio.com. There you'll find close to ten years of these sorts of interviews and conversations, all available for free for your listening pleasure.
We're delighted today to be speaking with Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor. Both are well-known authors in their own right. Today, we're talking about a recent coauthored volume, A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life.
Well, I want to take a step back and talk about what this book covers, because it's an amazing document of a particular period of time. When you both got started, you thought that you would be reflecting on the pandemic, but as the writing continues, it also brings in politics and insurrection, forest fires out in California, police violence. There's so many things that get talked about just in terms of national issues and events, but also there's this constant undertone of pop culture references and philosophy and theology. So this is a rich document, no matter how a reader might approach it. And I know that you have said earlier in the conversation that this is just what you two have been doing for the last several decades, but I wonder what it was like and how you were surprised as this project was unfolding with what you hadn't expected to be talking about, that you discovered that you were talking about. Professor Miles, I wonder if you could start us off with that
MILES: Well, let me introduce a topic, which is very akin to what I want to say in answer to your question. And that is that our conversation began in 1968, which was another very fateful year when so much of our political system seemed to hang in the balance. Riots were everywhere, assassinations were everywhere. The war in Vietnam was still raging on with no end in sight. But at the same time, there, there was as Mark pointed out, a moment of glorious hope. The Earth Rise, once the astronauts were circling from behind the moon and seeing Earth come over above the horizon of the moon.
And that a friendship has lasted that long, you know, it is existentially something that, that gives one hope looking forward. Within the arc of the correspondence itself, what happened to us was that partway through, we calmed down to a degree regarding the virus. We, the masking, the distancing, and then after a time, of course, the vaccine came on the scene. But even before the vaccine was there, we weren't as frightened day by day that this might take our lives. Meanwhile, the possibility that Donald Trump would not accept his defeat, which Michael Cohen, for example, in his testimony said that he knew Trump very well. He was the first, I think, who publicly raised that possibility, and it was a kind of a head slapper of a, oh no, I mean, he won't go that far. And it became clear and clearer that yes. Yes, he might, and if he did so, he was going to have many supporters. That became our preoccupation toward the end of the correspondence.
DAULT: Professor Taylor.
TAYLOR: So Jack mentions 1968, which was an extraordinary year in so, so many ways. The photograph on the cover of the book is the house where Jack, and I got married, my wife and I got the first week of June, two days, three days after Bobby Kennedy was shot. Two weeks later, we moved into the house that's on the cover of the book, and a few days after that, Jack and two other members of the Jesuits moved into the third floor. We were on the second floor. I was the third floor. And one, one of my fondest memories of that is the first time I met Jack personally, was I was sitting at my desk in that house, and we were, I mean, this was 1968. And I’m looking out the window, and a piano is floating in the air outside my window. And I'm again, ‘68. And I get up and I look, and there's a big boom down there with this rope, you know, hoisting the piano up to the third floor. But it couldn’t get up the stairs so it could go in the window. So Jack has a freakin’ piano, and then of course, and of course the whole year, Jack's playing the piano, and we’re hearing it downstairs, so I’d have to get the broom and pound on the ceiling to get Jack to cool it on, on the piano.
So, and two weeks after that, we start with graduate school at Harvard. So it was an extraordinary tumultuous time, and I mean, Jack mentioned earlier that, you know, I always tell students and try myself to, when you write, you need to know where you're gonna end up as you go. Whereas, in this situation that we were in, you know, I’d get up every morning and not know what letter Jack was going to have sent during the night that I'm going to have to respond to. I'm on the East Coast, and I get up very early, so my letter was usually the first to him, and he would respond and it would go back. So you know, so every day you’ve, it was unexpected. You know, I guess that one of the things that has come to surprise me is that in that 1968, which we associate with all the social [inaudible 40:58], right? You know who else graduated in 1968? Donald Trump. That we would be this generation that the two most influential people in this country would be Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas is something that was inconceivable. And the other thing that was surprising was the increasing drift of the Supreme Court. And this was even before this. And the role of religion in all of it. Because before the most recent appointment, six of the three justices were—well, Gorsuch was raised [inaudible 41:36] but Catholic. And you know, the impact—one of the things that's not often realized is that 1968 not only sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but that's when the religious right really took root as partly counter of counterculture. So that very conflict, right, is embedded in—and the first evangelical president we had was Carter, Jimmy Carter, right? I always tell my students religion is most interesting where it’s least obvious. That is to say, it’s not just what goes on in churches and synagogues and mosques and temples, right? There’s a religious dimension to all of culture. But because those who attack it and those who defend it are circumscribed in understanding of religion, we don't see the pervasiveness.
MILES: I of course agree with Mark that religion is there at places where it can't be seen, but I'm also quite interested in it where it can be seen. And of course in 1968, we were only two years past the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. Which brought about a transformation of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, which seemed to be in the direction of a liberalization of it.
And at the same time that this was happening, what was thought of as the revelation rather of the Sixties than of later was the sexual revolution, right? Very different emergence with regard to sexual relations, premarital sex, extramarital sex, homosexuality was barely spoken of at that time, though of course, it was present as well. But one wouldn't have thought, as Mark said, that that at this point in our history we would be experiencing such a massive seismic shift toward the right, rather than toward the left, either in the Roman Catholic Church or in evangelical Christianity and elsewhere in American Christianity or in our political institution. So, yeah, surprise. We, letter by letter, there is surprise, but also day by day, you know, there is, there are surprises that come to us in our own country and in our own physical world.
DAULT: If you're just joining us, this is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault, and we're speaking today with Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor about their coauthored book, A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life.
Well, as we're in this portion of the conversation, and we're talking about the unexpected surprises and echoing back to 1968 and how the thought was we were moving towards liberalization and now we're seeing rollbacks and reactionary movements against those liberalizations, I'm very mindful of a specter that haunts this book, and that's the specter of Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel. And the whole notion of Hegel thinking of philosophy as trying to understand history in your own time. And in this particular case, how Hegel thought of history was this back and forth between forces that pushed towards liberalization and forces that were more reactionary. And so this dialectical movement of history is very much consonant with what you have both been saying about the way that you yourselves and you want your students as well to discover truth, and that is in dialogue. And so I wonder, as we're moving towards the end of the conversation, gentlemen, where is the conversation going for us as a people, as a nation, as a faith, where do you see that as you've been looking back at the last several decades and looking forward to what might be yet to come. Are we slouching towards Bethlehem, or would you want to end on a note of hope?
TAYLOR: Well since you invoke Hegel, let me take that. I mean, Hegel pervades almost everything. And you're quite right, Hegel is what for me is the best definition of philosopher there is, and that is, philosophy is this time comprehended [inaudible, 45:32]. Right. But there's another fundamental insight of Hegel that goes [inaudible 45:35] and that is that the fundamental, the most crucial question, we now face, the most serious problem we now face, which is as old as Western philosophy itself, is that we have oppositional ideologies in an interrelated world. And I think that is a philosophical problem, it's an interpersonal problem, it's a social and economic and political problem. And one of Hegel’s great insights was that that kind of oppositional ideology is self-negating. I said earlier that we’re in a parasitic relationship with the earth. You cut down all the trees, and we die. Right? He defines spirit as an I that's a we and a we that's an I. It's that simple. If there is not a movement toward that kind of recognition—I mean, that is the reality with which, in which we live, and never more so than in the interconnected global world, right. To negate the other is to destroy the [self? 46:47]. And coming to—but, given where we are, those oppositional ideologies are as strong as they have ever been in my lifetime. Even stronger than during the Cold War. So if there is to be hope, it has to be to, and that's Jack pointed to the Earth Rise, which was used on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Right. And all of that gave rise, but it was and gave rise to the whole ecological movement. That kind of recognition of some kind of sense of behold—
MILES: You know, I do hold open, not happily, the possibility that we are en route to self-extinction of our species by of the destruction of our only habitat. It is fatal loss of habitat that has brought about the extinction of most of the species that are now gone. But if there is a place where what Mark describes as the, a polarization that itself becomes unsustainable and yields to something new, and if we look only for the moment at our country, we might possibly see a convergence of Republicans and Democrats of left and right on the issue that no one is happy with what the social media is doing to us. Republicans think they're being persecuted; Democrats see the extinction of truth in disinformation. So, it may be that, that something of a new beginning might start at that point in, in the last hearing of the select committee investigating January 6th, I saw it by far. The most interesting moment was the testimony given with a disguised voice by an executive deep inside Twitter.
He saw where this was headed. He saw it early. He believed Twitter could have stepped in and aborted it. They did not, because, he thought, of a kind of intoxication at being this close to this much power executed by the president and his followers by the use of tools, including Twitter, including, of course, Facebook. That's a rather slender read of hope, I would say, but it could be a starting point.
DAULT: It strikes me the entire reason why I started Things Not Seen, this show, is actually in response to a moment. And I believe it was, it might have been you, Professor Miles, who mentioned T. L. Luhrmann, or Tanya Luhrmann, the anthropologist. But she was on Fresh Air and being interviewed by Terry Gross. And at one point, Terry Gross said to Dr. Lurhmann, well, as you're interviewing these evangelicals who sit down and have coffee with Jesus, don't you ever want to tell them that they need to give up their invisible friends. And I thought we need to have a better conversation about this, and it needs to be a slower, deeper conversation about this.
And as you mentioned, Twitter and social media, it strikes me that this book, A Friendship in Twilight, this is a strike against the kind of rapid-fire, shallow culture that leads to poor thinking. And instead you've given us a model for deep, epistolary conversational thinking, where you're willing to risk with one another and willing to learn with one another.
I, so I guess I want to ask you is my last question: is the hope for our future in the form of long letters, like, is this where we need to be training our students to go and training our politicians, to go to do this kind of deep thinking and this kind of deep reasoning. Is that the way, and is this book perhaps a way of modeling that way?
MILES: You know, at the beginning of the book, we have a note to the reader in which we say that we are like two fellows sitting at the same table, engaged in deep conversation. Mark has said earlier in this conversation that conversation is the essence of teaching and the essence of learning for him. His ghosts, the other influences on his life that are at his table are also at my table whenever I'm talking to him. So I'm hearing him; I'm also hearing those who have formed him, and it's hearing, it's listening, you're listening and listening and listening, shutting up and listening at length. One of the joys of being a writer is you don't have to stop talking, you know, you can keep writing as long as you want. Nobody gets to interrupt you until you're done. You put it out in the world, maybe nobody's listening, but sometimes you find people who listen to you at book length. And write you about it. And that is a great thrill. That's, I think, the beginning, is deeper listening.
TAYLOR: You know, the subtitle of the book isn't letters; it's conversation. And that, I mean, that was deliberate, because the notion of conversation, as Jack just suggested, is more encompassing than letters. Although letters are a form of conversation. And a lot of this, I think, has to do with time and with speed. I did a book a few years ago called Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left. What is needed, whether it is the letter format or not, what is needed is the willingness to take time for slow, deliberate, and prolonged conversation. The problems we face are enormous. They do not give themselves to a limited number of characters. They do not give themselves to a limited amount of time. They take—Jack and I have been at this for more than half a century. But it takes a lifetime of deep conversation that can take the form of letters. But it can take the form of the conversation that we've had here.
DAULT: Well, Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor, this has been such a delight for me. I, as I said earlier, I'm a fan of both of your works individually. I was really struck by every moment of reading your book, A Friendship in Twilight, how much I learned of your relationship, which I didn't know about before, but also how much I learned about the world that I lived through with you. During these months of the pandemic, you helped to open up for me areas of that and ways of thinking about that, that I hadn't imagined. I know that my listeners will benefit from reading this book. Thank you so much for taking the time to write to one another, to go through the process of editing and collecting it. But thank you, especially both of you, for taking the time to talk about it today with me and my listeners.
MILES: Thanks, David.
TAYLOR: Well, thank you for being the kind of reader every writer wishes to find.
DAULT: We've been speaking today with Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor. Jack Miles is professor emeritus of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion at Columbia University and professor emeritus at Williams College. Today, we've been speaking about their recent book, A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life.