The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, to conclude what I’ve been saying.
I’ve said over the four years that I’ve been writing the Wednesday Blog weekly that I would stop writing this when it ceased to be fun. That’s a good rule for life overall that I’ve found: devote your life to things you love doing and keep them fun in the process. I tend to put on a very dry public face; a friend recently commented that I didn’t seem like one to scream or cheer at a concert, I affirmed that statement and demonstrated my own gentle “hurray!” to great amusement. This blog has changed with the times. It began as a project for me to write about things I enjoy outside of my research. I like to point to an early blog post all about my favorite state highway signs as a good example of this.[1] Yet I’ve found the topics I write about are changing, they’re becoming more academic, outlets where I can introduce some of the ideas I’m working on in my professional life and workshop them in a public forum. It’s a bald faced way of getting more readers to the Blog, I admit, yet so far, it’s worked.
I continue to cover politics here when I feel there’s a need to say something. Yet I’ve tried to balance what I’m writing to keep it positive, or at least to ensure that what I end up publishing suggests ways we can move forward out of the current crises we face. After all, there are enough writers out there pointing out the crises of the moment, some of us should be looking to the future to offer a light ahead that we all can reach for. This Spring, I was inspired by the commemorations in Boston of the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution and the rallies for democracy here in Kansas City to focus that positive attention on popular action, the root of any good political system. I believe that government must act with the consent and full participation of the governed, and that through our elected representatives at all levels we ought to consider ourselves both governed and government. It sounds paradoxical, I know, and to an extent I believe that paradoxes are often a good thing. I devised one of my favorite phrases, “the extraordinary acts of ordinary people” to express this sentiment, that it is people acting out of the ordinary, out of what is considered ordered, which propels political change and keeps our politics fresh.[2] In 2023 one of the fads of the year on the internet was women asking men how often they think of the Roman Empire. I was asked this by one of my colleagues over lunch at the Nativity Parish School and remarked that because I was teaching the Romans at the time they were front of mind. Beyond this however, as much as I am familiar with the remains of the Empire, I am more drawn to the Republic and its ideals of popular government, even if they were never realized. The founders of the United States sought to model this federal republic on Roman models, yet they kept the Constitution they framed fresh for its day, an American constitution living in its ability to be amended to fit the changing times and passage of each generation rather than a Roman one deemed sacred through association with the old Republic’s gods and ancient institutions. Our republic is secular because for it to be sacred is to make it inviolate and unchanging, a monolith which will grow ever more distant from the people it was meant to govern, until like Shelley’s Ozymandias it is left as a mere pedestal of itself adrift in the sands of time.[3]
I want to stay a while longer with this phrase because I am so proud of it. To trumpet the extraordinary acts of ordinary people is to say that everyone has a voice and an impact upon the rest of us. In the first few years of the Wednesday Blog, my political essays tended to get lower readership across the board. I started writing the Blog in March 2021, a year after the January 6th insurrection showed how much the Republic was corrupted by the refusal to concede the 2020 election which caused that attack on the Capitol. I’ve seen a steady decline in political readership for my writing since the 2016 election, yet after 2020 that readership dropped off a cliff. American politics today is not a happy thing to write about, and at the moment it only seems to be getting worse. Yet by focusing less on the people in power and more on the people engaged for the common good I saw my readership grow on these political essays until they tended to be level with my other non-academic writing. A great inspiration for me here lies in the revolutionary era anthem Chester, sung by the New Englanders in the Continental Army and one of the older tunes in this country’s patriotic songbook. I’d been listening to it here and there without realizing for months, yet once I figured out what it actually was, when I was in Boston in March no less, I found that it spoke to my sentiment in a far greater way than I anticipated. I’m listening to William Schuman’s arrangement in his New England Triptych (1956) as I write this now, a New Deal era work intended to celebrate the democratic spirit of the cradle of the revolution.
There is a great deal of history behind my politics, naturally I notice that being a trained historian, and having taught American and British history on several occasions and having read a great deal in Irish history I can point out the various threads which I’ve coalesced into a logical genealogy of my political philosophy. Suffice to say, I believe it is better to look to the future and enact political policy which will build a future that we can all be proud of. At the core of this is listening to the people around us, hearing what they have to say, and listening to our own logic and empathy, two things which should always work together in our decisions. In writing about the extraordinary acts of ordinary people I look to those who will appear from the crowd as the leaders from my millennial generation and those coming up behind us in Generations Z and Alpha. We have inherited a great mess, and we have a lot of work to do. There are plenty of people arguing and advocating on what needs to be reformed, I feel better suited to provide an optimistic voice of what we could look forward to. By putting ordinary people front and center, I hope to make clear that policy should address problems from the bottom up, help reinforce and support the poorest in society that the whole structure grows stronger in kind. You might call this trickle-up economics, to speak to the Reaganites. We could build a future where everyone has good work, they can be proud of, enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and where every child learns how to read. We could have this future where people feel that law is meant to support them rather than push them down. I see this every day when I’m out around town: I suspect that the general sentiment behind people who run stop signs, red lights, or drive in transit only lanes is that the law has never worked in their favor, always rather beaten them down and stripped them of their humanity, so why should they follow the law? We must find our humanity in each other if we are ever going to grow out of this time of crises and begin to build a better future.
I enjoy thinking about the future in other languages, not just in the sense of the future tense but in the mentality of the language. How do they express things which haven’t happened but will come? In English we have the word future as a monolith on its own, derived from French and originally from the Latin futūrus, an irregular future active participle of the to be verb sum. In English, the future is as much a place as it is a time, it’s the destination we’re going to. Yet is it not better to think of the future as the scenery about to pass by as we go down the line like the trees and fields that we pass on a train? The present is momentary, here and gone in the blink of an eye, each millisecond the present, and the past a great gulf of memory whence we came. Yet the future is something both unknown and recognizable. It is both what we can see ahead of us along the way and what is just over the next horizon. It is an irregular version of being which will come someday. French expresses the concept of the future like this, whereas futur refers to the tense, l’avenir is instead the noun I’ve heard used most to describe the concept of the future. Yet l’avenir instead merely is the crafting of a phrase, temps à venir (time to come) into a noun, avenir, or that which is coming. We don’t know in truth what it is, what it will feel like when it comes, yet we know that someday we will see it and live in it. The future is inevitable, yet it is not singular by nature. Rather, if there is one past and present those are merely the choices made by actors in those moments which were chosen from the multitude that is possible from what could come.
Irish expresses this sense of the future well because Irish really has no specific word for future. There is a future tense, which in some ways is more regular in its formation than the Irish present tense. Instead, Irish uses a phrase which breaks down the future into its core concepts: An rud atá le teacht, or the thing which is coming. Therein lies the future in its baldest form: it is merely the thing that is coming next out of all the possibilities. Another topic which I seemed to write about a fair deal for a while was faith, self-help, and religion. My Catholicism is influential to my cosmovision and political philosophy in my core belief of the paradoxical nature of God, that God can exist yet also be omnipotent and omniscient. Because of this, I like to say, “anything is possible in the Eyes of God,” or for short, “anything is possible.” As I think about the end of my doctoral writing and needing a dedication to affix on my dissertation, I’ve found myself thinking about this phrase, and about who my audience is. After all, you now reading this sentence in my future, just as I wrote it in your past. It is possible that just about anyone could be reading this now, and so rather than dedicate my work to one person in particular in the moment in which I am writing it, perhaps I ought to instead dedicate it to the possible, or rudaí indéanta in Irish. That second word indéanta is a neat one because it comes from the verb déan, meaning to do, thus the possible is something that might be done. In English and French, I say, “I am studying” or « J’étudie, » yet in Irish, I say, “Déanaim ag staidéar,” or “I am doing study,” which makes the study more of an act than a state of being. The future has and always will be something acted, something done by individuals in our own small ways that creates great change in the collective form.
I study history because of all the things I am interested in it is history which brings them together. So far, history is a human creation made in our image and likeness which seeks to tell our story as best as we can recall it. We’ve devised historical methods of a similar manner to understand other histories, salvation history, church history, and natural history to name three. I returned to natural history as an adult yearning for the halcyon days of curiosity and wonder from my early childhood and built my career on my study of André Thevet’s (1516–1590) sloth. It’s become my gateway into the history of natural history, and through it I’m beginning to make my name as a sloth historian. I do not believe in prescriptivism, the notion that history in inexorably leading to some great moment in the future when the final form of human nature will announce itself. I think this is limiting, claustrophobic in fact. It’s far too simplistic to say that we will all wake up someday and find the morning sunlight is just a little bit brighter, the grass and trees greener, and the sky a prettier shade of blue because there’ll be somebody among us who will find something contrary about the experience. I for one an enjoying the gray skies outside my window today, it’s finally cool enough in mid-October for me to open the blinds in my room and let some sunlight in without making it too hot. Rather, history teaches us that the future is what we will make of it. I chose to not study the twentieth century because I felt this dolorous pain in my heart that there were so many things which happened in the last century which could have been avoided, choices which could have been different. In studying recent history, I worried I would be faced with the ghosts of the world wars, Great Depression, and all the troubles faced by humanity in general and my fellow Irish Americans in particular throughout my working life.
Instead, I looked deeper into the past, first to the Roman Republic with an interest in studying the expansion of Roman citizenship in the late Republic after the Social War of the 90s and 80s BCE and later to the Renaissance, a period that seemed similar enough, Latinate to be sure, yet full of people and stories who I felt I could relate to better than the ancients. I found Thevet almost accidentally, and through his sloth I feel that I’ve found balance in my life that sustains me today, makes me feel more fulfilled in my efforts than I was before. My history is fundamentally interdisciplinary, historical zoology adopts zoological methods and theories to determine the true nature of historical animals, layering their scientific taxa upon their far older human memory and legendaria. In Thevet I am able to work with the ancients, looking especially Aristotle and Pliny, yet soon after I can turn around and look ahead to Buffon and Linnaeus and see how they interpreted what Thevet wrote in order to establish a clear lineage through the historical record for the animal in question. There is nothing sure about this history, often the historical sources are lacking with detail about a given animal, or the zoological data may not have enough detail about an extinct species to offer a clear picture of what it is I am describing. Both are limited by the foggy memory of the human past, yet together they can offer a light with which to move ahead and keep exploring those parts of our cosmos which are still strange and unfamiliar to us today.
I write because it is the greatest way I’ve yet found to express myself. I can say far more in an essay such as this than I could in a conversation. The Wednesday Blog remains less formal than my academic writing, here I use the first person. Yet with the passage of time, I’ve found the Blog has become more academic to the point that friends have told me they got an education about Thevet that they never expected. The Blog has several antecedents, including earlier less regular blog posts which you can find on this same website from before 2021 that all form the roots of this project. I’m proud of the writing I’ve done here, the Wednesday Blog now is comprised of 238 essays and 200 podcast episodes, I’ve written 521 pages, and the total word count is over 300,000. The future is defined as much by its potential as the fact that once it comes to be what was present will then be past. To see an end gives all things meaning. It is for this reason, at the end of the sixth book of the Wednesday Blog, and fifth season of the podcast, that I’ve decided to end this particular publication. This remains a fun thing to write, yet I have so much more to do today, and I only see that workload growing as I try my hand at more peer-reviewed articles, books, and translations in the coming decades. I hope the Wednesday Blog will be a testament to who I was at this point in my life in the years after the COVID-19 Pandemic and during my long years of doctoral study. Let these essays remain a monument of the first half of the 2020s, a sign of where we’ve been and where I hope we will be going.
[1] “Signs,” Wednesday Blog 1.10.
[2] “On Servant Leadership,” Wednesday Blog 6.15.
[3] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” Poetry Foundation.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 