EDITOR’S	NOTE

What’s this?

I remember distinctly the first time I read Leon Kass, this year’s Jefferson Lecturer, who is interviewed, excerpted, and feted in this issue of Humanities. It was late 1996, and I had just moved to Washington, D.C., to take a job as an assistant editor at the Public Interest. On my first day, I was handed galleys of “The End of Courtship,” Kass’s critical essay on the vulgar mating rituals of my generation.

A bachelor at the time and as caddish as the next twenty-five-year-old male, I was shocked by the essay, not so much by its moralistic tone as by the quality of its information. This philosopher had what I considered an annoying amount of inside dope on people like me. His report carried me back to those moments in childhood when some great deception of mine was, it turned out, known in every criminal detail by my parents, and all I could say was, “Who told Mom?”

In person—and on the page, when not being judged by prejudiced young cads—Kass is an impressive example of the examined life. For his investigations, he gathers information from science, literature, and everyday experience to learn about important moral subjects ranging from the mores of the young to the forms of eating particular to Homo sapiens. In doing so, he spends a great deal of time thinking both as a scientist and a humanities scholar. Famously, when he convened the President’s Council on Bioethics in 2001, Kass asked all members of the council to begin their work by reading “The Birth-Mark,” a short story about scientific hubris by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

What might be called scientific humility is the subject of a feature article in this issue written by Janet Browne. The well-known biographer of Charles Darwin, on the occasion of Darwin’s bicentennial, graces us with a recounting of the young explorer’s forays aboard the HMS Beagle. At this point in the Darwin story, the budding scientist, who has not yet adopted an argument for natural selection, is adventurously collecting species in the wild. It is a beguiling tale of innocence and calm, made poignant by our knowledge of the storm of controversy ahead.

If Hawthorne can prompt us to think about life and death while a biographer relays the story behind a great scientific breakthrough, then R. Howard Bloch, another contributor to this issue, must be right when he insists that the humanities offer a vital training in how to make meaning of even the driest empirical findings. In “What Words Are Worth,” his defense of the humanities, Bloch, Sterling Professor of French Literature at Yale, shows that not only are many important life lessons available in Literature 101, but that our sense of a shared humanity is strengthened and reaffirmed by revisiting the great literary and artistic achievements of the new and the old and of the East and the West. Our common humanity may, in a different and yet related way, also be the underlying theme of Vincent Cannato’s look at the controversy of immigration as experienced by Boston Brahmins in the late nineteenth century.

There is much else that I’d like to recommend, especially within our feisty departments, but brevity is the preferred style of editor’s notes. I’ll close by adding only that Liza Minnelli fans would do well to report straight to page 54.