Marilyn Thomsen Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. I'm Marilyn Thomsen Patty Vest And I'm Patty Vest. After a brief hiatus, we're restarting Sagecast with new guests, a new you look and a new host. Welcome, Marilyn. Marilyn Thomsen Thanks, Patty. It's great to be here. This season on Sagecast, we're talking with a variety of Pomona College faculty about how they came to study, what they study, teach what they teach, and love the field they love. Patty Vest Today, we're talking with historian Gary Kates, a Pomona faculty member who specializes in the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Marilyn Thomsen Welcome, Gary. Thanks for joining us. You have a long relationship with Claremont. How did you find your way here? Gary Kates Well, it all had to do with the teachers strike in Los Angeles when I was going to an L.A. public high school that year, 1969, 70. The teacher struck in the spring, and I had nothing to do. And I was headed for one of the University of California campuses. It was either going to be Santa Cruz or Berkeley. Gary Kates And I had a friend at Pitzer College, and so I decided to go visit her during this teacher strike. Patty Vest We’ll forgive you for Pitzer, but that’s ok. Gary Kates And the...I visited her and said, “Wait a minute. This is, I had never heard of the Claremont Colleges.” I had grown up in Los Angeles. My father went to UCLA, met my mother at UCLA. I was headed for the University of California. And lo and behold, I kind of liked Pitzer as an alternative. Gary Kates And it was among the Claremont Colleges. So I visited again and a third time and then decided to apply, which was late in the spring, and somehow got in and then I joined Pitzer College in the fall of 1970. I was the first class of men in a college that had only begun seven years before and had begun as an all women's college. Gary Kates I thought, honestly, that would make absolutely no difference since across the street was then Claremont Men's College, which is today Claremont McKenna and next door was Harvey Mudd, which technically has always been coed, but in that era was like 95% men. So I didn't think men on the presence of the Pitzer campus would be a big deal either to me or to other students. Gary Kates I was wrong. It was a big deal. I had women come up to me my first week and say to me, I don't want men on this campus. I didn't vote for men on this campus. You shouldn't be here. And that was kind of healthy for a 17, 18 year old guy to hear. So that was my start to Claremont and Pitzer. Patty Vest How did you react to that? How did it... Gary Kates It was bizarre. It was interesting thing. I kind of was the other. And I had to put myself in her shoes and in their shoes. And, you know, for the first month and a half of that fall semester, students would go into the dining hall. Now, most of the students were women, and they would go into the dining hall for breakfast in bathrobes, pajamas, with their hairs in nets and curlers. Gary Kates And I had a sister so. Patty Vest You’re used to that. Gary Kates I was used to that. But by Thanksgiving, that was over. They came dressed and no curlers. And so I recognized that my presence and the presence of the 39 other guys was, you know, changing the place for better or worse. Marilyn Thomsen Now, you've been friends with Char Miller, who you've met at Pitzer. Can you tell us about that? Gary Kates So Char's future wife, Judy, was in the dormitory where I was an R.A. my sophomore year. So I first met Judy. Then I went away my junior year and came back and they were a couple. So we met at the beginning of my senior year and Char’s junior year and I've known him. I mean, he's been a he was a close friend immediately and we've never stopped being friends since that time. Patty Vest And for those who don't know, Char, he's a professor of history and environmental analysis at Pomona. Marilyn Thomsen And there's an article in Pomona College magazine about your friendship and sharing a house on Indian Hill. Gary Kates Yes, we shared a house at 545 North Indian Hill that senior year. We didn't do it at first, but it was by November, we were sharing the house and I was living with Lynn, who became and still is my wife and Char was living with Judy, who he's still married to. And although we don't share the same house anymore, we're like a half a mile apart in Claremont. Gary Kates Our way of staying together, Char and I has been amazing to both of us and obviously not something that was planned, but something that just happened. Marilyn Thomsen You're both in the field of history. I can only imagine what the conversations were like around the house. Gary Kates Yes, yes. We're very good at boring our children. Well. Well, Char is a historian of the U.S. and environmental history, and I'm a historian of Europe and mainly cultural and intellectual history. So in some ways, we complement each other and we love talking to one another about one about the other's expertise and fields. So I will often in the morning, I'll be texting him about an L.A. Times article regarding a fire or an earthquake and asking him his opinion of the article and how it fits into a certain pattern or not. Gary Kates Or if there's a policy proposal to do X, Y, Z with wind farms or something. Char is my go to person and likewise he and Judy are planning a trip to Paris for next summer. So we've been talking a lot about that lately. Patty Vest So tell us how did you come back to Pomona. Gary Kates Through good fortune and good luck and the grace of God. I was happily teaching history in San Antonio, Texas, at Trinity University, but I had risen in the administration there from department chair to Dean of Humanities and Arts, and the position of Dean of the college came open at Pomona. And Lynn and I had kind of decided that we had raised our children in San Antonio, and that was great. Gary Kates But maybe we didn't want to live out the rest of our lives in San Antonio and that part of the world. So we were eyeing ways to return to Southern California, where both of us have, have or had then elderly parents. And the job of dean of the college came open and I applied for it and somehow I got it. Gary Kates The amazing thing about that, that I'll always cherish is that I succeeded as Dean Hans Palmer, who was a member of the economics department. While I was a student at Pomona. I took two classes with Hans Palmer. I took Introduction to economics with him, and then I took the economic history of Europe with him and I so loved his classes. Gary Kates And to be able to reconnect with him as he handing the baton off to me was such a pleasure. And then Hans, who now lives on the East Coast, lived for the next seven, eight years in Claremont. So I got to know him again really well and he was a resource for me. So that that really is a treasured relationship. Marilyn Thomsen How did you happen to get interested in the European Enlightenment in the French Revolution? Gary Kates So I lived in the era of the sixties when revolution seemed to be on the tip of the tongue of everyone who seemed to think more clearly than me and all of these kind of people I was reading or the Beatles were talking about that revolutions around the corner. So I started thinking to myself, How do you know? Gary Kates Like, is are we about to have a revolution? Patty Vest What do they know that I don't know. Gary Kates Yeah. What do they know that I don't know. And how do you know when you're in a revolutionary situation? How do you know when your country is going to experience or about to experience or maybe has started to experience a revolution? So that got me interested in the American Revolution in all of them. But I kind of settled on the French Revolution as the big one. Gary Kates And so in college I just found myself more wanting to know, more and more. Marilyn Thomsen Are you Fluent in French? Gary Kates I became fluent, although now my speaking and writing is more rusty, because if you don't use it, you know, it tends to deteriorate. But the reading is still yeah, the reading still there. But what also what I realized is that the United States in the late sixties was nowhere near a revolution. And so I kind of solved that problem for myself by the end of graduate school. Gary Kates And so then I had to explain, well then why did the French Revolution happen then? And, and so that's what kept me going and led me. Patty Vest Yeah. And yes. Okay. Marilyn Thomsen So so tell us. Gary Kates Well, so I think we all believe that revolutions occur when the oppressed masses get angry enough that they go out in the streets and insist on overthrowing the government, usually in some violent way. That's not how it usually happens. At least it didn't happen that way in the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution. We could go on. Gary Kates The way it really happens most of the time is that the ruling elite loses confidence in their own ability to rule. They are the first to understand that, or at least a faction within the ruling elite, are the first to understand that the system is morally bankrupt. And once that happens, it doesn't make a revolution any not inevitable. Gary Kates But that's the spark upon which it can spread. And so I saw that in my own lifetime, I want to say most recently, but it wasn't really recent, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. If you remember that the Soviet Union did not collapse because hundreds of thousands of Russians demonstrated in the street and said, we're not going to take it anymore. Gary Kates It happened because a reforming faction around Mikhail Gorbachev, they were the ones that had all the facts and said, we're never going to catch up to the West with this system. And so that's a classic, the way the Soviet Union fell as a kind of classic example of how a ruling elite loses confidence. Marilyn Thomsen What's the role of the Enlightenment ideas, you know, as a precursor to revolution? Gary Kates So there's a very old question in European history that you're opposing in a certain way, which is, was the French Revolution caused by the radical ideas of the European Enlightenment, those ideas promoting, say, human rights, liberal rule of law, and even the political participation of common people, what we would today call democracy. I actually turn that question around, because the problem with that question is it makes the French Revolution the culmination of enlightenment ideas, and it makes the French Revolution seem superior or more important, more significant than the Enlightenment. Gary Kates My way of looking at the Enlightenment and maybe this is a transition to the book I've just published the books that made the European Enlightenment. My concept of the Enlightenment is that its real significance in history is that it helped create and develop a critical reading public. From about 1750 to 1790 throughout Europe, you had a public that was as eager to read books about political ideas as they were to read novels, poetry, and fiction. Gary Kates It was such an interesting era where a book such as Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws could be two volumes, a thousand pages, could be a coffee table book in the hands of thousands upon thousands of middle class readers. And that doesn't even happen today, at least very much in our own era. Marilyn Thomsen Is that what you call an erudite blockbuster? In your book. Gary Kates Yes. Yes. Marilyn Thomsen Could that happen today? Gary Kates Well, it can happen today. And the most recent example we've had of it is a book by Thomas Piketty called Capitalism in the 21st Century, which is a very academic book, but somehow made its way into trade books and on the shelves of all bookstores. But it doesn't happen today the way it happened in the 18th century, in part because there's so much media and so many other kinds of books. Patty Vest Much more noise. Gary Kates Much more noise, you know. Patty Vest Gary, let's talk a little bit about a different book also, but also your teaching. I wanted to ask you a lot about that. And one of your books uses role playing games to immerse students in the world of the French Revolution. Do you still use this approach? Tell us a little bit about that. Gary Kates Well, I was brought in as a consultant for the role playing games and it was founded by a professor of history at Barnard College. And although I consulted with them so that they had the French Revolution part right, I never actually participated in the role playing games in my own classes, in part because that was the era when I was Dean and in part because I teach in a different style. Gary Kates I want to do close readings of texts in my classes and I want to have the students do the close reading of texts. And the role playing is a very successful model, but of an entirely different pedagogy. Patty Vest So tell us a little bit about your style, close readings. How do you teach? Gary Kates Yeah, so I think of the experience of the classroom as when the coach is in the locker room giving the pep talk to the team, the class that's about to go out on the field. I don't think of the classroom time as the moment when the game is actually played. I think the classroom is the time to inspire the students and give them the tools so that when they're alone, doing the reading, that they get the most out of it and that their minds are the most curious and acute. Gary Kates And so I kind of... I think a lot of my students might see the time doing the reading as the time kind of between classes. And I see it kind of the reverse the most. I want the most exciting moments for them to be, not when they're listening to me, but when they're listening to their own critical brains. Gary Kates Trying to make sense of this 18th century primary school. Patty Vest Playing their game after your class. Gary Kates Yeah. Marilyn Thomsen So? So what? How do your students respond to the ideas and the political activity, economic activity of the 18th century, the Enlightenment? Gary Kates Well, Pomona students are just amazing and they are so resilient and they're able to take constructive criticism so well and they're able to push through difficult, both difficult ideas and a lot of reading and a lot of work that that my heart bleeds for them. I think one big difference between teaching in my early career and teaching now has been that the technological advancements that we're all used to: word processing, the iPhone, the laptop, all of that has allowed writing to be much more iterative and central to the classroom experience. Gary Kates So let me give you an example. When I started teaching in the early 1980s, a student would submit a paper physically to my campus box. I might have left for that day, so I would not pick it up until I returned. Then I would return. I would take it home, I would read it. By then, three and a half, four days have gone by and then returning the paper to the student. Gary Kates I will have read it, but wait a few days until we're back in class to return that paper to the student. So it was clumsy and took a lot of logistical effort to receive and return physical papers. In today's world, as you as you all know, because it's not just going on in the classroom, it's going on in all organizations, Gary Kates students are able to email me drafts. I never print them out. I read them online, I use the comment features and the track changes features. It'll go back to them. We may then meet about it physically in the office or in the dining halls, or at Cafe 47. But we're meeting about it two days after they wrote it and the revision process then starts. Gary Kates It's, it's just a loop that is not just faster. It allows for the writing process to be seen as iterative with drafts and revisions. And I find that the learning process is much more intense and positive and rewarding both for me and the students. Patty Vest I was going to say there's probably a deeper understanding because there's not only a process when they're doing the close reading and then you're giving the pep talk for that reading. But there's also a process within the writing that wasn't happening before. Gary Kates That’s right. It wasn't happening before. And it didn't happen when I was a student or even a graduate student. Yeah. And I think it's an example that we don't talk about enough of how new technologies can actually facilitate the very old fashioned liberal arts physical relationship, in-person relationship between faculty member and student. It's not that it's pulling us away and we're doing distance learning or something and making it more impersonal. Gary Kates It actually shines a light and makes the relationship much more special. Marilyn Thomsen Let's go back to your discipline. Do you think that the ideas that came out of the European and the American Enlightenment are still dominating in our world today? Gary Kates Well, like Steven Pinker writes in his book Enlightenment Now, I think we need a lot more of those ideas to dominate or to be voiced with more clarity. One of the things I learned in this recent book in doing the research for this recent book, is how often an 18th century reader would read a book that they didn't like. Gary Kates So I have correspondence, say, between sisters that say, I'm going to recommend this book of Voltaire to you. Now, Voltaire, his ideas are abominable and please don't fall for this part of his idea. But he writes so elegantly and he has such a sense of humor. You have to read him. I think we today have lost in the public in the public sphere, reading or reading books by people we don't like or agree with. Gary Kates And I'm guilty of that myself. Patty Vest I was going to say, that's a rare thing now. Gary Kates Yeah. Patty Vest To hear somebody, instead of the correspondence, somebody texting their sister and saying, hey, have you read this book? Yeah, his ideas are terrible, but he writes really well. Gary Kates Yeah. And in a sense, that's really what the 18th century public cared about. How well the person wrote. So a book like Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that put on the map for the first time the issue of inequality as a central problem. So you say relevant for today. That book is as relevant for today as it's ever been. Gary Kates But people knew, quote unquote, that Rousseau didn't mean anything he was saying. How could somebody. Patty Vest Gary Kates How could somebody write such crazy ideas that there shouldn't be inequality? What else is society founded on? If not inequality? But it's so intriguing. It's kind of like science fiction. It's like, wow, he's getting us to think about this in a way nobody ever, so so there was a lot of reading like that of almost not taking the authors at face value. Gary Kates Later, readers came to understand that Rousseau was dead serious. But. But it took a while. Now. Patty Vest You've mentioned your latest book, Tell us the title. Tell us more about your latest book. Gary Kates So what I wanted to do with the books that made the European Enlightenment is Write a history of the Enlightenment that de centers the author. The problem with the traditional way of writing about the history of the Enlightenment is that we tend to focus on the major authors and on their ideas as they wrote them and thought them. Gary Kates That's fine to a historian. It doesn't explain the dispersion of ideas throughout the society. That's what we're interested in. Intellectual history. Cultural history is not just about an innovative and radical idea, like Rousseau's views on inequality. It's also about or should be about how those ideas affected ordinary European readers in the 18th century. And so what my book tries to do through looking at 12 case studies of Enlightenment books is to do a history that treats authors, readers and publishers on the same playing field. Marilyn Thomsen It's kind of like book history meets intellectual history. Gary Kates It's exactly what it is. Book history meets intellectual history and it's easier said than done because we have so much more information about, say, Voltaire or Rousseau than we do about their readers or their publishers. But in the era of the Internet, as more and more archival sources are being digitized and there is more and more data available online, it's been able to find just enough on readers and publishers, at least for these case studies, that you can you can make these balanced approaches. Marilyn Thomsen But with it being online now does that mean less trips to Paris? Gary Kates It means less. It does. It means less trips to Paris where I'm sitting in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and more trips to Paris where my wife and I are cycling. So that's what it is. That's what it really means. Patty Vest It's not a bad tradeoff. Gary Kates But I'll give you one example of a chapter of how this approach has yielded kind of new, new information. So one of my chapters is about a novel written by a woman. Her name was Madame de Graaf Annie. And the novel is called Letters of a Peruvian Woman, and it takes an indigenous Peruvian Inca woman and has her travel to France and it imagines what she thinks of France. Gary Kates There's a romance that takes place or a an approaching romance that the reader can say, Oh, she's going to marry this guy. And then there's another suitor, and, oh, maybe she'll marry that guy. So that's the typical 18th century. And she ends up that, I'm talking about the character now, the character Zulia ends up at the end of the novel saying, I'm not marrying any of you. Gary Kates I am staying single because the only way I can maintain my autonomy and therefore my freedom is outside marriage. So the book during the 1970s, this book was rediscovered for reasons I don't need to get into. It kind of dropped out of sight. It was a total bestseller at the time, but it dropped out of sight in the 19th century. Gary Kates It's only rediscovered by literary scholars in the 1970s, and with the kind of second wave feminism it, it becomes kind of... it's taught kind of in every college in the 1980s and nineties as this novel, you see there were feminists then and this is what they believed. So, so. And that's what I thought, too. And it is true. Gary Kates And that's what I thought when I began research on this book. But when you look at how the book was published, you actually get a very different story. And here's the story you got. A few years after the novel came out, there was an anonymous sequel that was published that had her marry suitor A. Marilyn Thomsen Is that like fan fiction today? Gary Kates Yes, it would be exactly like fan fiction today. But I'll get back to that because there's some complicating things in the 18th century about fan fiction. And then a few years after that, there's a second sequel in which she marries Suitor B So what? When I say marry, they actually end before the wedding, but it's obvious to the reader. Patty Vest They end up together. Gary Kates They end up together. So what I discovered is the following. First of all, novels in the 18th century, at least on the continent of Europe, not necessarily England, are published anonymously. No author, very few authors put their name on a novel that are living because it's kind of a presumptuous thing to do when it's considered a low form of literature. That's going to change through the century. Gary Kates But Graftonie published this anonymously. So when, so when publishers attached the sequels to the original publication, are you with me? Because they're all anonymous, the reader was not aware that it was written by two different authors. So 80% of the publications of this book are joined with one of the sequels or both of the sequels, because that's what the public wanted. Gary Kates So readers did not read the novel at the time as heck no, I'm staying single. I'm autonomous. That was just a moment in the middle of the story until she found suitor A or suitor B. Patty Vest That was the cliffhanger of the season ending. Gary Kates It goes back to a more conservative romantic. Patty Vest More appropriate. Gary Kates Story...Yeah. And so by looking not so much at the author's views and what the author intended, but in this case looking primarily at the publishers and how they were mediating between author and reader, you can really get a very different narrative. Marilyn Thomsen Are we still committed to the ideals that came out of the Enlightenment, individual liberty, laissez faire, the possibility of progress, religious tolerance? Or are those changing in our modern age? Gary Kates Well, they're definitely changing. They should change. We want them to change ideas in history are never timeless. What we mean by liberty is always going to be different than what someone in the 18th century meant by liberty. When we say, for example, that we have freedom, can you be free if you don't exercise the vote? Gary Kates Can you be free if you're not involved in local politics, if you don't go to your city council meeting and say that you either want composting or you don't want composting, that was the normative understanding of freedom from the ancients and many in the 18th century. It was Rousseau's understanding of freedom. But there's an entirely different meaning of freedom, which is, don't bother me, I don't want to be bothered. Gary Kates Just let me do what I want. I want my home. I want to know that I'll have it. I want enough food, but I want the government to go away and not bother me. That's a completely different concept of freedom. And so they're both being contested in the Enlightenment. So the Enlightenment does not hand us kind of one set of values that we need to read, kind of like the Bible and that some of us are more observant than others. Gary Kates The Enlightenment, I think, is a process of how, as a society, we're going to negotiate and address these very important political issues. Until the Enlightenment, these issues were mainly sorted out in royal courts and churches, and the Enlightenment becomes not a prescriptive set of values that you must think this about freedom and equality, but rather, oh, there is this thing called civil society and think of the churches and the royal courts as there, Gary Kates but on the margins. Now, how are we going to figure this out for ourselves? That's the zone of the enlightenment. Marilyn Thomsen After life of studying a very tumultuous time. What worries you about our world today? Gary Kates Oh, my. Marilyn Thomsen And what gives you cause for optimism? Just a little light question. Gary Kates Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's lots of things that give me cause for optimism, and I think my friends would say I'm way too much of an optimist, even in a dark age, like the one we're living in. One thing that gives me optimism is the if you think about the enormous changes in the rise out of poverty of such a high percentage of human beings in the last 75 years, mostly in Asia. Gary Kates I mean, it's not equally distributed around the world. But I think in terms of looking globally, there's much to be optimistic about when you think of the reduction of poverty. Of course, the values of liberal democracy in the United States, which in the U.S. we've been taking for granted, are now being tested in a way that they certainly have not been in my lifetime. Gary Kates And it does make enlightenment practices, enlightenment thinking about civil society, enlightenment thinking about disinformation and critical reading. It really goes to the heart of making the Enlightenment relevant for today and in a way that maybe ten or 15 years ago I thought what I taught was, I don't know, rather stale and old fashioned. And now it does seem for not the best of reasons to be more relevant than ever. Patty Vest In not only the U.S., but so many other parts of the world there are democracies. When you thought it was isolated. We may have thought... Gary Kates Yes, yes. Although and in that way, when especially when I think of other places in the world. I remember in 1990, we sent a run of the American Historical Review in boxes like 20 boxes, and spent like $500 doing this to a university in Hungary because they had recently come out of the Iron Curtain and were free, and they basically wanted everything they could get. Gary Kates And if you think of what that took to bring them those print copies and now what is available everywhere, either by hook or by crook, too, for someone to get their hands on information. There I'm very optimistic. And so we tend to worry about the disinformation effects of social media globally, and they're real. But at the same time, as more people have more access to information globally than ever before, that's very exciting. Patty Vest To change topics again. Gary, we're recording this at KSPC Studios in Pomona, and this is... can you tell us when was your first time at KSPC? Gary Kates Well, I always enjoy coming back to the KSPC studios because I was a dj for KSPC, my freshman and sophomore years of college, and I had a late night show. It was such a great experience. We were then in something called The Replica House, which is kind of where the art building sits today on the Pomona campus. Gary Kates It was a tiny little cottage, kind of really homey. And I remember what I distinctly remember about the show is that 11 p.m., 12 Midnight, High School kids from El Monte Fullerton and West Covina would call in to request songs. It wasn't so much. I mean, you'd think it would be my college buddies and friends would be the only ones listening. Gary Kates But I really saw them that KSPC was a vibrant station for high schoolers wanting to hear what these college kids like. Because, you know, we decided what music we were playing, nobody told us what music they were going to play. And so that that was a wonderful. Patty Vest You had quite the reach. Gary Kates It felt that way then probably more then now. Patty Vest On that optimistic note, we're going to wrap this up. Our thanks to Gary Kates. Now I'm going to say your full title now the H. Russell Smith Foundation chair in the Social sciences and professor of history for enlightening us today. Marilyn Thomsen And to everyone listening. Thanks for joining us on Sagecast, the podcast to Pomona college. Till next time.