So, picking up where I left off a month ago...
The Greek gods are terrible people. While they are occasionally just and even gracious, their modus operandi is to do whatever they feel like and to comply with the whims of their favorite mortals, often by killing hundreds of others; e.g., Achilles and Thetis. It seems to me that the only thing that separates them from mortals is their power. They are not more just or wise. They are not more loving or merciful. They are not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent. And they certainly are not love. They are simply the powers of this world personified.
These gods display a good deal about the Greek mentality. If Plato is to be believed, they, through the poets writings about them, had an enormous impact on the Greek mores. One of the most striking differences between Greek and modern American mores is the value of human life.
10.1 "[Jove] was thinking how to do honor to Achilles and destroy much people at the ships of the Achaeans. In the end he deemed it would be best to send a lying dream to king Agamemnon."
So this seems to be the line of reasoning: Thetis saves Zeus when the other gods try to overthrow him; Achilles decides to be whiny and asks Thetis to kill the people he is pouty at; Thetis goes to Zeus for help and Zeus decides to kill a bunch of the Achaeans to honor the whining Achilles. Did I miss something or did he just decide that Achilles' honor is more important than the lives of hundreds or thousands of Achaeans and Trojans? There is the fact that Agamemnon did something wrong and that it makes some sort of sense for him and his followers to suffer for their wrongdoing, but this is never mentioned particularly not as Zeus' motivation for killing them all. The issue is not the action that caused Achilles to lose honor (Agamemnon stole his woman) but the fact that Achilles lost honor at all.
It is hard for my modern American mind to grasp this preference for the honor of one (undeserving) man over the lives of hundreds. I suppose I should have learned more from Pericles.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Illiad
I've finally made it around to posting on the next book (the first "Great Book"): the Illiad.
There are a good number of interesting things to understand from this book, but I think the chief of them, and the one under which most of the others fall, is the Greekness of it. It is a wonderful window into the Greek mentality, showing the utter difference between their mind and ours in everything from the value of life to views on glory and honor and the purpose of sacrifice. I will get to most of these later as they come up in the book.
However, I want to start with a point of some similarity. Before I get to that though, I have to say this.
Troy is a bad movie. It makes the Illiad an American action movie, ruins nearly all the characters, and strips the story of any Greek elements that it once had.
Right. Now that that's out of the way...
5.3 "This will be best, for the gods ever hear the prayers of him who has obeyed them." -Achilles
This made me think of James 5:16 about the effective prayer of a righteous man. I realize that there are significant differences, especially once you realize that obeying Greek gods often means buying their favor with sacrifices. It still strikes me as an interesting similarity that the righteous man is heard by God.
The other interesting part about this quotation is that Achilles said it. Achilles is often portrayed as a completely arrogant and self centered individual. This statement, so early in the story, shows both that he is pious and that he has good judgment. Perhaps he isn't the two dimensional character that David Benioff wants him to be.
There are a good number of interesting things to understand from this book, but I think the chief of them, and the one under which most of the others fall, is the Greekness of it. It is a wonderful window into the Greek mentality, showing the utter difference between their mind and ours in everything from the value of life to views on glory and honor and the purpose of sacrifice. I will get to most of these later as they come up in the book.
However, I want to start with a point of some similarity. Before I get to that though, I have to say this.
Troy is a bad movie. It makes the Illiad an American action movie, ruins nearly all the characters, and strips the story of any Greek elements that it once had.
Right. Now that that's out of the way...
5.3 "This will be best, for the gods ever hear the prayers of him who has obeyed them." -Achilles
This made me think of James 5:16 about the effective prayer of a righteous man. I realize that there are significant differences, especially once you realize that obeying Greek gods often means buying their favor with sacrifices. It still strikes me as an interesting similarity that the righteous man is heard by God.
The other interesting part about this quotation is that Achilles said it. Achilles is often portrayed as a completely arrogant and self centered individual. This statement, so early in the story, shows both that he is pious and that he has good judgment. Perhaps he isn't the two dimensional character that David Benioff wants him to be.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Democracy
80.2 "The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment."
This is my last quotation from the introductory book. It deals with a topic that is of great importance in the book but about which I have made little mention. Without continual education of its members, democracy is doomed. This is why these books were compiled, why childhood education is insufficient, and why in these United States political discourse is so prevalent and yet so empty of any sense of the past, of truth and of any real ideas. Even the educated men to whom we entrust our political power have been educated largely without the aid of the Great Conversation.
America is and has been the great democratic experiment. We have overcome many hurdles that few thought we could: peaceful transfer of power from president to president, a credible military, and the democratic governance of so large and far-flung a state. This educational hurdle has faced our country for several generations and will continue to face us until we either overcome it or fail in our great experiment.
We have been slowly fading into a soft despotism (thank you Dr. Rahe) and the only remedy that I can see is education. Only the educated man can see this slow shift and resist it. Without education we become a nation of people subject to the will of the most recent fad or demagogue.
None of this is to say that Democracy is necessary. There is a trap in high education as well: pride. The temptation creeps in to think that politics is the highest end of man, that our chief aim should be to preserve our democracy. We think that greater understanding makes us better people and that a superior form of government will save the world. Humanism very easily forgets about God. So make sure as you read through your book list of great writers that you do not forget the greatest Writer. We must be educated if democracy is to survive but there are greater things than democracy or our nation.
This is my last quotation from the introductory book. It deals with a topic that is of great importance in the book but about which I have made little mention. Without continual education of its members, democracy is doomed. This is why these books were compiled, why childhood education is insufficient, and why in these United States political discourse is so prevalent and yet so empty of any sense of the past, of truth and of any real ideas. Even the educated men to whom we entrust our political power have been educated largely without the aid of the Great Conversation.
America is and has been the great democratic experiment. We have overcome many hurdles that few thought we could: peaceful transfer of power from president to president, a credible military, and the democratic governance of so large and far-flung a state. This educational hurdle has faced our country for several generations and will continue to face us until we either overcome it or fail in our great experiment.
We have been slowly fading into a soft despotism (thank you Dr. Rahe) and the only remedy that I can see is education. Only the educated man can see this slow shift and resist it. Without education we become a nation of people subject to the will of the most recent fad or demagogue.
None of this is to say that Democracy is necessary. There is a trap in high education as well: pride. The temptation creeps in to think that politics is the highest end of man, that our chief aim should be to preserve our democracy. We think that greater understanding makes us better people and that a superior form of government will save the world. Humanism very easily forgets about God. So make sure as you read through your book list of great writers that you do not forget the greatest Writer. We must be educated if democracy is to survive but there are greater things than democracy or our nation.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Childhood Education
76.1 "I must reiterate that you can set no store by your education in childhood and youth, no matter how good it was. Childhood and youth are no time to get an education. The most that we can hope for from these chaotic and uninteresting periods of life is that during them we shall be set on the right path, the path of realizing our human possibilities through intellectual effort and aesthetic appreciation."
Twin Conquests
47.2 "The twin aims that have animated man since the dawn of history are the conquest of nature and the conquest of drudgery. Now they seem in a fair way to be achieved. And the achievement seems destined, at the same time, to end in the trivialization of life. It is impossible to believe that man can long be satisfied with the kind of recreations that now occupy the bulk of their free time. After all, they are men. Man, though an animal, is not all animal. He is rational and he cannot live by animal gratifications alone; still less by amusements that animals have too much sense to indulge in. A man must use his mind; he must feel he is doing something that will develop his highest powers and contribute to the development of his fellow men, or he will cease to be a man."
His point about the twin conquests of man is fascinating. I have a sort of mental pastime that involves thinking what ancient minds would think of our modern world - of things like cars, electricity, running water, grocery stores, etc. I think most of these differences that would astound the ancient come down to differences in degree of the twin conquests. We have, as he says, done a fair job of conquering nature. Hurricanes, forest fires and volcanoes still prove that we aren't the masters of the winds and waves. However, most people in this country don't have to worry about extremes of temperature or heavy rains and we turn rocks into power for our stoves and refrigerators. As for drudgery, we no longer have to walk behind the plow (or even steer the tractor) and we have automated nearly all the mind numbing, dehumanizing jobs. It seems that all this has led to, however, is a seemingly endless stream of new video games, gaming systems, newer and flashier movies and 8000 TV channels. We have RVs, dirt bikes and motor boats but such things are not the end toward which mankind has striven for thousands of years. Entertainment is nice, but we must use our minds at least occasionally and maybe even serve our neighbor. If we do not, we are no better than the animals.
His point about the twin conquests of man is fascinating. I have a sort of mental pastime that involves thinking what ancient minds would think of our modern world - of things like cars, electricity, running water, grocery stores, etc. I think most of these differences that would astound the ancient come down to differences in degree of the twin conquests. We have, as he says, done a fair job of conquering nature. Hurricanes, forest fires and volcanoes still prove that we aren't the masters of the winds and waves. However, most people in this country don't have to worry about extremes of temperature or heavy rains and we turn rocks into power for our stoves and refrigerators. As for drudgery, we no longer have to walk behind the plow (or even steer the tractor) and we have automated nearly all the mind numbing, dehumanizing jobs. It seems that all this has led to, however, is a seemingly endless stream of new video games, gaming systems, newer and flashier movies and 8000 TV channels. We have RVs, dirt bikes and motor boats but such things are not the end toward which mankind has striven for thousands of years. Entertainment is nice, but we must use our minds at least occasionally and maybe even serve our neighbor. If we do not, we are no better than the animals.
Friday, August 13, 2010
A Bit More on Education
47.2 "As Whitehead has said, 'Whenever a book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will sat that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. If it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it cannot be educational. In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place.'"
I'm assuming that Whitehead is Alfred North Whitehead
51.1 "The dictum of Rousseau: 'It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him, nature called him to be a man...when he leaves me he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man.'"
Technical schools have their place, but they certainly shouldn't replace real colleges as the only place to get an education. (The one thing the Germans do badly and the whole world adopts it.) You see this trend even in how people view college: a way to get the job they want. As I said, this can be useful when you really want a particular job and need technical knowledge to do that job, but higher education generally needn't and shouldn't cater to that market.
I'm assuming that Whitehead is Alfred North Whitehead
51.1 "The dictum of Rousseau: 'It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him, nature called him to be a man...when he leaves me he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man.'"
Technical schools have their place, but they certainly shouldn't replace real colleges as the only place to get an education. (The one thing the Germans do badly and the whole world adopts it.) You see this trend even in how people view college: a way to get the job they want. As I said, this can be useful when you really want a particular job and need technical knowledge to do that job, but higher education generally needn't and shouldn't cater to that market.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Assumptions and Liberal Education
Throughout these posts I will be giving the reference page and paragraph of each quotation from the 1952 version of the Great Books. I know this won't be helpful to most of you in the way of locating these quotations, but if you are really curious, let me know and I will try to help you find it.
The Great Conversation (Book 1)
Pg. 2.1 - "These books are the means of understanding ourselves. They contain the great ideas that dominate us without our knowing it."
Somewhere in my collegiate career I realized that the most important thing in understanding why and in what way you disagree with another person is understanding their assumptions. Often the craziest people will have sound logic but flawed premises. This is especially true in the case of great authors and the great books. These writers are incredibly intelligent people and they rarely fall into traps of false logic. We must come to understand their assumptions because, as Hutchins points out, we in the west have inherited them unconsciously. I should add that we also need to have a pretty firm grasp on our own assumptions in order to understand our disagreements. Often this understanding comes from hearing other people say things that we already believe.
17.3 “If the people are not capable of acquiring liberal education, they should be deprived of political power and probably of leisure. Their uneducated political power is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrading and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable of achieving the education that responsible democratic citizenship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightly condemned the mass of mankind to slavery, and the sooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracy, the better it will be for the world.”
This follows a section in which he details his opponents claims that liberal education cannot be for everyone which they base on various things from lack of leisure time to lack of intelligence. He also goes on to say that he firmly believes that everyone is capable of attaining the degree of liberal education which responsible democratic citizenship requires. That being said, we are seeing the effects of a democratic which is in large part not educated in any real sense at all. The guys that I work with (all of whom have graduated high school and some of whom have a year or two of college) are all equally incapable of doing things like simple math, having a disagreement without resorting to petty insults, or displaying any command of the English language. Which leads my to the next couple points...
24.1 "The object [of school] appears to be to keep the child off the labor market and detain him in comparatively sanitary surroundings until we are ready to have him go to work."
44.4 “The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case. One of the most remarkable features of American society is that the difference between the 'uneducated' and the 'educated' is so slight. The reason for this phenomenon is, of course, that so little education takes place in American educational institutions.”
If you have had contact with college grads that went to an average college you know exactly what he is talking about. And if you have any sort of regular conversations with people who simply have a public high school degree, you start to wonder what they did for the 5040 hours that they were in class since the age of 14. The biggest problem though, is that I was little different and I went to a fairly expensive private boarding school. Where will we send our own children to be educated? It's looking more and more like there is nowhere to send them. This only means that the process of continually educating ourselves is all the more important.
The Great Conversation (Book 1)
Pg. 2.1 - "These books are the means of understanding ourselves. They contain the great ideas that dominate us without our knowing it."
Somewhere in my collegiate career I realized that the most important thing in understanding why and in what way you disagree with another person is understanding their assumptions. Often the craziest people will have sound logic but flawed premises. This is especially true in the case of great authors and the great books. These writers are incredibly intelligent people and they rarely fall into traps of false logic. We must come to understand their assumptions because, as Hutchins points out, we in the west have inherited them unconsciously. I should add that we also need to have a pretty firm grasp on our own assumptions in order to understand our disagreements. Often this understanding comes from hearing other people say things that we already believe.
17.3 “If the people are not capable of acquiring liberal education, they should be deprived of political power and probably of leisure. Their uneducated political power is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrading and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable of achieving the education that responsible democratic citizenship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightly condemned the mass of mankind to slavery, and the sooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracy, the better it will be for the world.”
This follows a section in which he details his opponents claims that liberal education cannot be for everyone which they base on various things from lack of leisure time to lack of intelligence. He also goes on to say that he firmly believes that everyone is capable of attaining the degree of liberal education which responsible democratic citizenship requires. That being said, we are seeing the effects of a democratic which is in large part not educated in any real sense at all. The guys that I work with (all of whom have graduated high school and some of whom have a year or two of college) are all equally incapable of doing things like simple math, having a disagreement without resorting to petty insults, or displaying any command of the English language. Which leads my to the next couple points...
24.1 "The object [of school] appears to be to keep the child off the labor market and detain him in comparatively sanitary surroundings until we are ready to have him go to work."
44.4 “The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case. One of the most remarkable features of American society is that the difference between the 'uneducated' and the 'educated' is so slight. The reason for this phenomenon is, of course, that so little education takes place in American educational institutions.”
If you have had contact with college grads that went to an average college you know exactly what he is talking about. And if you have any sort of regular conversations with people who simply have a public high school degree, you start to wonder what they did for the 5040 hours that they were in class since the age of 14. The biggest problem though, is that I was little different and I went to a fairly expensive private boarding school. Where will we send our own children to be educated? It's looking more and more like there is nowhere to send them. This only means that the process of continually educating ourselves is all the more important.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Great Conversation
"The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of obtaining"
When I was preparing for graduation from Hillsdale College, I realized, like so many others, that I would miss the place. I don't think it was because of Saga's fantastic fish Fridays or the all night paper writing sessions (which were sometimes fun but mostly left me hungover). The greatest reason that I do miss Hillsdale is the intimate relationships that I developed with a number of people there and the conversations that I had with those people. And here I don't really mean the late night drama llama walk, but the real conversations about God, truth, and the nature of things, or what C.S. Lewis calls "the verities which mortals lack or indirectly learn."
I have missed this part of Hillsdale more and more the longer I am away. The people that I work with have exacerbated this. Most of them would look at me like I was crazy if I asked them why Troy's neighbors helped them in the Trojan war (which I recently posed to a Hillsdale friend). By that I mean, most of them have read few, if any, good books and most of them don't have the faculties to even grasp what a philosophical habit of mind might be.
All this is to say that I miss all of you and want to continue the conversations we have had. Most of the best of these conversations have revolved around what Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins called The Great Conversation, which is to say, the questions about man, his soul, the universe and man's place in it, and, most importantly, God as they have been discussed by the greatest minds in the Western World.
All these thoughts have come together recently when I started working my way through the Britannica Great Books. In the introduction, Hutchins explains the liberal arts, how they have been pushed aside in modern discourse, and how we still need them. It is a wonderful defense of the liberal arts and you should all read it (I tried to find it online but unfortunately could not).
I am starting this blog to try to continue at least part of those conversations through my reading of the great books. I will be posting quotations from the great authors and some of my thoughts about them. I hope that they will inspire you to read these books yourself and, through them, to become more fully human and closer to God.
NB: Hutchins explains that the editors of this set did not include the Bible because most people already have it and they felt the space in the set would be better occupied by books that were less likely to be redundant. These books are truly great and have much truth in them, but the Bible is the only book that is true. If you haven't read it all the way through or have not read it in a while, I suggest you do that before you read any of the books I will be commenting on.
When I was preparing for graduation from Hillsdale College, I realized, like so many others, that I would miss the place. I don't think it was because of Saga's fantastic fish Fridays or the all night paper writing sessions (which were sometimes fun but mostly left me hungover). The greatest reason that I do miss Hillsdale is the intimate relationships that I developed with a number of people there and the conversations that I had with those people. And here I don't really mean the late night drama llama walk, but the real conversations about God, truth, and the nature of things, or what C.S. Lewis calls "the verities which mortals lack or indirectly learn."
I have missed this part of Hillsdale more and more the longer I am away. The people that I work with have exacerbated this. Most of them would look at me like I was crazy if I asked them why Troy's neighbors helped them in the Trojan war (which I recently posed to a Hillsdale friend). By that I mean, most of them have read few, if any, good books and most of them don't have the faculties to even grasp what a philosophical habit of mind might be.
All this is to say that I miss all of you and want to continue the conversations we have had. Most of the best of these conversations have revolved around what Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins called The Great Conversation, which is to say, the questions about man, his soul, the universe and man's place in it, and, most importantly, God as they have been discussed by the greatest minds in the Western World.
All these thoughts have come together recently when I started working my way through the Britannica Great Books. In the introduction, Hutchins explains the liberal arts, how they have been pushed aside in modern discourse, and how we still need them. It is a wonderful defense of the liberal arts and you should all read it (I tried to find it online but unfortunately could not).
I am starting this blog to try to continue at least part of those conversations through my reading of the great books. I will be posting quotations from the great authors and some of my thoughts about them. I hope that they will inspire you to read these books yourself and, through them, to become more fully human and closer to God.
NB: Hutchins explains that the editors of this set did not include the Bible because most people already have it and they felt the space in the set would be better occupied by books that were less likely to be redundant. These books are truly great and have much truth in them, but the Bible is the only book that is true. If you haven't read it all the way through or have not read it in a while, I suggest you do that before you read any of the books I will be commenting on.
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