What do you think you know about Medieval Children?
Perhaps no other period of history has more misconceptions associated with it than the Middle Ages. The history of childhood is also full of misconceptions. Recent scholarship has illuminated the lives of medieval children as never before, dispelling many of these misconceptions and replacing them with verifiable facts about life for the medieval child.
In this multi-part feature, we explore various facets of medieval childhood, from childbirth through the teen years and beyond. We'll see that, though the world they lived in was very different, medieval children were in some ways very like the children of today.
Briefly talks about education via the "7 seven liberal arts" of the trivium and then the quadrivium; what we now call "classical education". We plan to use that broad template for home education for Twyla, as I've said many times before.
2) A good article — "Classical Christian Education: A Look at Some History" by Ben House — that includes this snapshot of 18th century America:
Typically the schools in early American history were Classical Christian schools. The instructors were usually ministers whose training was a combination of classical languages and literature and Protestant theology. In other words, they studied the Bible in its original Hebrew and Greek, and they read Homer's Iliad in Greek, Tacitus' histories in Latin, as well as studying John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. For example, Moses Waddell, a Southern Presbyterian preacher and teacher (1770-1840), began studying Latin at age eight, and after six years of school, he had finished courses in Greek, Latin, and mathematics. After his conversion and entrance into the ministry, Waddell established, in a log building, a school with an enrollment of as many as 180 students a year.
The principle of this bill, and the principle of all the advocates of it, is that standardization in education is a good thing. I do not think a person can read the literature of advocates of measures of this sort without seeing that that is taken almost without argument as a matter of course, that standardization in education is a good thing. Now, I am perfectly ready to admit that standardization in some spheres is a good thing. It is a good thing in the making of Ford cars; but just because it is a good thing in the making of Ford cars it is a bad thing in the making of human beings, for the reason that a Ford car is a machine and a human being is a person. But a great many educators today deny the distinction between the two, and that is the gist of the whole matter. The persons to whom I refer are those who hold the theory that the human race has now got behind the scenes, that it has got at the secrets of human behavior, that it has pulled off the trappings with which human actors formerly moved upon the scene of life, and has discovered that art and poetry and beauty and morality are delusions, and that mechanism really rules all.
Scary, because it has come to pass, in the minds of some, hasn't it?
Sioux Falls is rural and religious; half of the population goes to church every week. People in San Francisco make much more money, are predominantly liberal, and just 14 percent of people in San Francisco attend church every week. Liberals are said to care more about helping the poor; so did people in San Francisco give more?
It turns out that this idea that liberals give more…is a myth. Of the top 25 states where people give an above average percent of their income, 24 were red states in the last presidential election.
Just to be clear, I think the proper association of the term "liberal" is not with the "left" (progressive is the more appropriate term), but with the radical, beyond left/right duality, free-thinking state of being that is at the heart of education in the liberal arts and the great works of the Western tradition, which of course is the root of "classical liberalism", and why America, land of liberalism, is the "dream of Europe". But in the above article, "liberal" refers to left/progressive.
I've expressed this before, as well as through my essays, but for those new to my writings on art, I wanted to reiterate what are some basic ideas that I explore in my work, and for you to follow as I blog and write new essays (and revise old ones).
What is art?
What is sustainability, and how is it relevent to art?
What is post-conventional, and how is it relevent to art?
What is transdisciplinary, and how is it relevent to art?
How is the syntopicon (or "great ideas") relevent to art?
I'm not so self-aware to be able to conclude that this list is exhaustive. "Polysemy", or "many meanings" is obviously important to me, and falls under the "What is art?" question. "Practice" or "sadhana" falls under "What is sustainability?" There may be more ideas fundamental to my view. I suppose that my essential assertion is this: the best art takes root in a lineage of imaginative fullness through the ages and is a living tradition, that tradition I call "integral".
Taken as a whole, all of this comprises an area of education I call "artistry studies", for working artists who seek to commingle their intuition, technique, and learning so as to make genuine art with resonance beyond ordinary language.
It is from Victor Davis Hanson, one of my favorite political thinkers (in part because his is a Classics-influenced view of world politics). His thought is influenced by both left and right, yet his perspective leads beyond both. Here, he touches on a remedy to deal with the Middle East that strikes me as truly inspired. He cites the fact that so much oil money goes to support Islamic jihadists. That is where the solution lay to what many think is an intractable war in the Middle East:
What money that does trickle down has been used for conspicuous consumption, not national investment — as monarchs and dictators import consumer toys to pacify the disenchanted. In other societies, modernity came at a measured pace, but in the Middle East nomads and peasants have skipped the telegraph and headed straight to the camera cell phone. Of course, the poor "Arab street," tuned into satellite TV, blames the postmodern West for titillating its newfound appetites.
To remedy this mess, a good start would be to lower our own oil consumption, expand American production and diversify our energy sources with solar, nuclear and ethanol power and coal gasification. Only by taking these steps can America — the most desperate of all oilaholics — collapse the world price and thus erode the assets of our adversaries.
Which places the challenge squarely on American innovation and entrepreneurialism, to both develop technologies beyond oil, and sell them widely. Thankfully, America has led the world in both for most of its history. So we are up to the challenge. Can we meet it?
Did you know you could use a bicycle tire pump to inflate a flat tire on your car? I had to deal with that this morning, but didn't have a lug nut wrench handy, and needed to drive the car to the shop to get the leak in the tire plugged up.
So I figured, why not, right?
And I got where I needed to go. Took about three minutes of vigorous arm motion, in case you were curious.
A new piece of mine, called Boiled Down, Will It Still Pop? It continues along the line I wrote yesterday, about a broader definition of folk music; in this new piece, I question the nature of today's pop music to provide foodstuffs for generations to come.
Also new (although from 1958) is a transcribed essay by Mortimer Adler, called What is an Idea? A very good read. And an artistry based upon knowledge of the Adler's 103 "Great Ideas" is both a nod to tradition and to the avant garde. I suppose just how that works ought be the subject of an essay, to explain things more. Ok, twist my arm.
I always suspected that I grew up in Wisconsin, and now live in Chicago. This test confirms it. Take it yourself, why doncha.
And how funny that Boston gets its own category. Having lived there for a year with Hannah, I know why.
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Inland North
You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
Comparing how conservatives donate money, give blood, and volunteer time, versus that of progressives (i.e., liberals, but I'm no longer going to use that word for the left), Thomas Sowell writes:
People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.
It is not that conservatives have more money. Liberal families average 6 percent higher incomes than conservative families.
...Conservatives not only donate more money to charity than liberals do, conservatives volunteer more time as well. More conservatives than liberals also donate blood.
Interesting. And why is this? Sowell writes:
For at least two centuries, the vision of the left has included a belief that those with that vision are morally superior, more caring and more compassionate.
While both sides argue that their opponents are mistaken, those on the left have declared their opponents to be not merely in error but morally flawed as well. So the idea that liberals are more caring and compassionate goes with the territory, whether or not it fits the facts.
Those on the left proclaimed their moral superiority in the 18th century and they continue to proclaim it in the 21st century. What is remarkable is how long it took for anyone to put that belief to the test -- and how completely it failed that test.
It is worth noting that in the philosophical frameworks of Ken Wilber, left/progressives are more developmentally evolved than conservatives, along whatever color spectrums he happens to be using. "Developmentally evolved" is of course another way of saying "morally superior, more caring and more compassionate." There might be other ways to define those terms. But at least when the definition includes donating money, giving blood, and volunteering time, Wilber's entire notion that progressives have in them more development (in worldview, in cognition) doesn't square with the study Sowell mentions in his column, or this "development" isn't worth much towards helping people in need. Either way, the claim that progressives are superior to conservatives, no matter who you dress it up, or color it, or cloak it in big words, is meaningless.
And why is this important? I'll let Sowell finish:
The two visions are different in another way. The vision of the left exalts the young especially as idealists while the more conservative vision warns against the narrowness and shallowness of the inexperienced. This study found young liberals to make the least charitable contributions of all, whether in money, time or blood. Idealism in words is not idealism in deeds.
Emphasis on that last sentence. It gets to our attitudes and actions in how we educate and raise our children, doesn't it?
Watch Rep. Rangel talking about why he supports a draft, here. I love how he's shown statistics that directly contradict his so-called position, yet he ignores them. That is about all he can do, isn't it?
More enlightened commentary from one of the Congress' brightest lights:
According to Rangel, "If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career, or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq. If there's anyone who believes these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No bright young individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of some educational benefits," Rangel said.
But so what? you ask. Well, this is what:
Rangel was responding to a question during an interview yesterday on Fox News Sunday about a recent study by the Heritage Foundation which found that those enlisting in the military tend to be better educated than the general public and that military recruiting seems to be more successful in middle- class and wealthy neighborhoods than in poor ones.
According to the study, 97 percent of military enlistees were high school graduates versus 80 percent of Americans in general. The study also concludes that the average reading level of military personnel is a full grade level higher than that of the general population.
That is the name of the songbook lying on top of my father's piano, at his house in Milwaukee. I've seen it before, and picked it up before. But this time, at Thanksgiving, picking it up was pretty 'effin cool. Talk about a trip back in time. I thumbed through it, stopping to belt out not a few tunes to my daughter, wife, and father. Hannah and my father joined in a couple times; Twyla bopped along as ever, the little music lover.
It is songbook of around 150 songs arranged for "community singing"; i.e., with church groups, civic groups, at parties, with the family. Most people's first reaction to seeing this book might be that it is something straight out of the American 1950s; and they would be right. Of course that is meant mythologically, because actually the book was published even earlier than that, in 1936. The "50s" is that which is artfully depicted in the first Back To The Future film, when Marty time-travels back to when his father was his age, with the barbershop tune "Mr. Sandman" in the air and at every populated street corner.
Many cultural standards are printed in this book, from "The Star Spangled Banner", to "Oh My Darling, Clementine", lots of Lutheran Christmas carols such as "Silent Night", to "Jingle Bells" and many more in this vein. Plenty of songs expressed a sentiment of a people at war (as this country was, obviously, at the time). But what I love about these old songs are the not-at-all rare feelings of despair, loss, death, longing. Lyrically, these are often strange. Clementine, after all, drowns in a river.
Where I'm going is this: we need songs like these. We need such things to bind us together, as sharing a common, umbrella culture that is American. Importantly, children ought learn these songs, or such songs native to their country (if you aren't American); these are perfect for introduction of the child into American culture, and become part of their musical consciousness (Oh Susanna! don't you cry for me!). They are profoundly better, both musically and lyrically, than the perky crap peddled today as "children's music". And, at least for me, these songs strike me as very important to the art of composing. I mean, I'm studying with a composition teacher (W.A. Mathieu) who is on the true leading edge of tonal music, in both theory and practice. But the Merrily We Sing songs are as revitalizing as anything. These are fun; these are singable by anyone; these are about human things and feelings. Composers tend to forget that if their ambiguous artfulness can't connect with people, it isn't music.
A collection such as this defines what "folk music" really is. The term has been misappropriated for too long to refer to country & western, or even more broadly as anything with an acoustic guitar and vocals with lyrics about regular things, or protest-y things.
Wrong.
"Folk music" is that music which is anonymous to a culture. Sure, most of the songs in Merrily We Sing have author/composer credits. But you recognize them as if you didn't know. Rather, these are "created by America"; as in, created by the cultural values which basically belong to everyone participating in the culture. Of course, sophistication varies amidst some umbrella term this encompassing. Jazz is certainly folk music (at least, through its hard bop period). Notably, when jazz became "arty" in the late 60s, it moved away from being strictly folk.
Folk music is that music which entertains most people without objection. It is the music people respond to without having to think about it. It is the music that most penetrates what, in this case, the music of America really is. It is made up of songs that sound similiar to others, but nonetheless express a feeling in a unique way. Usually, not an abundance of technical acuity is required to perform these songs. Because folk music is music in plain language, using rhythms, melodies, and chord changes that are in common use. Folk music is what we all share, whether we want to or not.
Will a songbook such as this be updated, in a way that somehow finds songs that are common today, 2006? Maybe, but it won't be anytime very soon. Maybe in a decade. Maybe in the 2050s. I think the internet and mass-media culture will have to reach its apex, its "golden age", and then and only then, after a number of years, can a common culture expressed through folk songs return. Periods of cohesion alternate with periods of cultural dissolution. Such is the way of things.
Until then, I have Merrily We Wing as one of a small but important number of songbooks I own that bind together hearty, non-insulting, often humorous songs with me, Hannah, Twyla, and "America" before "America" became something few can solidly agree upon what it means.
SOMEHOW, MY HUNCH IS THAT THIS WILL ADD TO JAZZ'S MYSTIQUE
But of course it is tragic, inarguably:
NEW ORLEANS -- For more than a century, musicians and fans in this proudly musical city have hoarded mementos of their culture.
Self-styled collectors packed tiny attics with precious scores, filled ramshackle apartments with antique musical instruments and stored irreplaceable photos of long-gone artists in cramped back rooms.
But as New Orleans struggles to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, one of the great casualties of the storm is starting to emerge: the loss of the documents and ephemera that chronicled New Orleans' distinctive musical life.
Unlike most major American cities, where cultural riches tend to be officially designated and then stored in grand museums, everyday New Orleans citizens always have done much of this work themselves, out of sheer love for the music.
These deeply personal troves disintegrated in the flooding that followed Katrina. From the rare historic instruments that clarinet star Dr. Michael White stashed in his bedroom closet to the career memorabilia that Fats Domino stored throughout his home, the material floated away, forever beyond the reach of scholars and historians.
"There's a whole universe of material from people's collections that were lost," said Greg Lambousy, director of collections at the Louisiana State Museum.
Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of the film "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," revealed his purpose for doing that in a rare out-of-character interview he granted Rolling Stone in part to counter charges that he was promoting anti-Semitism. On the face of it, this would be odd, given that Cohen is himself a Sabbath-observing Jew. His defense is that he is using Borat's anti-Semitism as a "tool" to expose it in others. And that his Arizona bar stunt revealed if not anti-Semitism, then "indifference" to anti-Semitism. And that, he maintains, was the path to the Holocaust.
Whoaaaa.
Does he really believe such rubbish? Can a man that smart (Cambridge, investment banker and now brilliant filmmaker) really believe that indifference to anti-Semitism and the road to the Holocaust are to be found in a country-and-western bar in Tucson?
...With anti-Semitism re-emerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world's largest Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost--is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism?
Of course not. But pretending so makes for a enjoyable film, apparently.
... rendered me in a productive mood, around the house. Last night, after we arrived home from Wisconsin (and our third Thanksgiving meal, third turkey, third bowl of cranberries, third pie), I jumped right into yardwork, and working on the new wall in our play room. Then this morning, I was able to make my long-sought after wake-up time of 5:30 am. I did my 90 min of music practice (including starting in on a new Bach piece from his Well-Tempered Piano), and then I tackled more yard work, all before 9 am. Then I made breakfast for Hannah, Twyla, and me, which I do everyday. So who knows where this burst came from, but I hope it stays, because I want a productive morning routine before I head out to work. Makes me feel better about everything. Not to mention more able, once I get home, to just enjoy my time with Hannah and Twyla, through dinner, play, and all that.
"The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum-wage laws ... one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books."
This is provocative, but I'm not sure why it is true, or not true. Any ideas?
It was a good one, out in the Chicago suburb of Brookfield with Hannah's step-sister's family, her father, her step-mother, and some friends. I was asked to perform music, so I choose two of the three pieces I composed for my brother's recent wedding, and did so on solo guitar (the pieces are for guitar and flute). One culinary highlight was a dish that Hannah brought — cranberry-glazed sweet potatoes. It is pretty easy, 100% seasonal, and with a nice, spicy kick. Highly recommended.
Anyway, two more thanksgiving meals to go. One tomorrow, and one Saturday, both in Wisconsin.
It's all here, in a recent Heritage Foundation study that is startlingly thorough in its analysis of the makeup of the current U.S. Military, along various factors.
It is simply a lie to say, as the current advocate for reinstatement of the draft, Rep. Charlie Rangel, that a draft is needed "as a means of spreading military obligations more equitably". A straight-up lie. Here's a particular quote on that:
...it is commonly claimed that the military relies on recruits from poorer neighborhoods because the wealthy will not risk death in war. This claim has been advanced without any rigorous evidence. Our review of Pentagon enlistee data shows that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005.
Which means the Rangel's "more equitable" request would lead to more not less poor folks. Is that what he has in mind?
Rangel is doing this to make a cynical political point; which means self-disqualifies from taken seriously about country's security and military management. This is a powerful Democrat, the soon to be chairman of the House Ways and Means committee. He said, "There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way..." That is nonsense on stilts; for god's sake, everyone (who is serious, that is) knows war is hell and that soldiers are killed fighting for ideas they hold noble. That is kind of how war works; that is why war is tragic.
Here's a key quote, overall:
Overall, the wartime recruits are more similar than dissimilar to their civilian counterparts. The all-volunteer force displays near proportional representation of income backgrounds. Whites serve in approximate proportion to their population, although representation of minority groups varies. Recruits must meet educational standards, and the military provides resources for furthering education to those who might not otherwise have the opportunity to attend four-year colleges. Although rural representation is disproportional, the military offers the opportunity to gain new skills and enter industries that are not available in rural areas.
With regard to income, education, race, and regional background, the all-volunteer force is representative of our nation and meets standards set by Congress and the Department of Defense. In contrast to the patronizing slanders of antiwar critics, recruit quality is increasing as the war in Iraq continues. Although recent recruiting goals have been difficult to meet, reenlistment is strong and recruit quality remains high. No evidence supports arguments for reinstating the draft or altering recruiting policies to achieve more equitable representation.
In other words, an all-volunteer military is working just fine, thank you. And doesn't it make sense, that the people who are serving our country are doing so because they want to serve?
National security is the most important issue, by far, that this country faces, and this powerful a Democrat is trying to win cheap points when our soldiers are out on the battlefield. Of course it is typical of politicians. But that doesn't mean it is any less disgusting.
Tis the time for restoration of family bonds, old memories, and lotsa food. D3 is celebrating three such events this weekend (two wings of Hannah's family, one of mine). I'm going to make turkey on Saturday, when we are with my father. Should be fun, and if I take a picture of what is sure to be a masterpiece, I'll post it. Till then, full bellies, my friends.
He considered it "the right and proper label" for his orientation. As quoted here:
"The 19th century liberal was a radical, both in the etymological sense of going to the root of the matter, and in the political sense of favoring major changes in social institutions," he wrote. "So too must be his modern heir."
Pray we can save "liberalism" from its current usage (which Friedman described: "a readiness to rely primarily on the state rather than on private voluntary arrangements to achieve objectives regarded as desirable") not to mention its current deadness, and restore the understanding of it advocated by Friedman, Charles Murray, and other visionaries who play beyond left and right, to the dismay of both.
From a very good summary of his impact on our world by Brian Doherty:
Friedman’s image may have been square—economics professor, PBS TV show host, advisor to Republican politicians from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan. But what he stood for is as groovy as can be: Power to the people, man.
At the heart of all of Friedman’s scholarship and activism was the idea in the title of his famous book and TV series: that all of us should be free to choose. From who should have to serve in the military to who should decide what a dollar is worth, Friedman has been 100 percent for taking power out of the hands of elites and government and handing it to the decentralized decisionmaking of everyone, everywhere.
Friedman's impact is so enormous, it seems immeasurable. He, as much as anyone, helped transform liberty from a concept into a state of being.
Seems like it's down to three people: Rudy Guiliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. While the Democrat side sorts out its candidates, you have time to get to know those three. Myself, I'm a Democrat by culture who thinks liberalism/progressivism is dead and considers today's national Democrats to be pretty deficient, though I generally vote Democrat at the city and state level (but not 100%). Translation: for U.S. president, the game is open for me.
That "other" side of him was as an advocate for school choice. Read more here, though it will come to no surprise to readers of this blog's last week or so. Kwote from the link:
If school choice becomes the norm in America, it will be Milton Friedman's real legacy and every poor child who is liberated from a failed government school will owe him a lasting debt of gratitude.
My question, what will it take for people to get over their obsession with public education (a.k.a., government education, because it is government-run)? It is almost a religion for some, in that even when they see its really obvious deficiencies, they still send their kids off to them. But I realize that not realizing that there are choices makes all the difference.
He gave a big speech yesterday. Read it here. To be honest with you, I'm underwhelmed, not to mention unimpressed with its relatively narrow scope (terrorism against the U.S. has been going far before 9/11; this cannot be pretended away). It is not a bad speech, and strikes me as decent and even good politically. Obviously, his speech will please both new as well as long-time opponents of the Iraq war, its policy, conduct, etc. But Obama's speech is strikingly deficient in giving any respect to the rationale for the war purpose, conduct, and goals offered by Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and so on. I mean, take on what Blair has said, Mr Obama, I dare you. And good luck.
Be that as it may, here is what is for me the strongest paragraph:
we should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force. In the past, it has been movements for freedom from within tyrannical regimes that have led to flourishing democracies; movements that continue today. This doesn't mean abandoning our values and ideals; wherever we can, it's in our interest to help foster democracy through the diplomatic and economic resources at our disposal. But even as we provide such help, we should be clear that the institutions of democracy -- free markets, a free press, a strong civil society -- cannot be built overnight, and they cannot be built at the end of a barrel of a gun. And so we must realize that the freedoms FDR once spoke of -- especially freedom from want and freedom from fear -- do not just come from deposing a tyrant and handing out ballots; they are only realized once the personal and material security of a people is ensured as well.
The first film director who I cared much about (starting for me with the still-brilliant Short Cuts, when it was first released) has died.
An interesting note from that link:
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he said Hollywood served as a source of inspiration for the terrorists by making violent action movies that amounted to training films for such attacks.
"Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie," Altman said.
From scratch, every bit of it. I used the sugar pumpkin we got from the pumpkin patch in October. I made the pie crust. I even made a red wine caramel to top the pie (and its requisite ice cream). It was the dessert last night, after a meal at our friends' place last night. They invited us over for dinner. How could we not bring pie?
Dennis Prager (who's radio show I sometimes listen to), with what strikes me as a sensible, and unique point, from his recent column:
We have not won the war in Iraq because of something completely unforeseeable: widespread massacres of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis and Muslims. We have never seen mass murder of fellow citizens in order to remove an outside occupier. No Japanese blew up Japanese temples in order to rid Japan of the American occupier. No Germans mass murdered German schoolchildren and teachers to rid Germany of the American, British, French and Soviet occupiers.
The level of cruelty and evil exhibited by those America is fighting in Iraq is new. Had Iraq followed any precedent in all the annals of resistance to occupation, America would likely have been victorious in Iraq. It may just be impossible, if one is morally bound not to kill large numbers of civilians, to fight those who target their own civilians and hide among them. But George W. Bush had no way to foresee such systematic cruelty.
By giving this interview of Chief Justice John Roberts your full attention. It is wide-ranging. He seems like an exceptionally bright guy, very respectful of the court, and I bet a very personable sort of guy to talk with. Here's a kosmic kwote for ya:
Think back to the framers who drafted the Constitution. These were people who literally risked everything to gain the right to govern themselves, certainly risked all their material well-being and risked their lives in the struggle for independence.
And the thought that the first thing they would do when they got around to drafting a Constitution would be to say, 'Let's take all the hard issues in our society and let's turn them over to nine unelected people who aren't politically accountable and let them decide,' that would have been the farthest thing from their mind.
I have enormous respect for the authority carried by the people across the street in Congress. Hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people have voted for them and put their confidence in their judgment.
Not a single person has voted for me and if we don't like what the people in Congress do, we can get rid of them, and if you don't like what I do, it's kind of too bad. And that is, to me, an important constraint. It means that I'm not there to make a judgment based on my personal policy preferences or my political preferences.
The only reason I'm protected from those political pressures is because I'm supposed to make a decision based on the law. And so I don't think it would be a good idea to turn all the hard issues over to the courts. Those hard issues belong in Congress, they belong in the Executive Branch.
The courts have the responsibility to make sure both of those branches abide by the legal limits in the Constitution, but that's it.
Here's another:
CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Do you think that, in your remarks you were talking about the least dangerous branch, do you think that the Supreme Court still is the least dangerous branch?
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, it certainly occupies a role in American life far beyond what it did at the time of the founding. I mean, just think how often people say reflexively, whenever there's an important social issue or political controversy, 'Well, the Supreme Court's going to decide that' or 'We're going to take it all the way up to the Supreme Court.'
The first reaction of people ought to be, 'I'm going to call my Congressperson about that' or 'I'm going to talk to my Senator or my governor or representative or somebody in the Executive Branch.'
The great gift of the founding generation was the right of self-government. We shouldn't give it up so easily to think that all the important issues are going to be decided by the Supreme Court.
This short eulogy nonetheless covers the important bases:
If all economists were like Milton Friedman, their trade never would have earned a reputation as "the dismal science." Friedman was not only an accomplished academic who earned a Nobel Prize for his ideas about monetarism — a provocative challenge to the interventionist assumptions of Keynesianism — but also the very definition of a public intellectual. With Capitalism and Freedom, a short book that promotes 19th-century classical liberalism and skewers 20th-century socialism, Friedman began to win admirers outside of scholarly circles. He became a powerful evangelist for freedom, advising presidents and prime ministers, writing a column for Newsweek, and hosting what may be the most influential television documentary ever broadcast: Free to Choose, which also became a best-selling book. Friedman never shied away from pressing questions of policy: In the 1960s, he was a strong voice for the all-volunteer military. He also called for a flat tax, deregulation, and drug legalization. The issue that may have concerned him most, however, was education. He proposed a market-based system of school choice in 1955, long before the idea captured the imagination of others. In 1996, he and his wife Rose — an intellectual co-conspirator who is a skillful economist in her own right — established the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation to promote parental choice in education. With his death on Wednesday, at the age of 94, liberty has lost a great friend and champion. R.I.P.
Here's a hunch I have no way to support but will nonetheless voice: the degree to which one may think Friedman's death is no super big deal is proportional to the degree by which that person thinks that the current levels of government involvement and management of society is both right and just.
Here's Adler, fast becoming a primary influence on my thought about art/aesthetics/humanities, from his fantastic book, How to Think About the Great Ideas, chapter 3:
Lloyd Luckman: Are you in fact saying that it's better to be in ignorance than in error?
Mortimer Adler: That's precisely what I'm suggesting, Lloyd. And I suspect that when I say this, when I say that ignorance is more like knowledge than error is, some of you may think it's a shocking mistake to suppose so. But though this may seem paradoxical, I think that I can explain to you why it is so. Any teacher will tell you that it is much easier to teach a student who is ignorant than one who is in error, because the student who is in error on a given point thinks that he knows whereas in fact he does not know. The student who is ignorant is in a much better condition to learn. It is almost necessary to take the student who is in error and first correct the error before you can teach him. I think that is the meaning of saying that error ir further away from knowledge than ignorance is. The path from ignorance to knowledge is a shorter path than the path from error to knowledge, because if a person is in error, you must first get rid of the error and reduce him to ignorance before you can start teaching him.
Socrates was the first teacher to discover this principle of teaching and to apply it to practice. He opined all the time. It was the first principle in his method. His method was to go about, as he said himself, "cross-examining the pretenders to knowledge and wisdom," and by the cross-examination, showing them that they were in error, that what they supposed they knew, they did not know. That is first reducing them to ignorance so that they could be in the right state of mind to inquire and learn.
This technique of Socrates was a very annoying technique. And that, combined with the fact that he was very fond of saying ironically that his only wisdom consisted in his knowing that he didn't know, and acknowledging his ignorance, so infuriated his fellow citizens that they put him to death.
There is a saying that the reason one learns how to read Greek is in order to meet two people — Socrates and Jesus of Nazareth. Learning Greek (I am finding out as I do just that) through the immersion method perplexes the hell out of you; but, of course, puts one in the proper state of mind to meet these two seminal characters (and their supporting cast); of course, as a beginner, I'm not there yet. But I am saying that some kinds of learning (the best kinds) are in fact dialectical: these require a back and forth between the learner and the subject of the learning, and perhaps this is the only true dynamic of learning.
I'll say one more thing. I believe that for today's purposes, it is an error to regard Socrates in any other way except allegorically; in other words, every person possesses in their psyche something like, for lack of a better term, a "Socrates voice", or "the spirit of Socrates" (and a voice/spirit for all the other characters in the Dialogues and the New Testament). Which is precisely why Plato's Dialogues remain a living mimesis of imaginative fullness — for, in some way or another, the voice of Socrates (by which I mean the way he thought) is one of the voices possessed by you and me.
In “Two Lucky People,” written with his wife, Rose Friedman, who survives him as a distinguished economist in her own right, Mr. Friedman well described the role of a public intellectual: “We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis.”
AP story here. Curriculum vitae here. And here is an excellent conversation with him, from this past summer. Amongst so many things, he (from what I can tell) was the first to rename public schools as "government schools", a change that sheds immediate light on why public schools operate so badly, on the balance. Here's a quote:
The president of the National Education Association was once asked when his union was going to do something about students. He replied that when the students became members of the union, the union would take care of them. And that was a correct answer. Why? His responsibility as president of the NEA was to serve the members of his union, not to serve public purposes. I give him credit: The trade union has been very effective in serving its members. However, in the process, they've destroyed American education. But you see, education isn't the union's function. It's our fault for allowing the union to pursue its agenda. Consider this fact: There are two areas in the United States that suffer from the same disease — education is one and health care is the other. They both suffer from the disease that takes a system that should be bottom-up and converts it into a system that is top-down. Education is a simple case. It isn't the public purpose to build brick schools and have students taught there. The public purpose is to provide education. Think of it this way: If you want to subsidize the production of a product, there are two ways you can do it. You can subsidize the producer or you can subsidize the consumer. In education, we subsidize the producer—the school. If you subsidize the student instead—the consumer—you will have competition. The student could choose the school he attends and that would force schools to improve and to meet the demands of their students.
I'm in favor of this as long as the same amount of money goes to those students whose parents chose to home-educate. Doing so is simply the fairest, most democratic way of doing things. But even that doesn't go far enough. Charles Murray's In Our Hands suggests a plan that would go far enough, however. And that is simply giving everyone over the age of 21 $10,000 a year (distributed as monthy grants), and ending all forms of welfare (individual, corporate, agricultural). Say what you want about our country, but it is awash in money, and an enormous amount of it is wasted on bureaucracy that, even more, greatly hinders our abilities to improve problems, such as in education.
UPDATE: Here's another Friedman quote, about education:
"There is no other complex field in our society in which do-it-yourself beats out factory production or market production. Nobody makes his or her own car. But it is still the case that parents can perform the job of educating their children, in many cases better than our present education system."
UPDATE 2: Check out this short YouTube of Friedman, talking about education.
Quite clearly, parents can foster an education in the three R's, along with deep exposure to history and society, and do so at home. Now, I don't know that Friedman himself was ever a direct advocate for home education; but his arguments clearly lead in that direction. Perhaps his death will help to foster changes in our attitudes about education? Let's hope so.
That's the take-away line from what strikes me as a very sane perspective expressed by Michael Rubin about (what else?) how to fix Iraq. Here's how it ends:
Shortly after Saddam Hussein's ouster, I spent a few days with the 173rd Airborne Brigade around Kirkuk, an ethnic and sectarian flashpoint. The U.S. troops offered aid, but the councils determined how it would be spent. For example, Kurds might be a plurality, but they could not dictate. In order to win consensus, they had to compromise with Turkomen and Arabs. Technocrats and those willing to compromise rose as Iraqis pushed the populists aside.
Can this local emphasis work given the ongoing sectarian violence? Yes. Many Iraqis support ethnic militias because they provide services and security the central government is unable to supply. The greatest impediments to reconstruction now are corruption and security. But every day, U.S. servicemen go on patrol across Iraq. They visit every city, town and village. They know what is possible and can keep tabs on the money they are handing out. While billions spent by Green Zone diplomats have evaporated into the ether, U.S. troops can provide accountability.
Injecting money directly to local projects works. Indeed, it is how Muqtada Sadr and the militias have won hearts, if not minds, and at a far lower cost. Rather than ignore our enemies, we should copy their model of success. The stakes for Iraq and U.S. national security are simply too high to throw in the towel.
I like Obama, and I voted for him for U.S. Senate (the choice for him was really, in truth, no choice at all; his opponent was a political joke).
In any event, I'm tired of all the positive raves Obama was received; tired, in that no one should think him a messiah, prince, or savior. I've scoured the net for negative reviews of his politics, and I've found one. I'm sure I don't agree with all of it, but it nonetheless makes some solid points, giving a close read to excerpts from Obama's books. Here's how it ends:
There is a thin line between being open-minded and empty-headed. Obama's politics of "understanding" crosses that line.... A true politics of understanding would recognize that some things are not worth understanding, or tolerating.
I don't know that Obama crosses the line; but I'll admit he can be a little too close for comfort, at least for my tastes. Obama, if he is going to get my vote for president (presuming he runs) will have to articulate a clear foreign policy that puts the national interest of the U.S. first, as it should be. After all, the president is the commander-in-chief, the first job of which is to protect the country.
This long yet excellent essay — Why Intellectuals Still Support Socialism — suggests that university professors require a liberal-left/socialist environment, tend to thrive in it, and thus generally advocate that general view (which explains why universities promulgate liberal-left thought to the degree they generally do).
Today, many professors at major research universities do little teaching. Their primary activity is research, though much of that is questionable as real scholarship. One needs only to browse through the latest specialty journals to see what passes for scholarly research in most disciplines. In the humanities and social sciences, it is likely to be postmodern gobbledygook; in the professional schools, vocationally oriented technical reports.
Much of this research is funded in the United States by government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the USDA, and others. The large universities have tens of thousands of students, themselves supported by government-subsidized loans and grants.
Beyond university life, academics also compete for prestigious posts within government agencies. Consider my own field, economics. The US federal government employs at least 3,000 economists — about 15% of all members of the American Economic Association. The Federal Reserve System itself employs several hundred. There are also advisory posts, affiliations with important government agencies, memberships of federally appointed commissions, and other career-enhancing activities.
These benefits are not simply financial. They are also psychological. As Dwight Lee puts it:
Like every other group, academics like to exert influence and feel important. Few scholars in the social sciences and humanities are content just to observe, describe, and explain society; most want to improve society and are naive enough to believe that they could do so if only they had sufficient influence. The existence of a huge government offers academics the real possibility of living out their reformist fantasies.
It's clear, then, that there are many benefits, for academics, to living in a highly interventionist society. It should be no wonder, then, that academics tend to support those interventions. Economists, in particular, play active roles as government advisers, creating and sustaining the welfare state that now surrounds us. Naturally, when government funds their research, economists in applied fields such as agricultural economics and monetary economics are unlikely to call for serious regulatory reform in their specialty areas.
And the piece ends with this:
What does the future hold? It is impossible to say for sure, but there are encouraging signs. The main reason is technology. The web has challenged the state-university and state-media cartels as never before. You don't need a PhD to write for Wikipedia. What does the rise of the new media, new means of sharing information, new ways of establishing authority and credibility, imply for universities as credential factories? Moreover, as universities become more vocationally oriented, they will find it hard to compete with specialized, technology-intensive institutions such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, the fastest-growing US universities.
Home schooling, the costs of which are greatly lowered by technology, is also on the rise. And traditional media (newspapers and network news) are of course rapidly declining, and alternative news sources are flourishing.
The current crises in higher education and the media are probably good things, in the long run, if they force a rethinking of educational and intellectual goals and objectives, and take power away from the establishment institutions. Then, and only then, we may see a rebirth of genuine scholarship, communication, and education.
So, as one action step, homeschool, to save our educational system. It takes just that kind of grass-roots, family-driven revolution.
This piece by Alan Kazlev expresses my view that "integral" and "Wilber" are distinct, and does so in a way better and more thorough than I ever could.
For me, not a lot of words are necessary to explain my position on "integral". As I express in longer form here, integral is a living tradition, a mighty river of imaginative fullness, that flows in particular through the Humanities, the bank of cultural achievement through the ages that forms what ought be the bedrock of knowledge and insight, democratically available to anyone who asks how to swim. I say "ought" because, as it stands in our culture, so much of the integral tradition is hidden by the overgrown weeds mixed of Theory, our lowest-common denominator public education system, and, as a result, sheer ignorance that any such river even exists.
But it does. And if you want to, you will find it.
People at different levels will conceptualize the Bible in different ways, just as a construct like evolution will get different treatments with different levels.
Hallelujah for that, regarding The Bible. It is a document that refuses such crude analyses that it is the product of one "level of consciousness". In fact, its very existence refutes the importance of "levels of consciousness" as a working concept relevent to the creation of timeless art. For if, in the case of the Old Testament, a work upwards of 2,000 years old can still inspire meditation and insight as much if not more than anything created today, what does that say about so-called "development"? What does that say about so-called "evolution"?
In my entry below that posted a YouTube about various politicians' words about Iraq and WMD, I talked about the goal of seeing Iraq more truthfully, and not through the inherent limits of the media age.
Writer/soldier Austin Bay provides one such perspective. His piece, James Baker and the Desert Storm Legacy strikes me as sober, honest, and informed. Kosmic kwote (one among many):
In an essay I wrote for the Dec. 9, 2002, issue of The Weekly Standard, I outlined the rough path to that "end state" in Iraq:
"Pity Gen. Tommy Franks or, for that matter, any American military commander tasked with overseeing a post-Saddam Baghdad. For in that amorphous, dicey phase the Pentagon calls 'war termination' ... U.S. and allied forces liberating Iraq will attempt -- more or less simultaneously -- to end combat operations, cork public passions, disarm Iraqi battalions, bury the dead, generate electricity, pump potable water, bring law out of embittering lawlessness, empty jails of political prisoners, pack jails with criminals, turn armed partisans into peaceful citizens, re-arm local cops who were once enemy infantry, shoot terrorists, thwart chiselers, carpetbaggers and black-marketeers, fix sewers, feed refugees, patch potholes and get trash trucks rolling, and accomplish all this under the lidless gaze of Peter Jennings and Al-Jazeera."
In summer 2003, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority weren't prepared to handle the situation that marathon sentence describes. However, by mid-2004 the U.S. military had hammered out a sound security and recovery plan. The campaign plan met guidelines promulgated in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546. This resolution is no top-secret document -- it's on the U.N. website.
"Phased withdrawal" of coalition forces has always been the goal. The issue is a realistic "when."
The Iraqi government confronts extraordinary challenges. Are there rotten Iraqi military units? Yes -- but there are also some very good ones. Do Iran and Syria support terrorists and militias? Yes. The dictators want the world to conclude that democracy is culturally and politically alien to the Middle East. They want the world to conclude, like British and French imperialists did in 1919, that Arabs can't handle democracy.
But despite the public stumbles and bloody learning curve, Maliki's government says otherwise.
If only that this entire view were more commonly expressed (in the blogosphere, on television) rather than how much play it currently gets (rarely, next to never), I would feel a whole lot better about the extent to which the American populace knew what was really going on, and seeing beyond the narrow media prism.
As I've written before, I've started study in the University of Chicago's Basic Program for Liberal Education of Adults. We meet weekly, and this quarter (the first of three this year, in a four-year program overall that explores the classics of the Western tradition, from Homer to Joyce), has been an exploration of the question, "What is virtue?" This is one of the enduring human questions, naturally. It has been so rewarding to participate. The classes are discussion-style, with guided close reading of, in this term, Plato, Sophocles, and Dostoevsky, and the discussions have been lively and reflective.
It is hard to talk directly about the class, because it falls intimately into the "you have to be there" category. Naturally, I'm thrilled to be reading Meno, The Apology, Crito, Antigone, and Crime and Punishment. Doing so as an adult, with a wife, daughter, mortgage, and 32 years of life lived, etc., renders these works in entirely new light, as you would imagine. It is hard to not say, "seriously, everyone should take this course!" But in truth, that is exactly how I feel. When you confront deep questions, of moral or whatever variety, the experience is character-building. I can't help but thinking that this sort of thing is one of the prime-movers of education, period.
So far, my hypothesis that this program will help my artistry (composing, writing), is too early to prove or disprove. But that is my hypothesis. If Socrates is right, and there is no such thing as a teacher (but there is a such thing as learning), then, in truth, it is up to me no matter what. I'd like it to be right, to whatever extent. But if the effect is negligible, I won't be disappointed. I'm sure there will be plenty of other benefit.
I know this is an ad from the GOP; while that gave me pause, I decided to post this anyway because the comments expressed by various politicians stand on their own, no matter what. But just to be clear, this is not a shill for a political party. Rather, as I've expressed in various ways for a while now, it is a plea to see through the false claims that "Bush lied" and see what really was going on when he decided to go to war in Iraq. Here, what "really was going on" clearly includes the fact that many people agreed with the conclusion that Hussein possessed WMD, intended to manufacture them, use them against other countries, etc. In the hyperspeed culture of the internet age, it is easy to forget stuff like this, because we are bombarded with SO many images, SO many opinions, SO many thoughts.
Why is academic freedom important? Because in order to think, in order to exercise your freedom, you need to be educated — and in order for people to be educated they need to have the freedom to consider a very wide range of ideas, to have their own preconceptions questioned, and questioned vigorously... They have to learn how to tolerate ideas that are really abhorrent to them. They need to learn the difference between ideas and actions. They need to learn that people can have very different ideas, and they can debate them without coming to blows.
You know, in our world today, one way you can stop people from coming to blows about their conflicting ideas is by teaching them how to argue, and teaching them not to be afraid of argument. There's an important difference between being embarrassed or feeling intellectually or emotionally wounded because you’re at the losing end of an argument, and actually being physically assaulted. I think it's incredibly important for students to learn how to argue, and to learn how to appreciate and even enjoy argument.
Being exposed to other ideas, being challenged, being put on the spot, being made to examine their own most basic beliefs — for students that is at least as important, if not more important than learning the fundamentals of their subject. What good is it to learn facts if you don’t learn how to think and how to defend your ideas? John Stuart Mill talks about this. When he talks about freedom of speech and freedom of thought, he talks about the importance of having your ideas tested and learning how to defend them. If you don’t know how to defend your ideas, then they can’t mean very much to you.
Learning to effectively argue (and enjoy arguing) is the a big part of the third stage of the trivium, the Rhetoric Stage, though it begins somewhat in the second stage of Logic, where the learner critically evaluates what they read and absorb.
Note: The Paideia Award goes to those insightful passages that extol the virtues of a classics-based education in the Humanities.
And it is not too late to sign up for a year-subscription, in time to get the November print issue (to ship shortly). Sign up today, to receive the world's only journal that's for workings artists, by working artists.
On Sunday's ABC News program, "This Week," Sen. Carl Levin, incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee, declared, "We need to begin a phased redeployment of forces from Iraq in four to six months." ... Levin's justification for this gradual withdrawal is that it will serve as a "signal" to the Iraqis that America's "open-ended commitment" is over and that they will now have to solve their own problems.
But the problem with this policy of "signaling" is that not only the good guys pick up the signals. Iraq's various terrorist groups -- al-Qaida, the Baathist last-ditchers -- will interpret Levin's signal to mean that if they keep on fighting for another six months and counting, they will drive out the Americans and emerge as the likely victors in the unrestrained civil war that follows.
... Besides, as Robert Kagan and William Kristol point out in Monday's Financial Times, the United States has for some time followed a policy of announcing future cuts in U.S. forces to encourage the Iraqi security forces to take on the main burden of fighting the insurgency. It hasn't worked.
Winning is not just removing Saddam Hussein's government, and capturing or killing enemies of a U.S.-supported Iraq government. No — winning the war means that the Iraqis, on the own time, are ready and able to manage their own government, and that we wait (and fight) until that happens.
There is a lot to chew on here, personally speaking. From Carrie Lukas's review of Strong Father, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know by Dr. Meg Meeker:
Dr. Meeker’s advice to fathers is both reassuring and challenging. She urges men to spend time with their daughters, to listen intently to them, and to realize that they will set their daughters’ expectations for future relationships with men. It’s up to dad to show his daughter what a responsible, humble, courageous, and good man really is.
