Neil Postman and Epistemic Humility

I just started reading Neil Postman's small book The Disappearance of Childhood. I am not nearly far enough in to comment upon the book, but I do want to make note of something he says in the introduction. I will quote him at some length here:

There is one question of great importance that this book will not address--namely, What can we do about the disappearance of childhood? The reason is that I do not know the answer. I say this with a mixture of relief and dejection. The relief comes from my not having the burden of instructing others on how to live their lives. In all my previous books I have presumed to point to a more effective way of solving one problem or another. Professional educators are, I believe, supposed to do that sort of thing. I had not imagined how pleasant it can be to acknowledge that one's imaginative reach for solutions goes no farther than one's grasp of the problem. . . But I have consoled myself with this thought: If one cannot say anything about how we may prevent a social disaster, perhaps one may also serve by trying to understand why it is occurring.

What I appreciate so much about this sentiment is its acknowledgment that sometimes we can more readily identify a problem than come up to a solution for how to repair the break. It is always disheartening to read a novel, an article, watch a movie, or engage with any other cultural product that diagnoses a problem with alacrity but fails utterly in its attempt at a solution. Postman's position here is to avoid that temptation and simply not feel obligated to provide a half-baked solution. It might be unsatisfying to a degree--I wish he saw some way out of the morass of modern childhood--but it is better than a crude or half-baked attempt at a solution. Perhaps the key move that needs to be made is not some large institutional change, but a recognition of the problem being addressed. 

Plato on Proportionality or a Word About Contemporary Politics

Something striking in reading Plato is his love of mathematics. Famously, the rulers of his ideal republic would be educated for decades in math. As we observe the world through the principles of mathematics, we conform ourselves to the realities of this world, submitting to its rules and regulations as well as its beauty and sublimity. In attaining this level of mathematical sophistication, Plato's philosopher-kings would enter the world of the agathon, or the good itself, and be able to rule justly for this knowledge.

When combined with Plato's redefinition of arete, a word translated straightforwardly in English as "virtue," but which used to be combined with the more martial notion of kleos (glory), Plato's philosopher-kings, the escapees of the cave of this world, are called back into the mud and the muck of the world. For the good of the world. They work to free others, to point others to agathon and arete. 

The good itself and virtue help us to achieve proportionality in our lives, for one of the great beauties of mathematics is the proportionality of the universe. We are able to rightly order our passions in what St. Augustine called the ordo amoris, in which everything is loved in the proper way. This proportionality goes beyond our own moral sense, though, and sweeps up the relationship between ourselves and others. We ought to desire our lives to be in proportion to each other.

In the  Platonic dialogue Gorgias, Socrates is talking with Callicles, a man who argues that we all want to accrue the most good for ourselves and will get away with everything we possibly can. Socrates replies:

"Yes, Callicles, wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world-order, my friend, and not an undisciplined world-disorder. I believe that you don't pay attention to these facts, even though you're a wise man in these matters. You've failed to notice that proportionate equality has great power among both gods and men, and you suppose that you ought to practice getting the greater share. That's because you neglect geometry."

There is a world in that paragraph. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein comments on this passage that "[a]nyone with a proper appreciation of proportion can't fail to appreciate that one's own self shouldn't be in disproportion to everyone else. . . So many ideologies come down, in the end, to ways of justifying our sense that we ought to get the greater share." True wisdom, true submission to the agathon, reveals to us how hollow this view of reality makes our lives.

I believe that any sense of proportionality has gone right out of the window on both sides of our political aisle. Both national parties are entirely in the tank to big business and big banks and everything that wrecked our economy several years back and undoubtedly is cooking up the next big bubble as we speak (shoot, it might be housing again). We have no way to stand up against this because our cultural elite hold all of the chips.  But our proportionality is all out of whack. Our body politic has turned into a caricature, with an outsized head and a comically small body. Say what you will for caricatures, but nobody has ever called one beautiful. And as Plato taught us 2500 years ago, things that aren't beautiful are not participating in truth. 

Raising Dragonslayers

In case it's not clear at first glance what is going on in this picture, this was taken during an interrupted dragon battle a month or so ago in my front yard. Dragons have long been the scourge of our neighborhood, hoarding gold, burning crops, eating livestock, etc. Fortunately for the Leawood district of Littleton, these two fierce youths moved into the neighborhood and have been fastidiously hunting down the local dragons, ministering the cold justice of forged steel to their scaly hides. Again, though it seems perfectly clear to any keen observer of dragon warfare, the weapons my children are wielding are as follows:

1) In my son's left hand is a sword for, and I quote, "stabbing into the dragon's flanks."
2) In my son's right hand is a dagger which some fools may dismiss as an inappropriate weapon for combat with a large, fire-breathing beast. Au contraire, the dagger is for stabbing the dragon's eyes. Furthermore, the dagger is a more fitting tool for this task than the sword, because "I can be more precise with a dagger." 
3) The black rope in my daughter's hand is so very clearly a whip that it barely merits mention, except to say that the purpose of the whip is to keep the dragon at bay while my son goes in with the dagger. 
4) The curved piece of wood in my daughter's hand is a bow for engaging the dragon from a distance while my son runs in with the sword for a good flank stab.

Do you even need to ask if they killed the dragon? With such tools at their disposal and a strategy worthy of Sun Tzu combined with the iron will evinced by their determined looks, how could they possibly have lost?

I came home to this scene after a day of work, a day spent thinking about how to educate the students put under my charge. As most of you know, we homeschool our kids. They spend their days at home with the exception of Thursday when they go to a homeschool group for science projects, music lessons, and group play with other kids. They know Latin declensions, can recite a 14 minute long timeline of world history, can skip-count up through the 15s, possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology (we're about to start in on the Norse and Celtic myths), use metaphors in everyday speech, and regularly throw out such words as "cumulonimbus," "precise," "antagonize," and "articulate." 

And this knowledge accumulation is important to me. I trust that down the road it will help them to be wise. I wish more of the students that I teach had received this type of training in their youth.

But that's not precisely why we homeschool. 

People obviously have all of these preconceptions about what homeschooling is (usually how bad it is for the kids) and assume that the reason we are doing it is to shelter our children from the world. And to be quite honest, that is part of the reason. This world sucks. I am not scared of it, but I am cautious of the dangers it has for my children. I don't want to expose them to its worst features because some people think it's wrong to "shelter" your kids. Those people are free to do what they want with their own children, and I frankly don't give a tinker's damn what they want me to do with my little charges.

As to the concern of whether or not kids will socialize, I can't help but ask: "Why in the flip would I want them to socialize to their peer groups?" Just to use a small sample size, my son is playing soccer this fall with a cohort of five year olds from our wealthy suburb. Of his five teammates, I have heard three of them swearing, calling other kids mean names, and shoving people to the ground for no apparent reason. Again, they're five. And any notion that we can dismiss this because "boys will be boys" or "they're just kids" is an attitude that enables the sort of culture that creates five year olds like that (and also, incidentally, allows people like Donald Trump to exist). I don't want my son and daughter (and son on the way) to be "just kids." I do not understand why I would have to accept that.

The more positive reason that we homeschool is because I want my kids to be wild. I want them to slay dragons in my yard so that they can grow up and slay dragons in this world. Metaphorically, of course. Everyone knows the great knights already rid the world of real dragons. I want Owen to pull the (real) sword I bought for him in Kenya out of its sheath and freak out his grandma; I want him to polish it in the morning because Arthur polished Excalibur. I want him to be courageous and full of virtue. Say what you will for our contemporary system of education, but those two qualities are decidedly not the goal.

I am not interested in merely training the minds of my kids at home. I am interested in training their affections. I want them to not only know the Good but love it. We homeschool because I am convinced this process can take place best within the home.

We live in a culture bereft of wildness. And I want my kids to be wild. I don't want their noses buried in iPads even if they are playing "educational" games. I want their noses buried in books, bringing to life the stories they read through their imagination and not through passive sensory receptors. I don't want their minds shaped by movies and television shows, again even the ones that claim to be educational, and oh dear God especially not Veggie Tales. I want their minds shaped by the written word and by conversation with people smarter than them. I want them to build things and use their hands and pursue their passions.

I want to come home and find, as I did today, that my son has made himself a pair of missile shooters for each arm (toilet paper roll and construction paper for the strap, obvs) and that he colored a picture for his best friend using every different marker color and that he read the story of Beowulf and that he makes jokes out of mispronouncing names of Greek deities (he does it in all reverence, Hephaestus) and that my daughter has her history timeline memorized up through St. Augustine and can sing along with her terrible enunciation to dozens of hymns. 

I want other adults speaking into their lives and taking on key roles, but I want the number one influence to be my wife and me for as long as possible. Because no one will love our kids like we do. Ever. It is a sacred duty and an ineffable privilege. It is a limited period in which I can exert this influence. I will not squander it. To make a reference to Hamilton and a line that Elle runs around the house exclaiming, "I am not throwing away my shot." 

This gift is precious. And needed. This world is full of dragons. But it is perilously short on dragonslayers. 

Hebrews vs Greeks

From Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's engaging philosophical apologia, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, riffing on the two primary ways in the West of achieving immortality:

So there were the (pre-philosophical) Greeks, pondering ways of endowing their limp slivers of mortality with a stiffening coating of mattering, and there were the Hebrews, considering a similar project, though they ended up with quite a different approach. The Hebrews offered a transcendent answer in terms of a god: the Greeks offered a secular answer in terms of the possibilities for enlarging a life in strictly human terms; this Greek pre-philosophical answer was incorporated into, and refined by, secular philosophy; and Western culture has been wildly oscillating between these approaches--the Hebrew and the Greek--ever since.

I like this way of framing things. I do think Goldstein is right to see this tension still active in our world. I feel this tension in myself. I want to be great, to achieve the kleos (glory) that the Greeks pursued. But I also want to love the mundane, appreciate the small, significant moments that will not thunder down through eternity. We are, all of us, caught between these two worlds.

But the Hebrew perspective is better. The Greek perspective leads to the glory of Athens at its height, but it kills Socrates for challenging the system. It leads to the fierce and noble honor culture of the Middle Ages, but it also leads to the Crusades and feuds and oceans of blood. It leads to Southern gentility, and to the Civil War.

The Hebrew perspective--that our lives are made meaningful by a teleology-giving God--imbues us with the requisite humility necessary to not fall into the trap of self-seeking glory.

Hamilton the Musical, or When You Need to Pull Your Car Over and Cry to a Broadway Tune

I am not what you might call trendy. (As every previous student, friend, and general acquaintance nods their head vigorously.) So I am a little late to the Hamilton frenzy, but boy am I glad this play exists. If this means nothing to you, I suggest this article from the now unfortunately-shuttered Books and Culture to get you up to speed.

Basically Hamilton represents a classic unexpected success story. A musical about an oft-neglected founding father with a mostly minority cast that covers the scope of Alexander Hamilton's fascinating life. I don't want to give background here. Read the article. I just love that it happened. There is much to bemoan about our culture; Hamilton is something eminently worth praising.

This post is nothing but budding fanboy praise. I have it on my phone and have been listening to it almost constantly. We have been listening as a family, too. My daughter now regularly requests it when she gets the chance. It has usurped Jack Johnson as her most requested artist. We dance together in the kitchen as we listen. 

We have been trying to teach our kids about music in a more systematic way. We are starting with Bach, listening to a ton of his music, reading a biography about him. I want my kids to understand the power that music can exert, and not just the easily accessible stuff. I want them to love the hard stuff, too. I want them to be moved as they finish Beethoven's Ninth, Dvorak's New World Symphony, Bach's Cello Suites, Vivaldi's Four Seasons. 

But I want them to love this stuff as well. I was listening to the soundtrack the other night while out running errands. It was dark and I was thinking about my kids and how much I love them, how blessed my life is by them. And then I heard this song that plays after Hamilton's son Phillip was killed in, ironically, a duel defending his father's honor. And it just got me. I had to pull off Arapahoe onto a side street and cry. I'm taking sobs. I can drive through misty eyes. I've done that plenty in my life. This was different. As I got myself under control and pulled back onto the main road and drove home I was so grateful for that chance to cry. I got home and hugged Owen tight and told him I loved him and how proud I am of how he is growing.

We talked in my class the other day about "knowing" truth through our emotions. Emotional knowledge is dangerous. Our emotions can just as easily mislead us as benefit us. But when you can trust your emotions, when they lead you to the Good, well, there is nothing else so capable of moving our souls. And music, perhaps more than any other art form, has the power to take us there.

You Shall Love Your Crooked Neighbor With Your Crooked Heart

One of my major personal afflictions is my self-righteousness. I want to believe, and generally do believe, that I am better than most other people out there. Humans are inveterate experts at self-righteousness and self-justification. Our motives are so clear to ourselves (or so we think) that if only people could see it from our perspective our actions would all make sense. Part of becoming an adult is realizing that you're actually a bastard. That your motives are neither pure nor clear. That your self is neither righteous nor just. Obviously, I still struggle living out this knowledge, but it's there now. Mercifully, God has revealed to me just how deep the depravity goes in my own soul. 

I was thinking about these things as I read W.H. Auden's poem "As I Walked Out One Evening" a few weeks ago and have incessantly returned to it in the meantime. I don't want to explicate the entire thing, but you should most certainly for the sake both of your humanity and your appreciation of beauty go and read this poem now. Here is a link for your convenience. 

Pertaining to self-righteousness and its nonexistence, I want to zero in on a few lines from the end of Auden's poem (again, I can't recommend highly enough to read it in its entirety). The conceit of the poem is a lover singing to his beloved about the depth of his love in ridiculous romantic diction: "I'll love you dear, I'll love you,/ Till China and Africa meet"; "I'll love you till the ocean/ Is folded and hung up to dry"; etc. 

The clocks in the city answer the lover's outlandish claims in rather more pessimistic language. They warn: "O let not Time deceive you/ You cannot conquer time." Time is a real douchebag in this poem. "Time watches from the shadow/ And coughs when you would kiss." Gah! What an image. The clocks assert that you are not going to be carpe-dieming your way through life. Rather, "in headaches and in worry/ Vaguely life leaks away." Vaguely, purposelessly, imprecisely--there goes life.

The clocks chill out after a bit, though, and add some dark encouragement to their admonition. Here it's worth quoting at a bit greater length:

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.'

That last stanza. It is hard not to cry reading that. This is not blithe moralizing. There are tears scalding your eyes. You are looking in desperation out of the window. Out at a world that often seems careless. At a world full of crooked people. But, you shall love your crooked neighbor, in the end. With your crooked heart. 

Self-righteousness gleefully recognizes the crookedness of your neighbor. Despair sees only your own. But this, this is something different altogether. This acknowledges your fundamental brokenness and that of your neighbor. And its command is love. When we see the crookedness in our neighbor we are not moved to self-righteous pity, but love that recognizes a fellow pilgrim. 

And that is beautiful, despite the tears. We will love each other in our crookedness until the day we are made straight.

Hell is Yourself

My main problem with teaching Dante is pacing. The Commedia is such an overwhelming treasure that it is hard to keep making forward progress. As such, I am miserably behind schedule. To wit, we are three weeks in and I am still trying to get us into the latter half of Inferno. Oh well. Here's a moment from Canto 14 that I find true of sin and sinners.

They are in Circle 7, a three-tiered level that punishes crimes against God (blasphemy), crimes against nature (homosexuality), and crimes against art (usurers, or people who charge interest). In this canto we're in the first of these tiers with the blasphemers. The spirit that the pilgrim Dante slows down to talk to here is Capaneus, a mythological warrior most famous from a play by Aeschylus. 

Capaneus is a member of a faction trying to overthrow Thebes. Imagining himself unbeatable, he declares that not even Zeus could stop his action and save Thebes. Zeus takes that challenge and lays Capaneus flat with a lightning bolt. Dante encounters Capaneus in this level where sinners are punished by either lying down or walking around on burning sand (depending on the severity of their sin) while fire-rain pours down on them, and rather than trying to ameliorate his fate Capaneus "sets his face against the fire in scorn." He disdains the punishment, refusing to give Zeus (Jupiter in Dante's Roman pantheon) the "small satisfaction" of pleading for relief.

There is something pathetically heroic about Capaneus' stand. In the midst of the fires of hell he refuses to repent or cry out. His pathetic heroism is redolent of another character in epic literature, and not a flattering analogue: Satan in Paradise Lost who likewise refuses to "bow and sue for grace/ With suppliant knee." Neither will bend to God's will, his power, or his judgment. The adverb before heroic, though, is important. And heroism here is pathetic. Moreover, it only serves to darkly affirm Capaneus' earlier self-serving words that "[w]hat I was living, the same am I now, dead." He imagines this to be an assertion of his independence and his integrity, but it is hard to see how the very characteristic that ended him up in hell is worth extolling. It is amazing what people will cling to.

Virgil, Dante's guide, chimes in helpfully here to rebuke Capaneus' vaunting pride:

"O Capaneus, by your insolence
you are made to suffer as much fire inside
as falls upon you. Only your own rage
could be fit torment for your sullen pride."

These lines remind me of the playground taunt from my childhood years: sucks to be you. Virgil is telling Capaneus basically that: "Capaneus, it sucks to be you. And now you're stuck with you forever." The heat of his rage only highlights the abject condition in which Capaneus now finds himself. And the fire burns inside of him in a more brutal way than that which rains down on his supine body.

And how true this is of us and our sin. We cling to it, cherish it, apologize for it, pretend it requires no apology. I know and have known people who are alive who are just like Capaneus. Scorning the flames. Refusing to bow. Carrying a hell within themselves. A hallmark of Christian theology that I imagine I read for the first time in C.S. Lewis is that every resident of hell is there by choice. The choice to deny God, hate truth, and exalt self is forever enshrined in hell. You are free there to worship at your own altar.

The Perils of General Revelation, 2

In the first post on this subject I talked about John Muir and the Romantic notion that nature has agency dependent of God. In other words, one of the category errors that we can make (and I have often been tempted to make) is one that goes back all the way to the fall of man: "exchange[ing] the truth about God for a lie and worship[ing] and serve[ing] the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever" (Romans 1:25). In this post I want to address another problem with relying on general revelation: forgetting that simply acknowledging God's existence has no power to save us from our sins.

Calvin begins his famous Institutes acknowledging that "true and sound wisdom consists in two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." He goes on to make it plain that we all know at least something of God through our human nature which, while fallen, still maintains "an awareness of divinity." Even pagan idolatry is proof that we are born discerning God's existence even if we miss the mark.

Moreover, we do not merely discern God's existence and nature in the hard sciences but people who have "tasted the liberal arts penetrate with their aid far more deeply into the secrets of divine wisdom." Humans stand as the chief object of the glory of God's power in creation. Our creativity and powers of discernment and wisdom are unrivaled. Yet, for Calvin it is simply not enough. As Michael Horton points out, "the grandeur of our species measures the depth of our depravity." 

Because of the fall our knowledge of God is only ever partial. However, can this partial knowledge through general revelation lead us to saving faith in Christ? For Calvin, the answer is no. Horton distinguishes the function of general revelation in Roman Catholicism compared to Calvin's thought: "In Roman Catholic theology, general revelation is a stepping stone to redemption. In Calvin's view it, is the rope by which we hang ourselves." We hang ourselves by our slavery to idolatry, by the way we "flatter ourselves most sweetly, and fancy ourselves all but demigods," by the way we have "fashioned [God] in [our] own presumption," making him a deity to fit our needs.

Calvin argues that this process is deliberate. We know we are not worshiping God as he is, but God as we choose to make him and we don't care. We want our vision even if it's false. In our elevating ourselves to the role of demigod, we willfully obscure the actual God.

This is why general revelation inevitably falls short. We are too mired in sin and sunken in depravity to worship God as he is. Therefore, as Horton argues, the "fall requires special revelation both because we willfully misinterpret God and ourselves even in natural terms and because it is only in the gospel that God announces his saving purposes to sinners." In other words, we need a better witness than creation to the work of the Creator to save us. We have that witness in Scripture alone.*

*Incidentally, I had one brilliant student point this out immediately when we started talking about general revelation. He intuited right away that its main deficiency is that it leaves us without knowing we're damned and how we can be saved. I usually have to coax this out of students, but he jumped to it right away.