Trust Not in Princes

I could never have imagined a few days ago that Donald John Trump would be president-elect of our country. I understand the arguments in favor of him, and I think that while it may be cathartic for liberals to believe that any Trump supporter is perforce a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, crypto-Fascist, there are real fissures in this country and deeply-felt estrangement in middle America and the Rust Belt that Trump both exposed (and, let's be honest, exploited). Indeed, part of the problem with last night is just the type of fracturing displayed on my Facebook wall in the past 24 hours. We no longer merely disagree with each other; the other is evil and motivated by nefarious intentions. We alone are pure. I hope that cools off over time and this morning I began my day by praying for Trump. That God would break him and drive him to repentance. That he would surround himself with and heed the word of wise counselors. That the gravity of his office would humble him.

But I want to offer a word that applies no matter what happens in the next four years. It is, fittingly, from Scripture. Here, without abridgment, is Psalm 146:

Praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD, O my soul!
I will praise the LORD as long as I live;
I will sing praises to God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the LORD his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever; 
who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

The LORD sets the prisoners free;
the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
the LORD loves the righteous;
The LORD watches over the sojourners;
he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The LORD will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, to all generations.
Praise the LORD!

I bolded the verse I find the most pertinent now. And, as I said, this is true whether your guy or the other guy is in office. We, as followers of the one true God, are not to place our trust in the worldly powers. Every president, governor, congressman, senator, mayor, and city councilor will be a footnote in the history of the new earth governed by King Jesus. Every worldly ruler will fail. There is much wisdom in acknowledging that. It helps us to avoid a spurious utopianism in the church. 

But the rest of the psalm is important, too. For in God's work in the world we see the church's mission in the world. If God executes justice for the oppressed, so should we. If God gives food to the hungry, so should we. If God sets prisoners free, so should we. If God opens the eyes of the blind, so should we. If God lifts up those who are bowed down, so should we. If God loves the righteous, so should we. If God watches over the sojourners, so should we. If God upholds the widow and the fatherless, so should we. If God will bring the way of the wicked to ruin, we should long for that day. As we long for his forever rule.

When the church unites itself to political rule and puts our hope in princes to do our bidding we lose sight of this mission. We become more concerned with minimum wage laws than with feeding the hungry. We become more concerned with "protecting" ourselves from people unlike us, rather than caring for the sojourners among us. When we unite ourselves to someone who preaches fear of other races and religions, we forget that it is God who reigns forever and over all and will one day bring all wickedness to justice. 

One of the perennial temptations of Christianity is to want the kingdom without the King. On the wall of my classroom I have a poster of Gustave Dore's illustration of Christ being tempted by Satan with the kingdoms of the world. The careful reader will remember that he spurns this temptation. He says, in words it bears committing to memory, "You shall worship the LORD your God, and him only shall you serve." It saddens me that his church seems eager to claim that throne he rejected. May we learn to await our true King and trust only in Him.

Last Chance U

I don't watch much TV these days. Between kids, work, and reading I don't have a lot of spare time. I still enjoy the periodic pleasure of falling under the spell of a show, though. And that happened last week, with the multi-part documentary on Netflix called Last Chance U. I knew virtually nothing about the show as I started watching, only that it came highly recommended from someone in my Twitter feed. 

The show follows a national champion junior college football time from East Mississippi Community College as they try to win back to back titles and their fourth championship in six years. Most juco players are Division I washouts or kids unable to land scholarships at a more prestigious school or kids whose grades or encounters with the justice system have kept them out of football's upper echelons. They come to EMCC in tiny Scooba, Mississippi for one last chance at making "the league" and thus fulfilling all of their hopes and dreams.

This show is unbelievably sad. One thing that becomes quickly apparent is that the players give absolutely zero shits about being students. The governing body stipulates that the players must maintain a 2.5 GPA. While it never outright reveals that these numbers are massaged by the athletic department and willing instructors, the implication is clear. One of the main characters of the show is the academic compliance officer for the school. She is frequently seen in the show rushing through the halls of the academic buildings escorting players to class, making sure they have pencils and notebooks, making sure they at least appear to pay attention.

Meanwhile the players are entirely uninterested in their scholarly pursuits. They often congregate in the compliance officer's office and sit, faces glued to the glowing screens of their smartphones, while she drones on (from their perspective) about the importance of attending class and receiving an education. They glance up from time to time and grumble a reply. School is clearly an annoyance to them, an obstacle to be overcome. They are football mercenaries, not students.

Race, too, is an undeniable feature of the show. Most of the prominent players on the team are black. Most are from bad backgrounds. Most don't have a fallback plan. Most are at the end of their line. And football seems to offer salvation. What's the point in going to class? They're not going to go on to run a bank or teach high school after they leave here. They repeatedly worry about having to return home and into a way of life they know is futureless. But football seems to them, despite the long odds, their only way out.

The coach is a petty tyrant, lording his small world and authority over a group of desperate man-children. One scene juxtaposes his daughters calling him a sweetheart and a teddy bear with him cursing vociferously at an 18 year-old for a minor infraction on the practice field. In another scene he is swearing at and arguing with an official to an embarrassing extent over a forward progress call in a game his team wins 69-20. In a later game he so provokes an official that the official responds to a shove from the coach by punching the coach (by this time in the show I expect most viewers are likewise lining up for their chance to take a swing). It is embarrassing to watch. This man's entire world is juco football. One of the culminating events of the show is a bench-clearing brawl in the final regular season game of the year. In response the coach lectures his players--in language dripping with racism--for being thugs and responding as if they were on the street (this as they are mostly defending one of their teammates who is literally being beat with helmets).  

After the brawl the team is disqualified from participation in the postseason and therefore unable to defend their national title. The last clip of the show is the coach recruiting next year's batch of hopeful athletes, promising the chance to attract D-I eyes and stressing the school's firm commitment to academics. While there is something slightly admirable in the coach's pluck, it made me want to throw up.

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The whole show made me sick to my stomach. I have felt estranged from sports lately. In our culture we don't let sports be sport. Everything is zealously managed and supervised and utilitarian. The goal is a college scholarship or acceptance to a good club team or the long shot professional hope. No one plays just because it's fun anymore. I've heard people complain about trophies for every player and the refusal of municipal leagues to keep score as hearkening some sort of death of competition in our culture. That's bullcrap, though. Competition is alive and well. Too alive and too well. What we need is a bit more relaxation and joy in our sports. They are games after all. 

Watching a grown man yell and curse at another grown man over the placement of a football in a game is a good reminder of how ephemeral sports actually are. And, to me, ephemerality is what makes sports glorious. They don't last. Every game is different. But our culture tempts us into thinking--with the myth making machine of ESPN and other sports media as zealous accomplices--that the glory of the football field (and the soccer pitch and the basketball court and the baseball diamond) is eternal. After my beloved Royals won the World Series last year, I realized that it wasn't actually that big of a deal. I woke up the next morning and went to work, much the same man as I was the previous day. In talking with my son about sports I have tried to communicate this to him. He learned the word ephemeral in The Wind and the Willows and has since been trying to think of things that are ephemeral compared with things that are more lasting. One night at dinner I told him sports fit into the ephemeral category. They are great and beautiful but very temporary. I told him that something sad in our world is how many people forget this. The cursing and the angst and the elation that fill my Facebook feed on a Sunday afternoon are inordinate to the importance of the event. They put more weight on sport than sport can possible hold. They blind us to the things that matter and last.

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One of the repeated lines from the school's compliance officer in Last Chance U--often used when a student can't bear the thought of attending class--is, "What's 'plan B'?" And no one has an answer for her. There's only Plan A: the League. But that is patently unrealistic for most of the athletes documented. There just are not enough roster spots in the NFL to accommodate the vast amount of athletic talent pumped through our system. But these kids are all trapped in this dream, thinking that it's just around the corner. This might be the saddest part of this series for me. There is actually very little hope for these kids.

The biggest hope, and sorry to sound all square and teacherly here, is the education they are spurning. But the program, as much as the coach might sweet talk parents with the idea of academics, ultimately doesn't care about anything academically apart from the players' GPAs. They are not being crafted into men--the goal of any sport worth its salt--but being used as tools in the quest for more banners in the stadium and gaudy rings on the fat fingers of a conceited man-child coach. And, like even the best tools, their utility at some point expires. Then they are thrown away.

The Disappearance of Childhood

If you happen to be much of a reader I trust that you have had the experience of reading a book that somehow seems designed with you in mind. As if the author was addressing you personally, individually. That books can create this type of intimacy across centuries and cultures is incredible. Reading truly is, in the words of Frankenstein's monster, a "godlike science." 

This short paean to reading is not distracting from the purpose of this post but directly to the point. In Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood he makes the rather controversial claim that it is precisely the decline of print-based culture and its replacement by the image-based culture of television that is quickly killing off childhood in our culture. 

For anyone who has read Postman's more famous work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, this thesis might not be altogether surprising. As Postman convincingly argues in that work, we are becoming a people addicted to entertainment, obsessed with glowing screens to the detriment of our humanity. Postman's argument here is a slight shift: here he asserts that it was precisely mass literacy that created childhood in the first place, creating a distinction between literate adults and pre-literate children. Television, with its flattening tendency, is destroying childhood and, as Postman will proceed to argue, adulthood as well. 

I plan to spend some time lingering in the arguments of this book. I mentioned in the prefatory post that one thing I appreciated about Postman's introduction is its epistemic humility. He insists from the outset that he will resist offering solutions to this seemingly intractable problem. As I will argue in the concluding post, though, his solution is fairly implicit throughout.

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For right now I want to briefly expound on the crucial first step in Postman's argument: the idea that childhood was created by the dissemination of print culture in the early modern period. Before I get into his ideas I want to note that this idea is not altogether new to me. In the hand-wringing of my parent's generation over these darned millennials (that they, ahem, raised), the emergence of an understanding of adolescence is cited as developing about 100 years ago. With sentimental children's literature beginning in the nineteenth century it is clear that our understanding of childhood shifted, but Postman's argument goes deeper than that.

Postman argues that, with their emphasis on education, the Greeks came the closest to inventing childhood. Though they would be flabbergasted by contemporary ideas of child nurturing, their ideas were close enough to ours to be recognizable. Postman further credits the Romans with another indispensable link in the development of childhood: the notion of shame. He asserts that "without a well-developed idea of shame, childhood cannot exist." In particular, children must be safeguarded from adult secrets especially relating to sex. 

The Graeco-Roman conception was snowed under with the Middle Ages, according to Postman's reading. Literacy was basically non-existent outside of small cadres of scribes and education, too, was mostly dead. He sums up the medieval view thusly: 

What we can say, then, with certainty, is that in the medieval world there was no conception of childhood development, no conception of prerequisites or sequential learning, no conception of schooling as a preparation for an adult world. . . The seven-year-old male was a man in every respect except for his capacity to make love and war.

The entire world was open to children. There was no effort to protect adult secrets from them. While some of this is certainly attributable to high childhood mortality and the resistance, therefore, to commit too much emotional energy into any one child, but Postman claims that this argument cannot be given too much weight. For example, in England in the mid-eighteenth century half of all total deaths were children under the age of five yet the idea of childhood flourished in that dark environment.

The major difference between childhood of the post-Renaissance period and its lack in the medieval period was not death rates but the printing press. 

I'll pick up there in the next post.

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.