Occasionally somebody publishes something that is such a combination of totally uninformed and incredibly condescending that you almost have to admire it. There’s a kind of shit-eating brio that you just have to take your hate off to for a minute.
Then after that minute, you need to take a scalpel to it. Fair warning, this post will be quite long. Let us begin.
Heather Mac Donald writes about the paucity of real learning in the contemporary American university. The argument is old as the hills: universities aren’t teaching “the classics,” whatever those are, and for that reason, we’ve got all the problems of modern society, what with the girls in trousers and the hippity hop language and black people who want nice things.
Mac Donald tells all this through the framing mechanism of the Great Courses recorded lecture series, a set of videotaped or audio recorded lectures. It’s a profitable business, according to Mac Donald, and that’s important– those producing this series aren’t those free loading professors in their ivory towers but are instead among our Galtian overlords. And they achieve this by giving the people what they want… old school Western civilization! The essential trick of the article is to meld your boilerplate “West iz best, suxxors” conservative nostalgia with your boilerplate “the market always leads us to virtue” Randian ramblings.
Now, I’m going to take you through a lot of this thing, because Mac Donald is dishonest and dishonest hackery deserves to be mocked. But it’s really enough to say this: most of the members of the Western tradition that people like Mac Donald lionize without understanding would be totally repulsed by the idea of market driven education that she espouses. You can go all the way back to the ancient Greeks, name checked liberally by Mac Donald and those like her, to find a philosophical tradition totally at odds with market driven education.
In the Oeconomicus, Socrates derides the illiberal and crassly practical knowledges that do nothing but advance the selfish interests of the learner (the banausikai techne). These are thought to be beneath both the pure knowledge of episteme, which advances human flourishing even when it lacks any pragmatic use– similar to the theory, in other words, that Mac Donald disdains– and the noble arts of agriculture and warmaking. And why, according to Socrates, are farming and soldiering to be placed above the self-interested mercantile forms of knowledge? Because they contribute to the common good, because they are not self-interested. These things are valued precisely because they are not market driven. Indeed, the way Socrates describes them seems positively socialist.
If this pre-Christian vision of the right life and right knowledge doesn’t thrill you, you could look at, well, the entire history of Western liberal education. For centuries, Western educators have held as one of their core concepts that their purpose is to engender an understanding and respect of those things that are not immediately valuable or material. Don’t just trust those old pagan Greeks. Listen to the Jesuit priests, part of the Western Christian tradition, who preached that true learning could only take place when one was not attached to material things. Listen to Thomas Jefferson, who felt that the first principle of education was that it train not consumers but citizens, who could set aside their selfish ends to pursue what was best for the republic. Or take another old traditionalist bastard, T.S. Eliot, who said “No one can become truly educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest.” That last is as explicit a rejection of market based education, and the Great Courses design, as I can imagine.
I could go on, and I’m sure readers could supply dozens of quotes from dozens of speakers– all suitably white, straight, and Western, of course, so that the Heather Mac Donalds out there will care to listen. So what is happening here? Are all of these people out of step with Western civilization? How could they be, as they make up Western civilization? This is the baldly obvious and yet almost universally ignored point: the liberalism that has created the modern university and all of the things that conservatives hate in it is in a lineage of Western civilization. It is one strengthened by other traditions, other cultures, and other kinds of people, yes, and all the better. That cosmopolitan regard for difference comes from Western civilization. That’s the most bitter irony of conservative championing of traditional education; it wants to leave out vast swaths of tradition that led the university and our culture to where we are. And these advances did not spring out of nowhere in the 60’s to be heckled by Barry Goldwater but have been building for centuries, as dedicated people have come to insist that Western civilization more fully live out its ideals.
For all of the individual failings of Mac Donald’s piece, it most suffers from a simple internal contradiction: it pretends as though a modern conservative consumerist philosophy is part and parcel with a Western tradition that in fact has routinely rejected it.
If I cataloged all of the risible statements in the piece we’d be here until doomsday. Each could be attended, if we were feeling masochistic, by the various Western ideas about knowledge that she betrays. She writes almost entirely by assertion, making vast and sweeping claims about the state of contemporary university education, without a shred of evidence. This idea that American colleges aren’t teaching a traditional canon is thrown about by conservatives constantly, but is evinced by nothing but anecdote. (True story, Heather: one prominent Western ideal is that claims about the world have to be defended with evidence.) If conservatives really want to push this narrative about universities where you can’t read Homer no matter how hard you try, perhaps the thing to do would be to find out whether that’s true and report what is found. But that takes work, and like all inquiry, there’s the possibility that you won’t hear what you thought, or what you wanted.
Her “evidence” is cherry picked class names that she assumes her readers will reject in knee-jerk fashion, such as “Wesleyan’s “Circulating Bodies: Commodities, Prostitutes, and Slaves in Eighteenth-Century England.” Why slavery and prostitution should be insufficiently scholarly, I’m not sure; they were and are real, and as is the case with all history, we have an opportunity to learn more about them today by studying how they were yesterday. Perhaps Mac Donald assumes that the presence of such a class means you can’t take one in Shakespeare, the oldest, whitest, and deadest of the old dead white men that we are supposedly running out of the university. Well, I won’t make any suppositions about the ease of finding a university without classes on Shakespeare, but as someone who grew up in Wesleyan’s theater department and still has family who works there, I assure you, he’s such a presence I wouldn’t be surprised if you ran into him in the halls.
Mac Donald claims that students at Bowdoin can’t take classes in “American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War.” This is interesting, considering that according to their course catalog, they offered classes called “Colonial America and the Atlantic World,” “American Society in the New Nation,” “The Civil War Era” and “The Civil War in Film.” Weird, right? Indeed, those kind of offerings absolutely dwarf the number of classes of the kind that Mac Donald mocks. Apparently intellectual honesty is not a part of the Western tradition.
Mac Donald writes
The advertising copy for “Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life” asserts: “Beginning with the definition of a great book as one that possesses a great theme of enduring importance, noble language that elevates the soul and ennobles the mind, and a universality that enables it to speak across the ages, Professor Fears examines a body of work that offers an extraordinary gift of wisdom to those willing to receive it”—a statement so reckless that it would get its proponent thrown out of the Modern Language Association’s annual convention.
Well, I just happen to have the program from the 2011 MLA convention. It is filled with hundreds of talks and presentations from academics who think that some of the books they are talking about are great, that some possess themes of enduring importance, that some of them are ennobling, that some contain kinds of universality, that some even are in possession of wisdom. Many of these books are even written by dead straight white Christian men. Go figure.
She writes that in literature enthusiasm is “alien to contemporary academic discourse,” which would come as quite a surprise to impoverished lit graduate students who pursue graduate degrees with low odds of being hired. She writes that “women lecture less than men” without the slightest indication that this sort of claim requires evidence and citation. She derides the (unsubstantiated) decline of lecturing without considering whether lectures are in fact always the best ways to impart knowledge. (I can only speak from my own experience, but my students– they don’t like lectures so much. That’s the market for you.) She brags that “each lecture must be 30 minutes long: no ignoring the clock or deferring material to the next week, as on a college campus,” as we all know that it is a crucial part of Western civilization that all knowledge can be imparted in the same time it takes to watch an episode of Mad About You. She berates black and female professors for wanting too much money to lecture. When she is apparently uncomfortable with making up facts, she quotes other people making them up for her. (“Creative writing is such a popular concentration within the English major, [Seth] Lerer argues, because it is the one place where students encounter attention to character and plot and can non-ironically celebrate literature’s power.” Evidence, Dr. Lerer?) She also takes seemingly innocuous statements by professors and surrounds them with what she insists they meant, which is of course always that the university is politically correct, adrift, in need of tradition, and generally unholy.
The whole thing is a stew of bad faith, misrepresented thinkers and ideas, and outright falsehoods. It turns the life of the mind against itself by inventing a pleasing, entirely fraudulent history of what learning once was and pitting that against the sordid reality of people trying to teach and to learn. It can’t decide whether to bash students for insufficient love of the classics or lionize them as consumers. It assumes as a given that students from marginalized groups have no legitimate grievances and that the university has no business trying to meet their particular needs. And again and again, it makes outsized claims about the world with no evidence and no indication that evidence is necessary.
People like Heather Mac Donald want the life of the mind to have lived and died long ago, to be studied like butterflies pinned to a wall. But as I will spend my life insisting, that is a vision denied by the very people that they lionize. Some venerable old man dishing out wisdom for the ages once said “education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” I can’t imagine an image more antithetical to Mac Donald’s conception of human knowledge, a conception that is predicated on the idea that the great advances of human kind are over and must never be interrogated, only venerated uncritically. The thing that makes flames both literal and figurative dangerous and powerful is that they have the potential to burn out of your control. A filled pitcher won’t ever overflow, but a flame, properly tended and provided with fuel, could burn forever. That we should let the fire burn in whatever direction it wants, even if it seems silly to those who think the human project belongs in a museum, is not merely humane and sensible. It is entirely in keeping with the Western tradition.
pete
I enjoyed that. Seems like a useful life’s work.
sj660
Dear Heather
Please walk by me again
With a drink in your hand
And your legs all white
From the winter
Jewish Steel
So, uh, you think I should try to get my money back from GC?
What’s wrong with a few nobling enoblers? They elevate the soul like aromatic bath salts. Probably.
jl
Nope. I am with McDonald, like, totally for reals, here. She is right and TL is so wrong and so morally degenerated. Shame and fie on this depraved Balloon Juicer for sneering at the great minds of western civ.
Following Great Classics should be taught in detail, with lots of context and notes.
Aristophanes, especially the dirty bits, and The Knights for an excellent satire of lying cheating bellicose fake patriotic populist demagogues.
Euripides, and I would go with Electra because the scene where the kid brains the old king with a shovel is kind of ROFL funny in a very sick kind of way, if I remember correctly. If not, that’s OK, since the portrayal of mythic heroes as neurotic bipolar murderous nitwits is kind of fun for class warriors like me.
Then a whole lotta Sappho and Alcman (with special concentration on Alcman’s obsession with big beautiful bazooms of buck nekkid dancers)
Then, I say, move on to Juvenal, with special concentration on Satire VIII, the True (Nature) of Nobility with its loving and respectful treatment of social tradition of the upper classes.
I can think of plenty more lessons from the Great Books and Precious Classics that I think will greatly edify our precious youth. But these three would be a good start and just maybe might undo the damage of all the multicultural and socially subversive nonsense that I am sure has mislead all you dang kids that mouth off around here.
jl
Then I would move on to Martial to elevate our precious youth’s minds, and it might improve the quality of the graffiti in the bathrooms. Actually, I am sure it would improve the quality of the graffiti.
Stillwater
WTF? My belief in the power of literature is only ironical? That pisses me off.
Ripley
Heathers 2: This time it’s canonical.
J. Michael Neal
I agree with this entirely, although I find a certain amount of irony in Freddie penning the first two sentences of the post.
BillinGlendaleCA (aka 10amla)
@jl:
Ah, graffiti. Nothing beats the one I remember from one of the restrooms in my undergrad dorm. It was right above the urinal: You can shake it, whack it, bang it against the wall; until you put it back into your pants, that last drop will not fall.
What we learn from a fine college education.*
* The university was ranked #2 on this year’s Washington Monthly rankings.
jl
Oops, Mr. deBoer wrote the post, not TL. Sorry.
Also too, close reading of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales about nuns and priest, and pardoners to make the kids respect religion.
Twain is an American Classic, but Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are too soft, and weaken our precious youth’s will. So, throw those out and study Letters from the Earth.
jl
@BillinGlendaleCA (aka 10amla): Can’t believe something like that would happen at UCLA (is that the one you mean?).
pete
@jl: Nice. A close read of Shakespeare’s Sonnets would go down well too, after cleansing the palate with a spot of Chaucer. For my third, I’ll throw in Tristram Shandy, just for formal fun in a pre-post-modern kind of manner.
All this yearning for the grand traditions of western civilization is merely another manifestation of the routine right-wing nostalgia for a past that never was, in which everything they dislike didn’t exist, even if (especially if) it actually did.
Joseph Nobles
I like the Great Courses I’ve ordered. I’ve got a calculus course and a nutrition course. They were good.
There is a strong emphasis on Western Civ and philosophy there, but they do have some that focus on the East.
drkrick
@BillinGlendaleCA (aka 10amla): Favorite graffiti found on the wall of a college rooming house in the mid ’70’s: Avoid Needle Drugs – The Only Dope Worth Shooting Is Nixon.
miwome
@BillinGlendaleCA (aka 10amla): Best graffiti I saw in a university bathroom:
VENI
SEDI
VICI
[Translation:
I CAME
I SAT
I CONQUERED
A play on Caesar’s VENI VIDI VICI, or, I CAME, I SAW, I CONQUERED.]
priscianusjr
I liked the article. It’s unfortunate, but there are a lot of problems with American academia today. And even if there weren’t, what’s wrong with popular education? Publishing is also a business, you know. And academia itself more and more resembles a business, from the POV of the administrators and the students than of the academics. I’m getting tired of this whole “dead white males”, Foucaultian hegemony crap. Universities should be universal. Nothing stops people from reading and learning about whatever else they may be interested in.
miwome
Oh, man, thank you for this post. A year plus out from my graduation from a highly and proudly impractical university (which did put a very strong emphasis on “the classics” and “laying the groundwork” and “reading primary documents”), I’ve been feeling that part of my mind slowly atrophy, no matter what or how much I read, since my current occupation isn’t really at all relevant to my education, or to being educated. (Not a failing of itself–I actually quite like my job–but it definitely doesn’t use those brain cells the way Mesopotamian Thought & Lit did.)
So, reading this was a welcome dose of nostalgia. I recognize that that’s ironic, given the way we tend to treat wingnut nostalgia, but there you have it. Feeling as though I were back sitting around a table with a bunch of snotty Poli Sci majors gave me the warmfuzzies.
fuckwit
I once owned an Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce (great fucking car, I loved that thing).
On the Alfa mailing list, one wag’s sig line was:
“VENI VEDI VELOCE”
I came, I saw, I went very fast!
Xenos
@pete: Shamela.
Is the term ‘middlebrow’ still in use? This sort of Fantasia-as-fine-art reading of western literature seems to be driving this crap.
bago
In the realm of lousy music to sleep to:
http://klaypex.com/
Xenos
Here is the Kundera quote I was looking for:
This sort of sentiment is behind political correctness, here the idea that not only am I learning something, but that I am validated and proven to be among the aristoi by by my good taste in culture and politics.
Nonetheless, a 32 hour course on Verdi sounds pretty great, although I doubt wanting to take such a course indicates that I am very well adjusted…
Dennis SGMM
When I was at Berkeley back in the Sixties there was a coffee shop on Telly nicknamed, IIRC, the Med. During one discussion of Great Things or another I went into the head at the Med to take a pee and saw the best graffiti I’d ever seen.
Someone wrote plaintively, “My mother made me a homosexual!”
Someone else replied, “If I buy her the wool will she make me one too?”
Brachiator
As another poster has noted, Sappho ain’t straight (probably). Socrates may not have been either, as far as that goes. And Dumas and Pushkin both had African ancestry (Pushkin looks a lot like Prince in some portraits).
But great stuff here. It’s just perverse that Heather is trying to reinvent the Western Tradition in such a bullshit, reductionist way.
Oh yeah, lots of great fart jokes in Chaucer, if I remember correctly. If that is not the essence of the Western Tradition, I don’t know what is.
BruceFromOhio
Started in 1980 or so: rightopia couldn’t steer the masses with uncut conservative dogma, so the whole movement went Madison Avenue on our sorry Western asses.
@Ripley:
I will be laughing at this for most of the day.
JGabriel
@Ripley: Win.
.
Omnes Omnibus
The Great Courses lecture series sounds like a pretty good idea. Mac Donald’s screed is pure idiocy, but the lectures, assuming they are well done, sound like they would be good as refreshers, to fill in gaps in one’s education, or as something for an autodidact to use. Not the same as a university course, but something of value.
dedc79
Ok, I’ll bite. MacDonald’s article may be a heap of garbage, but I do think there is something to be said with starting students off with some basics. Part of the problem is that many kids come to college barely knowing how to write or read a serious book. That is not a problem that a university can fix and much of the blame for that belongs with parents, high schools, etc…
That said, before someone takes a course in, say, modern American literature, there is probably value in having some knowledge of the classics, earlier european literature, etc.. since these are all reference points for the later american authors.
Would you ever recommend that someone read Ulysses without having read the Odyssey?
Omnes Omnibus
@dedc79: No one here has argued against that, but you probably just touched off a liberal arts vs. technical major flame war that will extend over 300 comments.
Tom Levenson
@jl: ‘sokay by me. Wish I had written this fine paroxysm of rage. Great work, FdB — speaking as one who for my sins currently happens to head a section (MIT-speak for a department that dare not say its name) in the School of Humanities, Arts and Sciences at a MRU, MacDonald’s piece has an aroma that beats durians.
Cervantes
@BillinGlendaleCA (aka 10amla):
The Cantabrigian version scans better:
“No matter how you shake or how you prance,
The last drop always falls in your pants.”
Tom Levenson
@Dennis SGMM: (a) that was the Cafe Mediterraneum, (I think). It was one of those where I first as a high school student attempted to impress sadly unimpressionable folk with my mature sophistication (I am so glad cell phone cameras did not exist to document that grotesque mid-teens moment…) And (b) it was at the time when Telegraph still felt like agora, and not a dirty, economically depressed parody of itself.
I do miss the Med. Though the place on College and Bancroft is fine, it lacks the grotty urgency of the old place. Got to go to Cafe Trieste in the City for that.
RSA
That was a strange article. MacDonald seems to be suggesting a basic similarity between a recorded Great Course and a regular college course. But it’s 12 hours of recorded material versus almost four times as much classroom time, plus questions and answers, homework and tests, and so forth. A better comparison would be with relatively short audio books that introduce some subject (for example, a reading of a “for Dummies” book–some of which are pretty good.)
Tom Levenson
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t think FdB’s saying that the Great Courses are bad, necessarily. They’re survey courses, with all the strengths and limitations to which such are heir. I think good examples of the genre are an ideal accompaniment, say, to an annoying daily commute.
But the point isn’t that this marketing framework doesn’t actually serve some actual consumer desire; it is whether these courses and their subject choices are superior to what liberal arts colleges and research universities are teaching their students-in-residence. And that’s where the nonsense begins.
Emma
@Omnes Omnibus: I just got one lecture on the Holy Grail (curiosity, what can I tell you). Serious scholar stuff, even if it does cover Monty Python :). Also got a couple on music, also very good. They’re great starting points if you’re curious about a topic you know very little about.
(edit) oops. The Holy Grail one is from The Modern Scholar, which you can get through Audible.com.
JGabriel
jl:
Yes. For instance, let’s not forget Carmen 16:
Oh, the ennobling classics!
.
Freddie deBoer
My point was not to argue the supremacy of the Western tradition or Western civilization. In fact I was arguing against people who did that. My point was that even by those standards, conservative critiques like this one (published by the Manhattan Institute, as it happens) fail even by their own standards of veneration for the Western tradition. If conservatism was driven by a real nostalgia, I’d still oppose most of it. Instead, it’s driven by a bogus, white-washed nostalgia, one which not only eliminates the interests of people who are female, non-white, or LGBTQ, but distorts the views of many of the canonical figures they say they respect.
Western civilization didn’t stop. It lead here, and our respect for marginalized groups and our commitment to pluralism are in keeping with much of the Western tradition, even though that tradition contains so much shameful behavior.
JGabriel
He’p me! I been goldurned MODERERATERED!
.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tom Levenson: Oh, I did not think that Freddie was making that argument at all and I agree entirely with what you are saying about both the value and limitations of such materials.
ETA: The Mac Donald piece used the things as a rhetorical crutch and I just wanted to suggest that they should not necessarily be tarred by association with her idiocy.
BDR
She’s bragging about the lectures being a whole half hour long?
At the colleges I attended, lectures ran for fifty minutes or an hour and fifteen minutes.
What a fucking idiot.
Brian S
@Emma: My father in law listens to them for just that reason, and they’re great for him. He’s a letter carrier who wanted to go to college but had to get a job to support his family (both immediate and extended–remember when the postal service made that option possible for a person with a high school diploma?) and so never could. He’s made good use of th library over the years, but he feels he needs some background from experts to help him get into the stuff he’s reading, so the GC CDs help him out. But he’d be the first to say he gets more from conversations than he does from listening to lectures. Those CDs are fine as an adjunct, but they’re not a replacement for a rigorous education.
Tom Levenson
Another thing that MacDonald notes but doesn’t credit is the increasing amount of “great course” like material available for free (!), courtesy of universities like my own. MIT’s open courseware makes elements of MIT’s education available to anyone, and in selected cases, offers whole courses on video.
The best known of MIT’s video offerings is probably Walter Lewin’s introduction to mechanics. Great Courses offers a science and math curriculum (good for them) — but I defy them to beat Walter as a teacher.
Lots of other universities are doing similar things; a clever subversive would aggregate (at least links) and begin to market. There is no reason that this kind of knowledge should be restricted to those with $270 a course to spend.
The other issue MacDonald doesn’t seem to notice is the fact that her Great Courses models are routinely censored, or perhaps more kindly, hobbled versions of the courses these teachers would offer their own students. She doesn’t seem to notice that this precisely corresponds to the narrowing of mind she decries (without anything like this kind of evidence) in other contexts.
There is so much more bullshit in that piece it beggars belief — or would, if we weren’t decades into the attempt to destroy the foundations of institutions creating uncomfortable knowledge. Freddie is right — one could go on forever on this one, but he didn’t, and I won’t.
Emma
@Brian S: I agree completely. They’re a great beginning but hardly an end in themselves. You don’t get an education from them, you get an idea of where you should be looking for more.
And also, IMO, you don’t need to pay as much if you know where to look. I’ve been listening to recorded lectures from placed like Berkeley, where they put the whole semester online. Many Universities do that now and it’s fantastic!
(edit) I see Tom Levenson mentioned that above.
NonyNony
@Omnes Omnibus:
They have them at my public library and I just discovered them earlier this year. I’ve been filling in some gaps in my history and classical knowledge through them and they’re quite good for that. They clearly can’t replace the depth of a university course in the subject matter, but then they don’t seem to advertise themselves as that. Personally I don’t even think they replace a survey course – all you’re getting is a lecture – you don’t get any in-class discussion, networking with peers about the material, an external text that covers the same material in parallel, sitting and reflecting on your own to write about the material, etc. You get a lecture that covers the high points of the era/works in question and that’s it.
They’re great for when I’m walking for exercise at night, or on a long drive, but they mostly make me wish I had focused a bit less on pushing myself so hard on my math/computer science degree as an undergrad and that I’d taken more than just the required Humanities courses. I’d say they’re more of a supplement/replacement for a popular book on the subject – something you might find in a decent public library – than a replacement for an actual university course.
prufrock
How bad does it make me look if I admit that I first read “ennobles” as “embiggens”?
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Bravo, Mr. DeBoer. This is an epic smackdown- and a magnificent defense of Western civilization, for real.
Dennis SGMM
@Tom Levenson:
Thank you! At least I remembered the nick. Would you believe that I’ve never been back to Berkeley since I graduated? I’d rather hold on to the place of distorted memory than the real one.
Constance
A friend and I are on our third GC history class. We enjoy the lectures, don’t do the supplemental reading and don’t write papers. I’m not developing an in depth knowledge or understanding. We both miss the discussion a real class could offer. Given our work schedules, they are fine for us. We already have our bachelor degrees and are taking the GC classes for fun. And we buy them on sale.
I’m not sure what Heather’s point is–we should only do the GC because universities are so bad? For me, accountability is everything and sorry, if I don’t have an instructor holding a pass/fail over my head I won’t write papers on my own or read textbooks. And who would read the papers I wrote on my own and comment on whether I have a clue about what I’m writing?
Is she selling GC? Gets a commission?
The worst university is probably better than no university–wait, there is that basement thing Dinesh D’Souza runs and the Oral Roberts U–and the best GC isn’t better than any university. Is this another oranges/apples thing?
El Cid
Conservatives love talking about their incredible love for Classical Western values, until you begin using Classical Western values (idealized, admittedly) such as rational inquiry, a demand for evidence, the importance of public support for the arts and sports, an Athenian proclaimed respect for the individual’s role in determining the nation’s future via democracy, and in general the need to use the lessons of science and philosophy to interpret the world.
Tom Levenson
@Dennis SGMM: I go back at least once a year (just returned from this summer’s hols) — I’ve still got family there, among other lures.
It’s enormously different, to be sure. Very yuppie and up market, much more so than I recall. But the campus is still beautiful, and a rich intellectual space (for all that the CA GOP attempt to destroy the possibility of governance may yet wreck it). And the shape of the landscape and the light are the same; actually better than my childhood. Thank you Clean Air Act (and CA emissions standards). Ha! Big Government!
Dennis SGMM
@Tom Levenson:
Good to hear that the campus is the same. Back in the day I used to believe that just walking onto Sproul Plaza raised my IQ a couple of points.
Sounds like it’s time for a visit.
Walker
St. John’s will be surprised to learn that it is no longer offering a Great Books program. And does Great Courses use Newton for their Calculus classes? Because if not, they are just posers.
Unsympathetic
The beginning of the last paragraph actually made me laugh:
These people are insane.
Robert Noble
Boy, this lady sure doesn’t know much as far as whats actually offered at American universities. I’ve gone back to school and am finishing my bachelors at Seattle University and we read the shit out of the classics. Maybe its just that I’m a political science and economics double major, but there are a quite a few classes that everyone is required to take that focus on “old books.” I think its great, and there are a lot of folks who could do for more of it, but it seems like MacDonald doesn’t really think we should move on from there. Most of the course descriptions she describes sound like advanced courses. So you have come to understand the relationship between industrialization and shipping and are interested in the affects of human trafficking? Here’s a class on the slave trade and prostitution that might interest you.
handsmile
Johio
There’s another flaw in her argument – where does she think the teachers come from who do the Great Courses? They’re college professors. So if she likes them so much on tape, she wouldn’t like them in person?
I’ve done a ton of the Great Courses and the teachers don’t seem to share her contempt for anything outside the Western canon. Even in a course like English Literature, the professor deals with women, minorities and makes a point the their voices were often ignored and that should be corrected.
The courses are entertainment, not an education. To me they’re equivalent to history and science books written for the lay person. But you can’t call it an education if the “student’s” role is completely passive. That’s not the way to master any subject.
Steve
When I was in college 20 years ago Allan Bloom was selling the exact same schtick. I remember reading his book (“The Closing of the American Mind,” if anyone remembers it) and wondering if his points might be valid, until I came to a rant about how rock and roll is warping young minds and I realized it was simply more of the same old crap. Honestly, if you went back 2000 years you’d probably find the same complaints about how kids today don’t spend time learning any of the useful stuff.
In my own experience, the people who failed to get a well-rounded college education were not so much the women’s-studies types, as the engineering and technical majors who had so many required classes they never had time for humanities along the way.
Samara Morgan
LOL
The Heather MacDonald sanctioned course in Dead White Guy Phailosophy.
@Freddie deBoer:
but freddie is a first principles man himself. i guess first principles and Dead White Guy Phailosophy like are some of the parts of conservatism that freddie DOESN’T oppose.
another glibertarian kangaroo slap fight where freddie calls out a blogger higher up the blogverse foodchain for page clicks.
/yawn
Samara Morgan
do you remember this, freddie? going my way, Sailer?
sadly, the Secular
RacistsRight disappeared Heather’s post so the link doesnt work, but i saved some commentary on my old blog.im just not polite enough to make it here, am i?
Ben JB
A nice take-down of an incoherent position. (I wonder if Mac Donald would support anti-science Perry.)
But rather than pick (even momentarily) on Prof. Lerer, I would want to see where Mac Donald got that quote–if only because I once read a really great article by Lerer on Twain, Connecticut Yankee, and philology.
And even in the Mac Donald article, Lerer argues that the audience/market may not always be right.
Samara Morgan
Im sad that SR disappeared Heather’s post about how swishy gay’d up marriages would scare off black males from marriage. Andrew would have loved it.
i saved one comment though.
This commenter on Heather’s thread pretty much sums it up for me–
Amir Khalid
@Tom Levenson:
In my part of the world (I can’t speak for yours) there are people, though of course not everyone, for whom the smell of durians is the sweetest and most heavenly of fragrances. Especially when the fruit is in season.
YellowDog
MacDonald seems to assume that education is linear, with start and end points. Ideally, it’s not, although in my experience students often approach it that way (“how many credits do I need?” “which courses satisfy the distribution requirements?” “will this be on the final?”) It should be a process that does not end when a degree is conferred. She also seems to assume that students are mere empty vessels and we have to be careful about what goes in. That’s true to an extent, but it’s equally important that students learn how to think critically about information. At the college level, that will accomplish more than rote learning. In my case, I found a loophole in the undergraduate requirements–by having a double major, a lot of the distribution requirements were waived. As a result, I took one science course and no math courses as an undergraduate. (Here’s irony–I later taught graduate statistics.) As a result, I had that grounding in the classics MacDonald touts (my second major was a general one in Humanities, with a heavy emphasis on literature), and some of my professors practiced the “identity politics” that MacDonald decries. Some of them were part of the then-new “critical” movement taking hold in academia. It didn’t turn me into a radical or a dropout from society, but it did expose me to other points of view and showed me how to think about other things besides whether Hamlet was indecisive or actively pursued a confrontation that would likely end with his death. (It was the latter–reread the soliloquy from that point of view. Argue amongst yourselves.) My post-graduate career is about 180 degrees from that grounding in the classics, but I feel that the lessons from those days are still with me even though I haven’t read Balzac in many years.
Tom Levenson
@Amir Khalid: Fair enough. But the “smells like hell but tastes like heaven” trope is the one I had in mind.
Tom Levenson
I finally figured out the shorter:
This is piece is that in which Heather MacDonald demonstrates she did not master the liberal arts to which she was (presumably) exposed in college. Which is, of course devastating indictment of the educational system that so deprived her of the capacity for critical thought.
[Edit] Ok, so it’s not that short. I fail at internet traditions. Sue me.
Samara Morgan
@Ben JB: actually freddie misses the point as usual, so we get another two thousand words of polite dissent with caveats.
snore city.
freddie himself is a big believer in “reasoning proceeding from first principles” and selected Dead White Guy Phailosophers.
in a pig’s eye, lol! slavery, anti-science, discrimination, chattel slavery of women and children, theocracy and opression of minorities are far in keeping with the “western tradition”.
poor freddie, still trying to recover some value added from Christendom.
Have you ever considered….that Francis Fukuyama was WRONG? Its not the end of history….its the end of westerncentric history.
Samara Morgan
@Tom Levenson: nope, you are wrong Dr. Levenson.
Heather perfectly mastered the lib arts curriculum of WESTERN academia.
Shorter Heather– being white and conservative means never having to say you’re sorry.
Samara Morgan
and freddies title is wrong….i disagree that Plato would have hated Heather’s article.
now, Pythagoras, he would have hated it.
:)
catclub
@Walker: That’s fluxions to you, consarn it. Leibniz, sneibniz.
I also tremble knowing that some guy who wrote a book on Newton is posting here.
Samara Morgan
@Tom Levenson: alas, you miss the flaw in freddies argument, Dr. Levenson.
But it was….he continues.
freddie says conservative representation of western tradition is not REAL adherence to
freddie wants to argue that Hearther’s position is somehow invalid. Yet position is integral to western tradition, while freddies disclaimer is irrelevent.
you also, Dr. Levenson, would like to pretend that the Heather MacDonalds are not representative of true western tradition.
they are.
Woodrowfan
they’ve never figured out that paper and class titles that sound “sexy” are designed to grab people’s attention. The topics are more serious than the titles make then sound, but you get more people interested with “Sex and the Roman Girl” than with “Reconsidering Gender Relations and Marriage During the Julio-Claudian Dynasty.”
Samara Morgan
@Tom Levenson: i muffed the shorter, sowwy.
:)
and see? it works for freddie too! that not REAL western tradition!
you think you & freddie can pick and choose what you like…..enlightenment values do not shape western tradition as much as you would like to pretend they do.
Christendom shaped western tradition.
and it still does today.
burritoboy
McDonald doesn’t understand that she is a sophist, one of Socrates’ opponents. This is precisely the point of the first great conflict in The Republic – Thrasymachus argues that what is good is what is profitable (profit defined by a highly reductionist model of self-interest). Of course, Socrates’ demolition of Thrasymachus is the platform upon which the remainder of the Republic is built. The true education of Glaucon and Adeimantus can occur only when the sophists like Thrasymachus are defeated.
Any mention of the Oeconomicus should be applauded. (Note: if the “great books” person you’re talking to hasn’t read their Xenophon, they’re just posers). Note that the Oeconomicus is Xenophon’s dialogue which Socrates himself relates – unlike dialogues which are remembered by others, Socrates himself tells us about this one.
Socrates thought the Western tradition of his time (i.e., the poetry of Homer) was essentially nonsensical (see Republic, Lesser Hippias, etc). Much of ancient Greek economic thought opposes capitalism (Plato’s Hipparchus, Eryxias and Republic, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Philodemus’ Oeconomicus and many more). This continued well into modern times (see More’s Utopia, the discussions around Christian monasticism and much more).
Omnes Omnibus
@ m_c: Congratulations. You managed to misunderstand the OP, most of the comments, and most of what is taught in humanities courses. This is quite an achievement.
Brachiator
@Samara Morgan:
. Yeah! Except, of course, for all that the non Christian influence. You know, like ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, pre-Christian European traditions, Judaism, Islam, etc.
henrythefifth
Yes, the young ones need more of that pastoral, loving, non-violent, Shakespeare! Let us take a passage from Henry V.
Henry: “If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh’d soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array’d in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch’d complexion, all fell feats
Enlink’d to waste and desolation?
What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy’d?”
Ahh, gentle Shakespeare. Rape, plunder, and spitting infants on pikes…..
burritoboy
“enlightenment values do not shape western tradition as much as you would like to pretend they do.
Christendom shaped western tradition.”
And Christianity has always been viewed as a form of enlightenment, an extremely pervasive symbology of the light. Christians (quite plausibly, in my opinion) presented themselves as the natural and correct culmination of the monotheism of the ancient philosophers.
Many, even most, early Christians argued that Christianity was such a force for good precisely because what our contemporary conservatives would call “political correctness”, which included such social engineering projects as:
1. the first efforts to abolish slavery
2. a radical (though partial) equalization of men and women, to the point where the Virgin and female saints often were more revered than any males.
3. systemic social welfare schemes
4. radical experiments in communal living
5. systemic public health schemes
6. the first educational efforts for women, peasants and slaves
7. arguing for radical social equality, to the point that slaves could become priests (something that would be considered bizarre and perverse according to the Greco-Roman tradition)
Steve
@Samara Morgan: You don’t get to pick and choose what you like, but you don’t get to pick and choose what you don’t like, either. There are a heck of a lot of influences in Western culture aside from the so-called scourge of Christianity.
Harold
Critical thinking is a part of the Western tradition (albeit wrapped up in conservative trappings — but its there non-the-less) as is Pelagianism — the idea that man can improve his own condition (or society – or Semi-Pelagianism, the idea that man can improve — with the help of God’s grace — which is the mainstream Christian position, as I understand it (Ant-Pelagianism or total depravity – is part of a few extreme fundamentalist traditions, such as Lutheranism and Calvinism in their most conservative aspects.
I have been reading Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature, an Institutional History” (1987) which touches on the history of the “Great Books” courses. There were those at the turn of the last century who felt a need to counteract the “materialistic barbarism” and vulgarity of modern life by substituting Culture for religion as recommended by Matthew Arnold (who at the time of WW1 had the advantage of being English, rather than German), in the form of a course on the classic works of the Western literature, beginning with Homer and coming down through the nineteenth century (the twentieth century had not yet happened). John Erskine, the founder of the General Honors at Columbia, and author of “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent” was a leading proponent and experimenter of this, first as adult education for soldiers in World War I. He wanted the books to be read quickly in English translation (like the Bible) with no “elaborate screen of historical and critical apparatus”. Discussion would supply the spirit of criticism as “a therapy to clear up misunderstandings and miscommunications caused by ideology” as well as motivating students to be active learners, rather than passive recipients of knowledge (as when listening to a lecture). This was sold as a spiritual education — since Erskine believed that to understand these books you had to have a soul, and it won the support of some religious conservatives. though Erskine himself was no moralistic reactionary. The proponents of General Education, with their disdain of “inert erudition” and “dead facts” were initially looked upon as dilettantes by the scholarly community, but they had their supporters and after World War 2 began to win the day. There is another book mentioned by Graff: Carol S. Gruber, “Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America”, which I would like to read.
I prefer a more historical and scholarly approach myself, but I can see the practical attraction of the Great Books method.
Harold
Critical thinking is a part of the Western tradition (albeit wrapped up in conservative trappings — but its there non-the-less) as is Pelagianism — the idea that man can improve his own condition (or society – or Semi-Pelagianism, the idea that man can improve — with the help of God’s grace — which is the mainstream Christian position, as I understand it (Ant-Pelagianism or total depravity – is part of a few extreme fundamentalist traditions, such as Lutheranism and Calvinism in their most conservative aspects.
I have been reading Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature, an Institutional History” (1987) which touches on the history of the “Great Books” courses. There were those at the turn of the last century who felt a need to counteract the “materialistic barbarism” and vulgarity of modern life by substituting Culture for religion as recommended by Matthew Arnold (who at the time of WW1 had the advantage of being English, rather than German), in the form of a course on the classic works of the Western literature, beginning with Homer and coming down through the nineteenth century (the twentieth century had not yet happened). John Erskine, the founder of the General Honors at Columbia, and author of “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent” was a leading proponent and experimenter of this, first as adult education for soldiers in World War I. He wanted the books to be read quickly in English translation (like the Bible) with no “elaborate screen of historical and critical apparatus”. Discussion would supply the spirit of criticism as “a therapy to clear up misunderstandings and miscommunications caused by ideology” as well as motivating students to be active learners, rather than passive recipients of knowledge (as when listening to a lecture). This was sold as a spiritual education — since Erskine believed that to understand these books you had to have a soul, and it won the support of some religious conservatives. though Erskine himself was no moralistic reactionary. The proponents of General Education, with their disdain of “inert erudition” and “dead facts” were initially looked upon as dilettantes by the scholarly community, but they had their supporters and after World War 2 began to win the day. There is another book mentioned by Graff: Carol S. Gruber, “Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America”, which I would like to read.
I prefer a more historical and scholarly approach myself, but I can see the practical attraction of the Great Books method.
Harold
Critical thinking is a part of the Western tradition (albeit wrapped up in conservative trappings — but its there non-the-less) as is Pelagianism — the idea that man can improve his own condition (or society – or Semi-Pelagianism, the idea that man can improve — with the help of God’s grace — which is the mainstream Christian position, as I understand it (Ant-Pelagianism or total depravity – is part of a few extreme fundamentalist traditions, such as Lutheranism and Calvinism in their most conservative aspects.
I have been reading Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature, an Institutional History” (1987) which touches on the history of the “Great Books” courses. There were those at the turn of the last century who felt a need to counteract the “materialistic barbarism” and vulgarity of modern life by substituting Culture for religion as recommended by Matthew Arnold (who at the time of WW1 had the advantage of being English, rather than German), in the form of a course on the classic works of the Western literature, beginning with Homer and coming down through the nineteenth century (the twentieth century had not yet happened). John Erskine, the founder of the General Honors at Columbia, and author of “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent” was a leading proponent and experimenter of this, first as adult education for soldiers in World War I. He wanted the books to be read quickly in English translation (like the Bible) with no “elaborate screen of historical and critical apparatus”. Discussion would supply the spirit of criticism as “a therapy to clear up misunderstandings and miscommunications caused by ideology” as well as motivating students to be active learners, rather than passive recipients of knowledge (as when listening to a lecture). This was sold as a spiritual education — since Erskine believed that to understand these books you had to have a soul, and it won the support of some religious conservatives. though Erskine himself was no moralistic reactionary. The proponents of General Education, with their disdain of “inert erudition” and “dead facts” were initially looked upon as dilettantes by the scholarly community, but they had their supporters and after World War 2 began to win the day. There is another book mentioned by Graff: Carol S. Gruber, “Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America”, which I would like to read.
I prefer a more historical and scholarly approach myself, but I can see the practical attraction of the Great Books method.
Harold
Critical thinking is a part of the Western tradition (albeit wrapped up in conservative trappings — but its there non-the-less) as is Pelagianism — the idea that man can improve his own condition (or society – or Semi-Pelagianism, the idea that man can improve — with the help of God’s grace — which is the mainstream Christian position, as I understand it (Ant-Pelagianism or total depravity – is part of a few extreme fundamentalist traditions, such as Lutheranism and Calvinism in their most conservative aspects.
I have been reading Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature, an Institutional History” (1987) which touches on the history of the “Great Books” courses. There were those at the turn of the last century who felt a need to counteract the “materialistic barbarism” and vulgarity of modern life by substituting Culture for religion as recommended by Matthew Arnold (who at the time of WW1 had the advantage of being English, rather than German), in the form of a course on the classic works of the Western literature, beginning with Homer and coming down through the nineteenth century (the twentieth century had not yet happened). John Erskine, the founder of the General Honors at Columbia, and author of “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent” was a leading proponent and experimenter of this, first as adult education for soldiers in World War I. He wanted the books to be read quickly in English translation (like the Bible) with no “elaborate screen of historical and critical apparatus”. Discussion would supply the spirit of criticism as “a therapy to clear up misunderstandings and miscommunications caused by ideology” as well as motivating students to be active learners, rather than passive recipients of knowledge (as when listening to a lecture). This was sold as a spiritual education — since Erskine believed that to understand these books you had to have a soul, and it won the support of some religious conservatives. though Erskine himself was no moralistic reactionary. The proponents of General Education, with their disdain of “inert erudition” and “dead facts” were initially looked upon as dilettantes by the scholarly community, but they had their supporters and after World War 2 began to win the day. There is another book mentioned by Graff: Carol S. Gruber, “Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America”, which I would like to read.
I prefer a more historical and scholarly approach myself, but I can see the practical attraction of the Great Books method.
Harold
Critical thinking is a part of the Western tradition (albeit wrapped up in conservative trappings — but it’s there non-the-less) as is Pelagianism — the idea that man can improve his own condition (or society – or Semi-Pelagianism, the idea that man can improve — with the help of God’s grace — which is the mainstream Christian position, as I understand it (Ant-Pelagianism or total depravity – is part of a few extreme fundamentalist traditions, such as Lutheranism and Calvinism in their most conservative aspects).
I have been reading Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature, an Institutional History” (1987) which touches on the history of the “Great Books” courses. There were those at the turn of the last century who felt a need to counteract the “materialistic barbarism” and vulgarity of modern life (business values) by substituting Culture for religion as recommended by Matthew Arnold (who at the time of WW1 had the advantage of being English, rather than German), in the form of a course on the classic works of the Western literature, beginning with Homer and coming down through the nineteenth century (the twentieth century had not yet happened). John Erskine, the founder of the General Honors at Columbia, and author of “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent” was a leading proponent of this, first as adult education for soldiers in World War I. He wanted the books to be read quickly in English translation (like the Bible) with no “elaborate screen of historical and critical apparatus”. Discussion would supply criticism in the spirit of Socrates as “a therapy to clear up misunderstandings and miscommunications caused by ideology” as well as motivating students to be active learners, rather than passive recipients of knowledge (as when listening to a lecture). This was sold as a spiritual education — since Erskine believed that to understand these books you had to have a soul, and it won the support of some religious conservatives. though Erskine himself was no moralistic reactionary. The proponents of General Education, with their disdain of “inert erudition” and “dead facts” were initially looked upon as dilettantes by the scholarly community, but they had their supporters and after World War 2 began to win the day. There is another book mentioned by Graff: Carol S. Gruber, “Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America”, which I would like to read.
I prefer a more historical and scholarly approach myself, but I can see the practical attraction of the Great Books method.
Steeplejack
@Harold:
A quintuple post! Haven’t seen that in a while. Kudos, sir.
Less Popular Tim
@Jewish Steel:
Especially if you snort them or whatever the kids are doing these days with those MPDV “bath salts”….
Harold
O dear, why did this post 4 times — I was just trying to close parentheses. So sorry.
burritoboy
Steve,
I’m not even sure what influences Christianity itself doesn’t contain – Judaism (obviously), ancient Greek philosophy (see Aquinas’ use of Aristotle), ancient Roman law (on the canon law), Islam (medieval Christian philosophers read many medieval Islamic philosophers and used terms invented by Islamic philosophers). Notable as well is precisely how many places and cultures the early Christians came from – Berbers, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Egyptians, Hebrews and so many other peoples and nations. The writings of the Church Fathers were originally in at least six different languages.
Marc
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yup. Some of us have the wit to not write about things when we don’t know much about the topic at hand. Others (like m-c) lug their baggage into such threads and spit out 10 or 20 or 30 Mad-Libs posts anyhow.
Nutella
Good post but not so good choice of quote. Apparently “education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” is attributed to Socrates but he never said it. Unless Freddie is thinking of some other venerable old man?
Tom Levenson
For the record, I hold no doctorate. Apropos of an upthread error.
Nutella
@Harold:
That’s funny. Your reading shows that the original impetus for Great Books programs was to oppose “materialistic barbarism” but now Mac Donald is pushing a commercial version of the Great Books program as superior to academics. Sounds like materialistic barbarism to me.
Bill Section 147
@Johio: As a Junior in High School my U.S. History teacher started the year by having us read a newspaper article. It was a bit strangely written and the format was odd but it was a screed on youth and how they had lost all respectfulness, were impertinent, unruly and poorly educated.
Of course the newspaper was from the 1870s. I think that lesson was the most important thing he taught us during the year.
WeeBey
I think we should all learn from whatever the fuck a Samara Morgan is.
ciotog
@priscianusjr: The problem with the claim that “universities should be universal” is that some experiences (those had by white males) are held to be “universal” while others are not. Why can’t every human experience be “universal” and worth learning from?
karen marie
I don’t know if anyone else has pointed this out, because I haven’t read all the comments, but only a small percentage of the population got the kind of education Heather longs for.
In colonial America, few got more than a primary school education (of course, in the south, fewer even got that) but instead worked as apprentices (males to learn a trade, females to learn to be good housewives).
How can Heather call herself a “conservative” when she is, at heart, such an elitist?
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: wallah, i understand everything.
Levenson and de Bore are just as much western culture chauvinists as Heather Mac.
They just pretend Heather is an anomaly, while she is mainstream….and they are the real anomalies.
:)
actually, freddie is pretty mainstream too. hes a first culture intellectual and an anti-empiricist. His “reasoning” proceeds from “first principles” rather than scientific data.
Samara Morgan
@burritoboy: but like freddie, the christian clergy CHOSE what influences to incorporate.
For example, if christendom had included Ibn Arabi’s space-time models, we might have a working time machine by now.
:)
Samara Morgan
@burritoboy: alas, you also are a first culture advocate.
and also, you are completely wrong here.
Islam is the last evolution of monotheism.
And arose in part as improvement over xianity.
Christianity had two great advantages in the evo bio world.
!. the “killer app” of proselytizing
2. never having to acknowledge that gays, blacks, women, out-group populations were equal humans. thus even if someone was killed in the conversion process, xians were still trying to “do good.”
all theory, no practice.
IPOF xianity and its sacred text were used to rationalize slavery, oppression of women, and randian economics IN PRACTICE.
the way you present 7 is highly biased.
that anyone can preach or become a priest is actually an argument AGAINST education and scholarship.
Samara Morgan
@burritoboy:
oh plz….this is just stupid.
it was fertility goddess capture like landing xian holy days on the old pagan dates.
Harold
90. Nutella, I completely agree. The generalists who looked to Matthew Arnold and even the New Critics who were their descendants, and who opposed German-type meticulous scholarship with its focus on sources and parallel references, were concerned about an influx of wealthy students who were now being sent to universities to make business connections and who despised learning and studying – having to study was a mark of being poor. The professors wanted to elevate the student body as a means of making literature relevant.
Today’s plutocrats seem to have reconciled themselves to meritocracy, at this point. I believe there is something to the idea of culture being in a sense “spriritual” — or non-material — in German geist (spirit and culture) are the same word — at least as not leading to immediate financial reward, though beneficial in the larger scheme.
As far as people continuously complaining over the ages that the younger generation is in decline, this is always true. Our complex linguistic and cultural communication systems are not completely self-maintaining but have to be taught anew to each generation. So those who throw up their hands at the barbarity and ignorance of new generations are responding to a real situation. Just because something is repeated through the ages doesn’t make it less of a real problem. On the other hand, conditions are always changing, so that the systems of the older generation are no longer quite adapted to current circumstances and have to be improved as well as maintained.
Samara Morgan
synopsis:
everyone on this thread is isomorphic with Heather Mac– you are all western culture chauvinists of some stripe.
freddie and tom levenson are also picking and choosing what they believe to be the REAL tropes of western culture, and calling out Heather Mac as a heretic.
IPOF, they are the heretics, because Heather Mac is normative.
anglosaxon xianity enabled a small of group humans to control a disproportionate share of the worlds resources.
it was a wildly successful EGT strategy.
but you cant pretend mainstream christianity away as some sort of fringe doctrine.
Christendom informed the whole of western culture.
Samara Morgan
@Harold:
no, because of the internet and peer-to-peer social media.
its why the rise of third culture intellectuals is going to kill off conservatism.
Heather Mac wants to do exactly what Harold is talking about– preserve the Great Books curriculumn as a trans-generational transfer mechanism.
but this is the Age of Information. Anyone can be a sage.
psycholinguist
I’ll have what she’s having.
Tehanu
As various people have also said above: the GC courses aren’t bad at all. I’ve listened to a couple in the last year or so on my daily 30-mile, 50-minute commute; it beats trying to find something on the radio. The ones I had were general introductory lecture courses and quite interesting as far as they went. But they are NO FUCKING SUBSTITUTE for a real university education which includes lots of time hanging out at the library and reading far beyond any course syllabus.
Samara Morgan
@Tehanu: so?
that wasn’t freddies point.
freddies point is that Heather Mac is some sorta traitor to western tradition, thus the Plato ref.
She is being true to western tradition.
she is trying for cross-generational transfer of Dead White Guy failmemes.
you know….i expected better of you Levenson. freddie and i go back to culture 11. he is as fake as Gaga’s pen0r. His blog is called l’hote because he usta be a liberal.
but being liberal don’t pay.
hes just farming pageclicks on his way to a paid gig somewheres.
like one of your other favorites.
:)
burritoboy
“but like freddie, the christian clergy CHOSE what influences to incorporate.
For example, if christendom had included Ibn Arabi’s space-time models, we might have a working time machine by now.”
I’m not sure how individuals are going to incorporate influences without making some sort of decision or some kind of gating mechanism about what they’re doing. Of course medieval Christians aren’t going to be influenced by absolutely everything in Islam – that would mean they would become Muslims themselves! That, on the other hand, doesn’t prevent them from being heavily influenced by Islamic thinkers.
burritoboy
“all theory, no practice.
IPOF xianity and its sacred text were used to rationalize slavery, oppression of women, and randian economics IN PRACTICE.”
I’m confused – slavery really did end in Western Christendom for quite a few centuries. (Serfdom, while quite horrible, is not slavery). Slavery, in fact, has never ended in Islam.
The experiments in communal living really did happen. And there were quite a few of them, considering that monasteries, convents, hermitages and so on were common.
I’m really confused about your comments about slaves – Christians allowed slaves to become priests. Such a thing was incredibly shocking to Roman society. Generally, slaves were not even permitted to enter Roman temples and the priesthood was reserved for the most wealthy and powerful (Julius Caesar’s first big job was as Pontifex Maximus).
There was some reason that women were particularly attracted to Christianity (something both Christian and pagan authors highlight, though for different reasons). I suppose there are other potential reasons besides Christianity treating women better than the other religions of the time. I myself would argue that Christianity precisely did do that – and the female saints are hardly just imaginary (some of course were, but many weren’t). Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great didn’t invent their sister Macrina.
Samara Morgan
@burritoboy:
thats what i said, right?
i would not say “heavily influenced” though.
For example, the orientalists tried to “capture” Imam Ghazali by saying he was a crypto christian.
much like Darwin’s supposed death bed conversion.
Samara Morgan
@burritoboy: slaves and women are the initial adherents of all new religions. because they are the most oppressed.
this was also true in the origins of Islam.
the beginnings of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism.
christians allowed anyone to become priests. no training or formal education required. and they still do.
you seriously havent read anything about fertility cults and how that formed the worship of Mary?
Samara Morgan
this is off topic anyways.
i dont believe inter-faith discussion.
all humans are actually what they have the capacity to be.
if Allah intended for you to be something else, it would appear in your path.
freddie is the dishonest one here, not Heather Mac, in that he tries to pretend western tradition is not wholly shaped by the Dead White Guys she is pimping.
She is more faithful to the tropes of western tradition than he is.
It is not fake nostalgia– its real, and its mainstream.
unlike freddies quaint mewling about enlightenment principles informing western tradition.
Samara Morgan
@Nutella: she is just trying deligitimize “liberal academe”.
the real reason academe is painted blue is Salam-Douthat Stratification on Cognitive Ability.
kth
Quite apart from this essay, Heather MacDonald is one of the most horrific people plying the punditry trade today. Assuming she counts herself among the cultured, fat lot of humanizing influence it has had on her.
Harold
Melvyn Bragg’s “In our time” is also good.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
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It’s “thegrio” not “brio” and you shouldn’t judge that site based solely on ABL’s contribution.
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Harold
Samara, I don’t like the great books approach myself, especially the idea of a closed canon. That is because while translations are ok, it is better to read books in their original languages. Or to have some people who can, even if you can’t yourself. And it is a fallacy to think one can learn about books without a contextual or historical apparatus. However, a great books approach is better than not reading at all. I can see why people like it. One thing that bothers me about it is that it omits a lot of poetry and song, which I feel is such an important part of the human heritage.
Perhaps people can teach themselves using the internet. Perhaps not. Without knowledge of the past, they may find themselves in an eternal present, inventing the wheel over and over again.
Joe
I’m a big fan of the Great Courses. Let the record show that one of their courses on 14th-century European history is taught by a real by-god socialist from Cuba.
Lyrebird
Nice! And a column I can totally agree with, though it might go over better (and sting more) to refer to the original poster formally… unless you’re acquainted & happy to have her use your first name.
Lyrebird
@burritoboy: Nice work!!! And I think lots of us underestimate the revolutionary change from pre-Xian European marriage traditions for women to even have an *option* to not consent to a match.
Porlock Junior
@Steve:
“Honestly, if you went back 2000 years you’d probably find the same complaints about how kids today don’t spend time learning any of the useful stuff.”
Yes, that’s what Socrates said, with a different choice of words from “useful” but the same idea. Plus, did you know those lousy kids were disrespectful to their elders? Shocked, shocked!
BTW, can any of the people with an actual knowledge of the classics give me the reference for the Socrates screed? Been wanting it for years.
Porlock Junior
I have seen the degradation with my own eyes at my alma mater.
When I showed up at that scruffy radical hippie school — sorry, hippies hadn’t been invented, these were beatniks — the first thing we had to do was read the Iliad.
When my daughter went there forty years later, it had already changed: the kids were supposed to have finished reading the Iliad before classes started. Free copy provided by the school at the start of summer, IIRC. Gives more time for discussing it during the term.
And now they have simply overthrown all standards. They will be reading the Odyssey instead! Is nothing sacred?
(Oh, the kids now look much more respectable, to an extent almost worrisome. No longer do they say “Seediness is next to Reediness”; rather, they wear their nice T-shirts bearing the students’ motto “Communism, Atheism, Free Love”. Am I worried about the school’s declining standards? You decide.)
Harold
Oh dear Pan and all the other Gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him. –Socrates’ prayer
***
Wikipedia says that the purported quote from Socrates in which he complained of the manners of the young is a misattribution and was never uttered by him.
burritoboy
“the beginnings of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism.
christians allowed anyone to become priests. no training or formal education required. and they still do.”
There was no formal education system (in the sense of granting diplomas) for anyone at the time. There were, of course, schools, which Christians attended alongside of pagans. And Christians had their own schools, like Clement of Alexandria’s famed school in Alexandria. Very deep thinkers like Augustine, Athanasius, Basil the Great and many others were not just priests but bishops, in Augustine’s and Athanasius’ cases, they were bishops of some of the very largest cities in the world at the time.
Many Christians were uneducated, but many others had had the finest pagan educations available in their times.
Laura Clawson
Holy crap! Did not realize you were one of those deBoers and a fellow Wesleyan…ugh, is the only term for it fac brat?
Harold
One of the most off-putting things about Richard Dawkins, whom I otherwise admire, is that he supposedly said that nothing written before 1800 is worth reading. Well, he is a scientist. But there have been very intelligent people in all ages who said things that are still very much worth reading, I think. In Antiquity and the Middle ages most (but by no means all) happened to be men — Not all were from Europe. St. Augustine was an African, for example. Repositories in the Vatican are filled with manuscripts, even today, that have not been edited.