11 Temmuz 2012 Çarşamba
10 Temmuz 2012 Salı
9 Temmuz 2012 Pazartesi
"Summer Canal" (oil; 6" x 8")
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No, I didn't paint "Summer Canal" on location. It is murderously hot out there. Instead, I dug up a photo I took last September while taking a break during a plein-air painting session. I took a leisurely walk along the historic C & O Canal in Washington, DC. One of the pictures from my walk inspired "Autumn Bliss," in which I exaggerated the hints of autumnal colors to come up with a glorious fall landscape. For the new painting, I stayed with a cool palette. I need to stay cool, at least psychologically.
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| "Summer Canal" |
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| Reference photo |
No, I didn't paint "Summer Canal" on location. It is murderously hot out there. Instead, I dug up a photo I took last September while taking a break during a plein-air painting session. I took a leisurely walk along the historic C & O Canal in Washington, DC. One of the pictures from my walk inspired "Autumn Bliss," in which I exaggerated the hints of autumnal colors to come up with a glorious fall landscape. For the new painting, I stayed with a cool palette. I need to stay cool, at least psychologically.
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| "Autumn Bliss" (oil, 9 x 12") |
Fruity Focaccias
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I went on a baking binge after moving into a townhouse with 2 ovens. I've never been a baker, but I thought that I should give it a go anyways and make good use of my roommates as taste-testers.
Some of my favorite baked goods to come out of my binge were the sweet and savory focaccias topped with various fruits.
The first focaccia recipe I tried was with figs that grew from a tree in the backyard, sage, and some sauteed shallots. The following recipe is adapted from lick my balsamic.
Focaccia with Sage, Shallots, and Figs(Recipe Adapted from lick my balsamic)
3 cups flour1 2/3 cups room temp water2 1/4 teaspoon salt1 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast2 teaspoon sugar5 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil2 1/2 tablespoon sage leaves chopped3 shallot bulbs thinly slicedsea salt to taste
The only thing that I did differently than lick my balsamic is that I topped the focaccia with shallots that were sauteed in balsamic vinegar and a pinch of salt before popping the whole thing in the oven. I highly recommend the shallots if you have a savory tooth.
The dough from this recipe turned out wetter than I expected. When I tried to make indentations with my finger on top of the uncooked focaccia, the dough had the texture of mud. The result, however, was deliciously thick, fluffy, and moist. In contrast, the dough for the following grape and rosemary focaccia was thin, fragrant, and crunchy.
Grape and Rosemary Focaccia(Recipe Adapted from Smitten Kitchen)
3/4 cup warm water
2 tablespoons milk, slightly warmed
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 cups halved seedless grapes
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary needles
2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
Apart from not using concord grapes, I also didn't top the focaccia with course sugar. Otherwise, I followed Smitten Kitchen's recipe fairly closely.
The grape focaccia tastes amazing, but you better finish it quickly because it doesn't retain its crunch-and-chew ratio very well when reheated. The fig focaccia dough holds better when reheated.
I went on a baking binge after moving into a townhouse with 2 ovens. I've never been a baker, but I thought that I should give it a go anyways and make good use of my roommates as taste-testers.
Some of my favorite baked goods to come out of my binge were the sweet and savory focaccias topped with various fruits.
The first focaccia recipe I tried was with figs that grew from a tree in the backyard, sage, and some sauteed shallots. The following recipe is adapted from lick my balsamic.
Focaccia with Sage, Shallots, and Figs(Recipe Adapted from lick my balsamic)
3 cups flour1 2/3 cups room temp water2 1/4 teaspoon salt1 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast2 teaspoon sugar5 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil2 1/2 tablespoon sage leaves chopped3 shallot bulbs thinly slicedsea salt to taste
The only thing that I did differently than lick my balsamic is that I topped the focaccia with shallots that were sauteed in balsamic vinegar and a pinch of salt before popping the whole thing in the oven. I highly recommend the shallots if you have a savory tooth.
The dough from this recipe turned out wetter than I expected. When I tried to make indentations with my finger on top of the uncooked focaccia, the dough had the texture of mud. The result, however, was deliciously thick, fluffy, and moist. In contrast, the dough for the following grape and rosemary focaccia was thin, fragrant, and crunchy.
Grape and Rosemary Focaccia(Recipe Adapted from Smitten Kitchen)
3/4 cup warm water
2 tablespoons milk, slightly warmed
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 cups halved seedless grapes
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary needles
2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
Apart from not using concord grapes, I also didn't top the focaccia with course sugar. Otherwise, I followed Smitten Kitchen's recipe fairly closely.
The grape focaccia tastes amazing, but you better finish it quickly because it doesn't retain its crunch-and-chew ratio very well when reheated. The fig focaccia dough holds better when reheated.
Beet, Apple, and Cheddar Tarts
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When autumn arrived in DC, our ovens began working overtime!
Once I started seeing apples arrive en masse at Wegmans, I immediately wanted to cook with apples, but in more interesting ways than in pies. I figured that pairing beets with apple would be a good way to ease me into cooking with beets and do something creative with the good ol' apple. I've never cooked with beets before. Its earthy smell and intense red pigment intimidate me. Thankfully, I found the awesome tart recipe below from MarthaStewart.com.
Beet, Apple, and Cheddar Tarts(Recipe Adapted from Martha Stewart)
1 thinly sliced Empire apple1 thinly sliced red beet2 shallots sliced1 thawed frozen puff pastry3/4 cup shredded colby cheese1/2 tsp thymesalt and pepper to taste
I added shallots to the recipe to make the dish slightly more savory than the original.
I feel like this tart can be eaten as an appetizer, breakfast, entree, side, or dessert. Its size and flavors can fit in any course of a meal! I decided to reheat a couple of the tarts for dinner one evening to go with a bowl of homemade Tom Yum soup.
Beet, Apple, and Cheddar Tarts with Homemade Tom Yum Soup
When autumn arrived in DC, our ovens began working overtime!
Once I started seeing apples arrive en masse at Wegmans, I immediately wanted to cook with apples, but in more interesting ways than in pies. I figured that pairing beets with apple would be a good way to ease me into cooking with beets and do something creative with the good ol' apple. I've never cooked with beets before. Its earthy smell and intense red pigment intimidate me. Thankfully, I found the awesome tart recipe below from MarthaStewart.com.
Beet, Apple, and Cheddar Tarts(Recipe Adapted from Martha Stewart)
1 thinly sliced Empire apple1 thinly sliced red beet2 shallots sliced1 thawed frozen puff pastry3/4 cup shredded colby cheese1/2 tsp thymesalt and pepper to taste
I added shallots to the recipe to make the dish slightly more savory than the original.
I feel like this tart can be eaten as an appetizer, breakfast, entree, side, or dessert. Its size and flavors can fit in any course of a meal! I decided to reheat a couple of the tarts for dinner one evening to go with a bowl of homemade Tom Yum soup.
Beet, Apple, and Cheddar Tarts with Homemade Tom Yum SoupRay's Hell Burger
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I arrived in DC during the peak of summer, which happened to be the time of year when I seek out good burgers. I remember reading about Obama taking to Medvedev to Ray's Hell Burger earlier in 2010. I didn't get excited about the place until I read their menu, which is packed with luxurious toppings like roasted bone marrow with persillade!!!! How can you not get excited by that?
Decisions, Decisions!
Ray's Hell Burger Team
Strawberry Shake
Au Poivre Patty with Gouda and Cognac and Sherry Sauteed Mushrooms
Unfortunately, by the time I arrived at Ray's for an early bird dinner, they had already run out of bone marrow for the day. Utterly downtrodden by that, I comforted myself with an awesome complimentary topping - cognac and sherry sauteed mushrooms - and paid extra for gouda.
The burger was hearty, flavorful, and juicy, but it's truly humongous. I couldn't finish all of it, and burgers just don't taste right reheated. I recommend sharing with a buddy at Ray's to avoid wasting the delicious and pricey burger.
I arrived in DC during the peak of summer, which happened to be the time of year when I seek out good burgers. I remember reading about Obama taking to Medvedev to Ray's Hell Burger earlier in 2010. I didn't get excited about the place until I read their menu, which is packed with luxurious toppings like roasted bone marrow with persillade!!!! How can you not get excited by that?
Decisions, Decisions!Ray's Hell Burger TeamStrawberry ShakeAu Poivre Patty with Gouda and Cognac and Sherry Sauteed MushroomsUnfortunately, by the time I arrived at Ray's for an early bird dinner, they had already run out of bone marrow for the day. Utterly downtrodden by that, I comforted myself with an awesome complimentary topping - cognac and sherry sauteed mushrooms - and paid extra for gouda.
The burger was hearty, flavorful, and juicy, but it's truly humongous. I couldn't finish all of it, and burgers just don't taste right reheated. I recommend sharing with a buddy at Ray's to avoid wasting the delicious and pricey burger.
Madeleines!
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I couldn't resist buying a madeleine pan once I decided to go on my DC baking binge. I only managed to make 2 kinds of madeleines before departing, but I will definitely be making more once I get settled in Madison. I'm eyeing matcha madeleine recipes right now...
My first madeleines were not quite as successful as I wanted. I forgot to add honey so my lavender madeleines turned out on the dry side. Luckily Jamie made delicious chai for us to dip the madeleines in. The lavender butter was tremendous though. I would definitely apply the technique of melting butter with lavender in other recipes. The smell is irresistible!
Lavender Madeleines(Recipe Adapted from PurpleFoodie)
Melting butter with lavender
Ready for the oven
Lavender madeleines with chai
My second batch of madeleines was much more successful because, well, I didn't forget any steps, and the parmesan helped make the madeleines both moist on the inside and slightly crunchy on the outside. Instead of ground pepper called for in the Williams-Sonoma recipe, I added cayenne pepper because I love the bit of tang it has that's lacking in black pepper.
Rosemary-Parmesan Madeleines(Recipe Adapted from Williams-Sonoma)
Rosemary-Parmesan Spicy Madeleines
I couldn't resist buying a madeleine pan once I decided to go on my DC baking binge. I only managed to make 2 kinds of madeleines before departing, but I will definitely be making more once I get settled in Madison. I'm eyeing matcha madeleine recipes right now...
My first madeleines were not quite as successful as I wanted. I forgot to add honey so my lavender madeleines turned out on the dry side. Luckily Jamie made delicious chai for us to dip the madeleines in. The lavender butter was tremendous though. I would definitely apply the technique of melting butter with lavender in other recipes. The smell is irresistible!
Lavender Madeleines(Recipe Adapted from PurpleFoodie)
Melting butter with lavenderReady for the ovenLavender madeleines with chaiMy second batch of madeleines was much more successful because, well, I didn't forget any steps, and the parmesan helped make the madeleines both moist on the inside and slightly crunchy on the outside. Instead of ground pepper called for in the Williams-Sonoma recipe, I added cayenne pepper because I love the bit of tang it has that's lacking in black pepper.
Rosemary-Parmesan Madeleines(Recipe Adapted from Williams-Sonoma)
Rosemary-Parmesan Spicy Madeleines
8 Temmuz 2012 Pazar
Religious Liberty?
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Vast and even incalculable quantities of ink have already been spilled over the issue of the HHS mandate that religious organizations purchase contraception as part of their compliance with the Obama health care plan. It would seem that little remains to be said.
I have read and pondered this issue as it has unfolded. I have signed a document, with many other scholars, objecting to the recent "compromise" on the grounds that it does not resolve the basic issue of forcing a religious institution to provide a service that is incompatible with its doctrine and belief. I am largely in agreement that this issue represents a profound and disturbing encroachment upon the internal ordering of religious organizations.
However, I am disquieted by the way in which the issue has largely been framed - not only by the Left, but perhaps more by the Right. The Right has sought to defend "religious liberty" on the grounds that the HHS mandate would represent an abrogation of the First Amendment's right to "free exercise" and that it would violate the "conscience" of religious adherents. By these appeals to the "rights" of religious organizations to hold certain religious beliefs - whatever those may be - and by an appeal to "conscience" informing that belief - no matter what it may hold - critics of the HHS policy have framed their response in the dominant privatistic language of liberalism. Their defense rests on the inscrutability and sanctity of private religious belief. It borrows strongly from sources of private religious devotion that lays no claim to public witness, in keeping with liberalism's dominant mode of allowing acceptable religious practice so long as it remains outside the public square. The appeal to conscience, while lodged at the level of institutional belief, subjects itself easily to the same claim by adherents within that religious order who might similarly object to a religious mandate (e.g., the prohibition on artificial birth control) on grounds of "conscience" to aspects of that belief (think Martin Luther. Or Andrew Sullivan.). The public response of critics of the mandate essentially cede to liberalism most of the ground that they would need to mount a serious case against the individualizing, relativizing and subjective claims that lie at the heart of the mandate and, more broadly, liberalism itself.
More than a few commentators have noted that this issue seems particularly oriented toward and at the Catholic Church. While some wags have questioned why other religious traditions don't seem to have a problem with other aspects of the mandate (e.g., Christian Scientists haven't risen up in objection to coverage of blood transfusions), frank speech requires acknowledgement of a more fundamental truth: from its earliest articulation, liberalism has set its sights on the rout of Catholic Christendom. Liberalism was fundamentally animated by a deep philosophical and theological objection to Catholicism - and, until recent times, vice-versa. Debate over the HHS mandate should be understood in its broadest context: the longstanding effort to wholly remake society in the image and likeness of liberal philosophy. That philosophy holds at its core that humans are by nature free, autonomous and independent, bound only by positive law that seeks to regulate physical behavior that results in physical harm to others (and, increasingly, selves). Liberal people should not be bound by any limitation upon their natural freedom that does not cause harm (mainly physical harm) to another human; otherwise, the State should be indifferent ("neutral") to any claims regarding the nature of the "the Good." Liberalism seeks to secure legal structures governing "Right" - procedures ensuring fairness with an aim to protecting (and expanding) the sphere of individual liberty while balancing claims regarding the "harms" of some individual practices (e.g., liberalism seeks to limit some harmful activities of the market at the edges while leaving its basic structure intact).
Liberalism understood from the outset that it could not abide any religious tradition that sought to influence the order of society based upon its conception of "the Good." "Private" belief could be tolerated: such belief would extend only to the immediate adherents of that faith; its adherents had to personally choose their allegiance to that faith; and any faith commitment would be the result of voluntarist choice and thus, a chosen self-limitation on the part of the faithful. Famously in his "Letter Concerning Toleration," John Locke refused to extend toleration practically to only one faith - Catholicism. His claim was that toleration could not be extended to any faith that acknowledged a "foreign potentate," which, for all practical purposes, meant the Pope. But, it requires a peculiar set of assumptions to conclude that the Pope is a "foreign potentate" - while the Pope does not claim political rule over Catholics, the Pope is the final arbiter of doctrine that is to govern not only the private behavior of Catholics, but their role and witness in the world. It is no coincidence that many of the cases involving "religious liberty" now involve Catholics, inasmuch as Catholics have erected worldly institutions in the effort to live out the witness of their faith - schools, universities, hospitals, charities, and the like. The Catholic faith is, by definition, not "private"; it involves a conception of the human Good that in turn requires efforts to instantiate that understanding in the world. As such, Catholics represent a threat to the liberal order, which demands that people check their faith at the door and acknowledge only one sovereign in the realm of proscribing public behavior - the State.
Catholics begin with a fundamentally different understanding of the human person than liberalism. We are not by nature "free and independent"; we are, rather, members of the Body of Christ. In the natural law understanding, we are by nature "political and social animals" (so states Aquinas, following and amending Aristotle), requiring law, culture and religion for our flourishing and right ordering. The law does not simply seek to regulate and prevent bodies from committing harm; rather, the law necessarily derives from, and seeks to advance, a positive vision of human good and human flourishing. The law reinforces the Divine law, seeking the restraint not only of practices that will harm others, but which will tend toward a condition of sin and self-destruction. Even where the law is "silent," we are not at leave simply to act as we wish; rather, we are admonished to live in accordance with and by the practice of virtue necessary to human flourishing. A polity based upon securing "the Right" is radically insufficient; rather, the polity is understood to be a reinforcement of efforts to orient people toward "the Good." While the Church and State necessarily operate in different spheres, the State's activities are oriented by the vision "the Good" articulated by Church and God's word.
Critics of the HHS mandate have framed their responses to the mandate within liberal terms. This is doubtless a requirement and necessity in contemporary liberal society - to gain a hearing at the table of public opinion, and especially the Courts, arguments must be framed in dominantly liberal terms. Thus, critics of the Mandate have sought to craft their response by claiming that the Church's internal beliefs will be violated by the Mandate, that the Mandate represents an encroachment upon "conscience." Critics of the Mandate thus downplay and even ignore the content of the belief in question; they rally around the protections of conscience, claiming a sphere toward which the State should manifest indifference, in which they should not meddle. The nature of the belief is largely irrelevant for the sake of the claim. Many of the Mandate's critics (especially non-Catholics) claim that they regard the Church's view on birth-control to be somewhat batty, but that fact is irrelevant to the Constitutional issue protecting private institutional conscience and free-exercise. Catholic critics don't depart much, at all, from this same argument.*
Catholic as well as non-Catholic defenders have largely sought to hold at arms length any claims about the rightness or truth of the Church's teachings on birth control: these are to be treated as belief within a "black box" that should be ignored by liberal society. As long as those crazy beliefs don't harm individuals within or beyond the faith tradition, then they should be accorded respect and indifference by the State. The Church seeks the leave of the State on the only terms recognizable by the liberal state: we have a certain set of private beliefs that aren't harming anyone. Leave us alone, and we'll be quiet.
However, everyone is aware, even if dimly, of the real issue, though few explicitly raise the matter. The Church does not seek to propound its teachings as a matter of internal belief solely for its faith adherents: it claims that its teachings are true as a matter of human good. The teachings regarding birth control are not simply a peculiar faith tradition that is thought to apply to adherents of Catholicism; it is a teaching that Catholicism hopes and intends to be adopted by all people, regardless of their faith tradition. The strictures concerning birth control are not propounded as a "faith-based" peculiarity applicable only to Catholics, like Jewish dietary laws, but as a considered position concerning the Church's deepest understanding of the human good - one that can be, and has been, framed in terms that are intended to be accessible and persuasive to non-Catholics. Among other reasons offered, the adoption of a birth control concerns a practice that Catholicism has understood to entail profound social consequences that, when widely practiced, leads to profoundly damaging social practices.
The Church's argument - made at a time when it was believed by many that the Church had no choice but to update itself to be relevant to changing times - was articulated forcefully by Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical "Humanae Vitae," and is addressed not only to Catholics, but to "all men of good will." As nicely summarized recently by Brendan Patrick Dougherty and Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry, Humanae Vitae articulated four discrete areas of social and political concern that they believed would become manifest widespread use of birth control:
1. General lowering of moral standards
2. A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
3. The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men
4. Government coercion in reproductive matters
The first three - unarguably evident in our time - concern the social implications of transforming sexuality from its intimate and natural link to reproduction to a "recreational," hedonic activity. The Church understood that the cumulative decisions of individuals - not intended to "harm" anyone - would nevertheless lead to manifest and extensive social ills. Liberalism begins and ends with the view that individual choice is paramount, and social costs can and should be redressed by government alone, leaving as much latitude possible to individual satisfaction of desire; Catholicism (echoing Aristotle) holds that society is an intricately woven fabric in which autonomous actions aimed at the satisfaction of individual desire will often prove destructive of that fabric. The Church holds this to be the case in all realms of human activitiy - sexual as well as economic, a point that is too often missed by American Catholics who allow their partisan identities to define their understanding of their faith (are those who oppose abortion and pornography any less "Social Justice Catholics"?). Liberalism holds that the State must be indifferent to the personal choices of individuals; Catholicism holds certain choices not only to be inherently wrong (even if they do not result in the immediate and evident harm of others), but, over time and cumulatively, socially destructive.
The last area of concern is perhaps even more difficult to grasp in an intuitive fashion than the first three. The last claims that the widespread adoption of birth control will eventually entail government coercion in support of its use. The Church understood - long before this tendency became evident - that liberalism was finally incapable of "indifference" toward the choices of individuals, particularly when those choices involved the limitation of individual autonomy, and particularly when any such limitation occurred in the context not of organizations that stressed individual choice, but rather asserted the preeminence of conceptions of the Good that commended practices of self-limitation. In short, liberalism would finally reveal its "partiality" toward autonomy by forcing institutions with an opposing worldview to conform to liberalism's assumptions. Liberalism would seek actively to "liberate" individuals from oppressive structures, even at the point of requiring such liberalism at the point of a legal mandate and even a gun.
The response of American Catholics to the HHS mandate has (perhaps necessarily) been framed in dominantly liberal terms that give it a chance of receiving a hearing in today's public sphere and within its Courts. But it should be acknowledged (as the response to the "Compromise" reveals) that the Church will ultimately lose the argument simply due to the fact that the way it is framed already represents a capitulation to liberal premises. Doubtless, an argument that stated more explicitly the Church's opposition to birth control would be even more quickly dismissed (but, first, caricatured and mocked) than the current invocation of "religious freedom." But, the real debate is not over religious freedom, in fact: it is over the very nature of humanity and the way in which we order our polities and societies. Catholicism is one of the few remaining voices of principle and depth that can articulate an forceful and learned alternative to today's dominant liberal worldview. That it truncates those arguments for the sake of prudential engagement in a contemporary skirmish should not shroud the nature of the deeper conflict. That conflict will continue apace, and Catholics do themselves no favors if they do not understand the true nature of the battle, and the fact that current arguments aid and abet their opponent.
___________________________
*See, for instance, an interview in today's Washington Post with William Thierfelder, President of Belmont Abbey College, in which he states "We’re not trying to tell anybody else how to live their lives. I, personally, I would hope people don’t seek abortions, but we’re not saying that. We’re being asked to violate our religious beliefs in our Catholic home." If this is the case, then my response is similar to Flannery O'Connor's retort to the fashionable notion that transubstantiation was only a metaphor: "What's the point?"
I have read and pondered this issue as it has unfolded. I have signed a document, with many other scholars, objecting to the recent "compromise" on the grounds that it does not resolve the basic issue of forcing a religious institution to provide a service that is incompatible with its doctrine and belief. I am largely in agreement that this issue represents a profound and disturbing encroachment upon the internal ordering of religious organizations.
However, I am disquieted by the way in which the issue has largely been framed - not only by the Left, but perhaps more by the Right. The Right has sought to defend "religious liberty" on the grounds that the HHS mandate would represent an abrogation of the First Amendment's right to "free exercise" and that it would violate the "conscience" of religious adherents. By these appeals to the "rights" of religious organizations to hold certain religious beliefs - whatever those may be - and by an appeal to "conscience" informing that belief - no matter what it may hold - critics of the HHS policy have framed their response in the dominant privatistic language of liberalism. Their defense rests on the inscrutability and sanctity of private religious belief. It borrows strongly from sources of private religious devotion that lays no claim to public witness, in keeping with liberalism's dominant mode of allowing acceptable religious practice so long as it remains outside the public square. The appeal to conscience, while lodged at the level of institutional belief, subjects itself easily to the same claim by adherents within that religious order who might similarly object to a religious mandate (e.g., the prohibition on artificial birth control) on grounds of "conscience" to aspects of that belief (think Martin Luther. Or Andrew Sullivan.). The public response of critics of the mandate essentially cede to liberalism most of the ground that they would need to mount a serious case against the individualizing, relativizing and subjective claims that lie at the heart of the mandate and, more broadly, liberalism itself.
More than a few commentators have noted that this issue seems particularly oriented toward and at the Catholic Church. While some wags have questioned why other religious traditions don't seem to have a problem with other aspects of the mandate (e.g., Christian Scientists haven't risen up in objection to coverage of blood transfusions), frank speech requires acknowledgement of a more fundamental truth: from its earliest articulation, liberalism has set its sights on the rout of Catholic Christendom. Liberalism was fundamentally animated by a deep philosophical and theological objection to Catholicism - and, until recent times, vice-versa. Debate over the HHS mandate should be understood in its broadest context: the longstanding effort to wholly remake society in the image and likeness of liberal philosophy. That philosophy holds at its core that humans are by nature free, autonomous and independent, bound only by positive law that seeks to regulate physical behavior that results in physical harm to others (and, increasingly, selves). Liberal people should not be bound by any limitation upon their natural freedom that does not cause harm (mainly physical harm) to another human; otherwise, the State should be indifferent ("neutral") to any claims regarding the nature of the "the Good." Liberalism seeks to secure legal structures governing "Right" - procedures ensuring fairness with an aim to protecting (and expanding) the sphere of individual liberty while balancing claims regarding the "harms" of some individual practices (e.g., liberalism seeks to limit some harmful activities of the market at the edges while leaving its basic structure intact).
Liberalism understood from the outset that it could not abide any religious tradition that sought to influence the order of society based upon its conception of "the Good." "Private" belief could be tolerated: such belief would extend only to the immediate adherents of that faith; its adherents had to personally choose their allegiance to that faith; and any faith commitment would be the result of voluntarist choice and thus, a chosen self-limitation on the part of the faithful. Famously in his "Letter Concerning Toleration," John Locke refused to extend toleration practically to only one faith - Catholicism. His claim was that toleration could not be extended to any faith that acknowledged a "foreign potentate," which, for all practical purposes, meant the Pope. But, it requires a peculiar set of assumptions to conclude that the Pope is a "foreign potentate" - while the Pope does not claim political rule over Catholics, the Pope is the final arbiter of doctrine that is to govern not only the private behavior of Catholics, but their role and witness in the world. It is no coincidence that many of the cases involving "religious liberty" now involve Catholics, inasmuch as Catholics have erected worldly institutions in the effort to live out the witness of their faith - schools, universities, hospitals, charities, and the like. The Catholic faith is, by definition, not "private"; it involves a conception of the human Good that in turn requires efforts to instantiate that understanding in the world. As such, Catholics represent a threat to the liberal order, which demands that people check their faith at the door and acknowledge only one sovereign in the realm of proscribing public behavior - the State.
Catholics begin with a fundamentally different understanding of the human person than liberalism. We are not by nature "free and independent"; we are, rather, members of the Body of Christ. In the natural law understanding, we are by nature "political and social animals" (so states Aquinas, following and amending Aristotle), requiring law, culture and religion for our flourishing and right ordering. The law does not simply seek to regulate and prevent bodies from committing harm; rather, the law necessarily derives from, and seeks to advance, a positive vision of human good and human flourishing. The law reinforces the Divine law, seeking the restraint not only of practices that will harm others, but which will tend toward a condition of sin and self-destruction. Even where the law is "silent," we are not at leave simply to act as we wish; rather, we are admonished to live in accordance with and by the practice of virtue necessary to human flourishing. A polity based upon securing "the Right" is radically insufficient; rather, the polity is understood to be a reinforcement of efforts to orient people toward "the Good." While the Church and State necessarily operate in different spheres, the State's activities are oriented by the vision "the Good" articulated by Church and God's word.
Critics of the HHS mandate have framed their responses to the mandate within liberal terms. This is doubtless a requirement and necessity in contemporary liberal society - to gain a hearing at the table of public opinion, and especially the Courts, arguments must be framed in dominantly liberal terms. Thus, critics of the Mandate have sought to craft their response by claiming that the Church's internal beliefs will be violated by the Mandate, that the Mandate represents an encroachment upon "conscience." Critics of the Mandate thus downplay and even ignore the content of the belief in question; they rally around the protections of conscience, claiming a sphere toward which the State should manifest indifference, in which they should not meddle. The nature of the belief is largely irrelevant for the sake of the claim. Many of the Mandate's critics (especially non-Catholics) claim that they regard the Church's view on birth-control to be somewhat batty, but that fact is irrelevant to the Constitutional issue protecting private institutional conscience and free-exercise. Catholic critics don't depart much, at all, from this same argument.*
Catholic as well as non-Catholic defenders have largely sought to hold at arms length any claims about the rightness or truth of the Church's teachings on birth control: these are to be treated as belief within a "black box" that should be ignored by liberal society. As long as those crazy beliefs don't harm individuals within or beyond the faith tradition, then they should be accorded respect and indifference by the State. The Church seeks the leave of the State on the only terms recognizable by the liberal state: we have a certain set of private beliefs that aren't harming anyone. Leave us alone, and we'll be quiet.
However, everyone is aware, even if dimly, of the real issue, though few explicitly raise the matter. The Church does not seek to propound its teachings as a matter of internal belief solely for its faith adherents: it claims that its teachings are true as a matter of human good. The teachings regarding birth control are not simply a peculiar faith tradition that is thought to apply to adherents of Catholicism; it is a teaching that Catholicism hopes and intends to be adopted by all people, regardless of their faith tradition. The strictures concerning birth control are not propounded as a "faith-based" peculiarity applicable only to Catholics, like Jewish dietary laws, but as a considered position concerning the Church's deepest understanding of the human good - one that can be, and has been, framed in terms that are intended to be accessible and persuasive to non-Catholics. Among other reasons offered, the adoption of a birth control concerns a practice that Catholicism has understood to entail profound social consequences that, when widely practiced, leads to profoundly damaging social practices.
The Church's argument - made at a time when it was believed by many that the Church had no choice but to update itself to be relevant to changing times - was articulated forcefully by Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical "Humanae Vitae," and is addressed not only to Catholics, but to "all men of good will." As nicely summarized recently by Brendan Patrick Dougherty and Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry, Humanae Vitae articulated four discrete areas of social and political concern that they believed would become manifest widespread use of birth control:
1. General lowering of moral standards
2. A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
3. The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men
4. Government coercion in reproductive matters
The first three - unarguably evident in our time - concern the social implications of transforming sexuality from its intimate and natural link to reproduction to a "recreational," hedonic activity. The Church understood that the cumulative decisions of individuals - not intended to "harm" anyone - would nevertheless lead to manifest and extensive social ills. Liberalism begins and ends with the view that individual choice is paramount, and social costs can and should be redressed by government alone, leaving as much latitude possible to individual satisfaction of desire; Catholicism (echoing Aristotle) holds that society is an intricately woven fabric in which autonomous actions aimed at the satisfaction of individual desire will often prove destructive of that fabric. The Church holds this to be the case in all realms of human activitiy - sexual as well as economic, a point that is too often missed by American Catholics who allow their partisan identities to define their understanding of their faith (are those who oppose abortion and pornography any less "Social Justice Catholics"?). Liberalism holds that the State must be indifferent to the personal choices of individuals; Catholicism holds certain choices not only to be inherently wrong (even if they do not result in the immediate and evident harm of others), but, over time and cumulatively, socially destructive.
The last area of concern is perhaps even more difficult to grasp in an intuitive fashion than the first three. The last claims that the widespread adoption of birth control will eventually entail government coercion in support of its use. The Church understood - long before this tendency became evident - that liberalism was finally incapable of "indifference" toward the choices of individuals, particularly when those choices involved the limitation of individual autonomy, and particularly when any such limitation occurred in the context not of organizations that stressed individual choice, but rather asserted the preeminence of conceptions of the Good that commended practices of self-limitation. In short, liberalism would finally reveal its "partiality" toward autonomy by forcing institutions with an opposing worldview to conform to liberalism's assumptions. Liberalism would seek actively to "liberate" individuals from oppressive structures, even at the point of requiring such liberalism at the point of a legal mandate and even a gun.
The response of American Catholics to the HHS mandate has (perhaps necessarily) been framed in dominantly liberal terms that give it a chance of receiving a hearing in today's public sphere and within its Courts. But it should be acknowledged (as the response to the "Compromise" reveals) that the Church will ultimately lose the argument simply due to the fact that the way it is framed already represents a capitulation to liberal premises. Doubtless, an argument that stated more explicitly the Church's opposition to birth control would be even more quickly dismissed (but, first, caricatured and mocked) than the current invocation of "religious freedom." But, the real debate is not over religious freedom, in fact: it is over the very nature of humanity and the way in which we order our polities and societies. Catholicism is one of the few remaining voices of principle and depth that can articulate an forceful and learned alternative to today's dominant liberal worldview. That it truncates those arguments for the sake of prudential engagement in a contemporary skirmish should not shroud the nature of the deeper conflict. That conflict will continue apace, and Catholics do themselves no favors if they do not understand the true nature of the battle, and the fact that current arguments aid and abet their opponent.
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*See, for instance, an interview in today's Washington Post with William Thierfelder, President of Belmont Abbey College, in which he states "We’re not trying to tell anybody else how to live their lives. I, personally, I would hope people don’t seek abortions, but we’re not saying that. We’re being asked to violate our religious beliefs in our Catholic home." If this is the case, then my response is similar to Flannery O'Connor's retort to the fashionable notion that transubstantiation was only a metaphor: "What's the point?"
Our Libertarian Future
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I was invited by the good people at "Minding the Campus" to write a response to the recently released 2011 American Freshman Survey. My brief essay is now available on their website. My main point:
What the data also demonstrates is [not only an increase in libertarian toleration, but] a keen and intense emphasis on the self. Today's students simultaneously urge toleration toward others, but also expect to be left alone. Their overarching emphasis upon individual achievement--particularly in the area of career advancement--suggests that the message of "toleration" and "diversity" seamlessly co-exists with a self-centered focus on material success and personal lifestyle autonomy. At risk is a cultivated belief in civic membership, a sense of shared fate and even forms of self-sacrifice.
One telling aspect of the survey has, to my knowledge, received no attention: while 72.3% state that the "chief benefit of college is to increase one's earning power," only 2% of current college graduates are enrolled in an ROTC or other military program. While likely career choices are fragmented among many possible choices (with the largest numbers of responses clustering around the choices of engineer, physician and business, together totaling 28%), only 1.5% responded that they foresaw a military career; 0.9% intended to enter government or public policy; and .1% stated an intention to become a member of the clergy. As many respondents indicated a likely future of unemployment (1.5%) as those willing to serve in the military!
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Several disquieting questions should come to mind: what kinds of citizens will these people grow up to be? What kinds of parents and what kinds of neighbors? They will likely be willing to leave other people alone--but will they care about others? Will they love? Will they serve? Will they sacrifice? According Charles Murray in his recent book Coming Apart, it is the upper classes (which will be composed by the students in this survey) that have largely abandoned any idea of trusteeship and moral and civic responsibility toward those who have not won the meritocratic sweepstakes. The survey suggests that this divide will only deepen in coming years.
I fear that we are not ushering in a utopia of toleration and sensitivity, but one of indifference and self-absorption. Today's young people have deeply absorbed the lessons that have been taught them by their elders. Do we truly think a civilization can persist when it teaches its young that the most important thing in life is indifference toward others and that the means to happiness is earning the most money?
Seven Years
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Seven years ago today, my teacher and friend, Wilson Carey McWilliams, passed away. I miss his gentle wisdom and bear hugs; his gravelly voice and uproarious stories; his invitations to sip bourbon as the sun descends toward ground.
We need his voice more than ever. Here is an excerpt from an essay entitled "Religion, Morality, and Public Life," re-published in the recent collection of Carey's essays The Democratic Soul. The essay was written in 1999, but still rings as true today as when it was written over a decade ago.
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Recquiscat in pace, my friend.
Seven years ago today, my teacher and friend, Wilson Carey McWilliams, passed away. I miss his gentle wisdom and bear hugs; his gravelly voice and uproarious stories; his invitations to sip bourbon as the sun descends toward ground.
We need his voice more than ever. Here is an excerpt from an essay entitled "Religion, Morality, and Public Life," re-published in the recent collection of Carey's essays The Democratic Soul. The essay was written in 1999, but still rings as true today as when it was written over a decade ago.
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In contemporary practice, the moral picture is not entirely bleak. Despite much uneasiness and more posturing, there have been gains in the relations between the races and the genders, and many old abuses are now subject to sanction. And religion, if it needs saying, provides support for the decencies and for some sense of obligation. But the temple, if standing, is in need of repair, especially since so many of the institutional pillars of the Framers' moral design have been unsettled or pulled down.
That states and local governments are now held to the essentially secular standards of national law would inspire some sympathy among the Framers, although the Supreme Court's insistence on the "wall of separation"—rendered almost go labyrinthine by the Court's opinions--goes far beyond the understanding and practice of the founding generation.
It is a matter for greater concern that the institutions of civil society have been so thoroughly penetrated and reshaped—and often shattered—by economics, technology, and the "hidden curriculum" of the media. In the new order of things, indignity is commonplace: the media confront us with superstars, just as the market disproportionately rewards elites; by comparison, the intermediate dignities offered by local communities seem tawdry. This perception is strengthened by the fact that localities--and with them, a good many personal relationships--increasingly are exposed to mobility and change, transient connections to which we are apt to limit our liability.
Despite general prosperity, economics adds desperations, weakening our already slender resources of trust and moral community. Inequality is escalating, with the middle class recently losing ground to both rich and poor. The vogue of "outsourcing" and "downsizing" makes jobs feel insecure, even in good times. Responding in kind, Kristin Downey Grimsley reports, employees are becoming less loyal to the firm or to their fellows, resulting in a workplace that may be "leaner," but is surely "meaner."
It is hardly surprising, consequently, that so many Americans are hesitant or half-hearted about commitments, or that they seek solace in immediate or short-term gratifications, inclinations evident even in the seats of power. It is also understandable that we are tempted to treat market forces as if they were autonomous and irresistible, partly because doing so saves us from the burden of responsibility, allowing us a more or less guiltless pursuit of interests and enjoyments. But conceding sovereignty to the market leaves us only the consumer's passive freedom to make choices, rather than having a say in defining what is choice-worthy. All of these retreats from society, politics, and faith diminish us, so that more and more Americans seem to be looking, sometimes furiously and sometimes wistfully, for what is missing.
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Recquiscat in pace, my friend.
Against Great Books
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I make available, below, the text of a lecture I delivered in November, 2011, at University of Texas at Austin. My thanks to the Jefferson Center and Tom and Lorraine Pangle for the invitation. My suggested title was "Against Great Books," but it was billed instead as "Why Great Books." You will see why the distinction is important. Be forewarned that it is a lengthy post - about 16 manuscript pages.
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Against Great Books
Patrick J. Deneen
Georgetown University
The proposed title of my lecture tonight was not “Why Great Books?,” but “Against Great Books.” I was advised that this might be too pugnacious, and a more modest title was suggested. My intention from the outset – if not wholly captured in the current title – is polemical, and I have not abandoned that ambition as readily as I abandoned the original title. I hope to raise questions about, if not books that are great, about books that promote a certain kind of Greatness. I do so in order to defend the reading of books and the ideal of liberal education, which means that we may need to be somewhat more discriminating in our recommendation of Great Books. For, there are Great Books that defend the reading of books, and Great Books that reject a book-centered education. The arguments of these latter sort have increasingly won the day – ironically, it is a set of Great Books that have contributed to the decline of the study of Great Books. If we seek to defend a program in the Great Books, we will need to inquire more fully into the ideas – advanced in some number of those books – that have powerfully transformed not only institutions of learning, but our civilization, increasingly to regard “Great Books” as an antiquated and useless pursuit. I will argue that those of us who customarily or habitually defend “The Great Books” need to reflect more extensively on the very notion of “greatness” and its relationship to a form of education that increasingly regards the teaching of “great books” – or the humanities more broadly – to be irrelevant. Above all, we need to be willing to call attention to books – and their authors – who have contributed to a trajectory in education that today has humanistic education on the ropes.
I want to begin by stipulating that many would commend the teaching of great – or “core” texts – in order to provide something more than the exercise of “critical thinking.” Across the academy today a consensus has been reached that, while we may radically disagree on the basic elements of a curriculum and hardly discuss what texts or even courses would be required of an educated human being, that we can all agree that the object of a course of study at the university-level is the cultivation of “critical thinking.” I have served on countless academic committees in which people of widely differing views about curriculum and courses all universally and enthusiastically assent to the idea that we should be promoting “critical thinking” in our classrooms. I have concluded that the only idea that is apparently impervious to “critical thinking” is the shared goal of “critical thinking”: no-one quite knows what it is, but we can all agree that we want our students to be able to do it.
Yet, many recognize that “critical thinking” is a weak hook on which to hang a justification of a program in “Great” or “core” texts. The advantage of justifying a curriculum around the banner of “critical thinking” is that its content can remain underdetermined: we seek a common, contentless outcome, and so any text or even experience that promotes a way of “thinking critically” becomes acceptable as an academic exercise. Push-pins is equal to Homer; that is, so long as push-pins can be claimed to foster critical thinking. After the ferocious curriculum battles of the 1980s – which included the Reverand Jesse Jackson marching on the campus of Stanford University yelling through a bull-horn, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ. has got to go” – it was with an almost audible sigh of relief that academics latched onto “critical thinking” as a contentless goal that allowed the responsible parties of the nation’s universities to lay down their arms and embrace the common project of cultivating a thinking style. We agreed that a university education was no longer about teaching some thing – rather, it was an agreement to teach a way of thinking critically about any thing.
A defense of an education in the Great Books often requires something more, one that does not shy away from a claim about the aim of education. The more robust claim is that these texts teach something substantive: not merely a way of thinking (though it may do this – after all the Jefferson Center itself claims that a course of study in Core Texts will foster skills in “critical reasoning, close reading, and clear, cogent writing”), but rather, a particular and substantive set of conclusions that make the teaching of these texts – as opposed to any texts or lessons – essential and necessary. This too seems to be the conclusion of the Jefferson Center, which highlights that an education in the core texts has as its aim the teaching of liberty: “The aim of the Thomas Jefferson Center is to realize Jefferson's vision of educating citizens and leaders to understand the meaning of liberty and to exercise it wisely.” Thus, a program like the Jefferson Center has drawn a preliminary conclusion about the nature and substance of the lessons taught by the Great Books – that they teach something about liberty, and that these books – rather than any books – are the source of a particular kind of necessary knowledge about the nature of liberty essential to a citizen in a modern liberal democracy.
I will have more to say about this claim regarding liberty toward the end of my lecture, but I want merely to stress that the Great Books are recommended in this latter case because they have something to teach us, and that we should read them for more than merely for a training in “critical thinking” or even because knowledge of these texts familiarizes students with books they should read to be able to claim that they are educated, but because they will have an impact on the way that we live our lives and organize our common world together. Of course, I think this is correct, and I would even argue that part of the central necessity of the Great Books is not only because those who read them can encounter and be influenced by their arguments, but because, at their most expansive, they have had a considerable role in shaping human society – even the lives of people who did not read the books. As parts of broader culture from which they at once take sustenance, and which they in turn influence, the ideas in the Great Books have shaped a world in their image and guided not only individuals, but a whole civilization, in fostering a way of life.
I have in mind something like the following passage by the Kentucky author Wendell Berry, in a novel entitled Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006). In the passage, a young Andy Catlett (who is most likely a fictionalized version of Berry himself) is observing his grandmother making a raspberry pie. Written from the perspective of an older Andy recollecting a morning in his grandmother’s kitchen, he writes,
I find a few things striking about this passage. First, an adult Catlett is able to understand better things of his youth, and the world that he inhabited, through the lens of a Great Book. Secondly, he surmises, and probably correctly, that while his grandmother probably did not read Paradise Lost, that it was a book that indirectly influenced her worldview. And, third, that the dissemination of the content of Great Books, even if indirectly known to a great many, nevertheless seemed to shape a worldview not only of individuals, but the general view of a society as well. Thus, an education in the Great Books was advanced not in order that Andy (or any of our students) could arrive at a personal worldview, but in acknowledgment that the ideas contained in those books have had the capacity of shaping a world.
We have a further intimation of this fact at the outset of Berry’s book, when he compares the town in which Andy’s grandparents live – Port William – from the town in which Andy grows up a short distance away, Hargrave. Port William as a whole, in contrast to Hargrave, seems influenced as a whole by the lesson of Paradise Lost. As described by Andy, “Hargrave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.” This contrast of longing for something more – so characteristic of Satan in Paradise Lost – is contrasted to a kind of acceptance of the world as an fallen place that may require more endurance than transformation. Port William, like Andy’s Grandmother, seems to have adopted the teachings of Paradise Lost while Hargrave seems to have turned to a different set of ideas.
Berry has returned recently to a reflection on the role of books in shaping a worldview – and specifically, the influence of Paradise Lost - now to suggest that it was a part of the older wisdom of older books to teach us not only about what we ought to aspire to do, but also about what is inappropriate and forbidden. In a 2008 essay written shortly after the near-collapse of our financial system, Berry wrote first of this lesson as expressed in Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, and then points to a passage in Paradise Lost that expresses a similar sentiment:
Berry here writes of the intention of authors of a number books that aimed to educate humans expressly through a commendation to understand the limits of human power and knowledge. A similar argument has been made by Roger Shattuck in his 1997 book Forbidden Knowledge, which includes chapters on Paradise Lost as well as Goethe’s Faust. In both cases, Great Books such as Paradise Lost sought to inculcate a sense of limits, a cognizance of knowledge inappropriate to humans, an effort to cultivate a capacity to accept and endure rather than the impulse to transform and escape, and sought to foster and encourage an education in the accompanying and necessary virtues that are required in a world in which such limits are recognized – virtues such as moderation, prudence, and avoidance of vices like pride and hubris. Moreover, (if we take Berry’s descriptions of Andy Catlett’s grandmother and Port William as indications), we can be cognizant of the way that books such as Paradise Lost shaped a broader worldview, even a civilization, oriented toward this understanding. And here we could look not only to a work such as Paradise Lost, but a dominant understanding of a long succession of Great Books, from antiquity and through the Middle Ages (such as the Greek epics and tragedies, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the Bible, the works of Augustine and Aquinas, among others). I want to suggest that this is one way we can distinguish between the Ancients and the Moderns.
What we can see in these works is a connection between the content of these books and a commendation that education rightly consists inescapably in an encounter with Great Books. For all their many differences, the Great Books in this tradition argue that there is something in the nature of reality itself – whether we understand it as nature as described by the Greeks, or the created order depicted in the Book of Genesis – that limits human power and ability to transform our situation. The appropriate disposition toward the world is not the effort to seek its transformation, but rather to conform human behavior and aspirations to that order. Hence, the primary purpose of education is learning to live in a world in which self-limitation is the appropriate response to a world of limits. Education in virtue is a central goal – particularly the hard discipline over the human propensity toward excess, particularly in the form of pleonexia or pride.
In order to advance this teaching to successive generations of human beings, education was largely ordered around an education in texts (and even languages) from this tradition (Greek/Latin; Classics and Bible). Every new generation needed a renewed education in the knowledge of human limits and the central necessity of virtue. Books themselves were understood to be a storehouse of wisdom from the past, a treasury and repository of hard-won experience and knowledge of these limits. What these books taught was itself a justification for an education centered around books. Because the present and future were believed to be fundamentally continuous with the past, the past was understood to be a source of wisdom about our condition as humans in a world that we do not command. An education in Great Books was itself a consequence of a philosophical worldview, and not merely an education from which we derived a worldview (much less sought an education in “critical thinking”).
Arguments against this form of education became common among elite thinkers in the early modern period, particularly justifications of a new kind of science that had as its aim the expansion of human control over nature. For instance, Francis Bacon wrote a succession of books and treatises – many considered Great Books – arguing that Nature should be subject to an intensive form of examination that would enable humans to extract her secrets and provide sufficient power for the “relief of the human estate.” Arguing strenuously against such authors as Aristotle and Aquinas, Bacon castigated previous thinkers for their “despair” and tendency to “think things impossible.” Asserting that “knowledge is power,” Bacon rejected the longstanding idea that knowledge consisted first in an acknowledgment of human limits. Rather, Bacon argued that it was necessary to wipe clear “waxen tablets” inscribed with older writing in order to inscribe new lessons upon them. He held a dim view toward the effort to gain knowledge through an education in books, regarding books, more often than not, as one manifestation of the “idols of the cave,” or illusions that obscured true enlightenment (Novum Organum [NO], XLII). He excoriated “the manners and customs of schools, universities, colleges and similar institutions, which are intended to house scholars and cultivate learning, [but where] everything is found to be inimical to the progress of the sciences. For the readings and exercises are so designed that it would hardly occur to anyone to think or consider anything out of the ordinary…. For men’s studies in such places are confined and imprisoned in the writings of certain authors….” (NO, XC). Ironically, Bacon would write a book such as this – Novum Organum – in order to argue against a reliance upon books.
His was one of a long line of Great Books that argued against an education in books. One sees similar sentiments expressed in the thought of Rene Descartes, who begins his book Discourse in Method with a similar condemnation of book learning as an obstacle to true understanding. There, Descartes writes that:
Descartes thereafter compares book-learning to the experience of travel, and concludes that both forms of sallying forth into the world of custom and opinion is largely a waste of time. Instead, he “shuts himself up in a room” during a cold winter’s night and proceeds to investigate what he can know purely through his own skeptical examination of his own empirical experience of reality. Famously, Descartes concludes that he exists because he knows that he thinks – a conclusion that requires no consultation of books or culture, but only what his own mind, stripped bare of all external influences, can grasp.
Francis Bacon’s secretary, Thomas Hobbes, was an avid reader of Descartes and arrived at similar conclusions about “book-learning.” In Chapter 5 of Leviathan – entitled “Reason and Science” – Hobbes rejects the counsel of those who “follow the authority of books,” and instead recommends an approach in which the learner trusts entirely his own experience and experimentation with the natural realm – and thereby, makes it possible for humans to exercise control over the natural world and attain a condition of “commodious living,” an echo to Bacon’s aspiration toward “the relief of the human estate.”
Centuries later, this line of argumentation would be employed here in the United States in defense of disassembling existing curricula that were oriented around the study of Great Books. Widely regarded as America’s most influential educational reformer, the philosopher John Dewey argued in a series of books that continue to exert great influence in schools of education that learning should be accomplished “experientially” rather than through an encounter with books. In his short work Experience and Education, Dewey argued strenuously against an education based in books at all, holding that such an education sought to transmit “static” knowledge to a citizenry that should be better enabled to face a world of rapid change. He wrote that books themselves were “to a large extent the cultural products of societies that assumed the future would be much like the past, and yet it is used as educational food in a society where change is the rule, not the exception.” Accordingly, Dewey founded an institution in Chicago called the Lab School – laboratory was to replace library; experiment was to replace knowledge gleaned from the past.
However, not only was such an education the consequence of a society that was experiencing change; rather, it had as its aim the acceleration of change with two aims: first, to actively displace cultural transmission as a norm of education, and thus, to unseat the place of “authority” and the past as a guide to action; and second, to permit greater command of the natural and human world with the aim of “growth,” particularly the growth of human power. Dewey makes this case in pointed terms in his book Democracy and Education:
Dewey argues that progress rests upon the active control of nature, and hence requires the displacement of the “savage” regard for the past and, arguably, their inclination to make a home in the world as created rather than seek its transformation through human mastery.
Dewey continues,
This should not surprise us, as elsewhere Dewey traces the lineage of his own thought back to Francis Bacon, acknowledging his regard for Bacon as the most important thinker in history. Writing in his book Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey acknowledged Bacon as the founder of the scientific method that now liberates humanity from the constraints of nature. According to Dewey, Bacon teaches that “scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.” The job of modern science – a realm of inquiry that extends to the human sciences (such as political science) as well as to the natural sciences – is to extract the secrets of nature by whatever means possible. Echoing Bacon, Dewey revealed the severity with which the modern scientist must approach his task:
As with Bacon, a close connection is forged between the modern project of the mastery of nature and the rejection of an education focused upon the teachings of the Great Books. Only by overcoming the “static” teachings of those texts can progress be unleased; only by extending human mastery over a tortured nature can humanity achieve the true measure of their potential greatness.
Today, most educational institutions in America have been deeply and pervasively influenced and shaped by the thrust of Dewey’s arguments. While many institutions maintain programs in which education in the humanities is pursued, it is seldom the case that the grounds for such programs is based upon an ancient understanding of the role that great books play in shaping the worldviews of students and broader society. Rather, the main focus and dominant understanding at most institutions of learning today is to advance the goal of knowledge as power in the effort to secure a form of liberty in which nature no longer is thought to govern or guide human life. The focus today is upon an education in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – with a corresponding decline of commitment to the humanities broadly, in some cases leading schools to disband entire departments once devoted to the study of the humanities through the reading of books.
At most institutions of higher learning today, at best one can only see the remnant of an older understanding of the role of Great Books to educate students in the virtue necessary in a world to which we must conform our actions. More in evidence is the newer and almost always more dominant devotion to the effort to “create new knowledge.” One can often see this exemplified in the contradiction between the older seal and motto of older institutions – reflecting a more ancient view of education based upon virtue and self-government – contrasted with more recent mission statements that stress the research and scientific mission of institutions. I have encountered few better examples of this than at this very institution, the University of Texas at Austin. The motto of UT Austin, as emblazoned on its seal, is “Disciplina Praesidium Civitate,” which is translated as “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.” These words are drawn from a longer statement of Texas’s second governor, Mirabeau Lamar, which reads in its entirety (located in your "Hall of Noble Words," which I am sure you all visit frequently), “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy and, while guided and controlled by virtue, the noblest attribute of man. It is the only dictator that freemen acknowledge and the only security that freemen desire.” This fuller statement – with its stress upon the relationship of virtue, authority and liberty, and with the overtones in the word “disciplina” not only of “cultivation” but discipline, point to an older conception according to which liberty was the achievement of hard-won self-control through the discipline of virtue. Moreover, the seal itself portrays the image of an open book on the upper field of the shield, demonstrating that the means by which this discipline of liberty is to be won is through an education in the wisdom, the lessons, and the cautions of the past accumulated on the pages of books that are deemed by an older generation to be essential in the education and formation of every new generation. The aim of such an education is not “critical thinking,” but the achievement of liberty governed by the discipline – even dictatorship – of virtue.
Contrast this seal designed at the time of UT’s founding with the Mission Statement devised in more recent years and found on the main web portal of the University. There – after some boilerplate about a dedication to “excellence” in education, which is about as rich in content as the phrase “critical thinking” – one finds a statement about the purpose of education at the University of Texas. According to the current mission statement, “The university contributes to the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development of new knowledge.” The stress here is upon the research and scientific mission of the university, notably the aim of creating “new knowledge,” not the effort to understand older wisdom. One searches in vain for a modern re-articulation of the sentiments of the older motto; rather than the inculcation of virtue, one finds only the emphasis upon research in the service of progress – particularly that progress that contributes to that centuries-old ambition to subject nature to human will.
What we see in this all-too brief précis of the debate between the ancients and the moderns is that two distinct and contradictory conceptions of liberty have been advanced in a long succession of “Great Books.” The first of these conceptions of liberty commends the study of Great Books for an education in virtue in light of a recognition of human membership in a created order to which we must conform and that we do not ultimately govern; the other conception was advanced through a series of Great Books that argued against the study of Great Books, and rather asserted a form of human greatness that sought the human mastery of nature, particularly by the emphasis of modern science. This latter conception of liberty did not seek merely to co-exist alongside an older conception; it required the active dismantling of this idea of liberty, and hence, the transformation of education away from the study of Great Books and instead the study of “the Great Book of Nature” toward the end of its mastery. The older conception of liberty held that liberty was ultimately a form of self-government; in a constrained world, the human propensity to desire without limit and end inclined people toward a condition of slavery, understood to be enslavement to the base desires. This older conception of liberty as self-government was displaced by our regnant conception of liberty, the liberty to pursue our desires ceaselessly with growing prospects of ongoing fulfillment through the conquest of nature, accompanied by the constant generation of new desires that demand ever greater expansion of the human project of mastery. The decline of the role of Great Books in our universities today is not due simply or merely to financial constraints or the requirement of federal funding for scientific inquiry or even science itself; preceding all of this was an argument made in many Great Books that the study of Great Books should be displaced from the heart of education.
What we are forced to consider is whether the justification of a study in the Great Books is sufficient – whether simply presenting these books as general representatives of “greatness” does not in fact contribute to the undermining of the study of the Great Books. If we do not, in the first instance, forefront a deeper philosophic claim that a certain conception of humanity within a created order is the precondition for the justification of the widespread study of the Great Books, then it is likely that such programs will remain boutiques amid a broader effort to expand the role of STEM in our institutions of higher education. Perhaps we even need to reconsider the very language of Greatness - perhaps at least considering a commendation of humble books, or at least Great Books that commend humility, in contrast to those books advancing a version of Promethean greatness which have undermined the study of books. In the final estimation, it seems dubious whether we can be indifferent toward these books, whether great or humble. Whether we study their ideas or not, inescapably they make a world in their own image. At least we have one choice: We can either understand the ideas underlying the world we inhabit, or, in rejecting the study of the Great Books, become more deeply ignorant of a world that has been shaped by a number of those books, and of the sources of the accumulating wreckage amid our Progress.
_______
Against Great Books
Patrick J. Deneen
Georgetown University
The proposed title of my lecture tonight was not “Why Great Books?,” but “Against Great Books.” I was advised that this might be too pugnacious, and a more modest title was suggested. My intention from the outset – if not wholly captured in the current title – is polemical, and I have not abandoned that ambition as readily as I abandoned the original title. I hope to raise questions about, if not books that are great, about books that promote a certain kind of Greatness. I do so in order to defend the reading of books and the ideal of liberal education, which means that we may need to be somewhat more discriminating in our recommendation of Great Books. For, there are Great Books that defend the reading of books, and Great Books that reject a book-centered education. The arguments of these latter sort have increasingly won the day – ironically, it is a set of Great Books that have contributed to the decline of the study of Great Books. If we seek to defend a program in the Great Books, we will need to inquire more fully into the ideas – advanced in some number of those books – that have powerfully transformed not only institutions of learning, but our civilization, increasingly to regard “Great Books” as an antiquated and useless pursuit. I will argue that those of us who customarily or habitually defend “The Great Books” need to reflect more extensively on the very notion of “greatness” and its relationship to a form of education that increasingly regards the teaching of “great books” – or the humanities more broadly – to be irrelevant. Above all, we need to be willing to call attention to books – and their authors – who have contributed to a trajectory in education that today has humanistic education on the ropes.
I want to begin by stipulating that many would commend the teaching of great – or “core” texts – in order to provide something more than the exercise of “critical thinking.” Across the academy today a consensus has been reached that, while we may radically disagree on the basic elements of a curriculum and hardly discuss what texts or even courses would be required of an educated human being, that we can all agree that the object of a course of study at the university-level is the cultivation of “critical thinking.” I have served on countless academic committees in which people of widely differing views about curriculum and courses all universally and enthusiastically assent to the idea that we should be promoting “critical thinking” in our classrooms. I have concluded that the only idea that is apparently impervious to “critical thinking” is the shared goal of “critical thinking”: no-one quite knows what it is, but we can all agree that we want our students to be able to do it.
Yet, many recognize that “critical thinking” is a weak hook on which to hang a justification of a program in “Great” or “core” texts. The advantage of justifying a curriculum around the banner of “critical thinking” is that its content can remain underdetermined: we seek a common, contentless outcome, and so any text or even experience that promotes a way of “thinking critically” becomes acceptable as an academic exercise. Push-pins is equal to Homer; that is, so long as push-pins can be claimed to foster critical thinking. After the ferocious curriculum battles of the 1980s – which included the Reverand Jesse Jackson marching on the campus of Stanford University yelling through a bull-horn, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ. has got to go” – it was with an almost audible sigh of relief that academics latched onto “critical thinking” as a contentless goal that allowed the responsible parties of the nation’s universities to lay down their arms and embrace the common project of cultivating a thinking style. We agreed that a university education was no longer about teaching some thing – rather, it was an agreement to teach a way of thinking critically about any thing.
A defense of an education in the Great Books often requires something more, one that does not shy away from a claim about the aim of education. The more robust claim is that these texts teach something substantive: not merely a way of thinking (though it may do this – after all the Jefferson Center itself claims that a course of study in Core Texts will foster skills in “critical reasoning, close reading, and clear, cogent writing”), but rather, a particular and substantive set of conclusions that make the teaching of these texts – as opposed to any texts or lessons – essential and necessary. This too seems to be the conclusion of the Jefferson Center, which highlights that an education in the core texts has as its aim the teaching of liberty: “The aim of the Thomas Jefferson Center is to realize Jefferson's vision of educating citizens and leaders to understand the meaning of liberty and to exercise it wisely.” Thus, a program like the Jefferson Center has drawn a preliminary conclusion about the nature and substance of the lessons taught by the Great Books – that they teach something about liberty, and that these books – rather than any books – are the source of a particular kind of necessary knowledge about the nature of liberty essential to a citizen in a modern liberal democracy.
I will have more to say about this claim regarding liberty toward the end of my lecture, but I want merely to stress that the Great Books are recommended in this latter case because they have something to teach us, and that we should read them for more than merely for a training in “critical thinking” or even because knowledge of these texts familiarizes students with books they should read to be able to claim that they are educated, but because they will have an impact on the way that we live our lives and organize our common world together. Of course, I think this is correct, and I would even argue that part of the central necessity of the Great Books is not only because those who read them can encounter and be influenced by their arguments, but because, at their most expansive, they have had a considerable role in shaping human society – even the lives of people who did not read the books. As parts of broader culture from which they at once take sustenance, and which they in turn influence, the ideas in the Great Books have shaped a world in their image and guided not only individuals, but a whole civilization, in fostering a way of life.
I have in mind something like the following passage by the Kentucky author Wendell Berry, in a novel entitled Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006). In the passage, a young Andy Catlett (who is most likely a fictionalized version of Berry himself) is observing his grandmother making a raspberry pie. Written from the perspective of an older Andy recollecting a morning in his grandmother’s kitchen, he writes,
"A peculiar sorrow hovered about [my grandmother], and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short. She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind the best appearances. I now wonder if she had ever read Paradise Lost. That poem, with its cosmos of Heaven and Hell, and Paradise and the Fallen World, was a presence felt by most of her generation, if only by way of preachers who had read it. Whether or not she had read it for herself, the lostness of Paradise was the prime fact of her world, and she felt it keenly." (36-7).
I find a few things striking about this passage. First, an adult Catlett is able to understand better things of his youth, and the world that he inhabited, through the lens of a Great Book. Secondly, he surmises, and probably correctly, that while his grandmother probably did not read Paradise Lost, that it was a book that indirectly influenced her worldview. And, third, that the dissemination of the content of Great Books, even if indirectly known to a great many, nevertheless seemed to shape a worldview not only of individuals, but the general view of a society as well. Thus, an education in the Great Books was advanced not in order that Andy (or any of our students) could arrive at a personal worldview, but in acknowledgment that the ideas contained in those books have had the capacity of shaping a world.
We have a further intimation of this fact at the outset of Berry’s book, when he compares the town in which Andy’s grandparents live – Port William – from the town in which Andy grows up a short distance away, Hargrave. Port William as a whole, in contrast to Hargrave, seems influenced as a whole by the lesson of Paradise Lost. As described by Andy, “Hargrave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.” This contrast of longing for something more – so characteristic of Satan in Paradise Lost – is contrasted to a kind of acceptance of the world as an fallen place that may require more endurance than transformation. Port William, like Andy’s Grandmother, seems to have adopted the teachings of Paradise Lost while Hargrave seems to have turned to a different set of ideas.
Berry has returned recently to a reflection on the role of books in shaping a worldview – and specifically, the influence of Paradise Lost - now to suggest that it was a part of the older wisdom of older books to teach us not only about what we ought to aspire to do, but also about what is inappropriate and forbidden. In a 2008 essay written shortly after the near-collapse of our financial system, Berry wrote first of this lesson as expressed in Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, and then points to a passage in Paradise Lost that expresses a similar sentiment:
With the issue of the human definition more than ever in doubt, John Milton in Book VII of Paradise Lost returns again to a consideration of our urge to know. To Adam’s request to be told the story of creation, the “affable Archangel” Raphael agrees “to answer thy desire/Of knowledge within bounds [my emphasis] . . . ,” explaining thatKnowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.
Raphael is saying, with angelic circumlocution, that knowledge without wisdom, limitless knowledge, is not worth a fart; he is not a humorless archangel. But he also is saying that knowledge without measure, knowledge that the human mind cannot appropriately use, is mortally dangerous….
And so our cultural tradition is in large part the record of our continuing effort to understand ourselves as beings specifically human: to say that, as humans, we must do certain things and we must not do certain things. We must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period.
Berry here writes of the intention of authors of a number books that aimed to educate humans expressly through a commendation to understand the limits of human power and knowledge. A similar argument has been made by Roger Shattuck in his 1997 book Forbidden Knowledge, which includes chapters on Paradise Lost as well as Goethe’s Faust. In both cases, Great Books such as Paradise Lost sought to inculcate a sense of limits, a cognizance of knowledge inappropriate to humans, an effort to cultivate a capacity to accept and endure rather than the impulse to transform and escape, and sought to foster and encourage an education in the accompanying and necessary virtues that are required in a world in which such limits are recognized – virtues such as moderation, prudence, and avoidance of vices like pride and hubris. Moreover, (if we take Berry’s descriptions of Andy Catlett’s grandmother and Port William as indications), we can be cognizant of the way that books such as Paradise Lost shaped a broader worldview, even a civilization, oriented toward this understanding. And here we could look not only to a work such as Paradise Lost, but a dominant understanding of a long succession of Great Books, from antiquity and through the Middle Ages (such as the Greek epics and tragedies, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the Bible, the works of Augustine and Aquinas, among others). I want to suggest that this is one way we can distinguish between the Ancients and the Moderns.
What we can see in these works is a connection between the content of these books and a commendation that education rightly consists inescapably in an encounter with Great Books. For all their many differences, the Great Books in this tradition argue that there is something in the nature of reality itself – whether we understand it as nature as described by the Greeks, or the created order depicted in the Book of Genesis – that limits human power and ability to transform our situation. The appropriate disposition toward the world is not the effort to seek its transformation, but rather to conform human behavior and aspirations to that order. Hence, the primary purpose of education is learning to live in a world in which self-limitation is the appropriate response to a world of limits. Education in virtue is a central goal – particularly the hard discipline over the human propensity toward excess, particularly in the form of pleonexia or pride.
In order to advance this teaching to successive generations of human beings, education was largely ordered around an education in texts (and even languages) from this tradition (Greek/Latin; Classics and Bible). Every new generation needed a renewed education in the knowledge of human limits and the central necessity of virtue. Books themselves were understood to be a storehouse of wisdom from the past, a treasury and repository of hard-won experience and knowledge of these limits. What these books taught was itself a justification for an education centered around books. Because the present and future were believed to be fundamentally continuous with the past, the past was understood to be a source of wisdom about our condition as humans in a world that we do not command. An education in Great Books was itself a consequence of a philosophical worldview, and not merely an education from which we derived a worldview (much less sought an education in “critical thinking”).
Arguments against this form of education became common among elite thinkers in the early modern period, particularly justifications of a new kind of science that had as its aim the expansion of human control over nature. For instance, Francis Bacon wrote a succession of books and treatises – many considered Great Books – arguing that Nature should be subject to an intensive form of examination that would enable humans to extract her secrets and provide sufficient power for the “relief of the human estate.” Arguing strenuously against such authors as Aristotle and Aquinas, Bacon castigated previous thinkers for their “despair” and tendency to “think things impossible.” Asserting that “knowledge is power,” Bacon rejected the longstanding idea that knowledge consisted first in an acknowledgment of human limits. Rather, Bacon argued that it was necessary to wipe clear “waxen tablets” inscribed with older writing in order to inscribe new lessons upon them. He held a dim view toward the effort to gain knowledge through an education in books, regarding books, more often than not, as one manifestation of the “idols of the cave,” or illusions that obscured true enlightenment (Novum Organum [NO], XLII). He excoriated “the manners and customs of schools, universities, colleges and similar institutions, which are intended to house scholars and cultivate learning, [but where] everything is found to be inimical to the progress of the sciences. For the readings and exercises are so designed that it would hardly occur to anyone to think or consider anything out of the ordinary…. For men’s studies in such places are confined and imprisoned in the writings of certain authors….” (NO, XC). Ironically, Bacon would write a book such as this – Novum Organum – in order to argue against a reliance upon books.
His was one of a long line of Great Books that argued against an education in books. One sees similar sentiments expressed in the thought of Rene Descartes, who begins his book Discourse in Method with a similar condemnation of book learning as an obstacle to true understanding. There, Descartes writes that:
as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.
The reason, he explains, is that books are the repository of foolishness:
when I look with the eye of a philosopher at the varied courses and pursuits of mankind at large, I find scarcely one which
does not appear in vain and useless…
Descartes thereafter compares book-learning to the experience of travel, and concludes that both forms of sallying forth into the world of custom and opinion is largely a waste of time. Instead, he “shuts himself up in a room” during a cold winter’s night and proceeds to investigate what he can know purely through his own skeptical examination of his own empirical experience of reality. Famously, Descartes concludes that he exists because he knows that he thinks – a conclusion that requires no consultation of books or culture, but only what his own mind, stripped bare of all external influences, can grasp.
Francis Bacon’s secretary, Thomas Hobbes, was an avid reader of Descartes and arrived at similar conclusions about “book-learning.” In Chapter 5 of Leviathan – entitled “Reason and Science” – Hobbes rejects the counsel of those who “follow the authority of books,” and instead recommends an approach in which the learner trusts entirely his own experience and experimentation with the natural realm – and thereby, makes it possible for humans to exercise control over the natural world and attain a condition of “commodious living,” an echo to Bacon’s aspiration toward “the relief of the human estate.”
Centuries later, this line of argumentation would be employed here in the United States in defense of disassembling existing curricula that were oriented around the study of Great Books. Widely regarded as America’s most influential educational reformer, the philosopher John Dewey argued in a series of books that continue to exert great influence in schools of education that learning should be accomplished “experientially” rather than through an encounter with books. In his short work Experience and Education, Dewey argued strenuously against an education based in books at all, holding that such an education sought to transmit “static” knowledge to a citizenry that should be better enabled to face a world of rapid change. He wrote that books themselves were “to a large extent the cultural products of societies that assumed the future would be much like the past, and yet it is used as educational food in a society where change is the rule, not the exception.” Accordingly, Dewey founded an institution in Chicago called the Lab School – laboratory was to replace library; experiment was to replace knowledge gleaned from the past.
However, not only was such an education the consequence of a society that was experiencing change; rather, it had as its aim the acceleration of change with two aims: first, to actively displace cultural transmission as a norm of education, and thus, to unseat the place of “authority” and the past as a guide to action; and second, to permit greater command of the natural and human world with the aim of “growth,” particularly the growth of human power. Dewey makes this case in pointed terms in his book Democracy and Education:
Why does a savage group perpetuate savagery, and a civilized group civilization...? In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for securing ends....
Dewey argues that progress rests upon the active control of nature, and hence requires the displacement of the “savage” regard for the past and, arguably, their inclination to make a home in the world as created rather than seek its transformation through human mastery.
Dewey continues,
A savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain. It adapts itself. But its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use. A civilized people enters upon the scene. It adapts itself. It introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment.
This should not surprise us, as elsewhere Dewey traces the lineage of his own thought back to Francis Bacon, acknowledging his regard for Bacon as the most important thinker in history. Writing in his book Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey acknowledged Bacon as the founder of the scientific method that now liberates humanity from the constraints of nature. According to Dewey, Bacon teaches that “scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.” The job of modern science – a realm of inquiry that extends to the human sciences (such as political science) as well as to the natural sciences – is to extract the secrets of nature by whatever means possible. Echoing Bacon, Dewey revealed the severity with which the modern scientist must approach his task:
[he] must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.
As with Bacon, a close connection is forged between the modern project of the mastery of nature and the rejection of an education focused upon the teachings of the Great Books. Only by overcoming the “static” teachings of those texts can progress be unleased; only by extending human mastery over a tortured nature can humanity achieve the true measure of their potential greatness.
Today, most educational institutions in America have been deeply and pervasively influenced and shaped by the thrust of Dewey’s arguments. While many institutions maintain programs in which education in the humanities is pursued, it is seldom the case that the grounds for such programs is based upon an ancient understanding of the role that great books play in shaping the worldviews of students and broader society. Rather, the main focus and dominant understanding at most institutions of learning today is to advance the goal of knowledge as power in the effort to secure a form of liberty in which nature no longer is thought to govern or guide human life. The focus today is upon an education in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – with a corresponding decline of commitment to the humanities broadly, in some cases leading schools to disband entire departments once devoted to the study of the humanities through the reading of books.
At most institutions of higher learning today, at best one can only see the remnant of an older understanding of the role of Great Books to educate students in the virtue necessary in a world to which we must conform our actions. More in evidence is the newer and almost always more dominant devotion to the effort to “create new knowledge.” One can often see this exemplified in the contradiction between the older seal and motto of older institutions – reflecting a more ancient view of education based upon virtue and self-government – contrasted with more recent mission statements that stress the research and scientific mission of institutions. I have encountered few better examples of this than at this very institution, the University of Texas at Austin. The motto of UT Austin, as emblazoned on its seal, is “Disciplina Praesidium Civitate,” which is translated as “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.” These words are drawn from a longer statement of Texas’s second governor, Mirabeau Lamar, which reads in its entirety (located in your "Hall of Noble Words," which I am sure you all visit frequently), “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy and, while guided and controlled by virtue, the noblest attribute of man. It is the only dictator that freemen acknowledge and the only security that freemen desire.” This fuller statement – with its stress upon the relationship of virtue, authority and liberty, and with the overtones in the word “disciplina” not only of “cultivation” but discipline, point to an older conception according to which liberty was the achievement of hard-won self-control through the discipline of virtue. Moreover, the seal itself portrays the image of an open book on the upper field of the shield, demonstrating that the means by which this discipline of liberty is to be won is through an education in the wisdom, the lessons, and the cautions of the past accumulated on the pages of books that are deemed by an older generation to be essential in the education and formation of every new generation. The aim of such an education is not “critical thinking,” but the achievement of liberty governed by the discipline – even dictatorship – of virtue.
Contrast this seal designed at the time of UT’s founding with the Mission Statement devised in more recent years and found on the main web portal of the University. There – after some boilerplate about a dedication to “excellence” in education, which is about as rich in content as the phrase “critical thinking” – one finds a statement about the purpose of education at the University of Texas. According to the current mission statement, “The university contributes to the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development of new knowledge.” The stress here is upon the research and scientific mission of the university, notably the aim of creating “new knowledge,” not the effort to understand older wisdom. One searches in vain for a modern re-articulation of the sentiments of the older motto; rather than the inculcation of virtue, one finds only the emphasis upon research in the service of progress – particularly that progress that contributes to that centuries-old ambition to subject nature to human will.
What we see in this all-too brief précis of the debate between the ancients and the moderns is that two distinct and contradictory conceptions of liberty have been advanced in a long succession of “Great Books.” The first of these conceptions of liberty commends the study of Great Books for an education in virtue in light of a recognition of human membership in a created order to which we must conform and that we do not ultimately govern; the other conception was advanced through a series of Great Books that argued against the study of Great Books, and rather asserted a form of human greatness that sought the human mastery of nature, particularly by the emphasis of modern science. This latter conception of liberty did not seek merely to co-exist alongside an older conception; it required the active dismantling of this idea of liberty, and hence, the transformation of education away from the study of Great Books and instead the study of “the Great Book of Nature” toward the end of its mastery. The older conception of liberty held that liberty was ultimately a form of self-government; in a constrained world, the human propensity to desire without limit and end inclined people toward a condition of slavery, understood to be enslavement to the base desires. This older conception of liberty as self-government was displaced by our regnant conception of liberty, the liberty to pursue our desires ceaselessly with growing prospects of ongoing fulfillment through the conquest of nature, accompanied by the constant generation of new desires that demand ever greater expansion of the human project of mastery. The decline of the role of Great Books in our universities today is not due simply or merely to financial constraints or the requirement of federal funding for scientific inquiry or even science itself; preceding all of this was an argument made in many Great Books that the study of Great Books should be displaced from the heart of education.
What we are forced to consider is whether the justification of a study in the Great Books is sufficient – whether simply presenting these books as general representatives of “greatness” does not in fact contribute to the undermining of the study of the Great Books. If we do not, in the first instance, forefront a deeper philosophic claim that a certain conception of humanity within a created order is the precondition for the justification of the widespread study of the Great Books, then it is likely that such programs will remain boutiques amid a broader effort to expand the role of STEM in our institutions of higher education. Perhaps we even need to reconsider the very language of Greatness - perhaps at least considering a commendation of humble books, or at least Great Books that commend humility, in contrast to those books advancing a version of Promethean greatness which have undermined the study of books. In the final estimation, it seems dubious whether we can be indifferent toward these books, whether great or humble. Whether we study their ideas or not, inescapably they make a world in their own image. At least we have one choice: We can either understand the ideas underlying the world we inhabit, or, in rejecting the study of the Great Books, become more deeply ignorant of a world that has been shaped by a number of those books, and of the sources of the accumulating wreckage amid our Progress.
Quigley on Georgetown, 1967
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Professor Carroll Quigley
"Is Georgetown University Committing Suicide?"
The Hoya
April 28, 1967
The Hebrews and the Greeks, who are our cultural parents, and our own western civilization descended from these two, have always agreed that the only sin, or at least the greatest sin, is pride, a particularly aggressive type of self-deception. And anyone who is concerned with the health of individuals knows well that neuroses and psychoses are basically simply forms of self-deception, combined with an obstinate refusal to face the facts of the situation.
This kind of illness is prevalent in all American higher education and in all the sub-divisions of it, existing, indeed, in a more obsessive and virulent form in the aspirant "Great Universities" than in the so-called "Great Universities" themselves. It is to be found in its acute form in Catholic education, in Jesuit education, and at Georgetown.
Of course, that is not what we are being told. Today, in education, as in government and in everything else, the propagandists flood us daily with rosy reports on how well things are going. Larger and larger expenditures of manpower, money and facilities (such as floor-space) are devoted to telling the world about the wonderful job being done in every organization worthy of the name from the Johnson Administration down (or up) to Georgetown University. Fewer and fewer people are convinced, or even listening, but in the process the money and facilities (if not the manpower) which could have been used on the goals of the organization are wasted on propaganda about what a wonderful job is being done, when any sensible person with half an eye can see that, every year, a poorer job is being done in the midst of self-deceptive clouds of expensive propaganda.
But beneath these clouds, ominous cracklings can be heard, even at Georgetown. If they come from within the University, they are drowned out with another flood of words, denials, excited pointings to a more hopeful, if remote, future, or by the creation of some new organizational gimmick, a committee or a new "Assistant Something-or-Other," to deal with the problem.
If, on the other hand, these criticisms come from outside the University, they are ignored or attributed to jealousy, sour grapes, or to some other unflattering personal motivation of the critic. When these criticisms come, as they often do, from some departing member of the faculty, they are greeted by reflections on his personal competence or emotional stability, both of which had been highly esteemed as long as he remained here. As a result, most departing faculty, to avoid such personal denigration, depart quietly, but they depart. Their reasons for leaving are then attributed to the higher pay to be obtained elsewhere, an explanation which fits in well with the Big Lie at GU, that all its problems would be solved if the University only had more money. Anyone who knows anything about the situation knows perfectly well three things: that Georgetown's problems would not be solved by more money and have not been, but, on the contrary, have grown steadily worse as the supply of money has increased; that resigning faculty have been leaving because they were discontented; and that the chief cause of that discontent has not been inadequate pay, but the generally chaotic and misguided Administration of the University....
Professor Carroll Quigley
"Is Georgetown University Committing Suicide?"
The Hoya
April 28, 1967
7 Temmuz 2012 Cumartesi
The Blessing Way (Joe Leaphorn #1) (audiobook) by Tony Hillerman
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Published by Borders/Recorded books in 1990.
Narrated by George Guidall.
Duration: Approximately 6 hours, 30 minutes.
The Blessing Way is the first of the Leaphorn books but, ironically, Leaphorn is a mere supporting character throughout most of the second half of the book. College professor/archaeologist Bergen McKee is the main character - the one who has the most growth and teaches the reader the most about Navajo society and culture.
Nevertheless, The Blessing Way is an enjoyable book. I have read all of Hillerman's books at one time or another so I am going back and listening to some of the older ones as a high-quality diversion from my boring work commute.
I intentionally picked this one, the oldest of the series, since I recently read and reviewed the newest of the series (The Shapeshifter), which, ironically enough, also prominently featured the Navajo Wolf/Witch/Shapeshifter. His descriptions of Navajo society in the two books would make an interesting comparison - a study in the ongoing process of diffusion of Belagana (white) culture throughout the reservation.
I figured out who did it with about an hour to an hour and a half of listening to go. However, that did not dim my enthusiasm for listening to an exciting escape, a chase through the desert and a great climax.
George Guidall did a strong job of reading the story - his pacing and ability to convey the appropriate emotion of the story were quite good. I enjoy his readings of the Leaphorn/Chee series.
I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.
Reviewed on December 20, 2006.
Published by Borders/Recorded books in 1990.
Narrated by George Guidall.
Duration: Approximately 6 hours, 30 minutes.
The Blessing Way is the first of the Leaphorn books but, ironically, Leaphorn is a mere supporting character throughout most of the second half of the book. College professor/archaeologist Bergen McKee is the main character - the one who has the most growth and teaches the reader the most about Navajo society and culture.
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| Tony Hillerman (1925-2008) |
I intentionally picked this one, the oldest of the series, since I recently read and reviewed the newest of the series (The Shapeshifter), which, ironically enough, also prominently featured the Navajo Wolf/Witch/Shapeshifter. His descriptions of Navajo society in the two books would make an interesting comparison - a study in the ongoing process of diffusion of Belagana (white) culture throughout the reservation.
I figured out who did it with about an hour to an hour and a half of listening to go. However, that did not dim my enthusiasm for listening to an exciting escape, a chase through the desert and a great climax.
George Guidall did a strong job of reading the story - his pacing and ability to convey the appropriate emotion of the story were quite good. I enjoy his readings of the Leaphorn/Chee series.
I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.
Reviewed on December 20, 2006.
Lords of Creation by Tim Sullivan
To contact us Click HERE
Published in 1992 by AvoNova (Avon Books)
Tim Sullivan's Lords of Creation is a little novel that tries (and really tries hard) to pull together a whole lot of ideas and one really big one and put them all into a 242 page paperback novel.
It is set in the year 1999. Instead of a successful first Gulf War, America gets bogged in a protracted fight that saps its political vitals at home. The Republicans work with a growing Christian Milleniallist movement who believe that the end of the world as we know it is coming and America should be prepared. A Department of Morality is developed and led by a preacher who attacks all of paleontology as "the work of Satan." Entire university departments are shut down due to a lack of funding and only amateur paleontologists can continue to dig.
One group of such amateurs are digging at a remote site in Montana when they find a odd metal box buried deep in a fossil bed, with the fossils. They remove it and sneak into the lab of the local university , quickly have it confiscated by the Department of Morality and when it is opened five dinosaur eggs are discovered inside - they have been held in stasis by the box for millions of years. Soon enough, they are hatched and these dinosaurs are not anything that the paleontologists recognize. They have larger brains, grow incredibly fast and work together very well. Also, there are lots of grandstanding arguments between the leader of the paleontologists, David Albee and Flanagan, the head of the Department of Morality. Flanagan admits that he acts the way he does to impose morality upon America just to save America from itself - drinking, drugs, abuse, etc.
****Spoilers*****
Up to this point, the book seems to be a kind of screed against religion in general (they're all fanatics, they're stupid and they hate dinosaurs!). But, suddenly, the story switches. An alien spaceship comes, summoned from "sleep" in the asteroid belt by the opening of the egg box. The alien reveals that its species created the super smart dinosaurs that were just hatched and it froze them again because their reptilian brains lacked any sense of morality and all of that brainpower with no morality was a disaster. They destroyed rather than build.
So, the alien waited until primates evolved and made them super smart because they had morality. The innate sense of morality would "drive [the] species forward. It is absolutely correct in its moral imperatives, that these imperatives are larger than the individual and must be asserted. Those who stand against it are always incorrect, though their opponents believe that their version of morality is just as correct. This conflict is the process that culminates in a planetary civilization, and leads ultimately to the stars." (p. 236)
Now we have an interesting premise, the most important thought of the book and it is laid out and never touched again, despite all of the questions it begs such as:
-Is Flanagan bad or good in light of this philosophy?
-Is the constant struggle really a good thing or not?
-Is the Department of Morality necessarily a bad thing - is it the realization of a planetary civilization thus stepping stone to the stars?
-If that is the cost, is it worth it?
Man, if there was ever topics to discuss, why aren't these being discussed? Instead, it wraps up in six pages and we are done.
One other issue. I know that authors have very little to do with the covers of their books, so these three comments are aimed at the person or persons that choose the art for the cover: 1) The book is set in Montana. There are no Saguaro cactus in Montana. 2) There is only one alien, not two. 3) The alien looks nothing like the ones on the cover.
*****End Spoilers*****
So, a really huge idea is brought up to discuss and it lays there and dies. The rest of the book is an okay space alien story.
I have to give it 3 out of 5 stars for the rest of the book. 1 star for the really big idea. Total: 4 out of 5 stars.
Reviewed on June 28, 2012
Tim Sullivan's Lords of Creation is a little novel that tries (and really tries hard) to pull together a whole lot of ideas and one really big one and put them all into a 242 page paperback novel.
It is set in the year 1999. Instead of a successful first Gulf War, America gets bogged in a protracted fight that saps its political vitals at home. The Republicans work with a growing Christian Milleniallist movement who believe that the end of the world as we know it is coming and America should be prepared. A Department of Morality is developed and led by a preacher who attacks all of paleontology as "the work of Satan." Entire university departments are shut down due to a lack of funding and only amateur paleontologists can continue to dig.
 |
| A fossil dig in Montana. Photo by SD Public Broadcasting |
****Spoilers*****
Up to this point, the book seems to be a kind of screed against religion in general (they're all fanatics, they're stupid and they hate dinosaurs!). But, suddenly, the story switches. An alien spaceship comes, summoned from "sleep" in the asteroid belt by the opening of the egg box. The alien reveals that its species created the super smart dinosaurs that were just hatched and it froze them again because their reptilian brains lacked any sense of morality and all of that brainpower with no morality was a disaster. They destroyed rather than build.
So, the alien waited until primates evolved and made them super smart because they had morality. The innate sense of morality would "drive [the] species forward. It is absolutely correct in its moral imperatives, that these imperatives are larger than the individual and must be asserted. Those who stand against it are always incorrect, though their opponents believe that their version of morality is just as correct. This conflict is the process that culminates in a planetary civilization, and leads ultimately to the stars." (p. 236)
Now we have an interesting premise, the most important thought of the book and it is laid out and never touched again, despite all of the questions it begs such as:
-Is Flanagan bad or good in light of this philosophy?
-Is the constant struggle really a good thing or not?
-Is the Department of Morality necessarily a bad thing - is it the realization of a planetary civilization thus stepping stone to the stars?
-If that is the cost, is it worth it?
Man, if there was ever topics to discuss, why aren't these being discussed? Instead, it wraps up in six pages and we are done.
One other issue. I know that authors have very little to do with the covers of their books, so these three comments are aimed at the person or persons that choose the art for the cover: 1) The book is set in Montana. There are no Saguaro cactus in Montana. 2) There is only one alien, not two. 3) The alien looks nothing like the ones on the cover.
*****End Spoilers*****
So, a really huge idea is brought up to discuss and it lays there and dies. The rest of the book is an okay space alien story.
I have to give it 3 out of 5 stars for the rest of the book. 1 star for the really big idea. Total: 4 out of 5 stars.
Reviewed on June 28, 2012
Isard's Revenge (Star Wars: X-Wing #8) (audiobook) by Michael A. Stackpole
To contact us Click HERE
Published by Random House Audio in 1999
Read by Anthony Heald
Duration: 2 hours, 59 minutes.
Abridged
Probably no one, even George Lucas himself, knows more about the Star Wars universe than prolific author Michael A. Stackpole. He has authored comics and novels and helped to build the entire post-Return of the Jedi storyline. Isard's Revenge is set several years after the last movie. The New Republic (the government that took over from the Rebel Alliance in Episodes IV, V and VI) is mopping up the various bits and pieces of what is left of the Empire. Several warlords have set themselves up here and there and the New Republic is negotiating or fighting with them. In this storyline, a warlord named Ysanne Isard, the former Director of Imperial Intelligence, presumed defeated and dead, has returned. She has put together a rather complicated plot to draw Wedge Antilles (newly promoted to General by Admiral Ackbar) and his Rogue Squadron into a trap so she can wipe them out to get her revenge for her defeat at their hands that was detailed in Book #4 of this series.
Read by Anthony Heald who covers a wide variety of voices, accents and species with apparent ease, this book is long on speeches and action and very short on character development. I could blame the abridgement for that. It almost certainly cut out too much of the interesting secondary story involving an attempt by an inter-species couple to deal with cultural prejudice as they try to adopt a baby to raise as their own. But, let's face it, the appeal of these books lies in the dogfights and the almost corny speeches the officers give to their pilots before the big fight.
While the audiobook version is abridged, it does two things the book will never have: 1) real Star Wars sound effects; 2) snippets from the original Star Wars soundtracks by John Williams. For old fans of the movies, it is awfully fun to hear the music and the blaster fire and the R2 units as the X-Wings roar into battle.
I rate this audiobook 3 out of 5 stars.
Reviewed on June 29, 2012.
Published by Random House Audio in 1999
Read by Anthony Heald
Duration: 2 hours, 59 minutes.
Abridged
 |
| Admiral Ackbar |
Read by Anthony Heald who covers a wide variety of voices, accents and species with apparent ease, this book is long on speeches and action and very short on character development. I could blame the abridgement for that. It almost certainly cut out too much of the interesting secondary story involving an attempt by an inter-species couple to deal with cultural prejudice as they try to adopt a baby to raise as their own. But, let's face it, the appeal of these books lies in the dogfights and the almost corny speeches the officers give to their pilots before the big fight.
While the audiobook version is abridged, it does two things the book will never have: 1) real Star Wars sound effects; 2) snippets from the original Star Wars soundtracks by John Williams. For old fans of the movies, it is awfully fun to hear the music and the blaster fire and the R2 units as the X-Wings roar into battle.
I rate this audiobook 3 out of 5 stars.
Reviewed on June 29, 2012.
Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV by Warren Littlefield with T. R. Pearson
To contact us Click HERE
Published by Doubleday in 2012
If you remember the giant television shows of NBC's heyday in the 1980s and 1990s this book will be fascinating. Shows like Cheers, Cosby, Law & Order, ER, Will & Grace, Friends, Frazier, 3rd Rock From the Sun, Mad About You and Seinfeld ruled the airwaves. Thursday nights were dominated by NBC and NBC usually made more money on that night than the other six nights combined - literally billions of dollars.
Warren Littlefield was directly involved in the creation of these shows or the in the decision to put them on the air. Littlefield tells the story of "Must See TV" through the voices of the participants themselves. The book is literally a series of quotes with very little in the way of narration from Littlefield himself. Littlefield calls it "oral history" format. If this book were a movie, it would be one of those "talking head" documentaries full of people talking.
But, what a documentary it would be!
I had my reservations about this book, especially when I saw its format. But, once I started it I blazed right through it. The stories behind the creation of these beloved television shows are interesting and told very well. Some stories are more interesting than others, of course, but the book zips along and is full of interesting tidbits like this one - Fred Dryer was the frontrunner for the part of Sam Malone of Cheers, instead of Ted Danson.
The inside story of what was going on in corporate NBC is interesting and, I suspect, a little self-serving on Littlefield's part. He is especially tough on Don Ohlmeyer (who does sound like a difficult person to work with) and makes it sound like NBC has not broadcast much in the way of quality programming since he left.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting book and I rate it 5 stars out of 5.
Reviewed on July 6, 2012.
If you remember the giant television shows of NBC's heyday in the 1980s and 1990s this book will be fascinating. Shows like Cheers, Cosby, Law & Order, ER, Will & Grace, Friends, Frazier, 3rd Rock From the Sun, Mad About You and Seinfeld ruled the airwaves. Thursday nights were dominated by NBC and NBC usually made more money on that night than the other six nights combined - literally billions of dollars.
Warren Littlefield was directly involved in the creation of these shows or the in the decision to put them on the air. Littlefield tells the story of "Must See TV" through the voices of the participants themselves. The book is literally a series of quotes with very little in the way of narration from Littlefield himself. Littlefield calls it "oral history" format. If this book were a movie, it would be one of those "talking head" documentaries full of people talking.But, what a documentary it would be!
I had my reservations about this book, especially when I saw its format. But, once I started it I blazed right through it. The stories behind the creation of these beloved television shows are interesting and told very well. Some stories are more interesting than others, of course, but the book zips along and is full of interesting tidbits like this one - Fred Dryer was the frontrunner for the part of Sam Malone of Cheers, instead of Ted Danson.
The inside story of what was going on in corporate NBC is interesting and, I suspect, a little self-serving on Littlefield's part. He is especially tough on Don Ohlmeyer (who does sound like a difficult person to work with) and makes it sound like NBC has not broadcast much in the way of quality programming since he left.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting book and I rate it 5 stars out of 5.
Reviewed on July 6, 2012.
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