Reading notes – Christian Leithart

Taming the Tongue

James’s writing on the tongue suggests that taming it is part of the dominion mandate:

For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and creature of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by mankind. But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

Even though he says here that taming the tongue is impossible, a few verses earlier he says this:

If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body.

In other words, the perfect man rules himself as he rules horses (v. 3), ships (v. 4), and all other created things. I don’t think it’s going to far to say that self-governance is one of Adam’s original tasks.

The Latest from Jacobs

The most frustrating thing about Alan Jacobs’s blog is the lack of a comments section. He posts so many thought-provoking things, and then gives me nowhere to put my provoked thoughts. So, here, in no particular order, are a handful of my reactions and comments to various things he’s posted over the past few months.

The Joy of Cooking, alternate cover — This wonderful cover illustration of The Joy of Cooking, showing a cook slaying the dragon of drudgery. I’m tempted to print and frame it for our kitchen wall.

George MacDonald motto: Corage, God Mend Al — And this image of George MacDonald’s personal motto, an anagram of his name, and deliberately misspelled because, as Jacobs explains, “in this world things that are mended still show the signs of their frayed or broken state. Mended but not yet perfected are the things and the people of this world, at their very best.”

This post may explain why I just can’t bring myself to worry about ChatGPT in education. I just can’t summon the panic:

Imagine a culinary school that teaches its students how to use HelloFresh: “Sure, we could teach you how to cook from scratch the way we used to — how to shop for ingredients, how to combine them, how to prepare them, how to present them — but let’s be serious, resources like HelloFresh aren’t going away, so you just need to learn to use them properly.” The proper response from students would be: “Why should we pay you for that? We can do that on our own.”

If I decided to teach my students how to use ChatGPT appropriately, and one of them asked me why they should pay me for that, I don’t think I would have a good answer. But if they asked me why I insist that they not use ChatGPT in reading and writing for me, I do have a response: I want you to learn how to read carefully, to sift and consider what you’ve read, to formulate and then give structure your ideas, to discern whom to think with, and finally to present your thoughts in a clear and cogent way. And I want you to learn to do all these things because they make you more free — the arts we study are liberal, that is to say liberating, arts.
Alan Jacobs

The things that I want to teach students have nothing to do with ChatGPT or other “fake intelligences.” Like Josh Gibbs, I’m actually rather pleased that such tools are revealing the mechanistic nature of so many assignments.

Here Jacobs argues that “it is virtually impossible for good art to be made in our place, in our moment” because we—addicted as we are to the Panopticon—are victims of self-censorship, which is the enemy of artistic expression. This dovetails with two other posts: this one on cultivating a quiet “home base” away from the censorious crowds, and—to push back on the idea of the self-sufficient artist—this one on the importance of intellectuals (and, I would add, artists) always having “a living community before their eyes,” that is, a group of people to whom their thoughts and words are directed.

Here’s Jacobs doing what he does best: making fascinating connections between books. His description of The City and the City reminds me of Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams, though in the latter the cities overlap in time, not in space.

We Are Leviathan

It’s so obvious in retrospect that Elon Musk bought Twitter to turn it into an AI farm. I’ve known this was the long-term play of technocrats for a while. I just hadn’t put two and two together (or X and X?).

Mary Harrington has noted what makes this potential AI (named Grok) different from others: rather than pulling information from static data, Grok draws on the “living” hive-mind that is Twitter. As if that isn’t disturbing enough, Harrington takes it one step further into politics:

This provides a potential solution to one of 21st century’s thorniest problems: how do you govern a demos that is both reflexively anti-authoritarian, but that also yearns for strongman governance?

In other words, young people today want to do what they want and they want to be told what to do. Justice means no human being should hold power over another, but it takes a strong, decisive authority to enforce that equality. What’s a young person to do? If Elon’s AI experiment works, it’s possible that young people could begin to trust the radically democratic central authority that is Grok. After all, Grok’s intelligence will be drawn from the people, so its decisions will be guided by what the people want without any personal biases. Right? Right?? In fact, feeding information to Grok could become part of your civic duty. Don’t you want a just society?

Harrington:

I hope this is all just my over-active imagination. But I can picture a near future in which it’s considered far more meaningfully democratic to pour your opinions and political passions into the LLM than to cast your vote. Isn’t this potentially a far richer way of contributing your perspective, than merely casting a ballot once every five years? When your words, sentences, opinions and sentiments form part of the billions of such phrasings that go to make up the totality of what the egregore knows, is that not a more representative form of participation in governance than casting a ballot?

It might feel a little less like being borne down upon by Leviathan, and more like becoming part of Leviathan. It might, indeed, feel legitimate.

How long till we see “I tweeted” stickers proudly displayed on election day?

Worthy of Individual Names

Hilaire Belloc describes the delightful disorder of an English seaside town in Hills and the Sea:

It is not only that the separate things in such towns are delightful, nor only that one comes upon them suddenly, but also that these separate things are so many. They have characters as men have. There is nothing of that repetition which must accompany the love of order and the presence of strong laws. The similar insistent forms which go with a strong civilisation, as they give it majesty, so they give it also gloom, and a heavy feeling of finality: these are quite lacking here in England, where the poor have for so long submitted to the domination of the rich, and the rich have dreaded and refused a central government. Everything that goes with the power of individuals has added peculiarity and meaning to all the stones of Lynn. Moreover, a quality whose absence all men now deplore was once higher in England than anywhere else, save, perhaps, in the northern Italian hills. I mean ownership, and what comes from ownership—the love of home.

A “strong civilisation,” as he says, needs order and strong laws. Both of these cause everything to look pretty much the same (towns, roads, cars). England, though I’m sure Belloc would call it a “strong civilisation,” resisted that standardization and so its small towns have preserved their unique character. (He goes on to say that “All the roofs of Lynn and all its pavements are worthy (as though they were living beings) of individual names.”

It’s extremely interesting that he immediately connects this with ownership and, almost instantly, the love of home. If we follow his reasoning, it seems to go like this: ownership –> love of home –> resistance to central government –> resistance to standardization –> places with peculiarity and meaning. (I’m sure Belloc develops these ideas more fully in other books.)

I’ll make one more comment. Even more than the English, Americans dreaded and refused a central government. We’ve pushed against it since our country’s inception. Yet, standardization has crept over all our cities, towns, and villages. Driving down the highway is like riding a carousel: you pass the same glittering objects again and again (Shell stations, Starbucks, Cracker Barrels). Our central government has more sway than we like to believe. But I wonder if the American form of standardization has more to do with mass media. I’ll leave it there for now.

Campbell and Catharsis

Since I teach ancient Humanities, I’m occasionally asked about Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the story structure he outlined in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. My gut reaction has always been to reject his ideas, but since I’ve never studied them in detail, I decided to read the book itself. Hoo, boy. It’s bad. Campbell is entirely too fascinated with paganism to be of any use in the classroom. An example:

As Gilbert Murray has pointed out in his preface to Ingram Bywater’s translation of the Poetics of Aristotle, tragic katharsis (i.e., the “purification” or “purgation” of the emotions of the spectator of tragedy through his experience of pity and terror) corresponds to an earlier ritual katharsis (“a purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death”), which was the function of the festival and mystery play of the dismembered bull-god Dionysos. The meditating mind is united, in the mystery play, not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time inhabited it, and for that time was the reality clothed in the apparition (at once the sufferer and the secret cause), the substratum into which our selves dissolve when the “tragedy that breaks man’s face” has split, shattered, and dissolved our mortal frame.

In other words, ancient mystery plays were rituals designed to carry the community (let’s call it the congregation) through tragedy by showing how death frees the spirit from the mortal body. Unfortunately, the spirit gets caught and trapped again, which is why these rituals have to happen over and over.

I spend quite a lot of time in class describing how the ancient pagans viewed the gods. It’s true that the gods were revered partly because they had escaped the confines of the mortal body, so from a purely historical standpoint, Murray’s statement is accurate. What I don’t need is some twentieth century literary critic making goo-goo eyes at this “principle of continuous life.”

Worse, some Christians see the monomyth as a precursor to the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, which would imply that these ancient mystery plays were in some way prefiguring the gospel story. Nothing could be further from the truth. The pagan story is that death frees the spirit from the body, its prison, at least until twelve months’ worth of wickedness piles up again. The worshiper is united, not with the death, but with the spiritual life that goes on and on. The gospel story is that Christ died and we died with Him, freeing us from sin forever. Being united with His death is the whole point. Furthermore, in the gospel story, the separation of body and soul in death is a great discomfort that Christ will resolve when He returns.

Assuming Campbell’s analysis of myth is accurate (I’ll decide after I’ve finished the book), to teach my students that ancient myths foreshadow the gospel story would be to do them a disservice.

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said: Grammar Stage Curriculum

This is the third of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog. Here are the first and second installments.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

Some in the world of classical Christian education disparage Dottie because of her emphasis on teaching the “tools of learning,” which the educated student can apply to anything he pleases. They insist that the quality of an education depends on what is taught as well as how it is taught, and they believe that Dottie’s approach doesn’t take this into account. True, Dottie is somewhat agnostic about content. She says that the teachers must look upon their classes “less as ‘subjects’ in themselves than as a gathering-together of material [her emphasis] for use in the next part of the Trivium. What that material is, is only of secondary importance.”

As we’ve seen already, Dottie comes close to contradicting herself at various places in the essay, and this may be one of those places. After all, she spends quite a lot of time talking about what should and shouldn’t be studied in the Grammar Stage. But I think the operative phrase in the quote above is “less as.” The teachers will teach subjects, truth, stories, facts, information, but they must see these things as all of a piece. Everything they teach can be used later on, which means nothing memorized is completely useless. It does not mean that the teachers should break advanced subjects into pieces and get the kids to memorize the pieces. But that will have to wait for another post. First, let’s look at Dottie’s curriculum recommendations for the Grammar Stage.

Grammar

To master Grammar itself, students should learn the grammar of an inflected language. (This rules out English, as we saw earlier.) Dottie is ok with Russian, Sanskrit, and Classical Greek, but she recommends Latin—Medieval Latin, that is, not Classical. I don’t know of any classical school that starts with Medieval Latin, but that may be due to a lack of textbooks.

Dottie also suggests starting a contemporary foreign language at this age. She recommends French or German. Honest question: Do any classical schools teach modern languages in the Grammar Stage?

English (Literature)

Dottie recommends memorizing (and reciting) poetry and prose and telling many, many stories, including ancient myths. Do not, says she, do not use ancient myths to practice Latin grammar. I suppose she doesn’t want young people to spend time poring over the unfiltered words of pagan authors.

History

I don’t want to point fingers, but I want to emphasize here that Dottie recommends History consist of dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities. Memorizing a timeline of dates and events does no one any good unless those dates and events are tied to real people and what they did. The particular dates, she says, don’t matter. What matters is having a historical framework of some kind—accompanied by “pictures of costumes, architecture, and other ‘everyday things.” Got that? Worry less about memorizing five hundred dates and more about getting a full picture of one or two historical time periods.

Geography

Geography, like history, is presented as facts associated with visual presentation: “customs, costumes, flora, fauna, and so on.” She encourages memorizing capitals and collecting stamps.

Science

Dottie recommends teaching science through “the identifying and naming of specimens.” Notice that word “identifying.” How is a student going to identify a devil’s coach-horse, Cassiopeia, a whale, or a bat without observing them? There is nothing in her description of Science that would require a student to even be inside a classroom. Excursions into nature seem like an obvious extension of her suggestions.

Math

I know people who scoff at the phrase “the grammar of Mathematics” because they view “grammar” as a linguistic term. But if we take Dottie’s own definition of grammar as “learning what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works,” then we can easily see how the term applies to math. She recommends memorizing multiplication tables, geometrical shapes, and “the grouping of numbers,” followed by simple sums in arithmetic. I’m not sure that these activities by themselves will result in a student’s understanding “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works,” but then, I’m not sure that any of Dottie’s Grammar Stage recommendations fulfill that promise.

Theology

Here, more than anywhere else, Dottie emphasizes that the student does not need to fully understand the material, merely to be familiar with it. She recommends teaching the Biblical narrative as a complete story of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption, as well as the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. I think she underestimates the students here. A nine-year-old can easily understand all of those things—not fully, perhaps, but sufficiently.

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said: Grammar

This is the second of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

The Trivium, as Dottie explains it, is a way to “teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning.” It means mastering a language in three stages: Grammar (the structure), Dialectic (the reasoning), and Rhetoric (the expression). So does the Trivium only apply to language? Well, yes and no. All three parts of the Trivium are language arts, but as Dottie says, “language itself is the medium in which thought is expressed.” Human beings need language to think, which means that mastering language can aid us in mastering thought itself. This paves the way for mastery in any subject whatsoever, whether geometry, music, astronomy, medicine, theology, or law. That’s the idea, anyway.

I won’t take time here to talk about whether there can be such a thing as “the grammar of math.” I know people have strong feelings about that. Instead I want to ask whether any classical Christian schools are actually following Dottie’s suggestions when it comes to the Grammar stage.

Dottie defines the Grammar stage as learning what a language is, how it’s put together, and how it works. She matches this onto what she calls “the Poll-Parrot Age,” in which “learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable.” (Later in the essay she gives an age range of nine to eleven years old.) Many classical educators treat the Grammar stage as a time of pure memorization. “Don’t worry about whether the students understand,” they say. “They’re just gathering material.” In general, kids like to memorize stuff, so everything appears hunky-dory. Grammar—check.

But pure memorization doesn’t teach a student what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works. To do that, you must teach actual grammar. Some classical schools teach English grammar in the early years, so that students know what direct objects and subordinate clauses are before they leave elementary school. But Dottie’s actual suggestion is teaching Latin grammar. Because Latin is an inflected language, its grammar is better than English grammar for teaching “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works.” In the Grammar stage, then, Latin should be more than chanting declensions and conjugations. Students should know what direct objects and subordinate clauses are in Latin before they leave elementary school.

Again, according to Dottie, the Trivium is a three-tier system: you must master the first stage before you ascend to the next. If you want to study Dialectic (the study of argumentation), you have to understand Grammar—which means Latin grammar. But nearly every classical school moves students to the “Logic Stage” based on age, not ability. Doesn’t that blow the entire system apart? How can a student learn to use language, to define terms and make accurate statements, to construct an argument and detect fallacies without knowing what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works? And forget about Rhetoric! How can a teenager who hasn’t mastered the structure of language and arguments to express himself well?

To be fair, Dottie is a little inconsistent here. When she describes the Trivium, she emphasizes its tiered structure (Rhetoric is built on Dialectic, which is built on Grammar). Later, when describing the “Pert Age,” she says it begins “so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to Pertness and interminable argument” or “when the capacity for abstract thought begins to manifest itself.” These benchmarks seem more tied to a child’s psychological development than how far he’s progressed in Latin.

If the Trivium consists of three stages laid firmly atop one another, and if we follow Dottie’s definition of Grammar, a student must study enough Latin to understand “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works” before moving on to Dialectic. How many classical schools actually operate this way?

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said

This is the first of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

One of the first things Dottie does in her speech is propose “to deal with the subject of teaching,” for the purpose of producing “a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society.” Like every thirty-two-year-old academic, she aimed high, at no less than an overhaul of modern education, to correct the woefully slack thinking that ran rampant through the England of her day. She helpfully lists some examples of the problem she wants to solve:

People are susceptible to propaganda.
Professional writers fail to define their terms.
The average educated person can’t tackle a new subject for himself.
The average educated person can’t make connections across subjects.
Academics can’t distinguish between material and final causes.
Academics assume what they are trying to prove.

Serious problems, these. Worth addressing.

Here’s where things get sticky. Does the average graduate of a classical school fare any better than his public school peers when it comes to:

Susceptibility to propaganda?
Defining his terms?
Tackling new subjects?
Making connections across subjects and disciplines?
Distinguishing between material and final causes?
Begging the question? (Or misusing the phrase “begging the question?”)

I’m sure Dottie would agree that, even in her day, exceptional students avoided these pitfalls. Her proposals weren’t meant to improve the lot of the exceptional, but of the average. We’re talking about the typical CCE student, the Classical Child-Not-Left-Behind.

If average graduates of classical Christian schools routinely make the mistakes Dottie lists above, then either a) her proposal doesn’t work or b) we haven’t implemented it correctly.