Reading notes – Christian Leithart

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.

Odyssey XIV

The part of Book XIV that always gives students pause is the poet’s sudden direct address: “And, you, Eumaeus, my noble swineherd,” etc. Peter Jones says that the figure of speech, apostrophe, is reserved for characters whom, for whatever reason, the poet has particular affection for. In the Iliad, it is used for Patroclus and Menelaus, while in the Odyssey, only Eumaeus is addressed that way.

Odysseus is, of course, the great hero of the Odyssey, and Telemachus and Penelope match his qualities in their own ways. But if you’re looking for a character who is truly good, Eumaeus is your man. He is courageous, hospitable, intelligent, and, most of all, loyal. I can imagine him being used allegorical as an example of a Christian: faithfully tending his Lord’s flocks until the day of return.

Odyssey XIII

I’ve decided to start sharing my notes and reading questions on the Odyssey. For context, I teach a 7th grade Ancient Humanities class, so I tried to write questions that can be answered at a middle school level and also function as springboards into more complex discussions.

(Btw, we are using Stanley Lombardo’s translation, even though it’s not my favorite. Someday I’ll take a leaf from this guy’s book and write a comparison between it, Fitzgerald, and Lattimore.)

What blessing does Odysseus give Arete right before he leaves?

Odysseus wishes that the Queen would be well “all of your days, until age / And death come to you, as they come to all” (XIII.61-62) He wishes her enjoyment of her house and family (ie, a good life). Ironically, Odysseus is the reason Poseidon turns one of the Phaeacian ships to stone (see below).

How does Poseidon punish the Phaeacians for helping Odysseus? How do they react to the punishment?

The Phaeacians take Odysseus home in one of their ships, and on their return, Poseidon turns the ship into stone in the middle of the harbor. Alcinous immediately recognizes this as the fulfillment of a prophecy* and resolves to never provide safe passage to any traveler ever again. Odysseus’s visit causes the Phaeacians to repudiate the law of hospitality. The last we see of them, they are huddled around Poseidon’s altar, begging him not to surround their city with a mountain, as the prophecy foretold.

Apparently, it’s unclear whether Poseidon actually fulfills this part of the prophecy. Lattimore translates Zeus’s response as, “But do not hide their city under a mountain,” which Lombardo has, “And then hem their city in with a mountain.” Obviously, it can’t be both. Peter Jones remarks that the first reading is based on the ancient commentator Aristophanes of Byzantium, while the second relies on the testimony of another ancient commentator, Aristarchos of Samothrace, both of whom wrote around the same time. So… we don’t know. Seventh graders love that kind of answer.

*This isn’t the first prophecy mentioned after its fulfillment. See Polyphemus’s lament in IX.505-519 (Lombardo).

Why does Athena prevent Odysseus from recognizing Ithaca?

My best guess is that she wanted to do the big reveal herself (XIII.197) and maybe mess with him a little. The two have that kind of relationship. As Athena says,

Here we are
The two shrewdest minds in the universe,
You far and away the best man on earth
In plotting strategies, and I famed among gods
For my clever schemes. (XIII.306-310)

Yep, two peas in a pod.

Jones also suggests that the whole scene is designed to maximize pathos by delaying Odysseus’s reunion with his home. We definitely see the same technique writ large throughout Books XIV-XXII.

Summarize Odysseus’s lie to Athena. Why does he make up a backstory?

See XIII.265ff. Odysseus claims to have killed a man who wanted to steal the gold he plundered from Troy. He mixes fact (he was at Troy, he knows Idomeneus, he came to Ithaca by ship and was left on the beach) and fiction (he is Cretan, he killed Idomeneus’s son, he traveled on a Phoenician ship). He lies to give himself an advantage, buying time and examining the stranger before revealing anything. He continues to hone this strategy as his encounters grow more and more dangerous, preparing himself for the final challenge of facing the suitors.

How does Athena disguise Odysseus? Be specific.

See XIII.447: “She shriveled the flesh on his gnarled limbs, / And withered his tawny hair. She wrinkled the skin / All over his body so he looked like an old man, / And she made his beautiful eyes bleary and dim. / Then she turned his clothes into tattered rags, / Dirty and smoke-grimed, and cast about him / A great deerskin cloak with the fur worn off. / And she gave him a staff and a ratty pouch / All full of holes, slung by a twisted cord.”

What reason does Athena give for not telling Telemachus that his father is still alive?

See XIII.437: “I wanted him / To make a name for himself by traveling there.” It’s interesting to consider what kind of reputation she expected him to earn. He still hasn’t done anything particularly heroic. Yet he has gained the respect of Nestor and Menelaus, if only for his politeness.