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Calling anonymous, Or, Can Anyone Be a Citizen Anymore?
When he joined us for the Ricochet podcast last week, anonymous got me thinking. (To judge from the comments, he got a lot of us thinking.) One of John’s points: That as knowledge expands, each of us can know only a smaller and smaller portion of the whole. Computers, for example, used to be simple enough to enable John and a couple of his buddies to design them from scratch, then sell them. Today that would be impossible. Computers now rely on too many layers of software. John could still design a computer from scratch, of course, but it would seem so primitive, so much like a crude toy, that it would have no commercial value.
This brought to mind Jeffrey Hart, the professor who had a profound influence on me when I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth—and the professor who in turn had influenced him. Consider this passage from Professor Hart’s magnificent volume, Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe:
In 1947 and 1948, when an undergraduate at Dartmouth, I studied with a professor of philosophy named Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a refugee from the Nazis. During World War I, as a soldier in the German army, he had fought at Verdun. On one occasion, during a lull in the bombardment, he wandered out into the pitted and scarred no-man’s-land. Suddenly the artillery on both sides began firing again and he took refuge in a crater….”I was a naked worm,” he told the students in the classroom. In 1933, he experienced another extreme negation in the form of the Nazi revolution…In consequence, he had thought long and deeply about education…He had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student’s mind.
He would say, “History must be told.” He explained various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.
He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.
No one could ever have held the whole of human knowledge in his mind—not, at least, for several thousand years. The Romans may not have known anything about electricity or the internal combustion engine, but no one man could have held in his mind all that they knew about engineering or the whole of Roman law. But could certain ancients have held in their minds the essentials of their civilizations? The intellectual kernels from which their civilizations could have been rebuilt? I think so. Moses could have re-founded ancient Israel. Pericles could have recreated Athens and Julius Caesar could have re-established Rome. Moving much closer to the present, I’d be tempted to argue that Jefferson or Adams could have recreated much of what was known and valued in the early United States.
Could anyone pull it off today? Who? To recreate the United States—the contemporary United States—what would he have to know? To put the question more realistically, what should young people learn to make them true citizens of this country—not citizens of the world, the ridiculous phrase so in vogue on campuses today, but citizens, again, of this country?
Published in General
I was about to post a comment like, “I wonder why nobody ever put out a sci-fi game that does include magic, similar to the way Shadowrun combined D&D and cyberpunk.”
And then I realized that Star Wars already did it.
Apropos of nothing: One of the things about curricula that teach the “great books” is that they do not teach all the material written by the classical writers, nor do they teach the canon as if it’s all gospel.
Take Aristotle, for example. There’s a heck of a lot of stuff he wrote, particularly about the physical world, that’s just plain factually incorrect. A school that taught Aristotle as the ultimate source of knowledge would be awful.
That’s what the post-modern activists don’t get (or intentionally downplay). They point at the things someone like Aristotle wrote that he got wrong and they say, “see? We shouldn’t be wasting our time with these dead white males!” i.e. if he wrote so much that was verifiably incorrect, how can we ever trust the philosophical stuff he wrote that’s unfalsifiable?
It wouldn’t be necessary. After the apocalypse the radiation will turn all the grass into Triffids.
I suspect that if the afore-mentioned dandelions, clover, and thistles ever got their act together that this would be the offspring. I think the wild parsnips are making an attempt at it too (my lawn grows nothing useful – though it’s fun to watch the honeybees in the clover).
But they teach far more than what kids typically get today. Which would I rather have: Aristotle, or, I don’t know, Walt Whitman and gender theory? Great books isn’t the end, it is just a beginning. A great books education doesn’t ensure anything: we arrived at the 20th century in part because of great books. There is a lot of garbage bandied about within great books. But it is much better than any alternative I’ve seen.
My 8 year old daughter was (poorly) translating Dancing Queen into Latin on the fly, that seems like success to me.
Skip,
As long as the roots are not severed it will be well….
Regards,
Jim
But, There’s a Zombie on my lawn!
And there we have it. We have traversed from anonymous on Citizens and Civilization to Zombies on the Lawn. We can fold it all up now. The true singularity has been reached.
Whoops. I clicked “comment” instead of “edit”.
Oh, but now I see I can no longer edit the comment I wanted to edit, so I’ll just post the addendum here:
Yabbut… Washington also didn’t have the distractions of Martha reading 50 Shades of Grey.
Is Mrs. Skipsul working you hard?
MYOB.
Wasn’t that one of the characters in Dune?
;-)
Yabbut or MYOB?
I think we scared Peter off.
I was going with MYOB. It’s more Duneish.
Yabbut sounds like an alien from H2G2.
I often do…
Is that a proud accomplishment?