Culture versus Education

Written a bit on this previously here.

To sum up: Education can only be an expression of a culture. Throughout history (and, one suspects, prehistory) education consisted precisely in those activities that passed on culture.

Putting on my mail-order evolutionary anthropologists’ hat, it is easy to speculate that learning a particular culture, one within which have survived those most necessary evolutionary participants called ‘parents’, would in itself have huge survival advantages: how are you going to survive in an environment? Look around – who in a similar situation has survived? Why, your parents! Let’s do that!

Anyway, once History rolled around, people began to largely fail to record how they educated their young – the record is surprisingly thin on details. This makes sense: it would be like expecting early historians to record how they chewed their food or got dressed in the morning – education is so completely natural and integrated into daily life that it would have seemed completely pointless to describe how it happened.

Unless you decided to change it. The earliest records I know of recording in any detail how young people were educated comes from the Greeks in around 500 B.C. Before then, we have things like the recurring biblical exhortations to fathers to make sure their children learned the laws of their ancestors – it seems to be assumed that the fathers would know how to do it, so that part seems to get left out. I say ‘seems’ because of course the laws of the ancestors would be passed on in their observance – if everybody around you is celebrating Passover, reenacting detailed rituals and reciting specific prayers, that’s something a kid will pick up. That’s why the historical biblical books record the many times the Law and the feasts were ignored or restored – that is precisely the history of the fall and rise of Culture, and, by extension, the history of education within that culture.

So, back to the Greeks. We know from quite a number of sources that the various city-states and various philosophical and political schools paid a great deal of attention to education. It is important to note that, early on, little detail exists to cover what we might call the grade school years – just like everywhere else, no one could be bothered to describe how little kids were to be educated, everybody just *knew* how that happened. The end result was clear: all properly educated little kids would be prepared to do the next level of schooling, equivalent to junior high school, at least in terms of the ages of the pupils.

(Later on, around the 3rd century B.C., the Greeks began to record even how little children were to be educated. I’d speculate that this new interest is a sign that people felt the culture was under threat, somehow, so that what used to be safely assumed now needed to be paid attention to. )

Here the records get thicker. The arguments – Greeks so loved to argue! – was over, ultimately, what kind of culture you wanted. Spartans wanted a culture that supported an army that would never lose a war; Athenians wanted to never lose a war, too, but believed it was better to get there via a broad education that would help one love the city he was defending. Changes to education both lead to and followed changes to culture. When Alexander lead his Macedonian Greeks in conquest of most of the known world, he set up everywhere both ‘Alexandrias’ – new Greek cities manned by his troops and colonists – and Greek enclaves within the major conquered cities, from which to govern them. In both these places, schools, called ephebia, were set up to make sure that the young men were properly saturated in Greek culture.

Ephebia began as military schools. Around the age of 18, men would spend a year or two training as soldiers. As the Macedonians and subsequent Roman dominations made defending your city-state less immediately critical, ephebia evolved into cultural schools entirely, eventually completely losing their military character. They even started accepting barbarian students, training wannabe Greeks along side Greek Greeks. Thus was the survival of Greek culture in Greek lands assured up until the sacking of Constantinople. The literary and artistic output of all that culture assured its survival up to today.

So, I hope I’ve shown how cultures generate education and how education reinforces or even reinvents culture. The important note here is that all the education – and there was a lot of it – in the ancient and biblical world took place without any graded classroom instruction. Graded classroom instruction is an idea of the Enlightenment and of the Industrial Revolution.

So, given that the graded classroom model is a comparatively later-day innovation, the question should arise: what sort of *culture* does that model aim to achieve? As an innovation, it is intended to make things new – to create what was not there before. A lot of what I’m writing about here on this blog is simply an attempt to illuminate the cultural goals of ‘scientific’ education. What many people suspect – that they don’t want for their children what the schools want for them – is true to a degree most people find hard to imagine.

Alas, you can’t make a new cultural omelet without breaking the existing cultural eggs. It is telling that the Orwellian phrase ‘multiculturalism’ is a religion among the most vigorous proponents of industrial schooling. They would like to reduce culture to an innocuous matter of taste, rather than an indispensable part of what it means to be a human being – the more easily to crack it, and replace it. So, in places like the KIPP school in New York and the Pardada Pardadi school in India, where everyone (almost) can agree that the cultures being destroyed – the drug and gang and welfare culture in New York, and the misogynistic culture or rural India – deserve to die, the classroom model is seen as a great success.

But what about the Mexican culture of California? Having grown up in Southern California and having lived in California almost my whole life, I can attest that the there are many good things in the Mexican culture in California: much tighter families, greater care and deference shown to the elderly, warmer treatment of kids, and a general openness and compassion sorely lacking in our dominant culture.

It is universally lamented by the champions of public education that comparatively few Mexican-Americans go to college, and relatively many drop out of high school.  Look at what is being proposed from the Mexican-American’s point of view:  You can stay in school and go to college. To do this, you will be setting yourself apart from those members of your family who don’t don’t or didn’t do this, most notably your parent’s generation. During high school, you will be doing homework during much of the time you would otherwise have spent with family and friends. If you succeed in high school, you will ‘go away’ to college, either literally or figuratively, spending even less time with family and friends. If you succeed at college, you will get a career, the pursuit of which will, as likely as not, take you even further away.

Now, as a member of a different culture than your family, you will see them at Thanksgiving and Christmas, in accord with how your new culture does things. You will not be involved in the daily lives of your sisters and brothers, nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts. You’ve traded all that for the approval of a new culture and money and stuff. When life gets hard, you will not be surrounded by loving family – you’ll just call them on the phone, maybe.

I suspect that many Mexican Americans do not pursue college because they are more or less consciously aware of this trade-off. They’d rather drop out at 17 and take that job with Tio Juan’s sheet-rocking business, or wait tables at Tia Lola’s  restaurant, and stay connected with family.

Perhaps you think I’m painting too sunny a picture, leaving out gangs and drugs and poverty. Perhaps I am – my personal experience with Mexican Americans was all through school and church, which has the effect of largely filtering out the gang and drug scene. The Americans of Mexican origin that I knew and know very much fit the picture I painted. As to the gangs and drugs and so on, perhaps the destructive power of our culture got ahead of itself, and managed to destroy the existing culture before it was able to develop the new one. I know that divorce and materialism, which play a smaller role in traditional Mexican families, have had a huge negative effect on Mexican-American families. A husband can just walk out on his wife here in America, move in with the girlfriend. He would probably have had to flee the country in the old culture, because the entire village would have probably been outraged at him.

Are Teachers Evil?

Let’s cut to the chase:  based on all I’ve written so far about education, teachers appear to be no more than unwitting tools of a concerted, ongoing, 200+ year effort to make students stupid, docile and utterly predictable. And, insofar as teachers are products of the education schools and are part of the education bureaucracy, they, too can be relied on to be stupid, docile and utterly predictable.

Is this accurate? Is this fair?

We all, I presume, had teachers we loved. I loved my 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade teachers. Can’t say I loved any of my high school teachers, but I respected a couple of them. These were teachers whose obvious love for the students managed to overcome, to some extent, what they were systematically doing to them.

But most of my teachers? Stupid? Well, yeah – too stupid to question why it was a good idea to teach kids as a class when in fact they could clearly see that some kids were way, way ahead of the lessons, some were merely ahead, some were behind – and a majority were bored and uninterested. They were stupid enough to keep doing the same things over and over and over again despite reality – a reality that demonstrated to everyone with eyes to see that kids learn different things at different paces, and that the whole idea of an age-based class was contrary and violent to the human nature and dignity of the kids.

A typical kid, if such exists, may at any one time find fractions impossible but read several grade levels ahead, or be great at kickball but terrible at relating to other kids, or have trouble writing legibly but be able to do long division in their head, or any other of a million combinations of talents, interests and skills that help make them a unique human being but defy any meaningful classification into a ‘class’.

How can anyone be so blind? Aren’t teachers idealistic people who love kids and have a burning desire to teach? What could possibly turn such people into mindless cogs? Teachers are not just the managers of a process – they are products of the process as well.  Education schools are renowned for their irrelevant classes, stifling bureaucracies, pointless busywork and failure to prepare their graduates for what to expect in a classroom. An education degree does not prepare one to teach math, or science, or history or English – it prepares you to be an educator.

Think of education school as first and foremost a filter: it filters out people with a low tolerance for all those things listed above – hate bureaucracy, busy work, and wasting time? Is your sense of justice offended by arbitrary rules? Is teaching math or English more important to you than being an ‘educator’?  Then you will most likely be filtered out.

This leaves us with more or less docile teachers, who will follow the orders themselves and impose orders on the kids, no matter how mindless or counterproductive those directives may be. The potential troublemakers have been largely filtered out.

Think I’m just making this up? Do you know any former teachers? What do they say about it?  If you don’t know any former teachers, you could read John Taylor Gatto.

So, we end up with many teachers who are stupid – in the sense of impervious to learning from their environment;  docile – in the sense of willing to follow orders without question; and predictable – in the sense that they are very unlikely to do anything unplanned. Well? Does this seem true to you? Compare this to reality for yourself.  Note that all this does not mean there won’t be the occasional maverick, or that the love of children may not survive on some level, or even that teachers aren’t perfectly nice people. But I challenge you: for every real maverick in a school, a person who does the right think even when it is ‘against the rules’, who treats kids as human beings with dignity, whose love of learning breaks out of the bureaucratic box, there are 9 who will conform with varying degrees of bitterness, whose contempt for their students (and, especially, their parents) is palpable, or who have long ago given up any ideals and are just putting in time until they can retire.

Or who move into administration as fast as they possibly can.

This is the nature of giant bureaucracies. This is what it means on the ground when you set ‘national standards’. This is what the architects of the school system have always wanted.

The usual fallback: that’s what school *IS*! It’s definitional! It has to be that way! No, it doesn’t. One-room schooling, where millions of Americans were educated, practiced in over a 100,000 schools for a century or more in this country, recognized this fact: that children learn in different ways and at different times. So, the teacher was in charge of a group of mixed ages, and her job (it was almost always a young woman) was to see where each child stood, assign a peer to teach them what they needed to know, and then, by means of ‘recitations’ – the child coming up to the teacher and reciting what they had learned – determine what progress was being made. In this way, children got to both learn and teach, got to see that they were a valuable part of the community, and got recognized as unique individuals.

One room schools achieved a remarkably superior level of education (just look at the readers they used and the math they had to do) with much lower ‘inputs’ – much fewer classroom hours and much less homework.  They were also under the complete and immediate control of the local families that supported them.

One room schools were the enemy of the scientific graded schools. They had to go. For one thing, the teachers were amateurs, not trained educators. They were known to and hired by the families whose kids were to be taught, meaning they had no loyalty to the high-minded concepts of Fichte and Horace Mann. They just wanted the kids to know enough to govern themselves, run their farm, and be responsible members of their community.

In conclusion: teachers in compulsory graded schools are not evil. What they do is.

Modern Education In the News: History Gets Ignored, In Accord with Current Educational Theory.

First, education in the news:

From the Catholic Exchange, we find out that Indiana has rejected the Common Core curriculum developed by the Gates Foundation in conjunction with the Obama administration. Two Indiana moms noticed that their kids’ homework was getting even lamer than usual, wondered why, and, after 18 months of attending meetings and asking principals and state

reps – investigative journalism, I think it used to called – they discovered that their state had replaced the ‘respected’ Indiana state standards with Common Core without bringing the change to the attention of anyone.

Here is a section that is wonderful for the surprise that our intrepid moms experienced when they discovered that these new standards had been enacted in such a way that almost nobody, certainly not parents, was even aware it had happened. Any acquaintance with the history of education in America would have prepared them for this recurring theme: that parents and voters, when presented with the choice, almost never agree to what educational professionals want to do, and that since at least the 1860s, the preferred method of educators has been to get innocuous-sounding departments of education founded at the state level and in the universities from which they could achieve the goals the voters consistently voted down. Compulsory state education was voted down for years in Massachusetts despite Horace Mann’s rhetorical efforts to make it sound OK; states in the Midwest - Indiana, for example – voted down the ‘scientific’ classroom model in favor of locally controlled one-room schools for decades on end. And on and on.  Common Core would be just the latest step in a 200 year effort to ‘dumb down’ us peons, as we will discuss below.

How Science Demands Our Loyalty and Agreement

Long said that I don’t ‘believe’ in science, that believe is exactly the wrong word to describe what we owe to science. So, if the language of faith – believe – isn’t the right one to describe our relationship to science, what is?

What I believe in is Truth: that we do live in a real, knowable world. Unfortunately, this faith in truth is not as obvious or ubiquitous  as it ought to be. These days, you’ll run across any number of people – often, people in academia, politics and entertainment (insofar as those things are different) who will hold with varying degrees of conviction that there is no truth, truth is relative, that you have your truth and I have mine. 

These attitudes are, fundamentally, treacherous. They reflect a rebellion, an act of treason, against everyone else and everything else in existence. To deny truth is the ultimate act of egomaniacal defiance. It spits in the face of all friendship, all love, all wonder. Insofar as you are making any attempt to live as a decent human being, you cannot hold relativist or worse beliefs about truth.

So, in this sense, science is based on the dogmatic assertion of truth, and my acceptance of science is therefore contingent: I defend and honor and accept the conclusion of science insofar as science defends and honors truth.

The price of science is eternal vigilance. The dogmatic assertions that 1) there is a real world whose existence is independent of my perceptions of it, and 2) that we are somehow (it gets more than a bit metaphysical at this point) able to learn the truth about the world does not mean we will automatically get it right, or that we are in any way preserved from error in our judgement. We can be wrong about the truth in many different ways, giving rise to the possibility of untruth. Of error. Of lies. Further, in so far as science can be used in the service of  power and wealth, we are sore tempted to misuse, misstate or ignore the truth  to achieve baser goals.

When you are a lover of science for any other reason than that you are a lover of truth, you are in a very morally precarious position.

Therefore, in my own humble way, I try to keep an eye on the most egregious acts of treason against truth made in the name of Science!.  This requires an understanding of the limitations of science in general, and of the particular limitations of various methods. I link to the TOF Spot and William Briggs because they frequently address both these species of limitations, and because of their knowledge of statistics, a subject about which I am largely ignorant and which figures enormously in many of the most egregious lies told in the name of science.

So: those like Sagan, who demanded our acquiescence to his claims in the name of science – ultimately, in the name of truth – while actively and knowingly overstepped the limitations of scientific knowledge for personal and political ends – they are the enemy, specifically the enemies of truth. As mentioned above, enemies of truth end up as enemies of all that is good and beautiful, all that is worth living for. This is a fight worth fighting.

But there are relatively few of those true traitors to truth. Much more numerous, it seems to me, are the legions of courtesans of science, who want to be counted among the cool kids, and therefore demand that we ‘believe’ in science and do whatever it is our betters tell us to do in the name of truth. And perhaps the greatest threat of all are the non-scientists who understand the game well enough to see what a powerful tool science is, with its claims of truth and its buckets of gadgets, but don’t even care about limits of knowledge or truth at all, but only see a means to the end of power. This is probably the smallest yet most dangerous group of all.

 

Ends and Odds: Back in the Saddle

- Visited the California redwood forests up near Eureka, CA, with the family. The forests are filled with surprisingly large trees, including this one, conveniently labeled, as the photo attests, ‘Giant Tree’:

Four adult sized people and one little kid can’t reach half way around the trunk; if you put a football field on end (not recommended – pretty sure it would void the warranty) the tree would stretch right past the opposite end zone.

- Micro Music at Mass Review: Attended Sunday Mass at the lovely church pictured below.  St. Joseph’s – a fine name, a fine saint – in Fortuna, CA.

The music was good and bad – we got a couple good hymns, the Latin Sanctus and Agnus Dei (although accompanied by a bizarre synth patch – but, hey, I’ll take it!)  – as well as some St. Louis Jebby songs.

A fantasy occurred to me: say you strip the lyrics from Be Not Afraid and submit the music – the tune and the accompaniment – for a composition class or competition anywhere outside the church music world. Well? Can you imagine somebody at Oberlin or Berkeley or even the local community college going: Yea, that’s what what I’m talking about! Or rather, can’t you see them going: Ya know, you use the same note with what might as well be random syncopation for about 75% of your ‘melody’ – that doesn’t strike you as lame?  And you could branch out into harmonic structures unknown to the Kingsmen without much risk of over doing it.

Anyway, lovely people, beautiful and efficacious Mass, and we got more good music to sing than bad. Not complaining.

- Iron Man III is OK. You may want to sit down for this – the plot has some holes.  But no spoilers here, uh-uh. Well, maybe a little, if you haven’t seen the trailer:

A wise man once said: it’s not the falling that will kill you – it’s the rapid deceleration at the end. Metal suits don’t alter that basic fact of physics one bit – if Iron Man hits the ground or any other even a little solid surface, he’s not jumping up to fight some more – he’s Jello in a can. And since when does genetics and brain imaging hocus-pocus result in human flesh that can withstand 3,000 degree (F, C, whatever)?

But, hey, it’s a superhero movie – it’s not supposed to make sense.

- Boy, politics is getting kinda interesting, in a road-kill/train wreck sort of way.

 

Science versus Science!

One of the things that’s long struck me about astronomy is how, now that we send out space probes and get a close look, the objects in our solar system often turns out to be wildly different than astronomers imagined. The thing to be learned here is that astronomers do a lot of speculating – they have some observations and a toolbox of theories, and they just can’t resist the urge to build. What gets built ends up not matching what further observations reveal. Therefore:

CAUTION! The Objects in This Science! Paper May Be Less Certain Than They Appear!

So, over at the highly recommended Chaos Manner, Dr. Pournelle gives a bit of a mid-book review of  The Static Universe, in which are described astronomical observations and measurements that do not jibe with the Big Bang. His esteemed correspondents chip in. An edifying collection of thoughts – read it!

My only claims to scientific achievement consist in having turned over a small Catholic grade school’s library of Time-Life science books, having read decades worth of Scientific Americans cover to cover, and having cleared the lab and sent a number of students to the infirmary during college chemistry.  (Note: if you’ve used a Bunsen burned to boil off all the liquid in a sample, Do Not immediately add a  nasty chemical  solution to the still very hot crucible. Just FYI.)  Also, read a lot of science history source materials, and studied philosophy and classics. So, of course, I know almost everything!

Therefore, I speculate on cosmology with nary a hint of hubris. At the Chaos Manner linked above,  gentleman named Jean-Louis Beaufils makes a comment I heartily approve of:

Despite it’s name, astrophysics is barely a science, or more accurately, very little of it has the same reliability as physics.

The core problem is the dearth of direct observation and the small size of the observation database.

Therefore Astrophysicists have to:

1) rely on a lot of second-hand data

2) assume that conditions which apply in the Solar system also apply everywhere else.

2) is further compounded by the scarcity of direct observation even within the Solar system.

So most of what’s presented as knowledge about the universe is actually but speculation, not groundless speculation but speculation still.

Almost every time we send a probe to a new part of the Solar system, we discover that things there are different, sometimes dramatically, from what was until then the accepted truth.

If Earth-based observation gives such unreliable results for objects that are only a few AU’s away from us, how can we assume that our hypotheses about objects that are even a few parsecs away actually describe what’s there?

In high school, back when VW Bugs ruled the earth, I remember realizing that the Big Bang rested on, essentially, 2 things: the red shift, and the presence of the predicted background radiation. (I wasn’t smart enough to know that it also falls out of relativity under some understandings.)  I though: you know, that’s a little thin. Are we really comfortable with the idea that the Doppler Effect accounted for 100%, or nearly 100% of the observed red shift? Really? The light we’re seeing has spent sometimes billions of years getting to us over unimaginable distances – how confident are we that nothing else is going on that could shift the spectra red?  Gravity is pretty mysterious – we’ve got some well tested formula that seem to hold very well over interstellar distances – but what about over intergalactic distances? All those red-shifted photons traversed an awful lot of twisted up space – to no effect?

Anyway, what do I know?  Here, unlike a lot of scientific overreach, there doesn’t seem to be much life or death level stuff at stake. It would be enlightening if scientist – science popularizers, more specifically – spent as much effort drawing attention to the specific and general limits of scientific knowledge as they do cheer-leading and patting each other on the back.

Odds and Ends

- Dr. Boli slays me.

- Marriage is like being the only two people in on a joke. And it’s a pretty good joke.

- My 15 year old daughter has, without warning, turned into a total bookworm. That odd duck folks like her mom and dad would be bookworms is no surprise, but our daughter is naturally charming, has tons of friends and is, of course, ravishingly beautiful in that 15 year old way. But she spends hours every day reading.

- Our 17 year old son dreams big – literally. He got it in his head that it would totally cool to build a ‘life size’ Golem from the video game Minecraft. Minecraft is a low-rez retro game where you build things and dig mines and raise sheep and I don’t what else – and it has this character of Golem which, translated in real life, would be a 9′ tall set of boxes configured to look like a menacing giant. So, via the miracle of  plywood and cordless electric hand tools, we are building one. Next issue: what does one do with a heavy, tippy  9′ tall set of plywood boxes once you’re done blowing the minds of a bunch of gamers? Stay tuned…

- The illustrious Mike Flynn posts about non-argument for the non-existence of God. It is so utterly refreshing to hear anyone even try to make a rational argument that I almost want to give the one guy who tries a manly hug.

- Speaking of arguments, I’ve written before about The Galileo Affair, this great article that ran in Scientific American decades ago on Galileo.  A kind commentator on First Thoughts  was able to point me to an online .pdf  of this essay which has since been removed.  In this essay, semi-famous astronomer Owen Gingerich gives a detailed and balanced account of what went down with Galileo, complete with – imagine! – references to and reproductions of source documents! It’s like he’s giving you the materials to make up your own mind. How insouciantly subversive.

A key step in his analysis is the classic syllogism, and the role it played in Galileo’s troubles. Galileo’s argument boils down to:

1. If the heliocentric model is true, Venus will show phases;

2. Venus shows phases;

3. Therefore, the heliocentric model is true.

Oops. Unlike today, where poor unfortunates fling claims and accusations against God in the name of Reason without even a hint that what they are doing is not remotely making rational arguments, the Renaissance was full of thousands upon thousands of people trained in classic logic and reason in the medieval universities that dotted the landscape from Oxford to Prague to Rome. These logicians were quick to spot the error: it is a condition of heliocentrism that Venus show phases, but Venus showing phases is not sufficient to prove heliocentrism – Venus could show phases for some other reason – say, that Brahe’s model was correct. In other words:

1. All men are mortal;

2. Socrates is mortal;

3. Socrates *might* be a man.

Correct reasoning would be:

1. If heliocentric model is true, Venus will show phases;

2. The heliocentric model is true;

3. Therefore, Venus will show phases.

Galileo assumes that which is to be proven, and then sets up an erroneous syllogism to prove it. That’s a no-no that thousands of educated people – say, the Romans who gave Galileo a bad time – would have spotted instantly.

There’s way more to the story than just this, and plenty of blame can be rightly thrown at the way the Church handled it, BUT: the problem wasn’t that Galileo was smart and the Church was stupid.

Lemurs and Science!

Let’s get back to the serious business of making fun of Science! headlines:

Are these dwarf lemurs the key to long-distance space travel?

No. Unless they have developed warp drive out in the jungles of Madagascar somewhere (and we all know it’s penguins that do that sort of stuff) it bloody unlikely that lemurs are the key to long distance space travel.

However, they are So. Darn. Cute. Look:

Assuming of course that you take your cute with ’50s bulgy SciFi alien death eyes.

Nope, turns out that, more important than facility with delusional hyper-drive pseudo-science, these lemurs can – ready for it? – sleep real good. Hibernate, even. And, they are primates! That means they’re just like us, except shorter, fuzzier and with those creepy death eyes. So, it should be EASY, CHILD’S PLAY to:

1. modify humans so that they can hibernate – genetic engineering, brain surgery, mind melds, whatever, don’t be a pedant;

2. extend that food-and-potty-break-free hibernation for years on end, instead of just a few months – hey, we’ve already cracked open the skull in step 1, how hard can this be?;

3. create massive interstellar spacecraft within which our newly-enhanced super-sleepers can crash – oops, poor choice of words, there – can *slumber* while meandering their way to Alpha Centari over the course of a couple decades or more.  Solar sails! Nuclear powered asteroid with vaporized rock drive! LOTS of rocket fuel! SOMETHING will work!

But lemur hibernation – that’s *the* key to long distance space travel.

But they are cute. Nightmareishly cute:

 

Today’s Thought on Schooling: Happiness

(Salvaged from a long post on a delicate subject that will never see the light of day):

One weird feature of the modern world is the definition of happiness. It’s not so much Aquinas’s definition that has been rejected – happiness is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue – it’s that we’ve replaced his definition of virtue with Callicles’s: the power to reward your friends, punish your enemies and indulge your every desire.

in fact, I think this thought right here might be the most indisputably true thing I’ve ever thought about the times we live in. (Yeah me.) Happiness is what happens when we get even, make people like us, and get to do whatever we want.

There are no doubt roles for all of us in this tragedy – for it is a tragedy, perhaps even the primordial tragedy, to mistake what happiness is – for all sorts of people and institutions, but let’s look at the role of education. Along with mentally and socially crippling us, modern education has also succeeded marvelously in ‘dumbing down’ our appreciation of happiness. I’ve been fortunate enough to know a number of big, happy families, and, in fact belong to one (through no merit of my own, I hasten to add). There is a  level of joy present in them that far exceeds what most people I know ever experience. In fact, it’s different in kind, not just degree – to be a part of something joyful, to have people to love who love you back, and to know that your belonging is not contingent on anything other than you being you – that’s a life-creating experience of another kind entirely. Yet the image of happiness that is most held up in schools is the idol of self-fulfillment. You will be happy, we are told in a million ways, when you get what is yours and nobody dares contradict your completely self-determined self.

These two images of happiness – the beloved and loving member of a family versus the Nietzschean self-willed uber-human – are not just mutually exclusive, they are opposites, in the precise sense that the first model is a reflection of Heaven, while the second is a reflection of Hell.

(Aside: I don’t think it needs to be noted that of course some families are miserable, and some loners are tolerably happy. But I’ve been wrong before. This does not change the fact that that the greatest natural happiness a man can have on this world is to be part of a loving family.)

There’s a memorable passage in Lewis’ Great Divorce where he argues in Hell with, I think, a bishop, who patiently explains to Lewis’ protagonist that while Heaven (meaning the Hell he’s chosen to live in) is perhaps not what they expected, it is nonetheless to be appreciated for what it is – and it is just fine. The bishop finds it better to redefine the misery he is living in as happiness, than to face the pain of recognizing his own unhappiness.  I see this every day, unfortunately. The amount of violence perpetrated in the cavalier destruction of families is less mind-boggling than the lies told to defend that violence. The majority of the families I know are ‘broken’ or ‘blended’ or both at the same time. In each case, the children are made to accept some lie about why the adults inflicted this misery upon them. The children act up, and get to be the ‘identified patient’ – their violence or lies or drug use or other anti-social behaviors are the problem, not the fact that Dad (when there even is a dad) has fled, and only talks to mom in order to scream and curse at her, or, perhaps even more insidiously evil, when mom and dad can usually pretend to be pals, the kind of pals who ended up sacrificing their children on the altar of their own self-fulfillment.

Sure, often the parents are struggling mightily to be good and to love their children, and often the children make enough peace with the situation to at least function day to day. They are to be commended for this, and, more importantly, we who have been blessed with family are to love them and support them as fellow fallen people no worse than we are – because they really, truly are not worse than we are. But while I’ve heard of  people who have truly faced the violence and lies and tried to deal with their aftermath, I’ve yet to any personally. Instead, parents will act shocked if you offer, however gently, the idea that maybe little Johnny is acting up because it’s hard to live just with a stressed out mom and her current boyfriend while dad doesn’t ever want to see you. Nope, that’s not it – it must be too much refined sugar. Or ADHD. Or too many video games. Something else, in any event.

Why We Should Care If Aristotle Has Been Disproven or Not

Getting ahead of myself, perhaps, in writing about whether or not Aristotle has been disporoven, when it’s possible – probable, even – that almost nobody cares.

Well, you should care. If you like science and technology, you should care. If you love truth, you should care. If you understand anything at all, you should care. So, let’s set the historical stage:

Prior to the early Greek philosophers, there’s no evidence that anyone anywhere believed that the world – physical, intellectual, moral, artistic and political – was understandable in any sort of systematic way. Some, most notably the Israelites, developed a detailed and objective moral code and theology – no small thing, to be sure. And human beings everywhere have made day-to-day technological advances. But you won’t find anybody laying out a well-thought-out approach to understanding the world around us until the Classical Greeks.

There’s a good reason for this: as foreign as it sounds to modern ears, nobody believed the world was such a thing as could be understood. In all the literature I’ve ever read from any culture (I’m no scholarly genius by any stretch, but I am pretty well read) in all cultures except those descended from Aristotle’s thought, there’s constant recourse to the arbitrary, petty or otherwise  incomprehensible acts of the gods or chance as the cause of Things.

We could digress at Russian novel length here on the confluence of factors that came together in Attica over the course of a thousand years to set the stage for a Plato, an Aristotle and a Thucydides. Suffice it to say that, in the fullness of time,  Greeks who loved their city, who committed to memory and wept at their poetry, who saw no limit to their arts that study and skill could not transcend, and whose hubris likewise knew no bound – they came up with the crazy idea that the world was understandable. The undisputed apex of this belief is Aristotle, who in one of the top two intellectual peaks of all time, systematically laid out his methods in a series of books. He represents the sum and apex of centuries of Greek thought.

Socrates was willing to say that the poets – the core curriculum of Greek education – lied about the gods. He said this because his reason told him that the actions and attitudes of the gods on display in Homer and the playwrights was contrary to divine nature. So: Socrates laid down the idea that the gods were in some ways at least understandable by reason.

At the same time, Socrates largely eliminated what we might call Revelation – what the gods chose to tell us about themselves. Since the poets could not be trusted, and the meanings of the oracles were shrouded, we could only say with any confidence about the gods what our reason revealed.  Effectively, Socrates had constrained the gods as explanations. While it was never wrong to attribute the cause of events to the work of the gods,  as properly and reasonably understood, it was also clear that this was not the end of thinking about things, but rather the beginning, as even the gods have natures, as the Greeks understood nature.

Aristotle takes up the challenge. Everything is subject to review and thought. Even God could be thought about and reasoned over. All the works of nature and man could be examined, using the skeptical scalpel  of logic, and checked against observation. Knowledge of that world could thus be gained.*

And Man is up to the task. The world was not arbitrary and unknowable in its essence, but – reason revealed – reflected the order and reason present in the Unmoved Mover.  Our natures as intelligent beings likewise reflect this order, enabling us, however imperfectly, to understand and know the world.

So, we can and do get push back on the conclusion that a very particular God – the Unmoved Mover is hardly what the Jews and Christians and even the Greeks themselves thought a god would be like – is required for human beings to have any sort of knowledge of anything. So, one would not be surprised to find schools of thought which reject the specific arguments about the necessity of a God at the end of the Physics, but are OK with everything else. But that’s not what seems to have happened, unless one is to take Kant to be that philosopher – a bit of a stretch. Kant loves, loves, loves Aristotle’s logic, but starts with Descartes’ radical doubt (and fudges it, as all who start there do) rather than Aristotle’s more common sense world of form and matter.  That’s not where he’s going.

Instead, all philosophy since 1600 that isn’t expressly Aristotelian at its roots seems hell-bent on getting away from Aristotle. The point of these last few little essays is to show that, while the likes of Descartes, Hume, and Hegel would like to disprove Aristotle’s whole world view, they don’t actually do it. What they do is set it aside.  What they do is embrace nonsense – non-sense both in terms of rejecting sensation and in terms of not making sense.**

Why this animosity toward Aristotle? Couple reasons:

Aristotle got drafted by the Church. Once the West stopped being constantly overrun by barbarian invaders, the Church settled down to founding universities and inventing modern science. From about 1200 to about 1500, Aristotle was deployed – baptized, the joke goes – in defense of the Church’s thinking, her philosophy and theology, most ably by St. Thomas.

Upon the occasion of the Protestant Reformation, everything associated with the Church’s defense of her teachings was tainted in certain influential circles. To read Thomas is to experience, in a way, Aristotle defending Mother Church. Thomas’s massive work towers in every sense above all the works of all the Reformers, like a Gothic Cathedral towers over a lean-to.  There was simply no chance thinkers like Luther and Calvin were going to make an dent in Thomas. So, the sought to belittle and dismiss him.

If you want to bring down a massive edifice, as all siege engineers know, attack the foundation.

But if you are not Catholic, should you care? Yes! Because while Protestant theology and the philosophers who spring from it might trudge along without Aristotle, modern science and technology can’t! As modern science more and more pretends it doesn’t need Aristotle, it more and more becomes a slave to politics and activism. On this blog, and on other blogs in my blogroll, a recurring theme is battling the forces of zealous partisans and fiery-eyed activists pretending to do science to promote their goals.

The knight in shining armor who can slay the dragon Science! (meaning here pseudo-science) is none other than Aristotle, with his cool logic, keen insight and insistence that we start with ‘what is most knowable to us, and proceed to what is most knowable by nature.’ Getting close to Aristotle is getting close to real science. Real science is close to truth. And Truth is God.

* Aristotle is routinely faulted for what he didn’t invent – scientific tools such as clocks and scales – rather than credited with what he formulated and perfected – the idea that the world is knowable to any extent by us puny humans. So, for example,  he noticed feathers falling slower than rocks, and didn’t find the issue all that compelling, and so just went with the simple observation. Now days, we’d say that’s wrong. We have 2000 years of practice and refinement Aristotle didn’t have.

** Hegel is most explicit in rejecting Aristotle’s logic, especially the fundamental Law of Non-contradiction. Hegel, by his own pronouncement, is illogical and contradictory – if that isn’t nonsensical, what is?