Spice Wrangling: Home Improvement Project

This has got to be the 2nd lowest bang for the buck home improvement project ever, after the truly out of control compost bin I built a couple years ago (which is even now falling apart, and will soon need replacing): Behold! spices being organized!

Yes, I, an adult-level male human, spent something like 8 hours building 6 little wooden boxes and painting them colorful primary colors, just so our spice collection could be better controlled.

We cook and bake a lot in the Moore family. Over the years, we’ve acquired a very wide variety of spices and specialty seasonings. You want to make gumbo or tikka masala? Got you covered. Red Hatch chile sauce or humus? Good to go. Pastrami rub or gyoza? No problem. This, in addition to all the normal stuff needed for cookies and cakes, roasts and burgers, burritos and stir frys, and so on. Also, you need not just oregano, but leaf, ground and Mexican (essential for guacamole) oregano. Not just chile powder, but Hatch chile powder, bulk chile powder, some hot, not so hot, and a couple varieties of whole dried red chiles – because you need them! You do!

Further, we’ve reached the point where we end up with 2, 3 or more containers of things, because, when we looked, we couldn’t find it, and so bought another. I’ve got multiple smoked paprika bottles (good for pastrami rub) because the previous bottle got shoved to the back or moved to the counter, and I missed it.

Here, we see about 75% of the extant seasonings. I threw a ton away after determining that they were at least 6 years old, maybe much older.

So, cute little boxes with cute little labels. Aaawww! Sheesh. There’s more to do, but my manliness demand I chop wood or dig holes or something man-ish before I spend any more time consolidating spices into cute bottles, labeling them, and placing them in the right little box.

Here’s some details:

Bottom shelf. Baking stuff, mostly. We own about 10 different extracts – they’re in the back. Vanilla, almond, lemon, lime, etc. The little red box pulls out separately; it holds half-sized bottles and other shorter things. Yes, I printed cute labels and afixed them. I’ll do some tequila shots later to wash the shame away, promise.

The Savory set holds all the common stuff, as well as bullion (vegetable, chicken and beef. We also keep beef and chicken stock on hand.) I went yellow because I had an old can of yellow spray paint and why not?

Top shelf. Labeled exotic with quotes, because it’s mostly completely normal, for us, anyway, it just gets used slightly less often.Rubs for barbeque, Indian and Asian spices, gumbo file, that sort of thing. Bags of dried chile on the top, along with other bulky stuff.

So, let’s see: still got a couple thousand bricks to lay out front. Let’s do that!

The Epistemic Closure of the Left pt 1: Definitions, Origins

Below I start to work through some ideas. I’ll try to finish this up soon in part 2: Method, Goal. Work in progress. When working things through, I tend to write in a stiff, quasi-academic style which even I don’t like to read. Sorry about that.

Here I will be using a simplified, practical definition of epistemic closure, similar to the way I define metaphysics as ‘what must be true if anything is true.’ Epistemic closure is that state in which all allowable questions and answers are defined to the complete and summary exclusion of any other questions and answers. Just as in the case of metaphysics, there’s a ton of stuff easily available on the web to give you a perhaps deeper but certainly more complicated (and less useful) understanding. But here we’ll stick to the practical.

Epistemic closure

Simple hypothetical example: Say I believe the tribal gods are responsible for all good and bad fortune. These gods dole out their blessings and curses based on how pious an individual or tribe is. Piousness is a measure of how strictly prescribed rituals and sacrifices are executed. The sole authority on issues of piousness – on ritual and sacrifice – is the medicine man.

Something bad happens, say the watering hole dries up. Under epistemic closure, the tribesman will only consider questions around how the tribe or he himself have failed to be pius, and consider only answers that involve some sort of ritual or sacrifice, as determined by the medicine man.

Questions that have to do with lack of rain, overuse, events that may have transpired upstream – these will only be considered, in the unlikely event they ever arise, in the context of impiety. Answers other than performing some ritual or sacrifice or other pious acts as determined by the medicine man will be ruled out, if by some odd chance they ever are allowed to arise in the first place.

The key point here: other questions to ask or solutions to consider will never arise in the normal course of things. The epistemological world of our hypothetical tribesman is closed. (1)

Further, there is a risk to reaching outside the closure. For anyone to ask such questions or seek such alternatives is to declare himself not of the tribe, since not only our tribesman, but everyone he knows agrees with his understanding and all the unspoken limits that understanding requires.

Competing epistemologies: what is and can be known

We don’t live in a simple world of a single tribe. People are tribal (or pack, or herd) animals whose survival, naturally speaking, depends on tribal membership. Therefore, even though tribal membership in the evolutionary sense is no longer needed for basic physical survival in an industrial society, defining your tribe, which necessarily entails defining out other tribes, remains an automatic instinctual behavior. (2)

Some people, aware of the downside of tribalism, consciously work against it, asserting that we’re all people, all in this together, and need to look at what we have in common in order to get through life with as little unnecessary conflict and bloodshed as possible. Such people – and I count myself among them – cannot be understood by members of epistemically closed tribes as anything other than the member of some competing and hostile tribe, about which all valid questions and answers are already known.

My thesis here is that today, in America, the Left is an epistemically closed tribe with dogmas about what can be known, about what questions are allowed and what answers can be considered, and this closure is not an accident emerging from our innate tribalism. Rather, our instinctual need to belong to a tribe has been consciously commandeered to reinforce a certain tribalism and lay out conditions for membership.

A ‘scientific’ epistemology

The most open epistemology ever developed I’m here calling ‘scientific,’ although science is more a product than a source of this theory of knowledge. It runs as follows, as readers of this blog know:

1. There is an objective universe, independent of any subjective understanding or feelings anyone may have about it.
2. The human mind can know things about this objective universe, however imperfectly.
3. Such knowledge is obtained when information about the universe is provided to our minds by our senses and rationally processed by our minds. The more, and more carefully, we look at the world, the more and more clearly we think about it, the more and better our ideas about it will tend to be.
4. Given the above, it is understood that any of our beliefs about the world may be overturned by further information and thought. The objective universe may prove us wrong, in other words.

There are of course all sorts of distinctions, details and even mysteries involved in this epistemology, which I’ve sketched at a very high level.
(3) Be that as it may, it is this way of looking at the world that has given us all technological and scientific progress. I’m typing this on a computer and sending it to be posted on the internet – actions only possible in a world that is truly reflected in the principles listed above. Whether on not scientists recognize that they require and have embraced this aspect of Aristotelian epistemology – and they usually don’t – they could make no progress if they had not.

I call this an open epistemology because, at it roots, it acknowledges that it does not know all the questions and certainly doesn’t know all the answers. In practice, even the possibility that no answer will ever be available to certain questions is accepted. While any individual operating under this theory of knowledge is as likely as not to fail in implementing it in particular cases, at least in principle they know they could be wrong, the real world can prove them wrong, and they don’t know all the answers or even all the good questions. (4)

This scientific epistemology also provides a framework within which honest people can disagree and argue without the risk of being expelled from the tribe. Two people can look at the objective universe, think about it, and simply reach different conclusions, since what can be experienced by any one person at any one time may differ, as can the particular logical path followed. The appeal in such cases can only be to logic and objective reality; in the best case, experience and logic can be harmonized and tentative agreement reached; but it is also perfectly possible that appeals to logic and experience harbor too many unknowns for a question to be settled. Such disagreements are not fatal to this theory of knowledge.

The closed epistemology of the Left

The current reigning epistemology of the colleges, and therefore of the the fields fed by recent college graduates, as well as the social circles peopled by such folks, is completely closed. (5) Its epistemology is as follows:

1. Everything is a social construct. There is no such thing as an objective universe, at least not in any way we could know it. Key corollary: any world we like can be created simply by creating the proper society needed to construct it.
2. The only source of unhappiness in the world is oppression.
3. The only answer to unhappiness is to change society so that it can construct a new reality that ends oppression.
4. The only valid intellectual exercise consists of identifying an oppressed group, identifying how they are oppressed and by whom, and agitating for the overthrow of the oppressors and the society that constructed them.
5. Feelings trump knowledge. Since the idea of an objective reality accessible to all, as well as logic itself, are social constructs, knowledge is replaced by feelings, only available through insight, enlightenment, raised consciousness – being woke, in other words. One is either woke, a member of the tribe and among the good people, or unwoke, an outsider and a reactionary to be reeducated or otherwise disposed of. Corollary: No claim of wokeness can be attacked with evidence or logic: the simple act of trying to use logic and evidence conclusively labels one as unenlightened, lacking insight, laboring under false consciousness – unwoke, in other words.

Origins

Readers here all know about Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his seminal role in establishing compulsory graded classroom schooling to create an obedient, compliant population more easily and successfully managed by the better people. Here is, as Paul Harvey might say, the rest of the story:

After delivering his Addresses to the German Nation as a series of lectures in French occupied Berlin in 1808 and 1809, Fichte was appointed rector to the newly-established Berlin University. Von Humboldt – Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt, not his kid brother Alexander the naturalist – was a huge fan, and, once the king had von Humboldt appointed to the directorate of education under the Minister of the Interior, he put Fichte in a position wherein he could best further his aims.

The context here is everything: educational reform was all the rage at the time. The better class of Germans, the kind of people who would, while under French occupation, pay to hear a 2nd rate philosopher give lectures on how wonderful and obviously superior Germans are, needed answers: how had the loathsome French managed to route their crack Prussian troops? How was it that clearly inferior French ruled them?

Because those troops were not as disciplined and obedient as they should be, Fichte assured them. Our troops were thinking for themselves, thinking of their homes and families and villages when they should have been thinking only of the glory of the fatherland! If only we could establish schools to remove all our children from the obviously baleful influences of village, home and family, and train them up to think only what we tell them to think and do what we tell them to do, why, then we could have the troops we deserve! We could resume our rightful place as the rulers of Europe and the world.

Thus, compulsory state-run schools which, by design, contradict and defeat family, church and village in favor of the state (or the Revolution, a meaningless distinction in practice). The success of Fichte and his acolytes – e.g., Mann, Barnard, Harris, Dewey, Freire, all those who see the schools as a means of using children to achieve the state’s goal (however thinly disguised) – is obvious upon inspection.

Berlin University was merely the prototype of phase II. K-12 will create the good soldiers and shopkeepers, mothers and cube dwellers, but we’re going to need a bunch of mid-level managers to keep it all humming. Thus, the research, or Prussian Model, university. Here was schooling for the brighter 6% or so of the population, already prepared by their primary and secondary educations to think what we want them to think, to prepare them to be “leaders.” We will pat them on the head, tell them how smart they are, give them degrees, then send them out to execute our plans: the plans of the that fraction of a percent who get to run things. (The von Humboldt brothers were homeschooled. Friedrich never got a college degree.) Many become teachers and professors, others managers and professionals, others bureaucrats. All, if successfully ‘educated,’ believe they are the most intelligent, open-minded, and moral people ever to walk the face of the earth. How could it be otherwise?

The epistemic closure of the Left traces back to this attempt by the self-appointed elites and the powerful to whom they are almost always courtesans to enforce uniformity of thought upon the little people. The mechanism is the schools. K-12 razes the family, village and church, to replace them with the state. Teachers, certified, employed and managed by the state, act in persona parenti, indeed, but more to the point, they act in the person of the state. This replacement of parent and preacher by teacher was specifically the method Fichte described. College has been remade into the mechanism by which a management class is created, to manage the process of homogenization and control. They are given to believe they are the leaders; in reality, they are merely tools.

One problem, perhaps not anticipated by Fichte or Mann, was that this mechanism, once in place, can be used by whoever controls its bureaucracy, for whatever end they desire. We’ll look into this aspect in part II.

Notes, pt 1

1. For a related real world example, the ever-popular Yanomami tribesmen – and I’m sure they are not alone in this – measure how human one is by how closely one’s language matches theirs: the same equals human; understandable but not the same equals somewhat human; unintelligible equals animal. Therefore, only some sort of trauma, such as explorers with guns, will ever threaten their epistemology (whatever it may be) – they have preemptively assigned anyone different enough to pose a challenge into a category from which no challenge is brooked.
2. Over the last 5,000 years, a few people, here and there, have worked to expand the definition of tribe, up to the point where some people refer to a brotherhood of man, or imagine themselves global citizens or other such inclusive-sounding phrases. Christianity took this as far as it can go by declaring all people children of God, which has the advantage of making tribal membership hereditary, prior to conformity to tribal rules. In theory, there is no out tribe of animals that may be killed – people who don’t speak Yanomami, reactionaries, Jews, people who could read. This ideal sits atop our hardwired instincts; general success is not to be expected. Most often, very tribal people functionally expand the definition of their tribe to include “everyone who does now or can be made to agree with me.” This is called “promoting diversity.”
3. I think this simple formulation captures the gist, but Moderate Realism is not quite that simple. Moderate Realism holds that things like species do exist, not as immortal, immutable ideas a la Plato, but as that which characterizes all individuals in the species. Thus, the idea of horse results from having seen what is common to all horses, based, of course, on the individual horses we have experienced. Like most of Aristotle, Moderate Realism turns out to be common sense, once understood: what else, really, could we mean by species?
4. Note that this practical, scientific epistemology does not exclude visions or miracles, nor any other way, known or unknown, one might experience the world. It simply makes no claims about such experiences, except noting that such knowledge, insofar as it exists, is personal, and can make no very strong claims on those who have not had that experience.
5. I am not claiming that everybody from every department in every college falls into this trap, but merely that, in colleges and all social circles dominated by college grads, this will by far be the dominant ideology. To fail to comply gets you excluded from the Kool Kids Klub.

Final 2019 Graduation Update

…then back to something more serious, promise.

Thomas More College of Liberal Arts has a lovely campus in Merrimack, New Hampshire, next to the comparatively larger Nashua. The weather cooperated, as the sunny 70F low humidity day is about the best they ever get in New England.

They have a lovely but tiny chapel, so they set up a tent for Mass:

Chapel

Almost the entire interior.

Tent

Lovely icon.

The college requires graduating seniors to make a 5-minute presentation on their thesis before the parents, in a ceremony held at the Mansion, a large 114 year old building a couple miles from campus:

With 28 graduates divided into 2 groups, this didn’t take too long, and we were able to turn to socializing and refreshments.

Bragging break: our son got honors for his thesis defense at TAC; the college president at TMC, unsolicited, told us our daughter’s paper was one of only 2 he’d really liked in his decade-long tenure as president. They did well.

Sunday, we attended Mass at St. Patrick’s – pics in the last post – before heading off to the kid’s uncle’s house (complete with aunt and 4 cousins). On the way, stopped in Northfield, MA, to visit the new TAC East campus. Wow.

One of the dozen+ beautiful buildings on this beautiful campus.

Chapel.

Main doors

Interior, from the choir loft.

The college is renovating some of the buildings, especially the chapel, which, having been built by Protestant Evangelicals, had no center aisle for processions. Overall, most of the buildings are beautiful, the grounds are very striking, just a lovely place. What a blessing!

Our son will be a prefect there next year, meaning he lives in the dorms and hangs with the students, in an effort to help seed the culture which TAC has spent almost 50 years developing on the west coast. He also will be a manager in the kitchen, which means supervising students, mostly, but also doing some cooking. He’s excited. He starts in 6 days.

Daughter soon heads off to Israel for a visit, then back home for a few weeks – then off to Africa as a lay missionary for a year! Yikes! On the plus side, older daughter is moving back to northern California from L.A., so we may see more of her, which is very nice. Down to one 15 year old child, and he’s making noise about doing college early. Kids these days.

So packed house at the moment – we also have another guest – soon to be largely empty. Prayers for the safety and success of our kids would be much appreciated.

Next up: Younger Daughter’s Graduation TMCLA

Posting this from a reception at the President’s House of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in NH. It’s nice:

Each soon to be grad presented a 5 minute summary of their thesis, to the cheers of the assembled thronglet, and then the wine and hors d’oeuvres were rolled out. Our daughter did well and is beautiful. No, I’m not biased. No way.

Next up is the parents dinner on campus; then tomorrow Mass and commencement.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

2nd Graduation in a Week; East Coast College Grand Tour

Last week, we did a graduation here:

Thomas Aquinas College Santa Paula

This week, in 30 minutes to be precise, we will be heading out to these places, making use of airplanes in the proper modern fashion:

Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, Merrimack, NH

Thomas Aquinas College Northfield, where Thomas our son will be working next year.

Younger daughter Anna Kate, who surprised us, and particularly her older brother Thomas, by red-eyeing it out right after defending her thesis and heading into finals week, by showing up for Thomas’s graduation 3,000 miles away at Thomas Aquinas College, is now getting her turn, and that means a half dozen of us will be doing the 3,000 mile trip from the Bay Area to Merrimack, NH and Thomas More College.

From there, we’re visiting relatives in Connecticut and Manhattan, then next Tuesday flying back – but on the route, we will be visiting Thomas Aquinas College East in Northfield, MA, where our son Thomas will be working next year. After a trip to Israel, Anna Kate will be heading to Africa for a year long missionary trip.

Kids these days.

Working on another giant post summarizing the epistemic closure of the Left, but not likely to post it before we come back.

Carry on.

Music at Masses Review: TAC Baccalaureate & St. Therese Alhambra

Was blessed this weekend to be present at two very beautiful masses, the baccalaureate mass for our son’s graduation at TAC, and a 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning mass at St. Therese’s in Alhambra, California. These masses were both very different and yet very much the same, one a huge celebration in a gorgeous church presided over by a bishop and half-dozen priests, with a amazing choir and organist, and all the pomp and ceremony one could want. The other was a low mass in a pretty parish church, with the only music being the typical Latin commons for the Kyrie (yes, it’s Greek, I know) Sanctus and Agnus. The priest also sang a bit of an old Marian hymn as an illustration of some point in his homily.

Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, Thomas Aquinas College, Ojai, CA

They were the same in their reverence, and in being directed to the glory of God and not the glory of men.

The choir at TAC is amazing. A school of 350 or so students can somehow produce a choir more than worthy of their beautiful church and school. There has long been a frankly shocking amount of musical talent at that school, given that there’s no music program as such (the students study music a little as part of their Great Books program). Yet in the now decade that I’ve been going down to campus, seems there’s always something musically excellent going on. At the family of the graduates dinner Friday night, for example, two different acapella groups founded or peopled by students, or both, performed, and both were excellent.

Interior.

Saturday morning, the baccalaureate mass began at 8:30 in a packed church. Here’s my one and only complaint about that beautiful building: site lines from anywhere other than the nave are terrible. When it’s a full church, half the people are in the transept or side aisles, and might as well be outside for as well as they can see anything. This obscured vision is a result of the sanctuary being recessed enough to be mostly invisible from the transept, but mostly from a nave and side aisle design in a building that’s not that big. In gigantic cathedrals, it’s often possible to see fairly well from much of the side aisles, as the columns are farther apart and the nave wider. In Our Lady of the Holy Trinity Chapel, all you can see from 90% of the aisle spaces is the columns and the nave – the altar and sanctuary are totally blocked. Of course, for 95% of the masses celebrated there, everybody sits in the nave and it’s no problem, so this is a minor complaint, really.

The Mass began with Come Holy Ghost while the faculty and graduates filed in, followed by the chant Introit while the clergy and Bishop Barron processed in and the altar was incensed. The mass commons were some lovely polyphony I didn’t immediately recognize, most likely Palestrina, perhaps – one of that crowd. They also did motets for offertory and communion including Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, and more chant propers.

For the recession, the choir sang the hymn tune from Jupiter from Holst’s the Planets – an extreme case of redeeming some beautiful secular music, in this case, from the hands of a goodball gnostic astrologer. Lovely.

Or it seems you can just listen to it – here. Audio is a bit spotty, but you will get the gist. Bonus Bishop Barron homily.

St. Therese of Lisieux, Alhambra, CA, interior.

The next morning, Mother’s Day, we – my wife, mother-in-law, our 15 year old son David, freshly-minted graduate Thomas, elder daughter Teresa, who lives in Alhambra, and our younger daughter Anna Kate who flew in from New Hampshire to surprise her big brother, gathered for the 7:30 a.m. mass at St. Therese’s and brunch afterwards. Younger daughter also is graduating, in one week! She had handed in her senior thesis Monday, defended it Thursday, then flew out Friday, flew back Sunday in order to take her finals! Insane, but typical – those two are only 20 months apart in age, and were often thought to be twins growing up (and fought like cats and dogs). Despite needing special permission to defend her thesis early so that she could leave Friday, and despite having to try to study for finals on the plane, she was not going to miss this.

Our older daughter Teresa helped arrange all this, picking up Anna Kate at the airport and putting her up, and driving her to the graduation. I love our kids! There are far better than I deserve, that’s for sure.

Modern-ish, but lovingly executed and not unlovely. It’s heart, and the hearts of all those involved, are in the right place.

Mass was what you’d expect early on a Sunday morning – very low key. The people, which included a passel of Sisters of Charity (they always look so happy!), knew the chant propers and sang them well. Quiet, reverent and of course efficacious.

We may not often get to have the 90+ minute high sung mass celebrated in a great church by competent, devote people, but I’ll take a revenant low mass celebrated by people who care any day of the week. I’m grateful to all the people who helped bring about both masses, even and perhaps especially those whose devotion helped to transmit a culture in which such things can take place.

Middle son graduation Thomas Aquinas College

A contingent of the family including all our children have converged on Thomas Aquinas College near Santa Paula California for the graduation of our son Thomas.

At last nights taco dinner on campus, we were treated to a typically lovely sunset over this very beautiful campus in the surrounding mountains.

Bishop Robert Barron both preached the homily at mass and gave the commencement speech. It was as excellent as you would imagine.

I made a furtive attempt to record some of the gorgeous music sung at mass today, but it didn’t come out. You’ll just have to imagine a beautiful mass in Thomas Aquinas College’s beautiful chapel. I was getting tears in my eyes. A beautiful mass celebrated in a beautiful church is the apex of western art, and indeed of Western culture.

Now comes the bittersweet moments when family and friends mill around and our new graduate packed up his stuff for the last time. We will gather at a nearby beach in Ventura, then drive home. On Wednesday we fly to the East Coast for our younger daughter’s graduation. It will then be my wife, our 15-year-old son, and me left at home.

Our children make us very happy.

The Allure of Psychology

One thing a classic liberal education is supposed to do for you is make you suspicious of ideas you find emotionally attractive. Like the brutal honesty demanded by science, it is just assumed to rub off on students who work their way through all those tough classic texts. Just about every freshman finds Plato attractive. Like the young men who followed Socrates around just to see him lightly eviscerate some pompous fool, we thrilled to the discovery that pompous fools could be eviscerated, and craved more. Then we run into Aristotle, and don’t like it much, because he, effectively, says: enough with the fun and games, time to stand your ground and say what you mean. Perhaps some of us get the idea that Socrates would have met his match, or more, in Aristotle (although I suspect they would have gotten along pretty well while having some doozies of arguments, because they had doozies of arguments. Socrates must have been bored out of his skull with the Ions and Menos of the world.)

Then, as you move on through the list, one precious idea after another gets beat up. You think that you’ve reached the pinnacle of sophistication as an 18 year old who has learned that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing, only to have that self-refuting notion beat up by Aristotle’s moderate realism. Then, perhaps, you see how Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology lead to places you might not want to go, making Descartes very appealing. But Descartes leads to Hume, Berkeley, and, eventually, Kant, while Thomas leads to science. So now, maybe, Descartes is less appealing, and you take another look at Aristotle…

Thus, by a million paths, the serious student learns to take extra care about accepting too readily ideas that he finds attractive, because he finds them attractive.

When I read Alice Miller‘s books 30+ years ago, I found her ideas very attractive, even though her Freudian approach was seriously off putting. I like to say that Miler was a fallen-away Freudian, but had not fallen away nearly far enough. What made her assertions more acceptable to me was how well they fit with evolutionary theory. On the fly as I read her books, I would substitute arguments from natural selection for hers, the unholy offspring of Freud and Rousseau.

Brutal honesty moment: in other words, I back-filled psychological theories I found emotionally appealing with evolutionary just-so stories. I get it. I suppose my purpose in writing this out, apart from trying to make it as clear as possible to myself, is to invite criticism.

What are these theories? I’ve mentioned them before, but never in great detail. Here, I’m paraphrasing them based on 30 year old memories and replacing Freudian turns of phrase with Darwinian language. These start out as truisms (I should hope) but turn dark:

• For their very survival, children need to be part of a family/tribe (Extended family – I’m just going to use ‘tribe’ from here on out). In our evolutionary environment, no children lived to reproduce outside of a tribe. Therefore, intense selection pressure has been applied to children in favor of group membership and against running off or doing anything that might get them excluded. (1)
• As sophisticated social mammals, children by instinct incorporate whatever behaviors are required for tribal membership into their base understanding of the world as foundational assumptions. (This is nothing more than saying ‘tribalism’ is a base state for humans and is pre-rational). Kids don’t think about these requirements (much), they just are.
• We see it in the ‘attachment-promoting behaviors’ of babies and toddlers before they are even aware of what they’re doing. As they grow, their behaviors become more complex and more specific to their particular environment. In this, people are only the most sophisticated among animals – you cat and dog do this as well.

All well and good, and I hope not too controversial. It should be noted that the reciprocal activity on the part of the adults – nurturing the tribe so that the child might survive – must also be a part of any environment of evolutionary adaptation. So parents and relative – the tribe – can be expected to behave in such a way as to promote the survival and integration into the tribe of its children. That’s the model that seems to have been developed and to have worked over the last half a million years or so, at least. There’s nothing necessarily nice or pretty about it – it’s just what works.

But what happens when, as in the modern world for the last couple hundred years in many places, many people survive despite having no tribe in the evolutionary sense? What happens when the brutal culling mechanisms of Darwinian survival get put on hold? Whatever else may happen, it is now possible on a scale and to a degree never known before for children to be neglected, abused, and traumatized – and still live, and perhaps even still reproduce.

• Children who are neglected, abused and otherwise traumatized will, through the all but inexorable drive of instinct, incorporate their neglect, abuse and trauma into their pre-rational view of the world. Miller, in her decades of work as a psychoanalyst, noted a remarkable ability of her patients to excuse, ignore and explain away the objectively horrible things done to them – which is what one would expect, under the evolutionary explanation above. Aside: this, at least, seems to be obviously true from just routine interactions with people.
• So we have a world increasingly filled with damaged children of all ages who, for basic survival reasons, have accepted their mistreatment at the hands of those who were supposed to love them, rationalized it, and who are highly motivated to accept it as part of their tribal membership fees.
• It gets worse: as part of the emotional mechanisms that ‘worked’ insofar as they did in fact survive into adulthood, their experiences and coping mechanisms now become the template for how to raise any children they might have. Thus, Miller observed the pattern where someone who had been sexually abused as a child, even if they were not themselves an abuser, would routinely put their children into situations where they were likely to be abused. To do otherwise would be to confront the careful structure that allowed the parent to survive in the first place. Very painful and disorienting.
• This is expressed in the title of one of her books: Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. To acknowledge one’s own mistreatment enough to protect one’s own child requires reopening some deep and carefully scarred over wounds. Rather than do that, we readily subject our kids to what we experienced, no matter how horrible.

Miller says that a sympathetic witness, someone who understood the trauma and abuse on some level and could tell the child that it wasn’t right, was all but essential to having any hope for healing. That witness provided a counter to all the stories the kid would otherwise make up in order to keep his membership in the tribe: that daddy didn’t mean it, that momma does really care, that what uncle did wasn’t so bad, and so on – all the little myths one runs into whenever one is drawn into other people’s dramas. Lacking such a witness, it seemed to Miller all but impossible to get past all the barricades built up by the child.

So, there you have it: I see – I think, that’s the question – people reenacting in their child’s life whatever it was that traumatized them as children: people who were abandoned at 15 abandon their own kids as teens; children of divorce get divorced; Sexually abused kids become libertines and expose their own kids to that life; and so in a million ways.

There’s more, but that’s the general outline. I’m not just saying that miserable childhoods tend to make for miserable adults. I’m saying that miserable childhoods tend to all but compel people to make their own children miserable in the same way.

Anyway, make any sense? I readily acknowledge that Miller is a loon – I read most if not all of her books, and she gets into speculation that’s little better than palm reading in many places. And, as mentioned, even though she became one of Freud’s harshest critics, she still thought and spoke like a Freudian. Am I just experiencing confirmation bias when I seem to see this inflicting of one’s childhood trauma on one’s own children everywhere I look, or is it real?

1. And, of course, tribes can’t survive without children, either, so, at least by nature, tribes care about their children as passionately as children yearn to belong. Note that this doesn’t imply any sort of lovie-dovie niceness: the ever-popular Yanomami tribesmen raise their sons to be good little homicidal sociopaths, because that approach has been proven to work. Similarly, their daughters are raised to seek the most murderous sociopaths as mates.
2. And then expanded, by design, to school, with its artificial and arbitrary tribes of classrooms and grades. But Miller doesn’t go there, as far as my memory can recall.

Book Review: William Torrey Harris – The Philosophy of Education, Lecure V

Concluding this review with the final lecture in the series. Lecture I review here, Lecture II here, Lecture III here, Lecture IV here. Going into more detail than usually is possible, including just pasting the the entire lecture below, because of Harris’s importance in advancing compulsory state schooling, and the lectures are short enough to admit of it.

This final lecture is also written as one run-on paragraph, this one nearly 3 pages long; clearly, these are outlines or note.

Let’s summarise our current state after Lecture IV: Harris believes all ‘substantial education,’ which he defines as the rote training and thoughtless inculturation every child in every culture receives, reduces the student to an ‘automata,’ careful to accept cultural premises and follow acceptable cultural paths. He tacitly dismisses the idea that a child could learn to think for himself, and accepts some form of tabula rasa: the idea that a child might already be himself, and thus not a clean field for indoctrination, is never considered.

In Hegel-speak, a substantially educated child has his individuality ‘subsumed’ into the culture. Such a one will have surrendered his individuality in order to belong. Harris then proposes a second educational principle, which frees the student’s individuality from this subsumption (while simultaneously not freeing it – hey, it’s Hegel!): learning to be an Hegelian. Only Hegelians, in Harris’ view, possess the tools to address society’s problems.

This second kind may be called individual or scientific education; it is the education of insight as opposed to that of authority.

Here we find the traditional Hegelian and especially Marxist abuse of the word ‘scientific’ to mean ‘untestable and poorly-defines assertions that I’d really like to be true.’ We know Harris means this, because he calls this an ‘education of insights’. Hegel places insights – direct infusions of truth into the soul, not subject to logic nor testable by experiment – above and beyond the reach of the little people and their math and science and technology. It is by insight, for example, that the enlightened Hegelian sees the Spirit unfolding and coming to know Itself through History. Thus progress is not a measure of net relative advances, if any, over time, but is instead Progress, a god-like force moving us ‘forward’. This is all very scientific.

Another aspect of scientific education is that it must be doled out a spoonful at a time by experts – here he echos Pestalozzi and Fichte – lest the child get the crazy idea that he can figure stuff out on his own, and become unmanageable. We see here the foundation of our dumb-them-down system that does everything possible to exclude or trivialize parental involvement.  Harris praises textbooks as the perfect tools to this end.

So, after the first two lectures, we are to understand that we all are automata except insofar as we’ve been enlightened, the sole measure of this enlightenment being our agreement with Hegel and his acolytes like Harris. Our schools need to be run by professionals, who alone are able to properly ration out knowledge, and who will take great care that their charges remain docile.

After an excursion through Kant and some more blank slate nonsense in Lecture III, Harris gets to the point in Lecture IV: the little benighted people need to be lead by the good and enlightened people, a sort of revolutionary vanguard, as it were.

LECTURE V. February 4th, 1893.  HERBERT SPENCER AND WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH.  (found here.)

In Herbert Spencer, the return to nature means the study of natural  science, and this becomes the great thing. But natural science is only the  instrument with which we conquer nature. Everybody becomes filled with the idea of progress by it, for we see that nature as it is, existing in time  and space, is conquered by inventions and made to serve man. There was never a more unscientific book made than Spencer’s essay on education ; for while he praises science, he does not apply it to a study of education as it  is and has been. To do this he ought to study the genesis of the course of study and explain its functions. The unscientific person takes things as they are, and cares not for their origin. To study things from a scientific standpoint means to take an inventory of them to find the process in which  they are being produced ; to connect them with other things ; to see things in their causal process. He does not understand the system of education as it exists, because he does not know the educational value of its branches. The education he proposes for us is for the purpose of complete living; but  what is Spencer’s definition of this complete living? Spencer does not take education as the genesis of man’s spiritual life, but merely as something useful for showing how to care for the body and perform the lower social functions as the tool of life, the instrument by which life is preserved.

More specifically Hegelian criticism. All current action is to be judged by its place within the Spirit’s unfolding both now and in the future. I have little knowledge of Spenser’s educational theories and would likely find them appalling based on what little I do know, but Harris’s critique here hangs on Spenser not being Hegelian enough, which I would take as a complement.  Sure, sound education is first and foremost education toward spiritual growth. Hegel’s idea of spiritual growth is hardly anything I’d sign up for.

Now  suppose the definition of complete living to be, to elevate each individual so that he can take advantage of the life and experience of his race. Then  he would find complete living to involve the initiation into the civilizations of the past that furnish the elements out of which our own civilization is formed.

This sounds good, having children learn about past civilizations, until you see it in an Hegelian context: past civilizations are mere illustrations of the Spirit’s march through History. One would not be permitted by Hegel to dwell too much on how our modern age has in many ways lost the excellence of past cultures – e.g., Greek excellence, Roman honor, Medieval logic, Renaissance conceptions of beauty  – and failed to replace them with anything of equal value, let alone exceed them. Hegelians have no place in their schema for genuine admiration of the past, which is just prelude to an ever more glorious present and future.

Spencer thinks that the first business of the child is to know physiology ; the next is the selection of a vocation or trade, which leads to training for citizenship ; and last of all he puts relaxation and amusement, in which he includes literature and art. Now, Aristotle characterized man as the symbol-making animal. Human nature has to be expressed by symbols. The poets of a people first paint the ideal, which makes civilization possible. Literature furnishes the most essential branch of education, so far as its function is to help the child into civilization. Man sits in the theatre of the world (as Plato tells us) and sees the shadows of men and events thrown on the curtain before him. Behind him and out of his sight is the Great Leader, who is making these shadows. From them he draws his ideals, but ideals are potentialities, not realities. Self-activity, the freedom of the soul, is made possible by the institutions of society, the family, civil society, State and Church. We must not confound the mere school with these other great institutions of civilization. In the family are learned the mother tongue, habits, and nurture. Civil society teaches him his vocation; the State, his duties as citizen ; and the Church shows him his place in the divine plan of the universe. Spencer calls education the subject which involves all other subjects, and the one in which they should all culminate. But some one has better said that school education is the giving to man the possession of the instrumentalities of intelligence. By his school education he does not attain all education, but he gets the tools of thought by which to master the wisdom of the race.

OK, sure, pretty common understanding, although the glossing over of “church” Mere Christianity style fails to address the real, passionate disagreements people have over what constitutes a proper church. This, I suppose, would be an area Harris would expect the little people to be lead by their betters.

There are, then, three epochs  of school education elementary, secondary and higher. The first or elementary stage is the opening of the five windows of the soul. (1) Arithmetic is the foundation of our knowledge of nature, by which we measure  and count all things inorganic. When its first principles are mastered the child begins to want to combine the organic with the inorganic, and then we come to another window (2), that of elementary geography. The distribution of animal and plant life is learned, and the child begins to peep  into the organization of things, the growth of plants, and the formation of the continents and the earth. Thirdly, he learns to read and write, and gets a glimpse into literature. The original colloquial vocabulary learned at home, variously estimated at from 300 or 400 to 3,000 or 4,000 words, deals  only with commonplace things. But the school takes this colloquial vocabulary as a key and opens up the great reservoir of literature in books, initiating him into a higher class of words, expressive of fine shades of feeling and thought. Thus, to his own vocabulary are added those of great writers, who have seen nature from a different point of view, and presented their thoughts  in gems of literary style. Literature lifts up the pupil into the realms of human nature and discloses the motives which govern the actions of men. Yet Spencer puts this last in his course of study. After learning all science has to give, after learning one’s trade and the care of his body, he would then, if there is leisure, permit literature and art. But literature is the greatest educator we have. It has made possible newspapers and periodicals and books, with pictures of human life and of the motives governing  our actions. The fourth window of the soul is grammar, wherein we have a glimpse of the logical structure of the intellect as revealed in language. The fifth window is history (that of his own country), wherein he sees revealed the aspirations of his countrymen, his own nature, written out in colossal letters ; and these five studies should make the elementary education of the student.

Here the Pestalozzian approach is clear: the expert decides the child shall learn Arithmetic first, and not go on to anything else until it is mastered; then  basic Geography, and only once this is mastered, reading and writing; then Grammar, then the History of his own nation.

Well? Anyone who has been around kids knows that no two are alike, and that one may take to math like a fish to water at age 5, while another will find it baffling into adulthood. Lumping kids together by age, a barbaric practice championed by Harris and his predecessors, makes it certain that the first kid is going to be bored out of his mind and the second baffled and confused. Sure, in some Pestalozzian, anti-Fichtean dream world each kid gets all the attention he needs and moves ahead at his own pace. Sure. History shows how well the graded classroom model has approached that ideal. If education were the goal, it might; but since control is the goal, it won’t.

And so on. I’m old enough and, after a fashion, smart enough that I got left alone by the teachers for the most part when I was a little kid, because I either knew the stuff or could fake it. Now? from what I can tell, teachers are not allowed to let a kid skate on attention or classwork if he seems OK to them. Nope, conformity is demanded. Control is, after all, at the base and summit of Harris’s ideal.

The secondary education takes up human learning and continues it along the same lines, namely : 1, inorganic nature; 2, organic nature; 3, literature (the heart); 4, grammar and logic (the intellect); and 5, history (the will). Algebra deals with general numbers, while Arithmetic has definite numbers to operate with. Geometry and physics continue inorganic nature, while natural history continues the study already commenced in geography. Then come Greek and Latin, and here is opened up a great field of study into the embryology of our civilization. In the dead language* we have the three great threads running through the history of human progress. The Greek, with its literature and aesthetic art and its philosophy, showing the higher forms of human freedom in contrast with the Egyptian, which showed only the struggle for freedom and never the man separated from the animal and the inorganic world. The Roman, with the continual gaze upon the will of man, seeks the true forms of contracts and treaties and corporations, whereby one man may combine with another, and it essays the conquering of men and reducing them to obedience to civil law, not only external conquest but internal conquest as well. The Hebrew thread is the religious one, which we recognize in the celebration of worship one day each week and in the various holy days. We acknowledge this the most essential thread of our civilization. So, with the secondary education we begin to get the embryology of our forms of life.

As mentioned here, high school education at the close of the 19th century puts virtually all undergrad work to shame. Admission to Harvard at this time merely required a demonstration of basic competence in Greek, Latin and calculus – which a high school student who hoped to go to college could reasonably be expected to have achieved.

Harris seems to support this model, which is quite similar to what I went through at St. John’s College.  He seems confident it will produce exactly the good little Hegelians he invisions all enlightened people to be.

But what if it doesn’t? What if the vanguard decides good little Hegelians are good little Marxists? Then, understanding history, logic, scripture, etc., become positive liabilities if they don’t produce such Marxists. There’s even a risk a student who really learned this stuff might forcefully reject Marx! What if education leads away from, not towards, the glorious revolution?

Best not to take that risk. Stick with basic indoctrination. It’s the only way to be sure.

The higher or collegiate education is the comparative step of education. Each branch is studied in the light of all the others. Natural science  and sociology are investigated ; logic and mental philosophy ; ethics and rhetoric; as well as the philosophy of history and of literature, and the comparative sciences, which furnish the light for the whole method of  higher education. The first, or elementary education, then, is but superficial, a mere inventory ; the secondary insists on some reflection on what has been learned ; and the third, or higher education, is the unity and  comparison of all that has been learned, so that each is explained by the whole. Give the child possession of the embryology of civilization, and his insight into the evolution of civilization is insured.

“Insight” – and there you have it. Harris is naively confident this insight is Hegelian. His Marxist successors excised all the basic stuff because they more wisely understood that all this education could, from their view, go terribly wrong.

Educators have  adopted the course of study as it exists, led by an unconscious or blind  impulse. Herbert Spencer should have investigated and discovered its purpose, which is a far deeper one than he has thought out when he advocates its overthrow for the sake of knowledge that leads to direct self-preservation.

“…led by an unconscious or blind  impulse. ” More Hegel, the Spirit unfolding itself despite men not being aware of what is happening.

1. Rosenkranz: Paedagogik als System (English Translation, D. Appleton it Co., New York). Third part, treating of the substantial contents of the national education Its sacred books, and the idea that the nation stands for in the history of the world. (Lec ture 1.)
2. Karl Schmidt : Geschichte der Paedagogik ; gives a much fuller statement of the details of the culture systems of the several nations. (Lecture 1.)
3. R. H. Quick ; Educational Reformers. (Lectures 2, 3, 4, and 5.)
4. Pestalozzi : Lienhard und Gertrud. (English Translation, Boston.) (Lectures.)
5. Herbart; Lehrbuch zur Psychologie. (English translation, tfno York). (Lectures.)
6. Rousseau : Emile. (Lecture 4.)
7. Herbert Spencer ; Essay on Education. (Lectures.)

Tomorrow (Wednesday) @ 3:00 PDT: Yard Sale of the Mind on the Radio

The Chief, over on Simple Facts of Life, is having me over on his web radio show to talk for half an hour about this post, in which I discuss three reasons to reject Gender Theory. We may talk about other things, we’ll see. Wednesday, May 8th, at 3:00 P.M. PDT. Click here to go to his website.

So, if you’re free tomorrow afternoon, check it out. If not, it will, I think, be up on the Chief’s website shortly afterwards.