A goy professor writes:
One thing about Judaism is that if you hang out in there long enough, as you have, I imagine you don’t much rub shoulders with functionally illiterate 32-year old women… too bad for you, right? Haha. I’m joking around, but I do wonder how you keep up the faith it takes to motivate you to write as much and as well as you do. I suppose you have some confirmation that you’ve accumulated an audience, and what a sophisticated crowd it must be. By contrast, I just got an email from a woman who is probably about 32-years old. She was panicked. She’s in my summer class, where I’m trying to squeeze 16-weeks and 3 real college credits into a 4-week night class. We’re two weeks in, and so we’re getting through the Puritans. I’m out at work early tonight to meet her –oh, here she is now. Fortuitous. More in a bit.
Well, it’s a day and a half later. That’s how it goes for me. I guess if I didn’t have a wife and kids and job, maybe I could blog that much… but that all misses the point. The real point is, how do you believe that it’s “worth it?” That anyone will change his mind? It seems like changing one’s mind based on cogent arguments is a thing of the past, like the age of miracles.
Of course I try not to be simple and say things like, “Kids these days,” at least not with a tone that suggests doom. Maybe we’re witnessing the birth of something new–some new way of thinking. But just as the spread of literacy and the printing press changed the world, including probably precipitating Protestantism’s revolution of Europe and colonization of North America, the spread of illiteracy–or, if you feel offended by that–“new literacy,” is going to have major consequences. Two nights ago, teaching the Federalist Papers to adults taking summer class, I realized that in their minds, some significant break has taken place in the time between 1787 and now that makes them unashamed to say, “it’s like I’m reading another language” when I ask them what the following means:
Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.
And again I’m not trying to gloat or condescend, I’m just trying to pay attention to this change we’re witnessing. I tweeted that single sentence while they were trying to work out what it means (I had provided definitions for about a dozen words), and found that it took five tweets. In Twitter, we call that a “tweet storm,” and almost everyone avoids reading a thread like that. But it’s one single sentence. And I know some who would say maybe we’re better off–maybe we could express that same idea more concisely: “People will try to advantage themselves by writing the Constitution a certain way, so watch out.” Maybe that would be better. Hm.
But this is all preamble. What I mean to discuss is the seeming failure of education. I tweeted you a link the other day to an essay called Res Idiotica, by Patrick J. Deneen. I hope you read it–it was a kind of revelation for me. Deneen makes the case that education hasn’t failed at all; it is doing exactly what it was designed to do, namely: “to produce a generation of know-nothings.” Here’s part of Deneen’s big finish (I love this; it feels so accurate):
Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is to understand themselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. Any remnant of a common culture would interfere with this prime directive: a common culture would imply that we share something thicker, an inheritance that we did not create, and a set of commitments that imply limits and particular devotions. Ancient philosophy and practice heaped praise upon res publica – a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first res idiotica – from the Greek word idiotes, meaning “private individual.” Our education system excels at producing solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.
A remnant! Anyway, the point is, you would have to be almost willfully ignorant of history to believe that we are now in unprecedented times. There are dozens of precedents for this phase of history, and only the superficial manifestations of form are different. The Egyptians and Babylonians traversed this phase; the Greeks did, the Romans did shortly thereafter. The Ottomans, the Ming Dynasty, not to mention that India has endured this part of the cycle probably half a dozen times in the past 10,000 years. But who has bothered to read the Egyptian Book of the Dead and study the glyphs? Who has read Thucydides (except Victor Davis Hanson, and who reads him?)? Who reads Plutarch or Tacitus anymore? The point is, it is an embarrassing confession of historical illiteracy to so much as gesture in the direction of Hitler when discussing the rise of Trump; it is an assumption that all nationalism is akin to Nazism. One has to be ignorant of modern day Japan and Singapore and China and Israel to make such a claim, let alone harboring an ignorance of Chiang Kai Shek, Tokugawa, Napolean, etc. And who bothers to use wikipedia to learn about Anacharsis Cloots or Sergei Nechaev or Rosa Luxemburg or any number of other people who might have insight into our current crisis? The answer is, none but a few autistic users of the /pol/ board on 4Chan, apparently. The rest of the West is being carefully ushered through a scrubbing of all history, such that most high school graduates know little beyond a few talking points (pronounced in cave man voice): “Martin Luther King, Jr. was good. Hitler was bad.”
Now I’m more than a thousand words in and I have 100% confidence that the only people who might still be reading this are exceptions to my rule. So no matter what I intended to argue, it cannot be widely effective, because 95% of people won’t read 1000 words.
