A Peace to End All Peace

My understanding of the history of what we now refer to as the Middle East was almost non-existent before reading this engaging history of the region from shortly before the Great War up to the current time. The Ottoman Empire, Winston Churchill, The Great Game, The Russian Revolution, John Buchan, Lawrence of Arbia, Making the World Safe for Democracy, and the beginnings of Zionism all come to focus in this mysterious region of the globe. I highly recommended A Peace to End All Peace as a great work of history and relevant to the news of the hour.

What we learn from art, literature, history, and music

Knowledge includes three distinct kinds: knowledge that, knowledge how, and knowledge what. I know that uranium is radioactive; I know how to ride a bicycle; and I sometimes know what to do, what to say or what to feel. The first kind of knowledge is information (of which science is the systematic part); the second is skill; the third virtue. In reverse order these correspond to the three inputs into a rational life: the ends, the means and the facts. Knowing what to do, Aristotle suggested, is a matter of right judgement (orthos logos); but it also involves feeling rightly. The virtuous person ‘knows how to feel’, and this means feeling what the situation requires: the right emotion, towards the right object, on the right occasion and in the right degree. Moral education has just such knowledge as its goal: it is an education of the emotions. The virtue of the Greek hero is of a piece with his emotional certainty, and this certainty is the gift of culture, and of the higher vision which culture makes available. By setting the individual within the context of the group, by providing him with ritual expressions and the path to collective release, by uniting him in thought with the unborn and the dead, and by imbuing his thoughts with ideas of sanctity and sacrilege, the culture enables the hero to give safe and sincere expression to the feelings that social life requires. The common culture tells him how and what to feel, and in doing so raises his life to the ethical plane, where the thought of judgement inhabits whatever he does.” —from Roger Scruton’s Modern Culture (p. 15)

Greek Warrior Ethic in a Nutshell

From Alexander Pope's awesome translation of the Iliad:

Ye Greeks, be men! the charge of battle bear;
Your brave associates, and your selves revere!
Let glorious acts your glorious acts inspire,
And catch from breast to breast the noble fire!
On valour's side the odds of combate lie,
The brave live glorious, or lamented die;
The wretch who trembles in the field of fame,
Meets death, and worse than death, eternal shame.

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows...

"One can argue over the merits of most books... one does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, he asks her to return his letters. The old man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. ... When you sit down to [read] it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy; I don't know. But it is you who are on trial." A.A. Milne

The Great Tradition

The Great Tradition will go on because the forces of nature are on its side; it has on its side an invincible ally, the self-preserving instinct of humanity. Men may forsake it, but they will come back to it because they must; their collective existence cannot permanently go on without it. Whole societies may disallow it and set it at nought, as ours has done; they may try to live by ways of their own, by bread alone, by bread and buncombe, by riches and power, by economic exploitation, by intensive industrialism, quantity-production, by what you please; but in the end they will find, as so many societies have already found, that they must return and seek the regenerative power of the Great Tradition, or lapse into decay and death. - Ablert Jay Nock , The Theory of Education in the United States

The Problem of the American University

Albert Jay Nock's diagnosis of the problems in American education delivered in 1931 were quite prescient and are still relevant. In the lectures he describes how a theory of education led to the destruction of classical education throughout all levels of the American school system. What led to the replacement of education in the Great Tradition with instruction and training? Nock identifies three aspects of the American theory of education: 1) A fantastic and impracticable idea of equality, 2) A fantastic and impracticable idea of democracy, and 3) A fantastically exaggerated idea of the importance of literacy in assuring the support of a sound and enlightened public order. This theory created a shift to training which vitiated the ideal of the educated person. Well written, precise, and at times very humorous, Nock's book is still worth reading today.

The Parable of the Sunfish

From Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading.

A post-graduate student equipped with honors and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: "That's only a sunfish."

Agassiz: "I know that. Write a description of it."

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.