I am very much enjoying Phillipe Aries The Hour of our Death, a magnificent and thorough study of the history of how western civilization dealt with death from its founding in the Middle Ages until now.  The book has many virtues, perhaps chief among them is how illumines the vast gulf he points out between the medieval and modern world in how they dealt with death.  I look forward to commenting more on Aries’ wisdom another time.

For now, however, two minor gaffes on Aries’ part can’t get out of my head.  So with apologies to Aries. . .

He begins talking about death in the Song of Roland, a good place to start as 1) the story comes from the early middle ages, 2) it has the hallmarks of fully developed civilization (unlike the histories of Nottker and Einhard), and 3) it has a lot of death.  He makes excellent points about how the rituals that (spoiler alert) Roland, Turpin, and Oliver perform before their deaths have the effect of “taming” death and reducing its sting.  So far so good.  But then he asserts that, “thoughts of reunion on the other side of death,” or even the vitality of the afterlife, had no part in their consciousness because they do not mention it.  Aries quotes from Roland’s wistfulness at losing the land’s he conquered in death as evidence that early medieval man did not think much of the next life in death.  We might respond that the argument from silence does not convince very much, or perhaps, that it is good evidence for how Roland felt, but perhaps not necessarily the whole of the middle ages.  We could also debate the extent to which literary evidence should count as historical evidence.

In a fascinating segment Aries discusses how over time the place of burial mattered more and more.  Eventually, burial within the church itself came even to supersede burial within church lands, or the church graveyard.  He cites one example,

In the 17th century the parochial mass was said at the altar of the blessed sacrament.  “Beneath this altar lies the body of Claude d’ Aubray, knight.  Having had on this earth a wholehearted and singular devotion to to the precious body of our Savior, he desired that on his death he be laid to rest and buried next to the Blessed Sacrament, that he might obtain mercy through the prayers of the faithful who prostrate themselves before the very holy and venerable sacrament and be born again with them in glory.”

Granted, such burials did not come without a fee.  But it is here that Aries, I think, misinterprets the purpose.  He views the special burial as a kind of exchange — the deceased do ‘x’ so that they get ‘y,’ and thus descends into a legalistic understanding of spiritual concerns.  Though throughout the book Aries offers implicit criticism in how the modern world deals with death and admires much of how the early modern world handled things.  He seems to have particular admiration for the early medieval world.  But, alas, he cannot escape his own modern, scientific outlook and assumes the same about the past.

We might say in response that, yes, such burials brought a certain cost, but funerals today cost as well, and likely cost more.  Regardless, proper burial requires work and workers need paid.

But we can go a bit further.  Aries assumes that such burials were seen as beneficial to the dead in the way that buying milk with a few dollar bills benefits the consumer.  But our relationship with God, let alone our relationships with people, do not work this way.  We don’t buy flowers for our wives to earn their favor, but for other, less concrete reasons.  Parishioners do not cross themselves, for example, for God, but for themselves.  Ritual acts proceed primarily from devotion, not duty.  So too, burial within the church or within church lands has nothing to do with any kind of “exchange” for salvation, but as a way for the dead to plant their flag in the “City of God,” represented by the church.  Thinking differently about death requires us to change our perspective on many other issues.

Others in earlier centuries share in Aries’ misunderstanding.  He writes,

Erasmus finds [belief] in the virtues of the last rites superstitious for the same reason [as other 17th century writers]: because they seemed to designed a dissolute life to be saved ‘in extremis.’

Heaven forbid that someone be saved in their last moments after a dissolute life!  That would upset the whole notion of righteousness as a kind of exchange.  This legalistic understanding is not limited to our modern times.

Aries’ book illumines much, and even his modern understandings reveal the vast gulf between the modern and early modern worlds.

I always enjoy musicians who can talk intelligently about their music.  Glenn Gould combined his brilliant technique with a brilliant mind, and thankfully, availed himself of many opportunities to speak.

The video appeals to me on a number of levels.  For starters musician and filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon almost parodies the speech and approach of a rather stuffy French intellectual (though I would never assert that’s what he actually was). What really intrigued me, however, was their discussion of whether or not one can truly play Bach on a piano instead of a harpsichord, which leads then to other digressions.

Gould breaks down composers into two types:

• The first seek to create the “ultimate” piece that can only be played in very specific ways, in very specific settings.  Such composers, he argues, concern themselves primarily with the reception of the music rather than the music itself.
• The second (whom he clearly prefers) concern themselves with the structural integrity of the music itself.  Gould always admired Bach for his “vertical and horizontal” integrity.  That is (I think) the piece went somewhere definite (vertical), but never at the expense of the relationship of the notes to each other (horizontal).

Certainly Bach has been a much more enduring composer than either in the first group Gould mentions.  Who can think of Paganini without the violin, or Liszt without some long-haired guy playing the piano?  But Bach shows up everywhere, with mandolins, saxophones, organs, and in different genres like jazz and even some heavy-metal.  His structural integrity allows then, for improvisation and modification.*  The fact of his endurance and applicability must give us hints as to how to operate in other areas of life.

Historian Arnold Toynbee talked about the traps that civilizations fall into that bring them down.  I appreciate that Toynbee often gave a spiritual focus to this topic, and focused on “idolization” of ephemeral techniques or institutions as one key problem.  In other words, at some point in the past a particular institution or method helped achieve some great good.  The solution to our present concerns then, means returning to some point in the past.  Toynbee comments,

We can see that this nemesis would bring on social breakdowns in two distinct ways.  On the one hand it would diminish the number of possible candidates for playing the creator’s role in the face of any possible challenge . . . On the other hand . . . these ex-creators, by virtue of their previous work, will now be in positions of power and influence. In these positions they will not be helping the society move forward any longer; they will be “resting on their oars.”

Classical education, it seems, can easily fall into the temptations of the first category of composers above.  We, perhaps unlike others, seek the “perfect” for all time in our educational content and methods.  This in turn can lead us to idolize the past, freeze it, and bring it forward to today.  But if we do this we forget that education involves primarily the transmission of certain experiences and beliefs from one generation to the next.  For it to transfer, it must have life, which means it must have some degree of wiggle-room and applicability in different contexts.  Athens’ own history is an example.  With their curiosity and passion for eternal things they might have created the idea of classical education.  But eventually they became a parody of themselves.  “For the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21).

But then one might counter — isn’t that what public schools essentially do?  They have a curriculum that is essentially interchangeable and standardized.  This curriculum, based on the standardized test, can then be easily transferred from one teacher to another.  In many classical schools, curriculum seems much more teacher-centric and would not transfer nearly as easily.

However, such approaches to curricula are essentially gnostic.  They have no incarnation.  Without a definite incarnation of an idea or method in the person of a particular teacher, there can be no power, no application, no life.  The Spirit could not descend until after the Son had come.

Perhaps we can conclude by saying that if one ever writes curriculum, pay extra attention to its structure instead of its sound.  When we play Bach, let Bach be Bach.  But be sure to put something of yourself into your own performance. I have never understood objections to those who say, “But Bach wouldn’t have played it that way.”  We do not go to concerts to hear Bach play, after all.**

Dave

*I remember reading one musician who said something like, “If Bach was alive today he would be a jazz musician.”  For those interested I include here part of an interview with the famous jazz pianist Keith Jarrett conducted by fellow piano player Ethan Iverson, on the subject of Bach.

EI:  Do you play the piano every day?

KJ:  Now I do, yeah. There was a long time in my life (when I was ill) when I didn’t practice really at all regularly, but now, yes, I do. It really depends on what I am working towards or away from or both. Sometimes I have to slowly erase one thing and move towards another.

I was just working on Bach over the last few months, and now I have to shelve that and pretend that I know how to do a solo concert, and while I’m pretending that, that’s practicing. But! I thought I was going to shelve the Bach, but now I’m playing the Bach, and for the last twenty-five minutes I do the other thing and it works very well. Because by the time I do the finger-work that Bach requires, and the control thing, my fingers are ready to be completely out-of-control and in-control at the same time. I didn’t realize that it was helping me improvise until Gary Peacock looked at me between sets and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

EI:  So, at one point, going between jazz and classical felt like more of an embouchure change than it does now? Is it beginning to even out?

KJ:  It really depends. When I was getting ready to record Mozart I couldn’t have mixed both. And in general, that’s the case. I generally don’t mix things. But I’ve seen how it seems to work this time, and I’m just taking advantage of it. Probably I’m in better shape than I was before, due to some of the patterns Bach forces upon you. The jazz player doesn’t ever play these patterns: they don’t come up; certainly not in the left hand. And working on the fingering puts you in a hypnotic state, playing the same phrase down one half step at a time or down a scale, and you’re doing the same fingering but it isn’t the same fingering, depending on how many black keys are involved. And Bach has this crazy ability to change key in the middle of a scale. So you’ve changed harmonic center in the process of playing what you thought was a simple scale so you can’t take your eyes off the music. And even with the bass line, if you stop looking you think you know what it is, but he always thought it out so well that it’s not always not predictable, but his note is always better than yours.

EI:  Do you work out your fingerings early on, or keep experimenting?

KJ:  I’ve had all kinds of experiences. With the Shostakovich, I just played it and played it and played it. When I realized I was going to record it, I had to say to myself, wait: I’ve got to find an edited version of this with fingerings! Because what I normally do is find different fingerings every time I play, probably. I just improvise that part of it. It works sometimes, but it doesn’t work in the studio, when you don’t want to do a second take. So I went through three different editions of the Shostakovich and ended up with absolutely no fingering: theUrtext, with no fingerings at all, and that’s always what I prefer in the end. With the Bach, I’ve been able to stick with that. I don’t even like making a mark on the page…

**If you listen to Glenn Gould recordings of Bach you will usually hear him humming faintly in the background.  Some object to this, but I like it.  It reminds me that the music I’m hearing doesn’t come to me disembodied, but from a real person in love with the music he plays.  Thus, Gould recordings can nearly achieve the immediacy of a live performance.

Thanks to Marginal Revolution once again for sharing a fascinating but perhaps not surprising article about ethics professors. The upshot is, apparently, they do not act any more ethically than the rest of us.

So the natural question arises then, what good are professors who teach ethics?  Would it be possible for an ethics professor to live badly and teach ethics well?  What about other disciplines?

Of course 99% of ethical questions seem perfectly obvious to answer.  So, as a friend pointed out, professors of ethics have to make their hay in the disputed areas where debate exists and the classroom might get a bit more interesting.  The article states,

An ethicist who feels obligated to live as she teaches will be motivated to avoid highly self-sacrificial conclusions, such as that the wealthy should give most of their money to charity or that we should eat only a restricted subset of foods. Disconnecting professional ethicists’ academic enquiries from their personal choices allows them to consider the arguments in a more even-handed way. If no one expects us to act in accord with our scholarly opinions, we are more likely to arrive at the moral truth.

In other words, there lies the implicit belief that to teach well one must distance oneself from the material so as to be more “even-handed.”

This gets at the whole purpose of teaching and education in general.  What follows below attempts to reproduce a conversation I had with a good friend and colleague.

If we hope to arrive at satisfactory conclusions regarding ethics or other subjects, we must start first with theology, the “queen of the sciences.”

One can take two basic approaches to God:

• Know something, believe something, then finally love something, or
• Love something, believe, then know

Scripture and the history of God’s people clearly endorse the latter option, though in modern times we tend to prefer the first.  In the Psalms we see numerous examples of something like this:

• The author struggles with evil
• Doubts God’s presence, His goodness
• Goes to worship God, then
• Arrives at the right knowledge and understanding of who God is

So too in the Gospels, Jesus rebukes the people when they ask for a sign.  We shouldn’t interpret this so much as Jesus saying, “You’re so weak and impatient!” but more like, “That’s not how you can truly know me,” which is what He wants for all of us.

The idea of establishing some kind of clinical distance from God and taking a piece of him out to examine is utterly absurd. Surely even skeptics would agree that such an approach would not allow us to know God, and if it could, what kind of God would we have?  So the best theologian would have the best prayer life, whatever form that took.

In an ecumenical environment the Bible teacher might need an even-handed approach with certain topics.  In teaching baptism he may need to give arguments for and against infant baptism.  But his goal should be to have students love baptism.  If a student came to the said teacher privately and asked, “Which do you believe?” we would rightly be aghast if he said, “I have no commitment either way.  It’s all the same to me.  I baptized one of my kids as an infant and another as an adult.”  The teacher would not love baptism.  For him, the discussion he led remained a mere game.  He would not teach his students to love baptism, but to think of baptism as a mere game.

So “detachment” from a particular conclusion may have its place at times, but knowing how and when depends.  The idea of “analyzing” God is absurd for so many reasons.  He is mystery and entirely transcendent.  Perhaps the level of analysis we apply has to do with the degree of mystery and transcendence in our subject.  A music teacher hears a piece of music and thinks, “What a great song.  I love it.”  This love then might lead them to analyze the piece and its tempo, chord changes, and so on.  But who would begin with analysis?  No one says to themselves, “This song has ‘x’ tempo, ‘y’ chord changes, and ‘z’ meter, so therefore I love this song.”  The transcendent qualities of great music, and the mysterious nature of its effect on us, renders that approach almost meaningless.

Indirectly the study of History should lead us to the love of God, just as in any other subject.  But that’s not the first port of call, but the second.  Directly History involves the study of people.  Most of us know that we remain a mystery to ourselves. What of our perception of others, and how should this impact our methodology?  Music has transcendent qualities, but do everyday people?  The question is difficult.  In biology the need to lead with “love” over “analysis” gets much reduced because we have dominion over matter.  As Pascal stated, matter might crush us, but we know it does so, while matter has no consciousness. We should analyze the bacteria before deciding whether or not to “love” it.

For the relationship between love and analysis for the History teacher, let us imagine three different teachers numbered 1-3:

1. This teacher has a passionate love and identification with the colonial cause and the American Revolution.  With just as much passion, he also teaches his students that Nazi fascism is evil.  His students absorb his passion and his conclusions in both subjects.
2. This teacher has no firm conclusions about the American Revolution and feels it a “tough call either way.”  He teaches both sides of the argument well.  When teaching W.W. II, however, he also teaches the evil of Nazi fascism.  His students split on their opinions about the Revolution.  On fascism they come out of his class with a more full understanding of evil.
3. This teacher has no firm conclusions on either the American Revolution or W.W. II.  When it comes to the Nazis he remains “objective” and even-handed, giving arguments for and against the merits of their world view.  Some of his students take the British side, some the American.  Some of his students take the Allied side, some identify with the Axis powers.

Teacher ‘3’ should never teach.  His teaching would lead people either to cynicism or evil living.  No good history teacher should consistently produce students who apply their knowledge to live evil lives.

But would we prefer teacher ‘1’ or ‘2’?

Theology has two basic approaches to God.  One is the way of affirmation — what we can truthfully say about God (Dante stands as the greatest master of this “way” still today, in my opinion).  Apophatic theology stresses that we can know God best by stating what He is not.  God is so fundamentally “other” from us that our affirmations will always remain deeply inadequate.  Both approaches have their place.  In the discipline of History I think the way of negation safer.*

We can say with certainty that God is not “in” the Nazi regime.  We lack the same certainty when discussing the American Revolution.  In History in general I think we can more often say what God is not than what God is.

This should not mean that we should have a goal of the “detached” teacher.  When we think of great teachers we had in the past we probably think of teachers that had a definite point of view.  They loved something about their subjects.  The key to teaching History well must lie in deciding what the proper object of love is in the study of History.

If we attach our love too heartily to particular people, eras, or civilizations we will likely obscure their faults and not teach them truly.  But a worse fate would mean becoming one of those historians that loves to point out everything bad about everything and seems to enjoy nothing at all.  The first teacher would wrongly order his love but at least love something.  The second has only cynicism and no sympathy for anyone or anything.

Nor should we say that what we love the process of investigation or method in the study of history.  We can use the term “love” in this case to mean “I find a certain process of investigation useful.”  But who can truly “love” a process?  What good is the process?  Where does it lead?

So to return to our question above . . .

I lean towards teacher #2.  Teacher #1 has the distinct advantage of communicating a clear passion (of course the American Revolution is just a stand-in for other events/people, political parties, that involve moral grey areas, etc.).  It’s easier to have a passionate dislike as opposed to something positive, so he gets credit there as well.  But teacher #2 can still have passion and communicate a love for much more than a process even if he has more caution in what he attaches himself to.  Applied rightly, the method he uses extends his sympathy and his humility.  This humility goes beyond intellectual humility.  The historian sees the complexity of a situation and realizes that salvation cannot come in this world and that failure inevitably comes.  We would not necessarily have acted more wisely had we been in their place.

What we love through this method, finally and hopefully, involves a vision and a desire for the Kingdom of God made manifest.  This should not preclude us having a warm attachment to certain people and places in history.  It might protect us from the danger of idolatry inherent in the “Way of Affirmation.”**  It seeks our own redemption as we identify with those in the past.  It seeks the redemption of others as we see their need for transformation of the fallenness of the world.

The dance between idolatry and detachment will always remain delicate, but we should understand that we’re near the truth when we see this tension.  Such tension lies throughout Christianity.  God is One God in three distinct Persons.  Christ is God and man, and so on.  When faced with such a dilemma we affirm both equally and finitely hold them in tension as best we can.

The time has come to end this rambling before I exhaust any more of your patience.

“Too late!” say my kids.

Dave

*The way of affirmation usually involves metaphors or similes.  The potential problem with this is our reference point which inevitably involves our own experience.  For a few centuries we said God designed the universe like a clock maker makes a clock.  Now that the clock has gone out of fashion, we no longer use this metaphor.  Did God create like a clock maker? Maybe, but probably not?  How can we be sure?  Perhaps we can see some faint or very basic connection between creation and the clock, but I think it safer to say God did not create the universe like a clock.

**The danger of the “Way of Negation” would probably involve a safe detachment that precluded practicing love.  Taken to extreme, could such an approach prevent one from loving even oneself?  If that happened, we could not love others either.

I like some jazz music, but have always regretted not appreciating the so called golden era of jazz from the late 50’s – early 60’s.  The prevalent pattern of 1) Introduce idea/theme, then 2) Long solos from every member of the group, and 3) Resolution with reprise of theme never grabbed me.  I prefer a more melodic approach, and a more band/team oriented approach.  No doubt much exists in the music that I do not understand, but there you go.

My favorite “all-time jazz great” has always been Miles Davis*, but his music sometimes fell into the above mentioned pattern.  Then I heard this:

Wow.  The first time I heard the music, I was so blown away I didn’t notice that the song is still basically, theme/solos/theme. After I noticed, I didn’t care.  The song is so fun, funky, jazzy, so “everything” I no longer thought about structure at all.  It takes us beyond structure and into play, into freedom.**

At about the same time I heard this song I read Michael Weinreb’s thoughtful and entertaining defense of college football, A Season of Saturdays.   In one section of the book he discusses the fact that “free-spirited” play calling tends to work much more effectively in college than in the pros.  You can have a wishbone offense, a spread offense, a pistol offense, and so on.  You can have coaches that take a more laid-back approach to the game with great success, i.e. Steve Spurrier, or “gambling” coaches like Les Miles. But . . . these coaches don’t succeed in the NFL.

When thinking about the possible surprise elation inherent within college football, one has to think of Boise-State vs. Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl a few years ago.  First the 4th and 18 play for to tie the game:

And to win the game, the most old-fashioned of crazy trick plays . . .

I realized the possible connection between Miles Davis and these Boise State plays when I had the same reaction as the announcer of the hook and ladder at the .07 mark as I did to “Directions” at about the 6:05 mark.  Both moments take you out of yourself entirely.  And while certainly pro football can have those moments, I agree with Weinreb (with no empirical backing, just an impression) that they happen more often in college football.  Going from 300 or so Division I programs down to 32 NFL teams narrows the field of talent to such a degree that so much depends on meticulous execution over crazy inspiration. Perhaps these kinds of wild, unexpected moments link together jazz and college football, two quintessential American creations.

The question I asked myself as I read was whether ultimately I agreed with his premise that college football should stick around and continue to have its place in the American consciousness.  Weinreb writes well, and I especially appreciated his soft touch — he doesn’t force his point.  But in the end, disagree.  College football can exist, sure, but needs scaled back drastically.  One caveat is that I fall into a demographic that Weinreb admits will probably not understand his book.  I grew up in an area dominated by professional sports, and I attended a Division III liberal arts college where maybe 500 people showed up for football games on Saturdays.

But still . . .

Wienreb focuses on his strongest argument, how college sports in particular bring us together in unexpected ways, and this gives college football (more than college basketball, I would agree) a kind of transcendence.  I don’t deny this — rather, it’s because I do agree agree with Weinreb on this point that I think we should try and bring college football back to earth.  One of the great aspects of music is that it can serve as a vehicle for transcendence, but music appreciation never (or hardly ever) devolves into tribalism.  Something always goes a little bit wonky when music gets involved with competitiveness, but college football can’t exist without it.  The rivalries can in certain places define one’s whole existence (Auburn-Alabama, Ohio St.-Michigan, etc.).  Such tribalism usually has a detrimental impact on us, giving us real animosity based on purely invented and artificial reality — i.e — there is no real reason for students at Notre Dame to hate USC.***  This transcendent tribalism leads to a kind of worship.  Weinreb attended Penn St., and in one chapter recalls a time when after a dramatic football win on the road, students stormed the stadium, took down a goal post, paraded to Joe Paterno’s house, and deposited it on his front lawn. Weinreb uses this story to support his argument, but I think it supports mine.  This presentation of the “sacrifice” on the “altar” looks a lot like worship of a false god to me.

The partial unreality of college life as a whole gets magnified exponentially in “big-time” college football.   Many of the best players on many of the best teams do not really attend the university.  Their classes, living situations, facilities, their treatment in general on campus gives them a life totally apart from other students.  The logic works like this:

• We must have football because it creates such wonderful communal moments
• But these communal moments are predicated on ultimately on winning
• So — we must attract the best players to win
• So — we have to create an additional unreal world apart from the actual campus community to attract players — some of whom don’t really belong at the university academically anyway — in order to foster this communal experience.
• We then give ourselves to this imagined community, which involves imagined hatreds

The academic scandals involving fake classes, fake grades, and so on should not shock us in the least. After all, in some places college football is a god, and gods need appeased.  Plenty of evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, exist to show how athletics tilt and twist universities in weird, unnatural ways.

I’m certainly not against sports in general.  God made our bodies to do wonderful things.  And, as our bodies are a form of revelation, the exuberant moments we experience in athletics are genuine, true pointers to Ultimate Reality.  I also don’t blame people desiring such communal transcendence and their willingness to sacrifice for it.  Again, we were made for such things.

The more we strip everyday life overtly of the sacred, the more we will seek to find it in other, perhaps less obvious ways. But seeking it in college football, as Weinreb admits we do, will in the end not give us answers, but instead, much to answer for.****  We will defend and sacrifice for the tribe to achieve it, making idols of our parochial communities.

Dave

*Miles Davis must surely rank as one of the great, if not the greatest bandleader of all time.  Of course he was a legend, but he helped turn countless sidemen into legends, like Ron Carter, John Coltrane, Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett — this astounding list goes on and on.

**Being beyond structure doesn’t mean that one is anti-structure, anymore than being beyond rationality means being anti-reason.  Of course the song has a structure and abides by certain rules of music, but one is not conscious of the pattern — therein lies self-forgetfulness.

***I loved my college experience as have many others, but I think one reason for the appeal of college is its fantasy-like existence.  In some ways our K-12 years have many more roots to “reality,” with family, age diverse community, and so on.

****I.e., the Penn St. scandals

Toynbee, “The Idolization of the Parochial Community”

Unhappily, Polytheism begins to produce new and pernicious social effects when its domain is extended from the realm of Nature-worship to a province of the realm of Man-worship in which the object of worship is parochial collective human power. Local worships of deified parochial communities inevitably drive their respective devotees into war with one another. Whereas Demeter our common Mother Earth is the same goddess in Attica and in Laconia, the Athene Polias of Athens and the Athana Chalcioecus of Sparta, who are the respective deifications of these two parochial communities, are bound to be rival goddesses in spite of their bearing the same name. The worship of Nature tends to unite the members of different communities because it is not self-centred; it is the worship of a power in whose presence all human beings have the identical experience of being made aware of their own human weakness. On the other hand the worship of parochial communities tends to set their respective members at variance because this religion is an expression of self-centredness; because self-centredness is the source of all strife; and because the collective ego is a more dangerous object of worship than the individual ego is.

The collective ego is more dangerous because it is more powerful, more demonic, and less patently unworthy of devotion. The collective ego combines the puny individual power of each of its devotees into the collective power of Leviathan. This collective power is at the mercy of subconscious passions because it escapes the control of the Intellect and Will that put some restraint on the individual ego. And bad behaviour that would be condemned unhesitatingly by the conscience in an individual culprit is apt to be condoned when it is perpetrated by Leviathan, under the illusion that the first person is absolved from self-centredness by being transposed from the singular number into the plural. This is, however, just the opposite of the truth; for, when an individual projects his self-centredness on to a community, he is able, with less sense of sin, to carry his egotism to greater lengths of enormity. ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’;⁵ and the callousness of committees testifies still more eloquently than the fury of mobs that, in collective action, the ego is capable of descending to depths to which it does not fall when it is acting on its individual responsibility.

The warfare to which parochial-community-worship leads is apt to rankle, sooner or later, into war to the death; and this self-inflicted doom is insidious, because the ultimately fatal effects of this religion are slow to reveal themselves and do not become unmistakably clear till the mischief has become mortally grave.

In its first phase the warfare between deified parochial states is usually waged in a temperate spirit and is confined within moderate limits. In this first phase the worshippers of each parochial god recognize in some degree that each neighbour parochial god is the legitimate sovereign in his own territory. Each local god will be deemed to have both the right and the power to punish alien human trespassers on his domain who commit a grievous wrong against him by committing it against his people; and this consideration counsels caution and restraint in waging war on foreign soil. It tends to prevent war from becoming total. The bashful invader will refrain, not only from desecrating the enemy’s temples, but from poisoning his wells and from cutting down his fruit trees. The Romans, when they had made up their minds to go to all lengths in warring down an enemy community, used to take the preliminary precautions of inviting the enemy gods to evacuate the doomed city and of tempting them to change sides by offering them, in exchange, honourable places in the Roman pantheon. When a local community has been exterminated or deported in defiance of the local divinity and without regard to his sovereign prerogatives, the outraged parochial god may bring the usurpers of his domain and scorners of his majesty to heel by making the place too hot to hold them except on his terms. The colonists planted by the Assyrian Government on territory that had been cleared of its previous human occupants by the deportation of the Children of Israel soon found, to their cost, that Israel’s undeported god Yahweh had lost none of his local potency; and they had no peace till they took to worshipping this very present local god instead of the gods that they had brought with them from their homelands.

Thus the conduct of war between parochial states is kept within bounds, at the start, by a common belief in the equality of sovereign parochial gods, each within his own domain. But this belief is apt to break down, and, with it, the restraint that is imposed by it. They break down because the self-worship of a parochial community is essentially incompatible with the moderation commended in such maxims as ‘Live and let live’ and ‘Do as you would be done by’. Every form of Man-worship is a religious expression of self-centredness, and is consequently infected with the intellectual mistake and the moral sin of treating a part of the Universe as if it were the whole—of trying to wrest the Universe round into centering on something in it that is not and ought not to be anything more than a subordinate part of it. Since self-centeredness is innate in every living creature, it wins allegiance for any religion that ministers to it. It also inhibits any living creature that fails to break away from it from loving its neighbor as itself, and a total failure to achieve this arduous moral feat has a disastrous effect on social relations.

A further reason why it is difficult to keep the warfare between parochial states at a low psychological temperature is because parochial-community-worship wins devotion not only by ministering disastrously to self-centredness. It wins it also by giving a beneficent stimulus to Man’s nobler activities in the first chapter of the story. In the histories of most civilizations in their first chapters, parochial states have done more to enrich their members’ lives by fostering the arts than they have done to impoverish them by taking a toll of blood and treasure. For example, the rise of the Athenian city-state made life richer for its citizens by creating the Attic drama out of a primitive fertility-ritual before life was made intolerable for them by a series of ever more devastating wars between Athens and her rivals. The earlier Athens that had been ‘the education of Hellas’ won and held the allegiance of Athenian men and women, over whom she had cast her spell, for the benefit of the later Athens that was ‘a tyrant power’; and, though these two arrogant phrases were coined to describe Athens’ effect on the lives of the citizens of other Hellenic city-states, they describe her effect on the lives of her own citizens no less aptly. This is the tragic theme of Thucydides’ history of the Great Atheno-Peloponnesian War, and there have been many other performances of the same tragedy that have not found their Thucydides.

The strength of the devotion that parochial-community-worship thus evokes holds its devotees in bondage to it even when it is carrying them to self-destruction; and so the warfare between contending parochial states tends to grow more intense and more devastating in a crescendo movement. Respect for one’s neighbours’ gods and consideration for these alien gods’ human proteges are wasting assets. All parochial-community-worship ends in a worship of Moloch, and this ‘horrid king’ exacts more cruel sacrifices than the Golden Calf. War to the death between parochial states has been the immediate external cause of the breakdowns and disintegrations of almost all, if not all, the civilizations that have committed suicide up to date. The decline and fall of the First Mayan Civilization is perhaps the only doubtful case.

The devotion to the worship of Moloch is apt to persist until it is too late to save the life of the civilization that is being destroyed by it. It does break down at last, but not until a stage of social disintegration has been reached at which the blood-tax exacted by the waging of ever more intensive, ferocious, and devastating warfare has come palpably to outweigh any cultural and spiritual benefits that the contending parochial states may once have conferred on their citizens. . . 

At this point in the school year different classes I teach touch on a similar theme . . .

Why did the French Revolution happen to such a nice guy as Louis XVI?

Obviously answering this question involves many factors, but one clearly is the problem of the mixed message and the tension that creates.  Louis worked hard to reform much of France.  He spent less money, he spent less time at Versailles, he believed in the power of science to transform the country, etc. etc.  In his excellent Citizens, Simon Schama points out that Louis’ scientific passions helped undo his regime.  He uses the example of ballooning.  Louis invited many not in the nobility to come to Versailles to witness some of the first hot air balloon experiments.  Again, we see Louis the nice, modernizing king at work. But as Schama points out, ballooning meant

• The presence of “commoners” at Versailles, previously the exclusive stomping grounds of the nobility
• The mingling of commoners and nobility
• The commoners traipsing over the hallowed Versailles grounds to follow the balloon, ignoring traditional boundaries in the immaculately kept gardens
• Absorption in the “boundary-free” nature of flight itself (this last one might be a stretch, but perhaps he’s onto something).

A few years later when the Estates General wanted to “modernize” and merge the three estates into one “National Assembly” dominated not by the nobility, but by the “everybody else,” Louis protested.  “That’s not how we do things.  We should preserve the ancient and inviolable traditions of France.”  One problem Louis had, however, was that he had been subtly changing those inviolable traditions.  He could not ride the tiger of the changes he helped bring about, and it cost him (and France) dearly.

A less overt, but no less impacting tension of “mixed messages” got introduced into Rome’s Republic ca. 200 B.C.  One can’t help admire the stability and effectiveness of Rome’s government from the founding of the Republic ca. 508 B.C. through the 2nd Punic War.  They had new elections every year, with new people in new offices most every year, and they thrived.  Part of the reason for this lay in the conservative nature of its society.  A society of farmers values stability and cohesion.  You see this cohesion demonstrated in this brief clip of how they fought.  In Rome’s prime, no barbarian horde of individual warriors ever stood a chance against a disciplined Roman maniple.

Naturally such a well-run state would have success and expand.  This expansion, however, threatened the very social cohesion that made them great in the first place.  The governing structure of Republican Rome had no idea how to navigate the dramatic change from its agricultural rustic roots to its “Mediterranean Empire” status, and even if they did, the Republic was built largely to prevent change. Rome grew great by preserving its identity through preserving their traditions.  This tension between Rome’s success and Rome’s identity helped lead to a century of intermittent civil war and the eventual collapse of the Republic between 44 and 27 B.C.

I have always enjoyed college basketball, and the men’s “March Madness” tournament is usually my favorite sporting event of the year.  I did not pay as much attention this year, partially due to business, and partially because watching college basketball has become much more a chore than I remember.  The pace of the game gets mangled by constant fouling (the Kentucky v. West Virginia game averaged more than 1 foul per minute of play), and constant timeouts (in televised games coaches get five timeouts plus eight mandatory tv timeouts).  While one might expect that constant fouling would mean more easy points in the form of free throws, in fact scoring is down across the board, no doubt due in part to the fact that no offense can ever establish a rhythm with continual game stoppages.

If this were professional basketball the solution would be relatively easy in the form of rule changes to make the game more entertaining.  But there lies the rub for the NCAA, because their sports don’t exist, in theory at least, for entertainment. The players are “student-athletes.”  They play the game to learn (hence, a mountain of opportunities for coaches to pound whiteboards and teach during timeouts), not entertain.  Charles Pierce lays some of this out expertly in his recent Grantland column here.  Pierce writes,

What’s fascinating to me, though, is not how to fix the problem [of scoring]; it’s how the problem doubles as the perfect expression of the current state of the NCAA and the amateur model itself. Because neither of college basketball’s twin personalities came into being spontaneously. They both exist by design, and whether the outcomes of that design are deliberate or not, the principles underlying it are deeply bound up with the contradiction at the heart of the NCAA’s idea of itself.

Here’s what I mean by that. Men’s college basketball has to be entertaining, because the NCAA, which derives most of its annual revenue from the tournament, wants it to make a lot of money. But men’s college basketball can’t prioritize entertainment too openly, because then the commercial motive would be obvious and would threaten the NCAA’s supposed reason for being.³ “We refuse to admit that we are selling it,” as Bilas recently said. This is how it’s possible to devote a tournament engineered for maximum fun to a style of basketball that elevates pseudo-moral qualities like instruction, teamwork, and sacrifice over carnal indulgences like, I don’t know, jumping, or the ball occasionally going into the basket.

The tension between basketball as revenue stream and the student-athlete model have been stretched to the breaking point.  The NCAA will have to make a difficult choice, and have boxed themselves in.  They can choose between . . .

• Basketball is primarily entertainment/revenue driven and so we make rule changes based on that principle, which sacrifices the student-athlete principle, or
• Basketball is about being a student-athlete and not money, and so changes will only be made that enhance the “student” aspect of the athletes.  Time-outs will stay, and money will disappear.

I suppose a third option exists, one the NCAA will likely take.  They will make rule changes, but under the cloak of improving the student-athlete experience.  They may believe this story.  Whether they believe it or not, they will increase the volume of their mixed message much further that I would think possible.  The NCAA as we know will be living on borrowed time.

One can say many things about Kentucky’s John Calipari, but his message is perfectly clear.

This post has had a few different lives.  It was one of the first posts on the blog years ago, but occasionally I come across a bit of information that might confirm what is a favorite and wild theory of mine.  I cannot prove the assertions I make, but I “feel” it to be true.  Below is the original post. . .

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For some time I have had a pet theory that I am far too proud of.

When we look at the ancient past we sometimes see law in the hands of the priesthood, or at least understanding of the law in their hands.  When civilizations are at this stage it is not uncommon to see people spend a lot of time going to oracles to help interpret law, make sense of their surroundings, and so on.

When we see this historians and archaeologists immediately think, “This civilization is in its early, pre-sophisticated stage.”  We assume that the obfuscation of law and the concentration of those who interpret in the hands of a select few must mean that their society has yet to come to intellectual maturity.

But then, look at us today.  What layman can understand our laws?  Who can fathom the depths of the health-care bill?  Who can actually read it, let alone make sense of it?

Only a special class of people, our priests, whom we call “lawyers.”

Not having understanding, the layman seek out their oracles to bring clarity to the foggy mysteries of law.  Some go to FOX, CNN, Stephen Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, or NPR.  They interpret for us. They become our ‘mediums’ to give us access to the secret knowledge.  But notice, we never interact with the law itself.  Nor do we interact with the ‘holy’ priesthood of lawyers.

And yet no one would say we are an unsophisticated civilization in its “early stages.”  If anything we are far too sophisticated.  But this sophistication may really be a form of regression, albeit a regression that cleverly hides behind advancing technology.

So, when we look at the past and see priests and oracles playing a large role maybe we should not think, “New, unsophisticated civilization,” but ponder the possibility that instead we see, “Old, over-complicated, tired civilization,” one with possibly a more vibrant and clearer past.

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That was the original post of a couple years ago, but recently I came across somethings else that made me think of the topic again.

In Toynbee’s Cities on the Move he makes a fascinating observation to begin his examination of the city throughout history.  He begins by looking at the nomadic character of early civilizations, where those who kept flocks had to keep their livestock moving to find land to graze.  He also cites the “slash & burn” agricultural practices of the earliest civilizations.  He then writes,

Our pre-nineteenth-century ancestors would have been surprised but perturbed if they could have seen present-day descendants of theirs who had seceded from the sedentary way of life as the pastoral nomads had seceded from it three or four thousand years earlier.  They would have hardly believed that any human being who once lived in a fixed house would prefer life in a traveling car.  The trailer towns in present-day Florida would have reminded our forefathers of the pastoral nomads of huts or tents.  The daily orbit of the present day commuter would have recalled the annual orbit of the nomad or shepherd; and it would have seemed appalling that ‘civilized’ sedentary populations should have been driven by economic necessity once again to become peripatetic.   . . . It is a spiritual misfortune for a worker to be alienated emotionally from the place where he has done his work and earned his living. . .

This modern sense of rootlessness manifests itself in our lack of connection with where we work and where we live.  So many notables of past eras, be they Thucydides, Socrates, Cicero, Dante, Machiavelli, or Browning all professed a great love for their respective cities.  We may pine for our homes, but I doubt that anyone pines for Centreville or any of the other random suburbs throughout America, which exist mostly as the equivalent of bus stations to take people somewhere else.

The most recent update to this post comes in the form of . . .

UPS drivers now use a system called “Orion” to guide their routes, and nearly all do not like it.  The formula they use makes no sense to the drivers, leading to what Alex Tabborok called “Opaque Intelligence.”  He writes,

I put this slightly differently, the problem isn’t artificial intelligence but opaque intelligence. Algorithms have now become so sophisticated that we human’s can’t really understand why they are telling us what they are telling us. The WSJ writes about driver’s using UPS’s super algorithm, Orion, to plan their delivery route:

Driver reaction to Orion is mixed. The experience can be frustrating for some who might not want to give up a degree of autonomy, or who might not follow Orion’s logic. For example, some drivers don’t understand why it makes sense to deliver a package in one neighborhood in the morning, and come back to the same area later in the day for another delivery. But Orion often can see a payoff, measured in small amounts of time and money that the average person might not see.

One driver, who declined to speak for attribution, said he has been on Orion since mid-2014 and dislikes it, because it strikes him as illogical.

He continues with what I think is the key point, “Human drivers think Orion is illogical because they can’t grok Orion’s super-logic. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from stupidity.”

I’ve always thought Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man an underrated work.  Here he attempted to reframe the typical evolutionary way of viewing history made popular especially by H.G. Wells’ Outline of History.  He may cinch the argument with his opening lines in the chapter “The Antiquity of Civilization:”

The modern man looking for ancient origins has been like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land and expecting to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks.  But the dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long built and lost to us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even the carved ornamental animals stand taller than the palm trees. . .  The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized [i.e. see how quickly “civilization” develops in the early chapters of Genesis].  Perhaps it reveals a civilization already old.  And among other important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalizations about the previous and unknown period when it was really young.