Murder, Metaphysics, and the Second Amendment

For a few months now I've silently watched the debate over whether to repeal the Second Amendment, in the news and on social media. Normally, I avoid charged political debates. I don't think they're very productive. It's much more productive, in my opinion, to discuss basic values. And it's much harder. I like getting to the point.

This is why I want to come at this from a politically neutral angle. To me, which political party agrees with a view is the least important question. Democrats, Greens, and other liberals are environmentalists. So am I. Republicans, the Constitutional party, and other conservatives are worried about the decay of family values. So am I. I don't choose my position based on what some party says about it. I choose it based on truth. To do otherwise is to put the cart before the horse. It leads to circular debates that never get to the heart of the matter.

I've finally chosen to write about the issue of gun control because I believe it has become a metaphysical issue. It's a question of what our hierarchy of values should be. It's become a deeply philosophical question.

To be honest, three months ago I found the question silly. Should we repeal the Second Amendment to the Constitution, namely that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."? Well, altering the Constitution should be a last resort, like when you're doing home improvement and considering whether you should remove a load-bearing wall. In the hierarchy of values, the Constitution is pretty fundamental. It's our most sacred set of laws, at the basis of what has made the United States a leading light for the world.

(Many liberals are going to say, ah, but is the U.S. a leading light anymore? Shouldn't we be following in the footsteps of Western Europe, which has mostly banned guns and generally don't have anything like the Second Amendment? Well that's precisely the question isn't it? So let's get to it.)

What finally convinced me of the importance of the question was a short New York Times article by a former Supreme Court Justice arguing that the Second Amendment is antiquated and should be tossed. He points out, and I agree with the sentiment, that "Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect."

Absolutely. These schoolchildren demand an answer. So does a former Supreme Court Justice. In fact, I've seen more (relatively) sober-headed debate over this issue during the last few months on social media than I have almost any other political issue. And I think the reason for this is simple: it does not (on the face of it) touch on religion, or minority rights, or any other of the hot-button issues that tend to offend the politically correct. With no minorities to get offended for, people are keeping (relatively!) cool heads about this. They talk about statistics instead.

Not that talking statistics, by itself, is going to get us very far. But since the entire case for repealing the Second Amendment seems to rest on statistics, it looks like that's where we're going to have to start.

The most-cited statistic in this context is that the U.S. has one of the highest murder rates of any industrialized country, and also one of the highest gun-ownership rates. So, the reasoning goes, if we could only get rid of guns, we could join the rest of the developed world (that is, Europe) in enjoying a low rate of murder. And the argument that we need guns to protect ourselves is silly, because without guns there won't be much we need protection from. Case closed.

Ah, but things are rarely so simple when you're talking statistics. We're forgetting that correlation is not causation, that there are many variables and some might be still more highly correlated, or more highly causal. We're forgetting that the Second Amendment actually has a reasoned purpose aside from affording us personal protection from murderers. All these things have to be taken into account.

Here are some more interesting statistics to consider.

-To begin with, we only really care about homicide rates, not accidental deaths. Only 0.5% of accidental deaths come from firearms, (about 700 annually). Traffic fatalities account for over 25% of accidental deaths (about 35,000 annually).
-Still, homicides are only one cause of death among many that we might get passionate about. There are about 15,000 homicides a year in the U.S. But many more--about 70,000--die from Type 2 diabetes, which is in turn largely caused by unhealthy diets and lack of exercise. Homicide is not even in the top ten leading causes of death in the U.S. anymore.
-It's been estimated that three hundred years ago the homicide rate was about seven times higher in America than it is today. We have seen a more-or-less steady decline, obviously due to a more comfortable and less dangerous way of life. But keep in mind that homicide rates have also fluctuated wildly from decade to decade.
-The total number of guns owned in the U.S has been going up in recent decades, while the murder rate is declining. But be careful: the number of households with guns is also declining. You're seeing more guns in fewer hands. What does this mean? Well it should be obvious if you think about it. Income inequality is going up, but so is average income. And the sixties and seventies were unusually violent decades for us, much worse than the fifties and forties. In fact current homicide rates are about the same as they were around 1950.
-In fact, current homicide rates are five times higher than they were in 1900. That means that in 1900, homicide rates were about 1/35th what they were in 1700. What the heck? What we were doing right back in 1900? Why not figure out what that was?
-Murder rates in New Orleans, Detroit, Jamaica, and Honduras, are all higher than they were in Europe 400 years ago. Mull that over for a second ...
-Some studies comparing rate of gun ownership with murder rate by state in the U.S., actually found a negative correlation. That is, the more guns, the less murders. The District of Columbia has both the highest murder rate and the lowest percentage of the population owning guns. Still, other studies show a positive correlation. Does your head hurt yet?
-In fact, if you compare the U.S. with the whole rest of the world (not just "developed" countries) it has one of the lowest homicide rates and highest gun ownership rates. That's because poor countries can't afford guns and tend to be more violent. But what exactly is causing what here can't easily be proven simply by citing statistics. In any case, there is a negative correlation, when measured across all countries, between gun ownership and homicide rates. Things are pretty complex here, right?
-The "developed" countries (as determined by the OECD), the four that have higher murder rates than the U.S. are Chile, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil. But then again Norway, which is the richest and by some measures happiest country in the world, has the 8th highest murder rate among the 36 nations they list as developed. Gah.
-Firearm ownership rates and robberies, measured by country, are negatively correlated. It seems reasonable to conclude that firearms deter robbers. So keep in mind it's not all about preventing deaths.
-Some studies show that rates of rape are negatively correlated with gun ownership, though the data here is also sort of all over the place. Google it for yourself.
-One study found three factors, each alone having a five times greater effect on homicide rate than gun ownership: (1) percentage of blacks in the population, (2) degree of income inequality, and (3) overall violent crime rate.

That it's so hard to pin down a definite relationship between gun ownership and homicide rates indicates that we aren't getting to the heart of the matter. What changed between 1700 and 1900 in America that led to such a drastic decrease in violence? And then what caused it to jump way back up over the course of the 20th century? It didn't have much to do with gun control laws. You might try to argue that it has to do with assault rifles, but by far most murders have always happened with handguns. You can't account for a 500% increase in murder rates when assault rifles only account for less than 5% of murders.

It's got to be a cultural change we're seeing. It's got to be a shift in values.

***
What about mass shootings? What about school shootings? Isn't this what this recent youth march on D.C. was all about? Aren't increased rates of school shootings what started this whole debate over the Second Amendment in the first place?

Over the last 50 years we've gone from an average of <1 death per year in mass shootings, to an average of about 30. Much of this rise has occurred in the last 20 years. During the same period, the number of deaths in school shootings has gone from <1 death per year to an average of maybe 20.

In the grand scheme of things, deaths from mass shootings are still fairly rare. They're about as frequent as deaths by lightning.

We hear about them because they make a good news story. You can't help but wonder how they happen. You can't help but be disturbed that over the last 50 years, they've gone from unheard of to notorious.

It's been pointed out that school shootings have been going on for over 200 years in the U.S. Technically, this is true. But it's strange that they are on the rise when violence overall is on the decline. It seems to tell us something about our culture, about how our society is changing.  It's very interesting (if disturbing) to read through Wikipedia's list of school shootings in the United States  which stretches back to 1764.

The one in 1764 is actually a massacre of white school children by some Native Americans during the Pontiac's War. There isn't another one listed until 1840. That doesn't mean there was no school shooting in the interim. But on the other hand there wasn't any shooting that could be counted as a massacre (3+ people killed by a single shooter) until 1940 (and this was by a teacher), even though dozens of single murders or multiple party gunfights are listed during the 1800's. If you read through these, almost all the murders before 1940 are due to quarrels or feuds, and if multiple people die it is usually people on two sides of a gunfight. Usual causes include fights over girls or escalating feuds that started with a beating or verbal altercation. In other words, gun deaths in schools were much more rare, and almost always the result of people trying (rightly or wrongly) to stand up for themselves in a heated personal disagreement.

Modern school gun deaths, on other hand, are not only more frequent but almost always the result of cold-blooded, premeditated, unprovoked murder. (They still use handguns more often than rifles, so the availability of assault weapons is not the cause.) Many of these child murderers admit to being copycats, to trying to outdo previous records. It's right that this should disturb us. It shows a decay of values.

***
But is the Second Amendment antiquated? If we can save a few lives by ridding ourselves of this obstacle to gun control, why shouldn't we, if it's useless for anything else?

Justice Stevens says that the Second Amendment was not originally put in place for personal protection. But this is debatable. Let's take a closer look at why it was put into place.

The U.S. legal system did not spring out of nothing. Rather, it was the offspring of English law, with a few important modifications. The right to bear arms was not an American invention, but had its source in the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

During the civil conflict between Protestants and Catholics in England, the Catholic king James II attempted to disarm the Protestants. The Bill of Rights of 1689 guaranteed equal rights to bear arms to Protestants as well as Catholics.

In other words, the right to bear arms, at least as understood in the 18th century, was a means to protect minorities from oppression.

This isn't to say that this was the only justification for the right to bear arms. This right was an old one, and its purpose comprised the obvious reasons: self-defense, resisting invaders, enforcing laws, suppressing rebels, resisting tyrannical governments, and participating in a militia.

You can find all these justifications for a right to bear arms, and more, in the writings of the Founding Fathers and in the written arguments made during the process of ratifying the Second Amendment. It wasn't just about having a "well-regulated militia." It reads ambiguously:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

But its ambiguity is part of its power. And it's been there since the beginning. Justice Stevens's claim that the notion of an individual right to bear arms is a 20th century invention is simply false. Individual rights were part of the original discussion over the Amendment, and the original notion of the right to bear arms. For example, in the Pennsylvania state constitution of 1776 states, "That the people have a right to bear arms in defence of themselves and the state ..."

Among the notions that came into play when the Second Amendment was drafted by James Madison, was the explicit idea that it would help check the power of a tyrannical government possessing a standing army. And there is no reason to think that this check was only thought to exist between the state and federal level, that a right to bear arms would not be just as necessary for preserving individual rights against city governments, or city rights against county or state governments, as well as state rights against federal governments.

Over the last 200 years, there have been many different Supreme Court Rulings that have taken advantage of differing readings of the Amendment. But we should not neglect how people have actually made use of the right to bear arms over the history of our country.

The settlement of the West is a good example of where people made use of the right, and gratefully. As a Montana sheepherder wrote his brother back in 1886:

"I never go to town [Miles City] without a six shooter in my pocket and few men do. Everybody is more or less a law unto himself. ... They average a shooting match in Miles about once a week, but it is mostly drunken rows. The characters that 'Die in their boots' are not missed much. ... A man who keeps his eyes wide open, is sober and minds his own business is quite safe here to be sure not so safe as he would be in a well regulated eastern town but plenty safe enough for all practical purposes. A man has got to get used to the 'far west' to enjoy the strange life. After living here a few years most people prefer the life and there are few who have lived here any length of time who can even contend themselves to live back east again. I am one of them."

In other letters he speaks of cases where large groups of vigilantes banded together against organized criminals. Many forms of self-defense -- on both an individual and group level -- were necessary in the Old West.

Would gun control have been of any help in the Old West? The question doesn't really make sense. The problem was one of lack of law enforcement. Without law enforcement, you can't enforce gun laws in the first place.

And yet, by 1900 the murder rate in the U.S. dropped to one of its lowest levels in the previous few centuries. How did this happen? The answer to this question is probably very complex, having to do with countless evolutionary forces, justice carried out within the law and outside it, population and economic changes, centralization of power, and cultural changes. If legislation played a part it was a minor one, since the laws in the West were simply modeled on the ones in the East. We sum all this up by saying that the West was "won" or "civilized," as if this somehow settles the matter.

But we can't pretend that all or even most of the violence in America during that century was in the West. There was the Civil War too, and it cost far more lives than the settlement of the West.

In fact the South's justification for going to war in the first place was to resist a tyrannical government. It believed it was exercising its Second Amendment rights. Of course, no one would argue that the Second Amendment trumps all other rights. Its purpose is to defend one minority against another, and the whole reason for the Civil War (unless you're a moral relativist) was in fact to end slavery, that is, to assert the rights of a minority--blacks--including (at least eventually) their right to bear arms.

The South rebelled against an allegedly tyrannical government, and failed. The balance of power, since then, has continued to shift from the states to the federal government. It has been argued in the New York Times that "an armed citizenry" is useless as a "check on the ambitions and encroachments of government power." The author cites these failed rebellions: "The Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, the New York draft riots of 1863, the coal miners’ rebellion of 1921, the Brink’s robbery of 1981 ..." But these examples--like the Civil War, as I'm about to argue--are completely irrelevant. If one sympathizes with any of them, then one believes they were right to consider the U.S. federal government as tyrannical. But if this is the case, if our government is indeed a tyranny, then we are faced with a much much larger task than repealing the Second Amendment. And if one does not consider the federal government tyrannical then these examples are all moot. A truly tyrannical government is the enemy of the people and would--one would pray--evoke a much more widespread rebellion than any of these, including the Civil War.

In fact, the Civil War is a bad example after all. Since we do not consider it a war of ambition by a tyrannical North, we cannot class it as a rebellion against tyranny, even if some would disagree. A true tyranny would have been opposed still more vigorously, and defended by an army less convinced of its own moral rightness. And I don't think this way of viewing history in terms of good and evil is unrealistic. If you think otherwise, if you think that might makes right and the moral high ground never comes into play, if you think that tyranny is all relative and cannot be reliably identified, then you have as little right to call the Revolutionary War just as you do our defeat of Germany in World War II.

On social media people have gone as far as to claim that a citizenry armed with assault rifles could never stand up to the U.S. military with its drones and tanks and missiles. But this whole line of argument is ridiculous. The United States has had a hard enough time invading much smaller countries with even lower rates of gun ownership than our own. In an urban war raw firepower is generally not the deciding factor. And this all assumes an unrealistic scenario where somehow the entirety of the armed forces is allied against the entirety of the civilian population. It's much more likely that you'd see civil conflict where both civilians and military personnel are split. Or, as I think is still more likely, you'd see a general industrial collapse where energy-intensive technology is too rare and expensive to be useful, or simply unavailable.

The whole notion of repealing the Second Amendment is another consequence of our over-exuberant belief of Progress. We are arguing as if our government is immortal, and our prosperity will grow forever. But if the past is any lesson, or if current trends of resource depletion or value decay continue, then our civilization is certainly mortal. Being mortal, we are faced with an uncertain future, where the defense of our principles by arms may become necessary.

A collapse would mark a return to a de-industrialized, de-urbanized, re-agriculturalized way of being, that is, a return to a way of life much like that of two or three centuries ago. Back then it was thought sensible to protect the rights of all minorities to carry weapons so that none were discriminated against.  It was thought right to have arms handy so that tyrants and criminals and invaders could be confronted wherever and whenever they appear. And the thought was certainly not wrong. To think that violence can be regulated away by bureaucrats is a peculiar notion of our peculiarly sedentary, passive age. On the contrary, through most of history and in most places even today, unjust violence must be answered with active courage and determination.

***
Rates of violence differ greatly from time to time and place to place, mostly independently of how guns are regulated. The cause of increasing mass shootings is certainly spiritual. Killers used to be vigilantes, sometimes misguided. Now killers are psychopaths, twisted to evil.

What's the solution? We need to educate our children in values. They seemed to know how back around 1900. In fact one of the most recommended books on homeschooling today is Charlotte Mason's Home Education, published in 1886. Much of the book is devoted to teaching your children values, including love and nonviolence. She advocates punishment, such as a slap on the wrist, only as a last resort. Section headings include "Moral Value of Manual Training," "Slipshod Moral Teachings," and "Importance of Ethical Instruction." By contrast, modern public schools have been steadily teaching less and less morality over the decades, and more and more pure academics, or at best poorly validated Rogerian-"self-realization"-type (that is, amoral) psychological theories like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (which Maslow renounced later in life as a misguided and even harmful way of seeing things). The failure of modern parents and schools to teach things like self-discipline is well-documented in many recent books. I recommend, for example, Leonard Sax's "The Collapse of Parenting," which cites numerous studies and examples from his own professional experience counseling parents.

Much more important than any amount of legislation will be our individual efforts to raise the next generation well. Even for children attending public school, it is the home environment that will do most for shaping their principles.

There is no ultimate solution that will fix our whole society. Confucius taught that to fix the state, you must fix the family first. And to fix the family, you must fix yourself first.

So let's do it. Let's act with courage and determination. Let's each start with our own self.

Take care what you fill your mind with. Beware modern entertainment with all its moral relativism. Beware modern anti-philosophies of nihilism and cynicism. Pursue classic tales and all their moral heroism. Pursue ancient philosophies of virtue and hope. Find what is beautiful, true, and good and share it with others.

Build your values on time-tested rock, not on sand.

How would it be possible to improve the moral foundations of one's nation without having one's own moral foundations in order? Metaphysically, it is not, as both Confucius and the Founding Fathers understood.

The Constitution of the United States may have its flaws. There may be ways to improve it. But it is sheer pride to think that jettisoning its statement (however clumsy) of that ancient principle, the right to fight by whatever means necessary to defend those you love, would ever be a better solution than setting straight the foundations of moral education in this country.

How Jane Austen Touches Truth Immortal

1.

We live in a time and place that is unusually charitable, tolerant, egalitarian, and free. We rightly pride ourselves in these virtues. But at the same time, our society is unusually materialistic, undisciplined, disrespectful, and irreligious. And since these sins are committed so flagrantly and universally, and are often mistaken for our virtues, we have become blind to them. It's like being in a noisy classroom all day. You begin to think that all happy children are this noisy, and that other classrooms are too boring to stand. Not until you've actually experienced a quiet, happy classroom do you come to realize what you're missing, what is possible.

This is what reading Jane Austen does for me. It's a way to lose myself in a different way of being, one that is quieter, more respectful, more disciplined, and ultimately more spiritual. I would not argue that the English aristocracy of the early 1800's comprised the perfect society, or anything close to the perfect society. It had many flaws, as all actual societies do. But its flaws were distinct from ours. And when you have a writer like Jane Austen who so clearly understands her own society and its flaws, by contrast with earlier societies that she has read about, can paint such a vivid picture of what hers was like, and thus allow us to finally see our own from a clear perspective, what you have is a window into a place that is only a step away from that perfect society, a place of eternal verity that can exist only in the imagination, where all these images can be brought synoptically together.

Austen's work stands, I will argue, as a testament to how mere fiction can touch on immortal truth.

2.

Jane Austen published four novels in her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. I would class all four of these as classics, and I believe I could make my point discussing any one of them. Recently I've finished reading Mansfield Park, which is probably the most serious of the four, in the sense that it deals with the most serious problems, and even has some tragedy at the end.

Don't be alarmed. It's still, for the most part, a happy ending. There is nothing wrong with tragic endings, but I would say that Jane Austen's style tends more toward comedy, and this is what we've come to expect from her. We expect her characters to be flawed, and amusingly so, yet to somehow find their way to a better place.

Now Jane Austen is commonly mistaken for a Victorian writer. As a matter of fact, she died two decades before Victoria was even crowned. And I've heard it claimed that, though popular in her lifetime, Austen's work wasn't tragic or dramatic enough for the Victorians, and that her writings were neglected for half a century for that reason. There is something very plausible about this, especially if you've ever read the Victorians' favorite philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, who was constantly lamenting how quiet, weak, and cowardly their age had become. The Victorians didn't believe that Jane Austen was the medicine they needed, and maybe they were right.

It's tempting to apply similar logic to our own age, and argue that we too have become too squeamish and need something more potent than Austen to wake us from our apathetic torpor.  Jane Austen, you might say, is the last thing we need. But I would argue otherwise. In physical terms, yes, we are weak, quiet, and lazy. We spend too much time indoors and with our entertainment. And like 19th-century English society we do indeed need a medicine of courage and adventure like you get from Homer or Plutarch. In spiritual terms, however, we've diverged from 19th-century England. In place of the hot-headed Thomas Carlyle we've enthroned the complacent utilitarianism of Peter Singer. In place of Alfred Lord Tennyson's warlike King Arthur we prefer Vladamir Nabokov's pedophilic Humbert Humbert. We call James Joyce the greatest writer who ever lived, when his most famous narrative dwelt solely in the boring mind of a dull protagonist, and we forget to put J.R.R. Tolkien on our lists of great literature at all, whose Lord of the Rings is infinitely more alive with the spirit of Homer than Joyce's Ulysses, and who I'm sure the Victorians would have adored. But we don't think much of Homer anymore and we hate the Old Testament. We've lost the ability to see anything heroic in the Middle Ages.

Our spiritual torpor is much more serious than our physical torpor.  It's really a compounding of the disease, a numbness. It started in our limbs and is working its way toward our heart. At this point it will do little good to repair our limbs, because without the heart the rest of the body dies. And Jane Austen is medicine for the heart.

3.

It's fashionable to say that the BBC's Jane Austen is never the real Jane Austen. But I disagree. Yes, you will get a lot more out of the books, but the BBC's adaptations, at least the mini-series, are faithful enough that it will still do you good to watch them.

As for film adaptations of Austen's work, I think these do usually miss the mark. Most of the story has to be cut out, which means more interpretation must be done, and this interpretation can't help but be more modern. Add to this the commercial factor, that movies are more expensive to make and thus often pander to the "market" and what is popular, and it's a surprise that that they are ever as good as they sometimes are.

The 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park is especially bad. The movie's poster is like a quieter, earthy-tone version of that for Amelie, as if Fanny Price were another quirky introverted protagonist desperate for a way to break out and let the world know just how quirky she is. This is the exact opposite of the what the novel is about, and unfortunately the movie is, on the whole, more faithful to the poster. And where it isn't faithful at least to this vision, it is even worse.

The reason I want to compare the novel and this bad adaption of it, is to give us a clearer picture of just where we are most prone to misunderstand Austen, which is, for this very reason, the place we have most to learn from her. (In case you're concerned about spoilers, I won't give away any major plot points that occur past the midpoint of the novel.)

Mansfield Park is not about a shy girl learning to show her spunk. It's quite the reverse. It's about a virtuous girl who resists every possible effort the world makes to get her to "come out." This is the term the character Mary Crawford uses. And there is a running debate in the book whether "coming out" is a good thing for a young woman to do. By the end of the story, Jane Austen has made it very clear where she stands on the question, and to make this very clear is the whole reason she wrote the novel.

It might be that Mansfield Park fails to clearly illustrate its point, at least for the modern reader. Since many movies like the 1999 one exist, evidently it has. But I would not fault Jane Austen for this. I don't doubt that, for her 19th century audience, her meaning was very plain. And I have met several other modern readers who understood it well the first time. But that so many film critics, including Roger Ebert, gave the movie glowing reviews and called it faithful to Austen, it is clear that there is a problem. I want to argue that for many of us there are some powerful ideological obstacles to understanding Austen properly.

Mansfield Park is an interesting case, because Jane Austen's difficulties in expressing herself to a modern audience are exactly Fanny Price's difficulties in expressing herself to the increasingly spunky world she finds herself in. All the ways in which her friends and family misinterpret her words, her actions, and her silence, are the same as the ways that we tend to misinterpret them. And the main reason that Jane Austen's contemporaries understood her and we do not, is that many of the flaws she portrays in her antagonists, indicating that they are antagonists, we no longer recognize as flaws. But after a sufficiently careful and thoughtful read to the end of the novel, I think a modern reader can understand, thanks to Jane Austen's careful realism, why these flaws--materialism, disrespect, lack of discipline, lack of religion--are in fact evils.

4.

In defense of Fanny Price's spunkiness in the movie, Ebert writes, "We are so accustomed to the notion of Austen's wit and perception that we lose sight of the fact that for her to write at all was a radical break with the role society assigned her."

Nonsense. By the age of 11 Jane Austen had starting writing and sharing her work with her family and friends. During adolescence she wrote stories, plays, poetry, and fragments of essays. Her father supplied her with writing materials and it was usual for her to read or perform her pieces before a private group. Many of her works were very satirical. She was given glowing praise for many of her youthful writings; they were well loved by her close relations, and have even been preserved to this day. (Google "Jane Austen's juvenilia.") By the age of 18 she had seriously begun writing novels.

For a woman to write novels was nowhere near unheard of. Both Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth were famous female novelists at the time. I find it hard to imagine that Jane Austen, who had received so much encouragement for so many years, had any difficulty in choosing to write.

Ebert concluded his review, "Anyone who thinks it is not faithful to Austen doesn't know the author but only her plots."

I beg to differ, sir. Calling the 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park faithful to the novel is to understand neither the author nor her plots.

So let us finally turn from the author and consider her plots.

When the novel begins, the wealthy Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram of Mansfield charitably (if somewhat arrogantly) offer to take in their niece, Fanny Price. Lady Bertram's sister is very poor and has many children, and agrees to this arrangement because it will give her some financial relief. So the ten-year-old Fanny Price, homesick, painfully shy, and a little frightened of her rich, imposing relatives, must get used to her new home. And the picture that is painted of the rich family there, her aunt, uncle, and four cousins, is not entirely flattering. The father is strict, but distant and cold. The mother is nice but lazy and unread, doting on her pug. The two daughters have been spoiled and are flighty and arrogant. They are cruel to Fanny and treat her as a lesser being. The oldest of the four children, a son just reaching adulthood, is already starting to lead a life of drinking and gambling. The only one of them that is generally humble, kind, intelligent, and disciplined is the younger son, Edmund. He takes Fanny under his wing and helps educate her, which means introducing her to both ancient and modern classics, which she reads and loves discussing with him. Edmund wants to become a priest, and not just for the money, but because he loves learning about virtue and teaching it to others.

Edmund's religiousness aside, this is, commercially, the best opening for a movie you could ask for. Modern audiences love seeing how arrogant rich people are, especially arrogant rich people with traditional values. Fanny's cold, stern uncle is the perfect fatherly villain, great for rebelling against and showing spunk to. The modern imagination will just go to town on a rich, stupid, lazy woman who loves her pug, or on two spoiled rich girls who don't like books. Add to it a hero that puts a book in your oppressed heroine's hand and you have pure Oscar-worthy gold. It really is too bad, in terms of the bottom line of Miramax Films, that the rest of the story only lends itself to a rather clumsy, slipshod adaptation that so lacked punch they had to add in a whole ugly subplot about slavery that in the end didn't quite give their audiences that warm glow they had probably hoped for from Jane's latest adaptation. (If you're curious about Jane Austen's attitude toward slavery, this is a pretty good analysis.)

But lets come back to the point. The weakness of the way the film introduces all these characters is that it is actually much more black and white than the novel. Sir Thomas is a great example. In the novel he's a well-meaning father. His strictness is not the problem; his coldness is. This is a subtle thing to portray, but Austen pulls it off beautifully. You don't end the novel hating him, the way you do the movie. Instead, you see him growing and learning to show more warmth toward his family. There is never an instance when he tries to impose a rule that Fanny disagrees with and must rebel against. Rather, it is his failure to reach his flighty daughters and son that causes much of the conflict of the story. And where his distant sternness fails, Fanny's warm quietness often succeeds.

The novel is not, to put more it bluntly, a critique of the authority of fathers. On the contrary, it shows what happens when fathers fail in their duty. It's because Sir Thomas failed that his daughters have become spoiled. And the fault is not only his, but his lazy, inattentive wife's. The novel is not about setting children free, but about disciplining them properly.

When Edmund finally comes to Fanny and introduces her to books, the point isn't that now she can now make a "radical break with the role society has assigned to her." The point is to educate her in virtue and introduce her to society, a job that her uncle and aunt, in their arrogance, are failing to do.

And all of this sets up the rest of Jane Austen's novel very nicely. It's a tightly woven tale, and every strand has the fineness and strength of silk. No character is neglected. Every one is consistent in their virtues, and suffers realistic consequences of their flaws. The father and mother are flawed disciplinarians, and as you would expect, they have mixed results in educating their children. And what is brilliant about the story as it unfolds is its elegant detailing of the logical evolution of each child's life as they pass into adulthood.

But none of this is clear from the movie because all it conveys is what your typically modern eye likes to see: rich, tradition-minded people being stupid and oppressive.

It's not that rich people don't sometimes oppress in the novel. As a matter of fact, the evils of greed are one of Jane Austen's major themes, not only in this novel, but in the rest. But she is also very careful to argue that wealth is not in itself evil. Many of her wealthiest characters are also some of her most virtuous. What is dangerous is not wealth, but an overpowering love of wealth.

5.

Let's turn to the second quarter of the novel. It is here that Mary Crawford and her brother Henry come into their own as antagonists, taking full advantage of all the Bertrams' weaknesses we've just learned about.

The main event of this part is the play put on by most of the young, unmarried adults at Mansfield Park: the siblings Maria, Julia, and Tom Bertram; their two friends, the brother and sister Henry and Mary Crawford; Maria's fiance, Mr. Rushworth; and the visiting actor whose idea it was, Mr. Yates.

The movie has already stumbled in introducing all these characters, failing to establish that they are anything more interesting than rich and spoiled. And it is here, during the debate over whether they should even put on a play while the master, Sir Bertram, is out of the house, that the film simply falls flat on its face. It never recovers.

In the book, there is a prolonged and lively debate over the propriety of putting on a play. Much is revealed about each character's sense of morality, especially when it comes to Fanny, Edmund (the good son who befriended and educated Fanny), and Tom (the wayward older son). It is made very clear through Jane Austen's mouthpieces, Edmund and Fanny, the reasons why it is a bad idea for them to put on a play. And these reasons should fascinate us moderns, for whom putting on a play is generally considered a very proper and edifying thing to do.

The reasons a play is a bad idea are this: (1) acting is an immodest profession, so is not a proper pastime for adult unmarried people of their social standing, (2) it would be taking liberties that their father, now absent, would probably disapprove of, and (3) since Maria and Mr. Rushworth are engaged, any romantic plotlines could cause confused feelings, and it would be hard to get around this because discussing the matter around the newly engaged couple would be indelicate.

In spelling these objections out, I've put a few words in Jane Austen's mouth. The reason for this is that Edmund hardly needs to explain any of them to Tom. He can merely mention them and Tom knows what he's talking about. That's because Jane Austen's contemporary readers were familiar with all the usual objections to the theater. Actors and actresses were flirtatious on stage, they often had to deliver bold, impudent lines. Someone had to play the villain, and portray attitudes that are evil. At a time in European history when entertainment was not seen as for its own sake but solely as a source of edification, all of these things were important considerations. Above all, a play should educate the morals of its audience. Plays which did not were considered dangerous to the moral fabric of society.

Today, we have almost forgotten that people once thought this way. People who express these opinions are either laughed at or dismissed as critics of free speech. Today we consider any hindrance to freedom of expression as a form of totalitarianism.

And this is exactly how the issue is dealt with in the movie. Nothing at all is mentioned about the delicacy of the fact that Maria and Mr. Rushworth are engaged. Nothing is mentioned about the immodesty of acting. In the movie, the only argument that Edmund brings to bear against Tom's plan to stage a play is that "father would disapprove." And Edmund delivers this line pale-faced and looking a little scared, as if their father might come home and beat them senseless for it any minute. All Tom has to say in the movie is, "Manage your own concerns Edmund, and let me take care of the rest of the family." He does nothing but pull the Patriarchy card himself, in a desperate attempt to make him less sympathetic to the viewers. Poor Edmund just scampers off with his tail between his legs to confess his fears to Fanny. To sum up, the movie sets up little more than a conflict between a Patriarch and ... well Edmund's cowardice. When I watched the movie (which was before reading the book) I hardly noticed the conflict at all, and went away surprised--since I knew 19th-century attitudes toward the theater--that Austen wrote a novel where everyone just put on a stage play for fun.

This whole part of the story makes infinitely more sense in the book. When the idea of putting on a play is brought up, the two immature Bertram sisters become eager and insistent. They are hard to reason with because they lack refinement, and too easily give in to their own whims and passions. The Crawford siblings, Henry and Mary, have been corrupted by their womanizing father and their time in London ("the city"), so are also quick to give in to their fascination with acting. Mr. Rushworth, it turns out, is not very intelligent, and simply follows the crowd. And in the novel it is Tom that is the coward, not Edmund. Though Tom is intelligent enough to understand the objections, and has the capacity for self-control, he lacks the courage needed to stand up to his friends. He does what he can to trivialize the matter "We mean nothing but a little amusement among ourselves, just to vary the scene." He weakness is that he's become a socialite, and as someone who has a weakness for drinking and gambling, this is no surprise. In the first discussion between Edmund and Tom, it is Edmund that has the last word and Tom that impatiently retreats to join his friends. There is nothing frightened about Edmund, only concerned: "Edmund was left to sit down and stir the fire in thoughtful vexation." It is, as in the movie, a problem that he is the younger brother and lacks authority to put a halt to it, but it is not the only problem here. It is no mere issue of "Don't tell Dad," but rather of what the consequences will be for Maria, her new engagement, and the other impressionable young people.

What happens next in the novel is exquisite to read. Eventually we will see Edmund weaken and finally give in, and Fanny come to the foreground as the last remaining hero. She courageously sticks to her principles while every other character in the book gives in to the crowd.

Here's how it happens. Though Edmund and Fanny are initially sitting out because of their principled objections, poor Edmund is put in a bind by the intrigues of the group. To begin with, their selfish inability to agree on what play to choose lands them with probably the most controversial choice they could have made, a play called "Lovers' Vows," which deals with sex outside marriage and illegitimate birth. But things are further complicated by everyone's selfish desire to be a lead actor. Maria ends up playing not opposite of her fiance Mr. Rushworth (who is too stupid for the lead role), but opposite of the seductive Henry Crawford, who was supposed to be wooing her younger sister Julia.  We've learned that Henry likes to make young women fall in love with him for sport. But at the same time he makes 4,000 pounds a year, and the somewhat materialistic Bertrams have been encouraging his attentions to their daughters for some time. This is already an explosive situation, and is troubling the sleep of both Fanny and Edmund, as Edmund tries every possible means to stop the production, and Fanny puts up every possible defense against being recruited into the play. (Not wanting to criticize their morals openly, she is forced to insist, "I can't act.") Then they run into a situation where they need one more male actor, someone to play opposite of Mary Crawford. Edmund initially refuses. At this point Mary slyly suggests they find a neighbor willing to take the part. Finally, not wanting to make the production public in this way, Edmund agrees to take the part.

Fanny is (internally) shocked, as she should be. Here is the one person she admires, Edmund, the only one who, through the entire story, has been standing up for principles, and he's suddenly flip-flopped. He tries to explain that he has no choice, that the play will become public otherwise. Fanny correctly stands by the position that this is inconsistent, that he cannot let their intrigues pull him in, that he must stay aloof. Edmund does what he can to get Fanny's blessing -- it's clear that he respects her opinion more than anyone else's -- but she (heroically, I would say, since she's falling in love with him) refuses to condone his choice, and he is left doing what he can to rationalize his choice to himself and the others. Even after Edmund has joined the production, and they continue to press Fanny to be a part of it, she sticks to her guns and refuses to act. She only goes as far as to help them with some lines, largely because the production is taking up the entire house and she can't help being within earshot.

But how is Edmund's weakness explained? We already know that he is falling in love with Mary Crawford, and these feelings cloud his judgment more and more as the novel proceeds. She often expresses anti-religious and mercenary sentiments (for example asking him why he wants to become a priest, and not do something more lucrative), but he excuses her transgressions to himself and others, believing he can, over time, educate her himself.

Speaking of Mary Crawford, she is cast all wrong in the movie. She doesn't come across as young or innocent enough. She is played by sexy middle-aged woman with a daring, alluring stare. As she seeks someone to act opposite her she stands boldly at the head of the room and declares: "What gentleman among you am I to have the pleasure of making love to?" They all turn their heads and gulp, their eyes saying "Pick me!"

Yes, Mary Crawford has dark eyes in the novel. Yes, she has a seductive charm, and an urbane manner. And in fact, she does deliver this line, if a little more by-the-by. (Of course, the term "make love" was just another term for "woo" back then.) But she should not seem so frank about being around the block a few times. It is completely implausible that a would-be clergyman would try to educate an older woman who is so blatantly worldly-wise.

What makes Mary work in the book is that she is young and impressionable. She brings her London ways to the country naively, not deliberately. At least this is what Edmund must think. In terms of modern tropes, she's the sweet girl with a dark side. When Fanny realizes that Mary's the one responsible for Edmund taking a part in the play, she's alone in her insight, with no way to explain it to anyone without betraying her friendship to either of them. In the movie, Mary Crawford is plain as day: she's pure evil. It's modern entertainment that tends to be black and white.

The entire plotline I've explained above takes three very short scenes in the movie, almost devoid of content. The first is the empty discussion I described between Edmund and Tom. "Father wouldn't like it," is all it amounts to. The second is the five second one where Mary Crawford audaciously asks the crowd of young men who's going to "make love" to her.

The third is ... bizarre. Edmund is up in Fanny's room saying he's worried that they're going to make their play public by going to the neighbors for a man to play opposite of Mary. Fanny just quietly stares at him as if all this is above her head. Enter Mary. She asks Fanny to practice some lines with her in front of Edmund and Fanny only manages to murmur two objections: (1) "To be truthful I have a dread of audiences," and (2, with an opaque smile) "Oh, no, no."

So Fanny's principled stand become a demure, silent shyness.

And then of course Mary and Fanny practice the lines together, and as these are supposed to be lines between lovers, you may infer where modern cinema might go with it. And it does. And this is the argument that convinces Edmund to join, though I believe he does mumble something about not wanting the neighbors to know about it. It's absurd.

It's here, as I said, that the movie falls flat on its face. There is no anticipation of any harm the play may cause, aside from angering Dear Old Dad. And that's what the rest of the story is supposed to be about, all the long-term problems that the imprudence of these undisciplined young people causes. I promised no spoilers, so I'm not going to go into what they specifically are, but the play has major negative repercussions in the lives of every one of the young people that takes part it in.

Jane Austen may be accused of a lack of realism here, but I would argue that it's more a lack a probability than plausibility. That acting can have these sorts of long-term effects on your life is well-known. I am sure you can name several famous actors and actresses who have married their lead partners in a movie, even ones who obtained a divorce to do it. I don't think anything that follows in the novel is implausible. Maybe certain probabilities have been exaggerated. But the point stands: entertainment is not merely entertainment. It affects how we see the world; it affects our values; it affects our relationships; it affects how our children's minds are formed. And most of us moderns, it seems, are blind to this. It is no surprise that Hollywood would miss this point entirely, even adapting a well-crafted novel dedicated to elaborating on it. We've entirely forgotten the principle that fun is learning, that entertainment is education, as the young people at Mansfield Park did when they put on the play, and this has been part of the cultural cycle of decline of American culture for more than a century. It's something we would do well to remember again. Maybe we need a Sir Bertram to come home and tell us that enough is enough. Or maybe we've reached the same point that they did in the novel before he finally did return: the point where his cold strictness would do us more harm.

No, it is not another Sir Bertram that is needed now. What is needed is for us to finally kick out Mary Crawford and start listening to the shy advice of the poor, modest Fanny Price.

6.

The immortal question Jane Austen touches on here is the question of education. How does one preserve a culture? More importantly, how does one raise children who choose good and not evil? These questions have been puzzled over by philosophers no less capable than Plato, who himself presented a picture in the Republic of a society where all entertainment was strictly regulated to ensure that no moral decay could occur. Of course, this picture was unrealistic, and Plato knew it was. He meant it as a picture of what the perfect education would look like, a formal definition of what the essence of education is. In reality, as he admitted, souls are diverse and they are supposed to be diverse, and to shape each one in an identical, unvarying mould, would be tyranny of the most radical kind.

In our imperfect world we need love and understanding. The root cause of all the strife portrayed in Mansfield Park was the arrogance of the two parents, Sir and Lady Bertram. On the father's side there was too much distance and authority, and not enough love. He wasn't the foaming, irredeemable tyrant he was in the movie, but more of the capable yet distant father. He just needed to spend more time with his children and develop real relationships with them, so that he could be a part of their amusements and make them edifying without making them dull. On the mother's side there was simply too much sloth: she lacked education herself.

And it is to the parents that the story ultimately returns, and the climax occurs when they see the consequences of their failure to educate.

To educate, they finally realize (and it doesn't give away too much to reveal this), means to instill self-control. As Sir Bertram grieves at the end, "They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them."

Self-denial and humility. Here we have the main lessons of the entire book, the unshakable virtues of Fanny Price herself, the very things lacking in those characters who fall. These are the first lessons of every perennial philosophy, every flourishing religion. Jane Austen wrote this book to help show why they are so important.

We live in an age of unbridled entertainment. And entertainment for entertainment's sake is the opposite of self-denial. It is the vanity of doing what you like for no reason at all. It is a blindness to reason, a blindness to principle. Every principle must contradict some selfish desire--whether money, fun, or sensuality--or it is not a principle. Every principle requires self-denial. Thus self-denial, the forgoing of entertainment for its own sake, is the most important lesson of every education.

Fiction unbridled, fiction without principle, as it tends to be in modern times, is fiction that from truth immortal wanders blind. But fiction of self-denial, fiction with principle, as you find in Jane Austen, is fiction that may glimpse truth immortal.

And may sometimes truth immortal touch.

Tools for Not Being a Tool

The more I think about the colloquial catchphrase, “Don’t be a tool,” the deeper it seems. The most troubling and comprehensive critique I’ve heard of modern technology is that it less makes us masters than masters us. Humans are, bit by bit, becoming slaves to their machines, and that this would occur has been foreseen for at least a century and a half:

“Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control.

— Henry Brooks Adams, 1862

Likewise, the most concise and thorough critique of the modern state is that it does not foster self-sufficiency but rather makes us more and more dependent on it. Similarly with the rise of corporations and corporate jobs, and the whole modern economy. Power has been removed from the individual family and their homestead, the individual pastor, the individual thinker, and been placed in Global Markets, Mega Churches, and Big Science.

The modern world is making us ever more tool-like.

There are ways to prevent this. There are tools for not being a tool. And they are all very ancient.  Passed on generation-to-generation, these tools have been propagated in books and kept alive in pockets where the corrupting influence of civilization has had less sway. Today, it is very hard to find such pockets, but they are there, and fortunately we have better access to classic books than ever before. In this post I’d like to take a brief survey of these anti-tool tools:

1.      Logic

“And if, on the other hand, wisdom and folly are really distinguishable, you will allow, I think, that the assertion of Protagoras can hardly be correct. For if ‘what appears to each man is true to him,’ one man cannot in reality be wiser than another.”

                —Socrates (in Plato’s Cratylus)

The death of reason is the great unsung catastrophe of modern life. I describe this in detail in my previous posts on logic (Part I, Part II). In essence, our very conception of what reason is has degenerated. Now, we think of it as “science”: a mixture of mathematics and experimentation done primarily by experts. Where we want to be logical, rather than thinking it through for ourselves we find a “study” so we can give numbers and statistics: “data.” While all of this has something of logic in it, it is degenerate because it lacks the independent and self-sufficient criticality that makes logic logic. It is worth quoting Aristotle again on this point:

"[T]he science which knows to what end each thing must be done is the most authoritative of the sciences, and more authoritative than any ancillary science; and this end is the good of that thing, and in general the supreme good in the whole of nature." (Metaphysics 2, 982b, W.D. Ross trans.)

Far from having or respecting any notion of supreme good, we now rely on a hodge-podge of specialty sciences, each referring to another or to a set of special experiments, none of them capable of binding our vast knowledge into any cohesive system of rationality. Even if the writings of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle contain many outdated facts, they each constitute an example of something we have forgotten: a worldview bound together into a relevant and self-sufficient whole by use of logic – logic as the tool, not the master.

To remember this art again would be to free ourselves from our intellectual dependence on aimless, bureaucratic science on the one hand, and pure unstructured relativism on the other, and give us back Logic as a form of individual strength, and not subservience.

2.      Knowledge

“We suppose first, then, that the wise man knows all things, as far as possible, although he has not knowledge of each of them in detail …”

—Aristotle (Metaphysics 2, 982a)

Closely related to logic is the class of mental tools that are facts, known as knowledge or science. Notice the ambiguity  in the term “science” – which can mean either methodology or knowledge. As science also carries bureaucratic connotations, we should generally prefer the term knowledge.

The biggest blow to modern knowledge has come from the Internet. Where before we relied on our memories, or on books that could be possessed by individuals, now we rely primarily on distributed data in the form of websites which we visit but do not possess. As such knowledge is passing out of individuals’ hands and becoming a property of our infrastructure. But for our knowledge to be integrated in any deep way with our logical faculties, for this synthesis to become a true science in the ancient meaning of the term, knowledge must be carried primarily in the mind. It is one thing for books to have replaced memorization as a means of passing knowledge. The death of memorization may mean that we will never be as fully whole as the Greeks were. But it is another thing entirely to allow our machines to index and recall information for us, and we must do everything we can to preserve the information-integrating processes of our own minds, if we are to continue to have minds at all.

3.      Craft

“Self-sufficiency is not attained by riches.”

                —Boethius

The entire modern myth of Progress rests on the exact reverse of Boethius’s aphorism, the false notion that, as Harvard economist Amartya Sen puts it “Development is freedom.” He uses this notion to argue that all we need to do to improve life in the third world is to make them more prosperous like us. We can see the falsity of this idea simply by following Boethius’s 1600-year-old reasoning concerning wealth and happiness: “If riches cannot eliminate need [which they never do] but on the contrary create new demands [which they always do] what makes you suppose that they can provide satisfaction?” This is just as true when stated in terms of “development.” A developed country has more needs. It uses generally 5 or 6 times more resources than an “undeveloped” country. The United States has one of the least efficient agricultures in the world, not in spite of its technology but because of it.

What we have lost, as many organic farmers have argued, is craft. We have replaced individual knowledge with mechanical processes. This hardly needs to be pointed out. Food production and consumption has become mechanized as never before. Not long ago, just a couple of generations back, it would be considered strange for a country-dweller not to know how to churn butter, slaughter a pig, or harvest wheat. Today it is less and less common, even for a country-dweller, to butcher their own animals, make their own bread, or even cook their own food.

We may have gained a vast amount of knowledge on a societal level, but what we have lost on an individual level is even vaster. Candle-making, soap-making, carpentry, metal-working, and basically all other country crafts are now kept alive only by a few isolated communities and craftsman.

And with the decline of these arts has come the decline of all fine art as well. Vegetables are mass produced; so are stories. Television has done as much to destroy craft as factory farming. We would rather buy food than grow food. We would also now rather buy music than play music. “Who has time?” All arts and crafts are inefficient. In both the decline of country crafts and the decline of fine art, there is a common culprit—our new love for science, mass production, and efficiency.

The decline of poetry and the fine arts is obvious from several different perspectives. Today, the ideal of the intellectual life is the scientist, who is completely objective and nothing to do with art. But the old ideal was the “man of letters,” a writer of poetry, essays, books, and letters who was equally expected to be able to write verse or music as mathematical equations. When ideals contract and are weakened in this way, the whole system of education follows suit. For decades now at the universities, the humanities and fine arts have declined as much as the agricultural arts. Everything is giving way to specialized, vocational, and industrial sciences.

We need to bring back poetry, art, and all other crafts. We need to bring back the ecosystem, the wild garden of the mind.

Assert your freedom. Value time over money. Learn crafts. Practice crafts. Create.

4.      Homesteading

“He who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment.”

                —Proverbs 12:11

Given that Progress is a fantasy, and that urbanity is given to chase it, pursuing a rural way of life is the most prudent way to prepare yourself and your descendants to prosper come what may. To throw your lot in with perpetual economic growth, and let yourself be entirely dependent on both your corporate job and far-away factory farms for sustenance, is a poor bet. Better to at least learn the basics—gardening, poultry, a few staple crops such as potatoes—and then even if you don’t yet have the time to entirely support yourself, when hard times come you will be much readier than average.

A homestead is an ideal place to raise a family. Children learn the value of work, and how to work. There is a great variety of work to be done and crafts to be learned. They will learn where food comes from. More food can be fresh and unprocessed. You get more fresh air and “probiotics,” because there is less reason to be confined indoors consuming mass media. You can live closer to nature, and learn about it by interacting with it. Tradition and traditional values are more in demand. Money, popularity, and consumer goods are less in demand. Even if you lack the land or skills to achieve this ideal fully, any step in this direction will only bring that much more psychological and bodily health.

Don’t be a corporate tool: be self-sufficient.

5.      The Classics

“He who cannot draw on 3000 years of history is living merely from hand to mouth.”

                —Goethe

You almost never encounter a great person who does not have their list of classics that helped make them who they are. Any book that has helped form great people, and has done so consistently over several generations, may safely be called a classic. It’s a book worth knowing. Reading a classic will help raise your quality of life and the quality of your thinking. A book worth knowing will help make you a person worth knowing.

The deeper you go into the classics, the deeper you will become as a person. Contrast this with academic learning. The deeper you go into any subject and the longer you spend studying, the more specialized and the less relevant to most people you will become. Applying academic philosophy to the world, and sharing it with people, is very difficult to do the more you read it. Applying Plato to the world, and sharing him with people, is very difficult to avoid doing the more you read him.

The world’s best education costs almost nothing. On the other hand, university educations are becoming more expensive, and we are going further into debt paying for degrees that are becoming less valuable. And the notions taught at universities are becoming more and more progressive (as if this were progress) and more politically so. The classics themselves are read less than ever, for the paltry reason that most were written by white men with very conservative views relative to today, as if being white, male, or traditional were an automatic refutation. On the contrary, we live in an extremely liberal society, relative to other times and places. So it is unavoidable that reading literature from other times and places will expose us to the special weaknesses of our liberal worldview. Again, once we’ve disposed of the idea of perpetual progress, we can come to understand that the future is likely to be very like the past, that this flowering of liberal civilization we’re experiencing has a great deal in common with the liberal civilizations of Athens, Rome, the Mayan Empire, Babylon, and countless others that have all grown decadent and declined. The notion that Western civilization alone is immortal is nothing more than a pretty piece of propaganda for making us its tool.

Free yourself from the chains of partisan politics and progress-worship. Read the classics and learn to think outside the matrix of our surprisingly provincial self-worshipping modern culture.

6.      Friendship

“Companions the creator seeks and not corpses, nor herds or believers either. Fellow creators the creator seeks …”

—Nietzsche

“The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.”

—Emerson

“Emerson with his essays has been a good friend and cheers me up even in black periods: he contains so much skepsis, so many ‘possibilities’ that even virtue achieves esprit in his writings.”

—Nietzsche

“Communion and friendship and orderliness and temperance and justice bind together heaven and earth and gods and men …”

—Socrates

During my years in academia I taught courses and attended conferences, I had seminar discussions about papers and wrote responses, I critiqued and published. But none of this ever reached the depth that my conversations have had over email, or over beer, or on a long walk with a friend.

In the institution, where the context is professionalism, the politics of the institution reigns. In informal settings, where the context is friendship, truth reigns.

7.      Fallowness

“The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”

—Katherine Mansfield

“The wisdom of a learned man is the fruit of leisure; he must starve himself of doing if he is to come by it.”

— Sirach 38:25

The ecology of the soil is surprisingly like the ecology of the soul. Overwork either one, and you kill it.

Amish and organic farmers alike understand the principle that the cheapest and most efficient way to build soil is to do nothing and let nature take over. It is called leaving a field fallow. In traditional Mayan culture, it was understood that when you cleared an acre of forest, you could plant crops profitably for two years, but you would have to leave it fallow again for 5-20 years before it could be used again. In the Old Testament, Leviticus requires that you leave your fields fallow for 1 year out of 7, and this is called the Sabbath Year, in analogy to the weekly Sabbath, the day of rest, contemplation, and leisure.

If you leave the land free and unused (not a tool), it will pursue an equilibrium state, every species proliferating as fast as it can until a maximally stable diversity is achieved. Nutrients are transported from high-density areas to lower-density areas. Coalitions of species are formed that can successful repel invasive organisms. Everything happens according to God’s law alone, and a perfect state of primal wilderness is approached, though this process can take centuries or more to reach completion.

The human mind is the same. Forces seeking to usurp it and make it a tool are manifold in modern society. Political parties seek to limit its opinions to those that will let it vote correctly. Propaganda by major news outlets is their preferred tool for plowing and planting your brain, but also increasingly blogs, social media, universities, and even public schools as well. We should distrust anything with a political bent. Media corporations also use propaganda (euphemistically called “advertisements” or “television shows”) to put you in the correct frame of mind to buy their products. Increasingly, the media’s complex of tools have merged with the political complex, because they share the goals of making people (1) less stuck on traditional ideals so that their minds will be (2) more pliable and (3) more dependent on the media for validation.

Some media is okay, in limited doses. Our identity as a culture is now crucially dependent on it, and unless you have a basic knowledge of popular culture, you lack Western culture period. But it would be much better to give up all television watching and news reading, and only read classics and letters from friends, than to do the reverse.

If they are not to be mere tools, but to aspire to the wholeness of wilderness, both our minds and our fields need fallow time. Do not overwork the land, do not overwork the spirit. Leave plots fallow; leave hours contemplative.

8.      Provincialism

“… a fool’s eyes wander to the ends of the earth.”

                —Solomon

We see provincials as “backwards” for good reason. They are good at preserving their way of life. And contrary to modern urban bias, this is a good thing.

Typically we use doublethink here. On the one hand we lament the loss of cultural diversity, the disappearance of the Native Americans, and the Westernization that is imperialistically destroying old cultures elsewhere around the world. Yet we do not even let ourselves pass down our own cultural diversity, let alone generate new diversity.

It is easy to forget that every society, every tribe and nation and ethnic minority around the world, all came from the same primeval tribe. We are all cousins. And all this diversity didn’t spring from nothing. It sprang from local adaptation--from a closeness to nature and the land and God—that is being lost.

Ecosystems are generated by diversification. Creativity is impossible as a tool of empires. Flourishing freedom only occurs outside Babylon, where the waters run free, the trees may grow to full height, and you know your neighbors well enough to love them as yourself.

In the modern Western world, village life is almost extinct. Most has been forgotten. There is not much community to join. But we should try to remember, because the time will come, when the ends of the earth are stripped of their treasures, when the empires have fallen and their chains rusted away, that we will again recognize the kind farmer next door as the greatest treasure of all.

9.      Liberal Education

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.”

                —C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man)

“For we are not speaking of education in a narrow sense, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how to rightly rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our view, deserves the name; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education.”

                —Plato (Laws I)

I’ve mentioned that public schools are increasingly used as platforms for political propaganda. I’ve also mentioned that they neglect the classics. To round out my critique it only needs to be pointed out that the logic of public education only makes sense where the parents lack any education themselves. The average public school student, if they’re lucky, will receive maybe 20 minutes of one-on-one instruction with the teacher per day. And the amount of time actually spent learning, by any means, is somewhere in the 10-30% range. You have a single teacher for 30 students. For a six-hour day, that’s 12 minutes per student. And where these students are spread across a spectrum of levels and abilities, you are lucky if more than 1/4 of the content of instruction is relevant to what you need to learn. And what about this remainder of the day spent in school, the majority where there is no content of interest and no teacher guidance? Rest assured the student is being taught by peers no wiser than themselves.

Teachers deserve our admiration. They do a great deal for our children with very little. I owe a lot to the teachers I’ve had over the years, from elementary through graduate school. The weakness of our public education system lies not in our teachers, but in the design of the system itself, in the daunting mathematics of the task we are giving them.

The mathematics of homeschool is much more encouraging. Spend just an hour with your child each day and you’re already giving them three times more attention than even the best of their teachers could. Teach them self-study and help them find books and resources, and you will be sure that close to 100% of their study time is spent actually learning. The ratio of adult influence to peer influence will be, even for a family of six, five times better. And with a mixture of ages, the older children can learn by teaching, and the younger have that many more teachers.

But do homeschool children enculturate and socialize properly? I think they do. Studies confirm that they are generally better adjusted. (See my full critique of public school and the university system.)

For two thousand years in the west, the most admired form of education was a “liberal” one. That means, rather than being trained for a vocation, you’ve read the classics of western literature and surveyed every field of knowledge from a philosophical, value-based point of view, with the aim of gaining a coherent world-picture. Recall that this aim is also the ultimate goal of Logic, properly characterized. So now we have come full-circle, and we see that the aim of becoming a free, open, and rational mind is best achieved by the intellectual independence given by a liberal education, rooted in the classics, sheltered from corporate and political propaganda, and given the leisure and fallowness to grow into wholeness and self-sufficiency.

Standing Your Ground

How do you stop caring what other people think of you?

Logic vs. Logical Fundamentalism (Part 2)

Logical Mastery

A master of logic knows both its power and its limits. As we saw in the last part, to assume that logic alone is sufficient for forming all our beliefs is absurd, because then we would need no other techniques.  On the contrary, it is manifest that a true master of logic would have many diverse forms of knowledge, in order to use the techniques and premises most useful for the question at hand. And since no human has the time to learn all disciplines, a true master of logic must be acquainted with the most general and important disciplines.

In other words, the best logicians are more than logicians. The domain of logic itself is rather narrow. It consists of simple-yet-thorny problems, which would confuse if they were not laid out explicitly. Some of these problems are more central than others. What is 12 times 15? Most of us don't know this immediately. Even people who can do it quickly in their heads reason something like this: 4 times 15 is 60. Since 12 divided by 4 is 3, this is the same as 3 times 60, which is 180. This is how I personally do the problem, and in most cases I can do it in about 3 or 4 seconds. But I haven't been entirely logical yet, and perhaps you didn't follow. To clarify, let me use arithmetic which is essentially the logical formalism of numbers:

12 x 15 = A

(3 x 4) x 15 = A           factorization of 12

3 x (4 x 15) = A           associativity

3 x 60 = A                   4 x 15 = 60

180 = A

It's probably taken you more time to understand my reasoning here than it would have to simply use a calculator, or to use long-multiplication as you learned in school. In fact, you might wonder why I chose to do it this way when I could have used the usual way of writing multiplication problems. I was attempting to explain a mental trick I use in multiplying numbers. In most cases it helps me calculate much quicker, and I've been using it for so many years it often happens largely beneath my consciousness. Where did I get the trick? Why is it faster? You should also wonder: why is it important?

This example has shown several uses of logic, as well as weaknesses. Logic is useful for well-defined problems. It is useful for explaining our thoughts more clearly. It is also useful for analyzing and teaching methods of thought that can speed up thinking. Logic is not useful for vaguely-defined problems. The question of how to find good tricks for doing math in your head is not a question of logic, but of experimentation and play. Logic can clarify, but only at the cost of using more words and symbols to explain. I could have stopped with "12 times 15 is obviously the same as 3 times 60, which is 180," because that's normally how I think about it. But it is not a fully logical argument because it might not be obvious to you why it is the case.

Humans only rarely use pure logic. When a lot of pure logic must be done, we give it to computers, which are much faster at it. Among scientists and philosophers, sometimes the use of logic is considered to bestow a greater deal of certainty and authority. This is often unwarranted – even professional papers in physics usually contain more verbal passages than they do mathematical equations. Putting more equations in a paper does not necessarily make the paper as a whole more certain. Logical or mathematical reasoning is always based on assumptions, and these assumptions, along with the fidelity of the reasoning, will generally determine the soundness of the conclusion. Rather than comparing the number of mathematical symbols being used, it is best to treat each written argument on its own terms. The practice of judging a subject based on how logical it appears is a major source of our bias against the humanities and in favor of physics and mathematics.

Logic is fidelity. By making our reasoning explicit, we make sure that nothing is lost or misunderstood. Mathematical knowledge is precise, so it requires a precise symbolism. Learning to use this symbolism carefully and with fidelity helps us to express ourselves clearly. Fidelity is also important when using the English language. The vast majority of our reasoning is in our native tongue. There is no master mathematics that can encompass everything we must say, therefore it is a special challenge to express logical arguments in words. How do you explain your logic fully when you are bound to use words that do not have perfectly precise meanings? In the universities, this is known as "informal logic," but it is taught so narrowly as to be inadequate to what we need it for.

Logic itself is easy. If it is raining, there are clouds. It is raining. Therefore, there are clouds. When you have rules and you know how to apply them, there is no problem. When you're given a set of math problems and all you have to do is follow a mechanical set of rules, it quickly becomes tedious. What is hard is expressing complex logic informally, in words. It is difficult to take a tough new problem and express it logically when you have no formalism. And this is the way it is with most real-life logical problems we run into. Is abortion right or wrong? Two novices can easily spend hours debating whether this question can even be parsed into logic.

Logic is a tool. That something is a logical question does not automatically make it important. The question of how to multiply 12 and 15 was merely an example, and we did not go as deeply into it as we might have. A true master of logic does not get caught up in less relevant details. On the contrary, a master of logic knows what is relevant and develops tools for thinking about the most relevant details.

Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, is perhaps the most all-round capable logician who has ever written a book. Everything he wrote was in Greek, not in equations (as modern logicians strive to do), yet it is so clearly and carefully thought-out and argued, that even where he is mistaken you can tell exactly where his error crept in. Ultimately, this is why logic is important. If we can lay out our ideas clearly and explicitly, then we have done something useful for future generations even if it is wrong. Let's take a look at his discussion of it means to be wise:

[W]e must inquire of what kind are the causes and the principles, the knowledge of which is Wisdom. If one were to take the notions we have about the wise man, this might perhaps make the answer more evident. We suppose first, then, that the wise man knows all things, as far as possible, although he has not knowledge of each of them in detail; secondly, that he who can learn things that are difficult, and not easy for a man to know, is wise (sense-perception is common to all, and therefore easy and no mark of Wisdom); again, that he who is more exact and more capable of teaching the causes is wiser, in every branch of knowledge; and that of the sciences, also, that which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of Wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results, and the superior science in more of the nature of Wisdom than the ancillary; for the wise man must not obey another, but the less wise must obey him. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 2, 982a, W.D. Ross translation).

The context for Aristotle's discussion is an introduction to the principles of metaphysics, which for him are the first principles of what exists, applicable in all fields of knowledge. He equates knowledge of metaphysics with Wisdom itself, which is the broadest and most divine science. As he does at the beginning of all his books, Aristotle clearly and succinctly lays out the goal of his work and his method of approach. The first task, then, is to determine what "causes and principles" the wise man must understand to be wise. This passage is only preliminary, but it begins with "what notions we have about the wise man," including (1) that he has general (if not detailed) knowledge about every field, (2) that he has knowledge about difficult subjects, (3) he is a capable teacher, (4) he knows subjects which are more theoretical and primary.

Just in stating these aspects of wisdom, which are generally taken for granted and left as unconscious assumptions, even today, Aristotle has given an explicit, logical definition of philosophy that is as perfect as can be desired. (Incidentally, the art of making definitions is an essential branch of logic that is nevertheless neglected in most modern courses on the subject.) The relevance of his definition today can be seen simply by asking who we moderns consider wise and determine whether they satisfy it. Scientists are usually called the wisests among us, and among scientists, physicists, such as Albert Einstein, are held in the highest esteem. Other people, who oppose putting mathematics on a pedestal, most commonly name novelists like James Joyce or perhaps analytic philosophers, like Wittgenstein, or postmodern philosophers, like Derrida, as the wisest. So let's consider these four categories of modern thinkers – physicists, novelists, analytic philosophers, and postmodern philosophers – in terms of Aristotle's criteria.

Physicists fail, in general, to satisfy criterion (1). They do not have knowledge of every field, but are relatively untrained in philosophy, the humanities, and "soft sciences" such as the humanities. Most modern physicists are encouraged to specialize even further in a particular field, such as astrophysics, solid state physics, quantum field theory, etc. They are far indeed from being trained in politics, ethics, or mysticism. Physicists do, however, often satisfy criterion (2). Their subject involves extremely difficult mathematics, so difficult that professional physicists tend to score better on mathematical aptitude tests than mathematicians themselves. Some physicists do satisfy criterion (3), being good teachers. My experience as an undergrad at Caltech was that most physicists, however, prefer to focus on research. Physicists are rarely excited about teaching their theories to those outside their field, and when they are good at making their ideas accessible, the way Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene are, their books fail to address the broadest range of human concerns, however excellent they are in other respects. Theoretical physicists satisfy criterion (4), knowledge of what is theoretical and primary, but experimental and applied physicists do not. Therefore, even theoretical physicists only satisfy 2 out 4 of Aristotle's criteria, and are thus not Wise under his definition. This conclusion holds up when compared to the role physics plays in practice – physics is indeed too specialized and too insular to provide people with what you would call wisdom, and is usually more useful in technical engineering contexts.

Novelists often do satisfy criterion (1). Science fiction authors, especially, often display an impressive range of knowledge, including moral, aesthetic, social, and scientific aspects of human life. Writing good, publishable fiction is indeed difficult, so we can give them criterion (2) as well. Are novelists capable teachers? In a few ways they are, because they can inspire people to think and question. But on a person-to-person basis, you wouldn't generally go to novel or novelist to learn a particular subject. Aristotle's criterion, more specifically, is that "he who is more exact and more capable of teaching the causes is wiser." Novelists can't be exact in novel writing, because their stories become boring. Nor do they focus on causes, but on human drama. So they do not sastisfy criterion (3). Do they know subjects which are more theoretical? Often they do, but this is not essential to being a novelist, so we cannot say they satisfy criterion (4) either. Once again, we have a class of thinkers that satisfy only 2 out of 4 criteria.

Postmodern philosophy does not stress ability in mathematics or science, though it does encourage its students to investigate a broad range of fields. At their best, postmodern philosophers do have broad-enough knowledge to satisfy (1). Being a successful postmodern writer is certainly not easy (any kind of writing career is difficult), so we can say that they have knowledge of difficult subjects (2). When it comes to causes and exactness, postmodern philosophers are not trained to teach clearly (3). It is unclear whether postmodern philosophy is properly theoretical, or simply claims to be, but even if we give it the benefit of the doubt on (4), it still only scores 3/4.

	Physics	Literature	Postmodern Philosophy	Analytic Philosophy
1) Broad?	No	Yes	Yes	No
2) Difficult?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
3) Teach causes well?	No	No	No	Yes
4) Primary?	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

Analytic philosophers generally do not satisfy condition (1). They are often untrained in literature, religion, and aesthetics, though most respected ones have at least some knowledge in these fields. They do satisfy condition (2), since analytic philosophy is a very difficult subject, in terms of the complexity of the language and logical reasoning used. They generally score even higher than English professors on language aptitude tests. The best analytic philosophers are good teachers and mentors, and write clear popular accounts of their philosophy. They treat causation and reason as exactly as can be expected, so they satisfy (3). Analytic philosophy is also entirely theoretical, which means they satisfy (4) and score 3/4 on Aristotle's test.

In other blog posts (for example this series) I have argued that analytic philosophy is too narrow to be considered the heir to classical Western philosophy. Aristotle would have agreed that analytic philosophers are not philosophers in the truest sense. Let's take a look at the passage almost immediately following his definition of wisdom:

"[T]he science which knows to what end each thing must be done is the most authoritative of the sciences, and more authoritative than any ancillary science; and this end is the good of that thing, and in general the supreme good in the whole of nature. Judged by all the tests we have mentioned, then, the name in question falls to the same science [metaphysics]; this must be a science that investigates the first principles and causes; for the good, i.e. the end, is one of the causes." (Metaphysics 2, 982b)

Why is the study of the supreme good or end necessarily the most authoritative science, according to Aristotle? He states the reason at the end of his definition of Wisdom: "for the wise man must not obey another, but the less wise must obey him." Whatever knowledge deals with the supreme good, or the ultimate goal, is necessarily the one that determines how the rest of our knowledge is organized or applied. Whatever project one works on, the first question is always, "to what end?" If a project does not have a goal it is not a project at all but mere play. Modern analytic philosophy is mere play because it does not have a supreme goal or aim, which is Aristotle's first requirement for a science to be central. So let us augment Aristotle's definition of Wisdom to take into account the other assumptions that he originally left implicit. (Making them explicit is, once again, a practice in verbal logic):

1.      A wise person has general knowledge of all major fields and their ends.

2.      A wise person can learn difficult and important subjects.

3.      A wise person is more exact and capable of teaching causes and purposes in every major branch of knowledge.

4.      A wise person is more knowledgeable about fields that are primary in the sense of being more theoretical and which concern central or superior ends or purposes.

According to this more exact definition, which is closer to what Aristotle really meant, analytic philosophy fails to satisfy any of these criteria because the ends or purposes of its abstract linguistic systems are rarely made explicit, nor are they stressed in university courses. It is generally assumed – usually implicitly – that because science drives societal progress, and analytic philosophy is the study of science, analytic philosophy is directed toward the ultimate goal of civilization. However, as I argue in my recent book, it is far from obvious that progress is occurring at all, nor does it appear that the so-called "advances" of Western civilization are sustainable. At the very least, these bedrock assumptions warrant investigation. No field of study can be called "wise" which ignores the open question of the ultimate goal of civilization.

Aristotle is the master of logic, and it is thanks to his fidelity – which, again, is the essence of logic – that the modern world is acquainted with the views of his opponents. Even Plato's system of metaphysics is made clearer in Aristotle's writings than they are in Plato's own dialogues. The strength of a philosophical tradition lies in the fidelity of its logic. Without clear explanation, the basic ideas of a system of thought cannot be transmitted faithfully to future generations. Nor can the weaknesses of a way of thought be uncovered, analyzed, or overcome.