To know the place for the first time
     Learning through care

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

Eden did not require care, so in choosing death over imperishable bliss, Eve was choosing to be human--to be a planter and a cultivator, to watch and labor in a place where there was a need for care. Her tasting the forbidden fruit may have been done in a desire to make the fruit real.

So her descendants labor outside the garden, catching glimpses of an imperishable beauty that we experience almost as nostalgia. Through care we learn what beauty is really, and how much of a gift it is, really. Through care, we learn to have a human heart.

“What we lost through [Eve’s] act of transgression we never really possessed, for without a human heart in its midst, Eden was wasted on us,” Robert Pogue Harrison observes. “Yet the mortal earth into which we fell was not.”

A garden is slow music
     Making time visble once again

A garden is like slow music, a composition that arises in time. A garden is always a story, a series of events constantly evoking care from the gardener, who sees both what he hopes will be and what is actually present, actually unfolding.

Unfortunately, gardens are largely invisible to modern people, who are living in a hurry, seeing kaleidoscopic surfaces which change constantly, without meaning, without rootedness in narratable time within which the thoughtful person learns to transform images into radiant phenomena. So the hurried soul sees only the image of the garden, the garden itself as invisible as the soul.

Modern irony
     Say what?

Correction in today’s New York Times:

A report in The Caucus column on Friday about President Obama’s remarks to lawmakers and religious leaders at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday rendered incorrectly part of a quotation by Mr. Obama about the current political debate. In noting that “we become absorbed with our abstract arguments, our ideological disputes, our contests for power,” he went on to say, “And in this Tower of Babel, we lose the sound of God’s voice.” He did not say “this tower of babble.”

We seem to be losing, a little, our power to be understood.

The context of childhood
     Waiting for Superman?

An attentive young girl in her school desk surrounded not by a garden but by desolation--it’s an evocative bit of propaganda for a film I haven’t seen: Wating for Superman, which won the “audience award” for a U.S. documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s by the director of An Inconvenient Truth. So that’s two strikes against it.

The image catches my attention because it suggests an important truth: the environment in which education takes place matters profoundly. The School of Epicurus was a garden at his house on the outskirts of Athens. Withdrawing to a garden in dark times, when humanity is under siege from the forces of darkness, can be a sanctifying mode of sanity.

If our culture continues its “progress” towards “ideals” that are toxic to childhood people of good will are going to have to contemplate the realities of our public schools, the environments in which childhood is embedded.

I’m skeptical that this film--emerging as it seems from progressivism, which is much of the problem--is likely to tell important truths. However, since its promotional poster does resonate in me, I’ll look forward to giving it my attention.

Christmas
     Overcoming the world

I’ve been enjoying Christmas more intensely this year because my sense of good things being threatened has been getting stronger. On Christmas Eve a solemn troupe of pompous old men believed by themselves to be among the most powerful in the world voted to put themselves in charge of physicians, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and all of us. That they lack the wisdom to do what they have promised matters less than that they have no real intent to deliver on those promises. Though some claimed privately to be uncomfortable with the carnival of lying and theft, like good Stoics they wore their masks and did what they had to do.

Theirs, after all, is a tragic world. The thing to do, maybe, is to get money and power and to find ways to keep it.

The corruption and collusion were well-publicized, the deceptions were easily discerned, and the opposition of most citizens was duly recorded. It seems, for the moment, not to matter. In the foreground the gray heads stood in television lights paying public homage to goodness by insisting that what they did they did for the poor–assuring us it was a noble accomplishment–trying, vainly it seemed to me, to distract us from the ancient rituals of thievery, bribery and threats going on in the background, not quite respectably hidden. I don’t know whether they know what they do.

In such a time I turned with heightened gratitude again to the story of a baby in a manger, to the endless memory of a birth that left the Olympians stranded, power draining from the tawdry myths. The age of petty gods with doleful powers, of bestial nightmares demanding appeasement, began to recede.

No one is free to ignore that miraculous birth. The most venal little king who has gained a throne through the pettiest methods now feels compelled to justify his rule by speaking of victims, by pretending to act out of compassion. It wasn’t always so. Alexander thought it enough to provoke awe. Concerning himself with the plight of the poor didn’t–couldn’t have occurred to him.

Ancient societies did have the ideal of compassion–but it was chiefly within defined groups, the boundaries strewn with victims. For centuries people had depended on scapegoating and ritual sacrifice for cathartic moments, driving Satan out through cyclical violence that relaxed the tension, refocused the rages that come of living against one another.

Jesus changed the game. In his story we are confronted with a god who came willingly among us to suffer, to accept the full measure of violence orchestrated by the Olympians who needed to refocus and pacify the mobs, and then to teach us a profound truth about this world, giving us the key to peace– if we want it more than we want lesser things. He was born into a faith that had long taught that every person is an immortal soul, equally valuable to God. Being condemned by the world in a pattern of violence that even his staunchest disciples could not resist, he was tortured to death.

But the story does not end. Jesus disrupts the cycle. He returns from victimhood with a simple message: “I am innocent. I have overcome death.”

The consequences of that moment ripple through the ages. Mists dissipate. A pattern hidden in endless cycles of violence since the beginning of the world comes into view.

Today’s world is dominated by a commitment to compassion. We all feel compelled to care about others, or to pretend that we do. Compassion is now understood as a universal claim upon us all, including the rulers of the earth. And there’s no real doubt about where that revolutionary idea entered history. It comes from the Jewish and Christian story:

“Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, thirsty and give you to drink, a stranger and welcome you, naked and clothe you, sick or in prison and visit you?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” (Matt. 25:34-40)

Such a teaching shook the world to its foundations. Of course, the powers and principalities against which we contend, of which Paul spoke, didn’t simply go away. Indeed, they have never been more powerful. The modern totalitarian spirit finds itself forced to pay homage to Christ, taking up the cause of victims, claiming the mission of redemption as its own. Judas, among the first to oppose Christ, serves as a model. When Mary anoints the Savior’s feet, Judas protests that instead of buying perfume the money should have been given to the poor. “He said this, not because he cared about the destitute,” John tells us, “but because he was a thief. He was in charge of the moneybag and would steal what was put into it.” (John 12:4)

“Why wasn’t the money given to the poor?” asks the thief, the willing instrument of murder. He parodies the master. It’s the pattern of the great ideologies of the twentieth century, which, while speaking of helping “the people” and promoting the common good, made that century the bloodiest in history. What they offered was a parody of the kingdom of heaven. They promised money and food and healthcare, but in practice the promises failed.

In truth, an individual counts for nothing to the socialist masters. Their vision is grand and abstract. Individual persons are stifled, flattened and hollowed out, having little left to do but to comply. Amid the vast machinery assembled in the name of compassion, people soon find themselves quite alone, quite powerless, quite desperate, with nowhere left to go. Modern totalitarians talk of a future city of man, an egalitarian cage of mind-numblingly complex design, where the authorities have outlawed poverty and fear as they continue their work of perfecting society through applied and enforced reason, in a nightmarish parody of heaven.

It becomes more clear day by day that Christianity is the main obstacle to this vision. The work of the kingdom of heaven is to perfect every person, to invite all of humanity into a universal family of equals who have educated their individual wills through a recursive process of sin and repentance to be able to live with freedom and dignity, at peace with all.

It also becomes more clear day by day that people who understand this need to talk about it explicitly. Most who support the totalitarian spirit are sincere in their desire to live in a compassionate world--many of them are merely deceived. Those who authentically desire peace will be drawn to the continuing story of a baby born to topple the princes of the earth by living moment by moment in love and friendship with all he met. They need to hear that story, and they need to see its consequences in the lives of neighbors. Our work now is to discern and denounce the decoys–the seductions–that turn souls away from their divine source to lose themselves and their liberty in a phantom kingdom, the sound and fury mounting, and to live by the rules of the better world that is being born–

to ask forgiveness, to take upon ourselves the name of Jesus Christ, and to take responsibility for doing the things he would do.

Finding hope in financial ruin
     The future of soulcraft

Since I don’t think the schools we have built are sustainable, I’m always looking for people who are thinking not about reform but about doing something entirely different. I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point, people find themselves with the opportunity to move in dramatically different directions, whether they choose it or not. It would be a shame if people busily got to work repeating our mistakes.

Jeffrey Polet in “Education as Moral Formation: A Localist Proposal” gives some thought to college education, but some of his thoughts might have salience for high schools as well. He argues that it’s not possible for an educational system not to encourage some view of the moral life, and that therefore some thought should be given to what virtues are intentionally cultivated. “Without encouraging the virtues of honesty, generosity, charity, industry, diligence, docility, and so forth,” he says, “it is hard to see how students would be capable of any intellectual work.”

He summarizes a talk given by Shawn Floyd of Malone University at Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Ethics and Culture this month:

Floyd’s presentation focused largely on the role of the cardinal virtues (courage, justice, temperance, prudence) in developing exemplary intellectual practices. They are key to the intellectual habits that alone can lead to the awakening of the mind and to a functioning academic community; for only when these virtues are operative can we evaluate each other’s work (justice), or make the right sorts of decisions as to what students should or should not be subjected to (prudence), or learn how to affirm what we believe to be true (courage), and to avoid the temptations that distract us from the tasks at hand (temperance). These are examples of how the cardinal virtues ground all intellectual activity.

He notes that “one of the the things we learn from the Platonic dialogues is that philosophy is always a battle for the souls of the youth of the city.” But this doesn’t lead him to believe there’s much a modern school can do in the way of an intentional project aiming at soulcraft:

There are at least three barriers to such a project: 1) the ideological fracturing of the professorate and the loss of any shared tradition or beliefs; 2) the size and scope of the modern academy; and, 3) the reduction of the academy into the service of the modern state.

Variations of all three problems exist, in perhaps more pernicious forms, at the secondary level. Polet suggests pretty radical changes in the way the academy is organized but without any hope that such changes will be implemented any time soon. Still, there is hope of sorts:

At some point employers and prospective employees both are going to realize that a liberal arts education is not a prerequisite for many of the jobs that are out there. Given the careerist impetus of many of our students, such realization will lead to an immediate decline in enrollment. Coupled with our financial crises and demographic changes and the conclusion suggests itself: there are colleges that will not survive this storm. Once the rot of wealth is stripped away, there could be a renewed call for schools that shape moral character, not ones that ideologically indoctrinate. At that time, such suggestions might seem prescient.

Public schools, of course, are in quite a different position than colleges that must recruit students, at great expense to those students. Government funded and controlled institutions in other countries have managed to reach appalling levels of degradation without them failing, exactly. Failing inexactly is familiar territory, and it could continue in some form even through financial and intellectual ruin.

When I get tired of thinking about such things, I begin to wonder what happens as the proficiency rate required by NCLB gets to 100%, when young people with IQs of 65 have to test proficient at math and reading to prevent a school’s takeover by hordes of state-level bureaucrats, with their “walk through” clickers, their powerpoints, their surveys of disgruntled students, and their standardized templates for change.

The Ethics of Authenticity
     Cross posted discussion from EC

This is the first post in what’s intended to be a dialogue between Steve Shann and me and anyone else who cares to join in. We will discuss Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity, chapter by chapter, as we have the time and the inclination. It’s a brief book, but it treats a big topic: the disquiets of the modern age. Taylor is a professor of philosophy and political science, and his work has been quite influential. Cross posted from English Companion Ning.

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With The Ethics of Authenticity Charles Taylor stepped into a rather noisy fray about whether modernity has been a good thing or a bad thing. Many pre-modern peoples lived in realities, or worlds, that had “given” moral orders that gave meaning and purpose to life. But those moral orders also limited their choices, sometimes in oppressive ways.

The main thrust of modernity has been to dissolve the authority of traditions, and so many view it as a welcome force of liberation.

But from the beginning others saw it as the cause of cultural decline, leading to a narrow narcissism where “liberated” individuals could see nothing larger or more important than their own desires. Allen Bloom, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, Christopher Lasch and others have spoken eloquently about the disquiets of modernity. We have heard much about a “permissive society” and the “me generation.”

Taylor acknowledges the truth of what they have said, but he believes it’s important to remain optimistic, and he believes he sees reason for optimism. He seeks a middle path between those who see modernity as decline and those who see it as liberation. He believes that both the “boosters” and the “knockers” of modernity are right–that our present condition includes much that is admirable as well as much that is frightening. Our best course is to try to develop the former and avoid the latter.

He has a Roman Catholic background, and he is well-schooled in modernity, and it’s not clear to me what, finally, he makes of either tradition. He seems to want to be thought of as “one of us” by both camps. I have some sympathy with that attempt. I grew up in a Christian cosmos but through much of my college and grad school periods I was somewhat in thrall to the modernists. Certainly I learned things from modernity that seem true to me, and thus are now part of the Christian way of seeing things that I haven’t abandoned. So I would like to see Taylor’s project succeed, to help me bring together aspects of my own mind that I can’t always harmonize. I’ll say a little about how well I think Taylor succeeds later.

For now, a quick synopsis of Chapter 1 might be enough. Taylor argues that the when modernity dissolved belief in the old moral orders it left us with three malaises: a loss of meaning, a loss of purpose, and a loss of freedom.

The loss of meaning was brought about by the fading of moral horizons which gave meaning to our actions. In a reality where the old moral order has faded and the individual has become primary, there appears to be little beyond the self that has meaning. It then becomes difficult or impossible for anything the self does to matter very much. Nothing is worth dying for. There are no real occasions for passion. We may end wanting little more than what Nietzsche called “pitiable comfort.”

The loss of purpose comes about through an “eclipse of ends” by instrumental reason. With no sacred order to constrain them, economic calculation and technological power combine to treat everything, including we ourselves, as raw materials for our projects. What other goals or purposes–what worthy ends–can withstand the logic of “cost-benefit” analysis? We have seen the danger to our environment when the logic of economic growth seemingly outweighs ordinary good sense, and we see it looming ahead as a centralized health care bureaucracy cannot help but “put dollar assessments on human lives.”

The loss of freedom follows from the elevation of the individual and the rise of instrumental reason. One can see the pattern in a modern city. Though modern cities were designed to work for private vehicles–seemingly in homage to individual choice–once they are built the individual has great difficulty living in a way that goes against the grain. The individual becomes an atom in a vast and complex system built to favor the individual, but this deprives the individual of any feasible alternative.

Even worse, people who see themselves as individuals committed to their own satisfactions will not want to participate vigorously in public life. If the government provides enough satisfactions, most people will pay little attention to what it does, preferring to stay home, pursuing private pleasures. Taylor cites Tocqueville, who said we could end in “soft” despotism with such outward forms of democracy as regular elections when in reality we have no control over an “immense tutelary power” that runs everything. In this view, “each citizen is left alone in the face of a vast bureaucratic state and feels, correctly, powerless.” Feeling helpless, the citizen withdraws even more, and the cycle of growing despotism continues.

That’s the dark view. Taylor claims that it is not inevitably how things need to go. Explaining the way forward is the task he sets for the rest of the book.

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To some degree, my concerns are different than Taylor’s. I’m a practitioner, a teacher who works with young people. While I’m interested in what philosophers have to teach, engaging in philosophical dialogue is only tangentially my work. I feel considerable urgency about what I can say, and how I should represent the world we face to young people who are buffeted by voices urging them in all sorts of directions. The dark side of modernity which Taylor deplores is often ascendant in public schools. In an earlier time, the school itself would have taken positions on the moral questions that are now in play. But as those questions have become controversial, schools have often simply retreated, leaving teachers without much in the way of guidance from the community or the school leadership. At critical moments, those whose assignment it is to lead are quiet.

Teachers are often on their own, with the understanding that there may be consequences for their own lack of silence. Teachers who believe that morality is simply a private matter may feel they are still too constrained by social pressure to conform to old teachings that are but fables. Teachers who believe in some traditional morality may feel they are no longer free to give young people the guidance they need.

I’ve been increasingly pessimistic the last couple of years that public education will be able to resolve the tension. My sense is that schools are trying to resolve the moral question by adopting workplace ethics as its model, which is to say that students will be taught that morality is mainly a matter of complying with the authorities on such questions as copyright infringement, nondiscrimination, or whatever the authorities decide is useful to support the project they are currently promoting. A good person will be one who pleasantly cooperates on the task as assigned.

Nonetheless, harder questions will continue dividing people until some groups decide to leave. Taylor believes that we can find in the modernist view grounds for greater agreement that might yet bring us together.

I’d love to hear what others think.

The full discussion:

Chapter 10
Chapter 9
Chapter 8
Chapter 7
Chapter 6
Chapter 5
Chapter 4
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 1

Living in Montana
     from The Lit Window (CSU)

I have crossed lives I wanted
and left them like adolescence
to be here.
                        At sunset I leave home
and climb and stand silent, layers
of dark gathering ways I’ve not yet been.
A hunted animal,
                                I am still, my skin
listening. In twilight, barbed wire
fades.
              The only map of here
is far away, forgotten in some file
in the fluorescent office
of a coughing man.
                                      A sudden elk
below me crashes from timber and pauses,
knee-deep in meadow, then leaps
soundlessly away.
                                      Perhaps unafraid.
The sky darkens and I linger
between the stars and the safe sparkle
of valley yard lights. If I could
I’d charm the cosmos, instead
of standing stilled, outside
a circle of wagons.
                                      I practice
not wanting luck, longevity, fairness,
success—not wanting what I can’t decide.
I pause at who I am. What—like a cougar—
shifts and tenses in the night around.

Teacher Evaluation
     From The Lit Window

I am saying that whatever Frost is talking about
he is also talking about something else--the place
where at any moment we might find ourselves
choosing among many things who we are.

Janet looks out the window. I remember the first time
her eyes opened to my showing, the pulse
when the words became poetry--delighted seeing
through pure shock. She smiles now

the smile friends share amid the crowded blunders
they also share. Craig looks at her then at me,
frowning, certain more has occurred
than he finds reason to believe.

I read another poem, throwing gentle hints that work
and don’t work like so many brilliant flies,
cast in the mist happening between cottonwoods
at the river’s edge in a quiet, transient dawn.

At the back of the room the principal is keeping track
of how often I pause and whether faces look up or down.
The truth is such an absolute code I cannot help him,
knowing all his data can never break it.

Discerning the rules of life in storyworlds
     Teaching narrative intelligence

I like students to practice seeing the way every story asserts a moral theory of the universe. It’s possible to think about moral issues in an objective way simply by asking what virtues characters employ to reach their telos and what sort of world results from the deployment of those virtues. I invite students to figure out, from the stories we read, what the rules of life appear to be.

Here are basic questions that help gain entry to storyworlds.

1. What is the main character’s telos at the beginning of the story? What’s her life about--what purpose or goals organize her action, her thinking?

2. As the character acts in response to conflict, what virtues does he exhibit? I’m using “virtue” here to refer to a strength from the character’s point of view. For a Spartan, ferocity might be a virtue. For Odysseus, skillful lying was a virtue. The reader’s judgments about such things can come later, but during the reading, try to understand the character’s view of what is good.

3. What consequences follow? How successful is the character at resolving the conflict in a way that fulfills his telos?

4. What turning points occur in the story--key moments where the character needs to rethink either his telos, or the virtues he is employing, or both?

5. Summarize the plot in no more than three sentences, focusing on the major events and the key actions by the main character. Then state a “rule of life” based on that plot. If the story is true to life, then what rule about the way things work is illustrated by it?