Comments on: War! Uh! Huh! What Is It Good For? Absolutely–Okay, Never Mind

By: CAFiorello

CAFiorello — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:46:24 +0000

OK, minor quibble, and I’m not claiming that clinical psychs don’t often fall off the rails, but the DSM is psychiatrists, not psychologists!

By: robert_piepenbrink

robert_piepenbrink — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:29:06 +0000

Indeed. Almost all the founders were familiar with the closing days of the Roman Republic, and largely with Athen’s internal political difficulties–and, for that matter, with the history of the English Civil War and Commonwealth. These were useful things to know when setting up a Federal government, and our understanding of conditions in the latter part of the 18th Century helps make clear what they were thinking of.
But the leap from a well-informed citizen needing to understand History to placing Philosophy and Literature on the core curriculum isn’t obvious to me.

By: jd

jd — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:45:50 +0000

“So John says he knows that the American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand governments evolved from the British, and that they’re similar and different in many ways, but he doesn’t see anything he could use that information for.”

Jane, in Physics, a theory is useful if you can make predictions. Evolution provides lots of explanations but has little predictive power. I know that the US, Austalia and NZ governments evolved from the UK system and I know that the US has a written constitution with a Bill of Rights. But I can’t use that knowledge to predict whether the other 3 countries have written constitutions or a Bill of Rights. That is the sense in which I can do nothing with the information.

Jane wrote “We don’t read Plato and Aristotle know because we’re can’t decide who’s right and whose wrong. We read them because they’re among the first steps in a long journey which we want to participate in. Participating in that journey is valuable in itself–just as studying the evolution of mammals is valuable in itself–but at the moment, I think it’s also vitally, practically important.”

I agree completely. Let’s consider a question being discussed in Australia. We do not have a Bill of Rights. Some people are campaigning for one to be included in the Constitution. One of the arguments against it is that the US Supreme Court has been using their Bill of Rights to give too much power to the courts and override the elected government. That comes from making a comparitive study of the history and development of other countries.

One of my philosophy professors pointed out that the USSR had a very nice constitution with a Bill of Rights during the Stalin era. It didn’t stop the purge trials and the Gulag. My conclusion is that if you have a government which respects “rights”, then you don’t need a Bill of RIghts. If you have a government like Stalin or Hitler, then a Bill of Rights is a useless piece of paper. But perhaps having a Bill of Rights reduces the probability that someone like Stalin or Hitler reaches power.

This is getting too long and I don’t know if Jane wants to get into a discussion of “Human Rights” and “Justice” so I’ll close now.

By: Lymaree

Lymaree — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:48:28 +0000

-”I feel like we’re rowing in a sea of ignorance so profound and so universal it’s coming close to swamping us. It comes from both the left and the right, neither of which have any idea how this country was actually founded, or on what principles, or by what reasoning.”-

On the other hand, the writings of Thomas Paine and various commentaries on them come up 3 times in the top 21 rankings in Amazon’s best sellers. People *are* making an effort to learn something.

By: Lee B

Lee B — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:59:33 +0000

Jane, this is an interesting discussion. Can you recommend some way–books, a website, a syllabus, whatever–that someone who’s interested but doesn’t have the option of going back to school could *get* a thorough grounding in the humanities?