Hildegarde

I have a standard ritual for Sunday mornings.  I get up and put on water to boil for the tea.  I sit down and check a few things online, then do any work I have to do.  I write the blog, if I’m inclined.  I go listen to music.

For what it’s worth, I often have tea left when I go to listen to music, because I have a 40 ounce teacup.  I put two Double Bergamot Earl Grey teabags in it and let them steep for about twenty minutes, fifteen if I’ve been going through one of those periods of caffeine sensitivity. 

I bring this up because I’ve had a couple of quasi-Sunday mornings recently, days when I haven’t had to go out and do anything and have been able to listen to music in the mornings.  And the music I’ve been listening to has been Bach, but not my usual Bach.

Yesterday, I listened to The St. Matthew Passion, Bach’s great choral piece for lent.  This morning, I’m going to put on his D Minor Mass, which is actually written for the Lutheran Church, and not the Catholic one, but Catholics like it anyway.  Unbelievers like it anyway, too.

Part of this is to point out something that I probably should have said yesterday–I don’t worry about whether or not Bach wrote “the best” symphonic music, because Bach didn’t write symphanic music.  He wrote choral music and chamber music, and he’s as good as he gets in both.

As for the symphonic, I think Mozart had it down before Beethoven.  See the Jupiter Symphony. 

But all of this comes around to self-determination, and the pursuit of happiness, and the entire idea of rights and the ways in which a society defines the human. 

So here it goes.

First, I think that the people who are always having fits about self-determination do it for window dressing.  None of them ever seems to actually be concerned with the right of each of us to “pursue happiness,” as Jefferson put it.  Rather, self-determination becomes code for “everybody should be forced to do it my way,” and the magic trick is carried out by simply playing up the stories of people who want to do it the right way and acting as if stories about people who want to do it other ways don’t exist.

So we hear stories about people who desperately want to quit smoking, but never stories about people who have weighed the risks and decided the chance of lung cancer is better than taking anti-depressant meds that suppress their libido, suppress their ambition, and suppress their creativity.

We here stories about people who want abortions and can’t get them, but not the stories of women whose babies test positive for Down Syndrome of Spina Bifuda or other disabilities and birth defects who are under sometimes extreme pressure to abort whether they want to or not.

And don’t tell me that last one doesn’t happen, it happened to me, and I know I’m notiing like the only one.  And in my case, the tests were wrong, and the baby that would have been aborted was Matt. 

But on every contention issue, what we get is carefully screened narratives that illustrate only one side, as if the other side is not possible.

What’s more, it’s logically impossible that one can be both in favor of individual self-determination AND in favor of treating health care, or education, or housing, as a “right.”  If you have a right to health care, your doctor has no right to self-determination.  He has to treat you whether he wants to or not.  Or if he doesn’t, somebody does.

In extreme cases, some people may have to be forced to be doctors or teachers if not enough people are willing to enter those professions to provide everyone with their “right.’

Actually being in favor of self-determination would result in a very different world than the one we’re living in. 

All that said, let me point out that the entire idea of self-determination is a derivative of the Christian concept of the importance of the drama of the individual soul.  Each of us, the Church says, is put on earth to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.

It’s not that the Greeks and the Romans had no concept of the individual, because they did.  What they did not do was see that individual as pristinely separate from the society that created him.  Socrates dies, he tells us, because having taken all the good things his city has given him, having become who he was because the city made him so, he owes the city obedience to its laws, even when it’s wrong.

Maybe it’s the fact the Christianity began as a persecuted minority religion, but it has had, from the start, a strong principle in favor of the primacy of the individual conscience–that is, the right and duty of each individual to obey the laws of God and to resist the laws of man when they violated the laws of God.

Men and women are obliged to obey the civil authorities in all things except sin, St. Paul says–but the implication is obviously that the individual will know sin when he sees it and resist being coerced into practicing it.

This is not some kind of fanticism.  Western Civilization continues to assume its validity, although sometimes schizophrenically.  We did not allow the German officers their defense–I was only following orders!–because we still think there are times when it is necessary to refuse to follow them.

Before you start jumping up and down on my head, I do know that in practice this would wreck and army.  I’m not saying it’s a very practical principle to hold.  I’m just pointing out that we do, in fact, hold it, somewhere there at the bottom of everything.

When one amongst us acts on it, we tend to defend him if we think his cause is just (and the law is unjust), or to deny him by saying that the conflict in question was trivial and therefore didn’t rise to the level of allowing an exception.

In the latter case, when the issue seems to be too big to be called trivial right off the bat, we either say that the person doesn’t believe what he says he believes (the guy who kills abortion doctors doesn’t REALLY believe that the doctors are killing actual babies), or just skirt past the whole question by pretending it isn’t there.  He’s not obeying the law!  He has to!

The principle of the primacy of conscience–the right to self-determination–is very important.  And the fact that we shouldn’t carry it to far, that we can’t have a decent life if we do carry it too far,  doesn’t change the fact that we need it.

It is, for instance, the basis for the modern progress of science.  In order for science to develop as it has for us, we must have men and women willing to say “your ideas are just wrong, and I’m going to prove it.” 

We must have people who believe that finding and declaring the truth is more important than personal relationships, religious beliefs, civil laws, or deference to elders and authorities. 

Without such people, science either develops extremely slowly, or doesn’t develop at all.

The interesting idea to me is not that some people who want to impose their will on the world use “self determination” to hide what they’re getting at, but the possibility that the right to the pursuit of happiness can only be upheld for most people in any society if that society has a strong, overaching and generally accepted understanding of the world that in itself limits the conceivable acts of individuals.

Okay, that sounded fairly convoluted. 

Let’s put it this way–I don’t think that any society can honor the individual right to self determination in most cases unless there are some cases in which it refuses to do so, and these cases are accepted virtually unanimously as simply, unquestionably wrong.

That is, I don’t think that any society can honor most individuals’ right to self-determination if it is morally relativist. 

Moral relativism–the idea that there is no right or wrong, that the Holocaust was right for the Nazis and sex with children is right for the pedophile and we cannot judge o condemn either of them, since their ideas are just different than ours–

Moral relativism actually restricts the right to self determination for more individuals than almost any form of universally accepted objective moral code. 

I have no idea if I’m making that clear.  Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.

Maybe the question that should follow all that is this:  why is it that so many people assume that any objectively based moral code would automatically have to outlaw  practices they approve of (like, for instance, gay sex, or even abortion)? 

It’s almost as if the people most strongly declaring the impossibility of objective moral standards are actually more sure there is one–and more sure of what it is–than I am.

I really am getting out of it here.

Time to go find the B Minor Mass, and my book on the Middle Ages, and to think about making a gigantic turkey sandwich from the leftovers from last night.

We were very bad, really.  We made this turkey breast, and then I was going to make pilaf and a vegetable, but Greg and I just looked at each other and went at the bird just like that, with oranges to finish.

Bach.  It’s Sunday.

And I’m cold.

So, give me a few moments here.

First, I think I definitely agree with Robert–Rome fell, as a government, but  Rome did not fall, as a civilization. 

And, for that matter, Greece didn’t really fall as a civilization, either, although other and odder things happened to it.  A Greek of the Classical period would not be able to find people to talk to, but he would be able to find things to read.  A Greek of the Byzantine period would be able to find people to talk to, although pronunciation and vocabulary would probably make the conversation a little rough at first.

And, of course, both the Greek and the Roman would recognize a lot of the world as it has come to be.  We’re still debating a lot of the same ideas.  Hell, Christianity even goes through cycles of indulging the same heresies.

What I think would end up being a problem is the entire idea of “progress.”  Or, at least, “progress” as we understand it.

Let me start by saying that I think there are definitely events that constitute  unambiguous evidence of progress.  Antibiotics, for instance, and vaccines, are enormous advances over what we had before.  So are modern agricultural techniques.  So is central heating. 

There is always the Faustian dilemma–there are always downsides to material progress–but in general, we did the right thing in choosing to wipe out smallpox and grow enough food for everybody toe eat.  The advantages dwarf the consequences.

With other things, though, I think the evidence of “progress” is less clear, and in some cases I think it’s nonexistent.  I also think somebody like Aristotle, or Cicero, would be mystified by the very idea of it.

Let’s start with sculpture.  The Greeks and the Romans were light years ahead of anybody else in the West in sculpture until you hit Michaelangelo and the Renaissance, and they’ve been light years ahead of almost everybody since.  The Greeks were idealists in what they portrayed and the Romans were realists, but both of them produced work so startlingly, concretely real, so present-in-the-moment,  that it’s possible to sit next to one of those nymphs, or one of those senators, and think you can start a conversation with it.

I am not one of those people who holds a cold compress to my head and moans that modern art is all nonsense that can be done by any five year old.  Some of it is, and some of it is very complex and interesting.

But the fact is that taking a piece of marble and turning it into the Winged Victory is an extraordinary example of human intelligence, talent and ingenuity, and a gigantic revolving cube in less so.

Yes, okay, I know.  There’s no reason why we should judge the worth of art by whether ot not it displays evidence of human intelligence, talent and ingenuity, but I always thought that was a good place to start.

It’s not just sculpture, however, where the idea of progress doesn’t seem to fit, or at least not to fit well.

There is a lot about social attitudes and social behavior at the fall of Rome, and later in the Middle Ages, that we have passed, and good riddance.  Steven Pinker famously gave the example of a prime Medieval street game–find a stray cat, string it up over a fire, and laugh at the funny noises it made while it burned to death.

We can go too far with personalizing our pets, but that we now understand that we are obliged to be decent to them is a good thing, and definitely evidence of moral (or social) progress.  So is the fact that we no longer find it acceptable for anybody to own slaves.

But I think both Aristotle and Augustine would have found the idea of moral progress not just wrongheaded by mystifying.  They’d have said that we could come to a clearer understanding of what the moral law required of us, but not that we could ‘advance'” that law. 

Augustine would have looked on “moral progress” as akin to “benzine progress”–that we are saying that because we have a better understanding of the moral law, we have somehow changed the moral law.

And Augustine would have had a lot less trouble with some aspects of modern social morality than his successors in the Reformation would have, never mind his sucessors in the  American evangelical Protestant churches.

The Christians disapproved of abortion in the age of Augustine, but the Roman government did not, and the practice was widespread, if dangerous to the woman.  Homosexual relations between men were widespread, too, although there was no concept of “homosexuality” as we understand it now, as a sexual orientation in which some men seek to have sex only with other men.

To the Greeks and the Romans and the Augustine-ero Christians, men were simply incapable of not wanting to nail anything that moved, women if they were available, other men, sheep, knotholes in trees.  They didn’t have the same shock-horror, that’s unthinkable response that many of us have even now, and that was certainly prevalent a couple of decades ago.

Of course, Augustine wouldn’t have thought it sensible to conceive of homosexual relations between men as a disease.  The only disease involved, he would have said, was original sin.

Then we have the concept of government, and that gets trickier the longer you look at it.  Certainly some kinds of governments are more dysfunctional than others.  Some are so dysfunctional that they amount to disasters waiting to happen.

I think that is true of all forms of the totalitarian state.  Fascism eats its young, and Communism is nothing but Fascism with better rhetoric.  It is just not possible to build and run a government based on the premise that you can control every aspect of the life of the people without bringing about death, starvation, disease and decay.  North Korea is a lot of things, but it is not a worker’s paradise.  China is doing better to the extent that it lets loose on the reins–and I’ll start worrying about it taking over the world when it starts freaking every time its people respond to that loosening by behaving like…well…people.

But short of the great totalitarianism, what happens in government is not really as easy to sort out as we think it should be.  In spite of all the rhetoric on the right and on the left, I don’t think there’s one ideal form of government that is the repository of all moral goodness.

What there is instead is a continuum.  At one end, it threatens to fall over the cliff into anarchy.  At the other end, it threatens to fall off into tyranny.  All along the continuum in the middle, people have and do form successful societies.

Whether any of this constitutes “progress,” though, is less clear.  The Greeks and Romans certainly had successful societies, and they are the basis for the most successful civilization ever to appear on this planet. 

(And civilizaions appear to be like anything else–Babe Ruth held the record in both the most home runs scored and the most times a player struck out for many years, and Western Civilization can lay plausible claim to some of the best and all of the absolutely worst societies that we know about.)

In some ways, though, we seem to me to be behind Greco-Roman and early Christian society:  we have lost the sense that to be human is to have an obligation to live up to our human-ness. 

Aristotle understood that.  Augustine understood it, too, although he would have phrased it differently.  He would have said that we had an obligation to live up to our heritage as sons of God.

(And he would have said “sons,” not sons and daughters, because he would have seen even women in the Church as “sons,” that is, a children who could inherit the kingdom.)

(Okay, never mind.  That’s something from Saint Paul that gets persistently misunderstood, and it drives me crazy.)

I don’t think the Greeks and the Romans lived up to their obligation to be human any better than we do, but they actively encouraged the attempt, where we seem to work at denying the necessity.  When people do things that are self destructive and wrong, we tell them they can’t help it, they’re only human, and besides, this is an addiction, it’s a disease, we have treatment.

The treatments don’t work any better than the old stress on guilt and shame and sin, but they make us feel smaller.

And that doesn’t seem to me to be progress at all.

Here is the thing about the fall of Rome–it should be a matter of straightforward reporting, but it isn’t.  And it’s the way in which it isn’t that interests me.

We know more or less when the civilization of Egypt ended, and the civilization of Sumer, and the civilization of Babylon.  What were once great empires simply disappeared into the mist, and although bits and pieces of them still float through the cultures of the world, their foundational principles are largely forgotten and unimportant for those of us now alive.

With Rome, it’s not so easy, because although the Roman empire disappeared, Rome itself did not, and the civilization of Rome is with us still.  We still read the Roman writers, from the earliest days of the Republic right down to the Christianized Senators and saints-in-training.  The Roman Catholic Church still has Latin as its official language, and Latin is the language with the most modern offshoots still in existence.

So maybe what I’m asking here is what it means that Rome “fell.”  Or that any civilization ever falls, if it doesn’t completely disappear.

The usual date for the fall of Rome is 410 AD or CE, the year the Visigoths, I think it was, sacked the city.  A lot of people sacked the city over the course of about a century.  We tend to pick this particular sack both because it was the first and because it gave rise to a truly remarkable book, St. Augustine’s Civitas Dei, City of God.

In a way, Augustine founded what would become almost a genre–books in which the fall of Rome is seen as a metaphor for something or the other the writer wants to say, or an object lesson in some moral the writer wants to make. 

For Augustine, this was about the transiency of the earthly city and the permanence of the eternal one.  Rome the Empire pronounced eternity but delivered only a fragile and precarious temporality that was at long last due to fail.  Christianity promised eternal life in a city God built, that could not be destroyed by anyone but God himself, who had promised He would not. 

The other great book about the fall of Rome is, of course, Edward Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is a kind of anti-Augustine.  Gibbon’s point was that Rome fell because it had become Christianized, that Christianity was an afflication that made men and nations weak.  He might have bee the precursor of today’s New Atheists.

But none of this really gets to what I’ve been thinking of, which is that what strikes me about accounts of this period–and especially of accounts that attempt some kind of historical accuracy in the sequencing of events–is how diffuse it all was.

Rome didn’t “fall.”  It did something closer to just sort of sag–like a balloon losing air very slowly.  We hear a lot about how Christianity appealed to the pagan mind, but not so much about why it appealed.  By the time Constantine adopted that religion in the fourth century, most Romans no longer actually believed in their gods.  They hadn’t been talked out of belief.  They hadn’t made any rational and reasoned decision.  They’d just sort of…stopped.

This seems to me to be much closer to what is going on in the US and Western Europe today than our present narrative about religion recognizes.  I don’t think people stop believing because they’ve been convinced by arguments and evidence that there is nothing to believe in.

I think that what they do is to wake up one morning and find that, somehow, it all just sounds–well, not real.  Or maybe silly.  Or just not anything that can hold their attention any more.  It’s as if once these were stories with narrative drive, and suddenly they’re not.

This kind of thing happens all the time, of course, with actual fiction–the public goes through a mania for vampire stories, for instance, or romances, and then the mania peters out and the interest runs out of steam. 

Religious narratives require a stronger commitment, and they last longer–although I do wonder how long that will be in the world of the Internet. 

The thing is, I don’t know if it’s even possible to reinvigorate a narrative once it has fallen out of favor in this way.  It is, as a teacher of mine once said, the “so what” factor–and it seems to be operative in a lot of places these days.  It is in a lot of Christianity in the West, but in Western Europe it is also operating in the entire idea of a distinctly Western civilization. 

I have no idea if I’m making this clear enough.  I do know that, reading through this book, the incredible ennui of the Romans with their religion sounds very familiar. 

For Rome, ennui with paganism was finally transformed into passion for Christianity, but in order for such a transformation to happen, a new narrative must arise that evokes passion in both the people who tell it and the people who hear it.

I know of nothing of that kind now.  What Robert has called “the movement” doesn’t really do it.  It leaves most people completely cold, and it is completely cold.  The other contender would be Islam, which at least has the passion of its believers, but it doesn’t seem, as yet, to be capturing the passion of much of the rest of us.

Somebody or the other said once that no empire, and no ruling class, was ever defeated–they always defeated themselves.

I wonder if they don’t so much defeat themselves as just get tired.

A couple of days ago, one of my cats decided he was still really a tiny little kitten, in spite of weighing nearly thirty pounds, and started bouncing off the walls like a ping pong ball in pursuit of…well, who knows what cats are in pursuit of.

What happened was the eventually he toppled one of my TBR piles, and in doing that brought to light a book I didn’t even remember I had.  It’s called Early Medieval Europe 300-1000, by Roger Collins, who is a British academic in one of the Oxbridge universities.  Off the top of my head, O don’t remember which.

For many years, I belonged to the History Book Club, the only book club I ever have belonged to that I thought was really worried.  And it was one of those things, because after I’d been getting books from them for years, I found out my father had also been a member at about the same age.

Anyway, this is the kind of book I tended to buy from that book club, so I would guess I’d had it around, unread, for a good ten years.

Let’s leave aside the thing that annoys me here, which is that, technically, the period between 300 and the absolute collapse of the Roman Empire is not any part of the Middle Ages, not even the early Middle Ages, which lots of us like to call the Dark Ages.  The inclusion of this period in this book is easy to understand when you start reading, so I’ll let that go.

Some people here once asked me for good general books on the Middle Ages, and I think that this would be a good general book on this early period…sort of.  I say sort of, because it concentrates more than I like on the succession of emperors and the fate of the Roman army and the various battles than I like, without doing any of that in serious detail.  And it manages to cover the Arian, Nestorian and Monophysite heresies in a page and a half, which is a good trick.

It also, however, brings up a few interesting points, and ones that do correlate to what is going on now.  So…

The first has to do with a personal matter, one that I’d never really thought through. 

I’m not terribly interested in the cultural history of antiquity–I like a lot of Greek and Roman writers, and I’m interested in their ideas, but I don’t find myself very curious about the day to day life of classical Athens, or the political structure of imperial Rome.

That’s odd, in a way, because I am very interested in those kinds of things in other periods of history–certainly in the history of the Middle Ages in Western Europe, and in the history of the Victorian period in England. 

For some reason, I simply can’t wrap my mind around the idea of  the classical period.  On some very basic level, my understanding of it lacks depth.  Or, to put it the way I probably should, I just can’t feel it.

It suddenly struck me, this morning, what the difference is–I know nothing about the music of the period.  Not a thing.

I don’t think this is lack of education on my part.  The impression I get is that nobody knows what the music of this period sounded like.  We have nothing like a Rosetta stone for musical composition, and so we are unable to hear what the classical Athenians or the Republican Romans heard in melody and rhythm.

There are, of course, lots of speculation about what this music sounded like, and even some attempts to recreate it.  Back in the late 1970s, I attended a production of Oedipus Tyrannus at an ancient ruin of a theater in Greece.  The producers had gone out of their way to recreate what they thought the chorus and its accompanying music sounded like.  It was interesting–and later, I’d note that it was a lot like what came to be rap–but the simple fact is that the producers had no idea if what they were doing was accurate to the period.  We don’t know if the music of the period was melodically based or rhythmic, whether it ordinarily had lyrics or leaned heavily to the instrumental.  We know what the lyre is, and we have some idea of the kinds of horns that were popular, but that’s about it.

Plato wanted to ban music from his ideal state because he believed that music played on the emotions and bypassed the mind.  I think Plato had a point, not about the banning (I’ve got Eine Kleine Nachtmusik coming from behind my head), but atout the emotions.

I think music expresses the emotional  reality of a culture, that music is how we enhance and express how we feel, as opposed to how we think.  I think that to the extent that poets were revered as something close to demigods over much of the period from classical Athens to the Romantic period, it was because poetry was in itself a form of music.  Its rhythm and rhyme were, until very recently, closer to lyrics than to anything else.

These days, society is so diverse and fragmented, musical styles and productions provide a range of possible emtional worlds to live in, but even in the Middle Ages there was at least some of that.  There is the music of Hildegarde von Bingen, which is a form of prayer that I have always thought was close to perfect.  It has words, but you don’t need to know what they are to enter into that particular emotional universe and live there for a very long time. 

In the same period, though, there were songs and ballads about romantic and heroic legends, and other songs about love and death, and lots of instrumental music meant to bring on a ‘sweet melancholy’ or to provide the structure for a dance.

I can only assume that all these things were provided by the music of antiquity to the peoples of antiquity.  I just don’t know what that music was.  I have nowhere to go to listen to it.  I can read treatises about it, and speculations in droves about what it sounded like, but I just don’t know.

And that means that the culture of classical Athens and imperial Rome is lost to me in a way that other periods of history are not.  I can read Augustine’s confessions and understand something of the intellectual (especially theological) tenor of the period near the fall of Rome, but I can’t even begin to know what it felt like.

I find myself wondering how much this matters.   How much of our understanding of the historical realities of the period do we lose because we can’t hear the music?  Is it even possible for us to understand what caused the fall of Rome without that information? 

It’s an odd subject, the fall of Rome.  And on that, this book is very enlightening.

My first impulse, after yesterday’s comments, is to say–smug, self-important, smirking student government types?  Exactly–that’s Sarah Palin to a T.

And that would be truthful, from my experience, which did not include any contact with student government at all after ninth grade, and that only included contact with jocks in graduate school, when I taught a few.  They gave me an abiding love of ice hockey, no matter how dysfunctional it gets. 

But New England is not big on jocks.  At least in this state, when school budgets get tight, sports are the first to go, ditched without ceremony in order to preserve academics.

The thing is, however, that I don’t really care about jocks or where anybody went to school.   I do care about whether we present ignorance or knowledge as the preferred state for our public officials and our children, Lady Gaga or Mozart, Chicken Soup for the Soul or Sense and Sensibility. 

Climate matters. 

That said,  I want to address something else, and I’d be interested in input if anyone has any.

Robert says he’s on the side of Tunxis, but my guess is that he’s really on the side of UConn–the University of Connecticut will provide you with a first class education, fully equal to Yale’s, if you pick and choose your courses right.

Tunxis, however, and the other community colleges in the Connecticut system will not.  There’s a reason why employers do not send recruiters for their upper-track employment programs to places like Tunxis, and it’s not because they’re being snobbish about the name of the school.

In Connecticut, the community college system provides what is basically a remedial course for students who did not do well enough in high school to get into a “real” college.  This is the case even where the student is not in remedial courses, and is supposedly getting “college credit” for his coursework.

To start with, there’s the math problem–most real colleges, be they  UConn or Yale, expect freshmen to be able to start calculus when they enter, and often advanced calculus.  Calculus is not offered in the community college system, which provides “college algebra” instead.

In case you’re wondering what “college algebra” is, it is, as far as I can tell from looking at my students’ textbooks, exactly the same elementary algebra course my sons were required to take in ninth grade. 

What this means is that even those CC students who transfer into good four year colleges–and the CC system here does a good job of that, getting the very best of their classes right into the Ivies–will be, at a minimum, a year behind when they enter.  And that’s just in math.

Because the second problem is the workload.  Where UConn and Yale will expect students in freshman English to produce a five page paper a week and a ten to fifteen page term paper at the end of the semester, the CCs will require one and a half to two pages papers a week and maybe (and not always) a five page “research project” at the end. 

The disparity in expected reading is just as large, or larger.  Students can get through the CC system here without reading a single whole book.  Go to UConn (never mind Yale) and you find students required to read three or four books (or more, in literature classes) during the semester, and for each course.

The problem with the workload is so pressing that my old college has a special program for CC students who might want to transfer in, providing them with residential summer courses run at the Vassar College level to get people used to the pace, then granting them admission as sophomores (rather than juniors) when the program is done.

The result is that most employers know what each level in the system teaches, and so do most graduate and professional schools.  That’s why a C from Yale can get you into the Harvard Business School, but you need an A from Western Connecticut State. 

That does not mean, of course, that people from the CC system never break out and make good.  Of course they do. 

And it’s my personal opinion that if what you’re looking at is the top ranks of anything–law, finance, even movies–the people who make the most spectacular successes will not come from the Ivies, but from the bottom of the first tier to the top of the second.  In fact, the phenomenon is so pronounced, it’s got a name in sociology–the second tier advantage.  Steven Spielberg went to Long Beach, not Berkeley (and he dropped out).  The boardrooms of the major banks and financial companies are littered with gradustes of the University of Nebraska and Penn State.

The problem is not these people, because people with extraordinary talent and drive are going to get where they’re going no matter where they start.

The problem is with the next set of students down, the ones who are good but not great, the ones who are essentially middle of the road, good kids, bright enough, conscientious, but nothing really special.

For those students, where they go to college can easily be the ballgame.  They’re not going to found their own companies.  They’re going to work for other people, and those other people have recruiting programs that quite definitely distinguish between colleges and universities to decide who will and won’t get hired for which employment track. 

That’s a fact of life, not the way things should be but the way things are. 

I’ve had people tell me that this situation is not the same everywhere, and that California in particular has a CC system that deliberately provides education on the same level as the rest of its system, so that spending a couple of years at a CC does not have the stigma there that it has here. 

I don’t know enough about California to know.

And now, excuse me, but I’ve had virtually no sleep, I have a full day, and the Visigoths have just sacked Rome.

First, to correct one thing–what William F. Buckley actually said was that he’d rather be ruled by the first three hundred names in the Cambridge telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard, not Yale–maybe not so small a point as it seems, given that Buckley himself was a Yalie.

And I don’t think he was acting like a yahoo when he said it–but then, Buckley almost never acted like a yahoo, and for most of my childhood he was the outstanding example of someone in the culture who wanted to uphold the standards of high culture and higher learning.

We forget sometimes that it was Democrats and  Liberals who were seen, in those days, as abandoning such standards and pandering to the mob–who were advocating dumbed down popular culture over high culture because high culture was “elitist.”

If William F. Buckley was still the face of American conservatism, I might be one.  If he was what the Republican Party presented to me of worthy of support, I might be a  Republican.  These days, though, the Republicans provide me instead with people whose biggest selling point seems to be “they’re just like you!  they’re just folks!” 

Cheryl asks why Americans “hold on” to the grudges of high school, and that takes a little more to answer.

First, let me say that I DIDN’T have a bad time in high school.  In fact, I loved high school, and I loved college, too.  I went to a Catholic girls’ school in which the nuns represented the first intellectual women I’d ever known, and it was absolutely wonderful.  Nor did I have any trouble at all with harassment from my fellow students. 

For me, the problematic years were late elementary school and junior high, especially junior high, which seemed to explode in animosities from one end to the other.  And, in my case, the wounds of that era are not gone and will never be gone simply because they have not stopped–some of my persecutors were related to me, and still are, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t quite break away and put an end to it.

But I think that the reason for why Americans are often wrapped up, and warped by, their experiences in school is complicated.

Start with this:  Americans seem to have a nearly infinite tolerance for inequalities of wealth, but absolutely no tolerance for inequalities of any other kind.

The undercurrent to almost everything we do here is a tacit refrain that goes:  you can be anything you want to be; as long as you work hard, you can be anything.

There are advantages to thinking like that, of course.  If we think we’re capable of doing something, we’re more likely to actually try it, and we can’t do anything we don’t try.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of advantage to cutting people off before they ever got started, on the assumption that they just don’t have what it takes.

Unfortunately, almost all of us don’t have what it takes to succeed at something or the other, and some of us don’t have what it takes to succeed at most things.  That’s a matter of heredity and largely beyond our control. 

But to admit that heredity plays a part in our talents and abilities seems–and I use the word intentionally–to imply that some of us are simple born better than others.  And since that is unacceptable, we put ever increasing stress on denying innate differences between individuals.

Schools are where this commitment to the innate equality of all people are put to the test, and schools are where we first learn that the idea is nonsense.   It takes maybe two weeks for most kids to figure out that there are some things they’re “just not good at,” and then the trick becomes learning to accept that while not actively and formerly challenging the school’s assumption that that is not, and cannot be, the case.

But denying reality is not cost free.  In order to do so, we must find an explanation for our failures that is not “I just wasn’t born with this talent.”  And there are a lot of explanations.  There is sexism/racixm/classicism (I’d be able to do it if you weren’t oppressing me because I’m a woman, or because I’m black, or because my father works in a vacuum cleaner factory), which is in vogue at the moment.  There is “parents don’t really understand how to raise children.”  There is “the people who are winning this fight are keeping me down deliberately.”   And, of course, there is the assertion that the standards aren’t really standards at all, they’re just made-up standards that are all subjective, and whatever it is I do is just as good as whatever it is you do, even if I’m drawing pumpkins that look like building blocks and you’re Michaelangelo.

More settled and traditional societies–and more self-consciously hierarchical ones–have this going for them:  they do not blame individuals for their failure to all reach the heights of everything.  In America, if you want to be a writer and you do everything you’re supposed to do to get you there, work like hell, produce books, submit things as asked, but still fail to get published–well, there must be something wrong with you.   You must be to blame somehow.  You can’t have really done all that work and still not have succeeded!

Other societies tend to go, “oh, well, didn’t get born with that.  So what?”  It is not a core underpinning of your very identity and self-worth if you were born with only middling intelligence, or nonexistant talent.  It is just a fact of life.

The philosophy of “anybody can do anything if they just work hard enough” is poisonous in some ways, because it encourages most people to blame themselves, to see themselves as internally and spiritually lesser, for the fact that they are in the majority by not being their generation’s Bill Gates of Stephen Speilberg.

School is where we go to find out that we’re not good enough.  It’s where we first encounter and cannot deny that we lack what it takes to “succeed” in any meaningful way.  It’s where we first erect structures to protect our position against those of the people around us who, simply by existing, make us feel inferior.

I think that is behind a great deal of the harassment directed at “smart” kids in American schools–those are the kids who do have the innate talent at just the kinds of things that can lead to “success” in the wider world. 

Or at least, it seems so in the context of the school.  The wider world is actually a lot more complicated. 

Still, for most students, graduating from high school and going on to Yale with a full scholarship or graduating to go on to Tunxis Community College says all anybody needs to about what those kids are going to be for the rest of their lives.

I don’t know a better way than meritocracy to order the world.  I do know we never seem to face up to its drawbacks.

So Robert said:

>>>So we’re back to “Why are todays yahoos ignoring our Ivy League (or First Tier)
Great and Good?”>>>

And it took me aback, because I don’t remember ever saying a thing in that last post about the Ivy League, or people with degrees, or who you voted for. I did complain about the marketing of W. as “vote for me because I’m just a C student,” and I could have complained about the marketing of Sarah Palin (asking her what magazines she reads is “gotcha” journalism), but that was far less important to me than the relentless enshrining of ignorance as a preferable state of mind throughout American culture.

And that ignorance goes hand to hand with visceral, and sometimes violent, hostility to smart (or at least knowledgable) people in all of American day to day life.  My impression is that this is fairly new, and that my father’s generation, for instance, was not stuck with it. 

In my generation, what we have is a sort of split.  When I was growing up, the kids I was in classes with embodied the hostility, but I was very aware of the fact that there was another world, an adult world, where the values were very dfferent.  They–the people who were willing to verbally assault me, among other things–got to Rule in elementary school and junior high (and in some public high schools, from stories that I’ve heard), but then there was the Real World, and in the Real World, people like me–people who read lots of books, including “hard” ones, who used “big words,” who were nerds and geeks–well, we got to run the world.

I’ve tried to explain this before with limited success, but I’ll give it one more try.

I think an awful lot of American politics these days, on both sides of the political aisle, is being run on emotional memories of high school.

I think, for instance, the reason why so many Demoracts went batshit crazy over W.  and Sarah Palin had to do with the fact that they looked and sounded like the kind of people who harassed them when they were younger. 

And that a lot of the less sane response to Obama–and not just Obama, but to the whole “educated class”–has to do with who that segment of the population envied in school.

In a way, what the meritocracy has done to us is to make us all feel like losers, and to make us all feel that it is desperately important that “our people” be in control, because otherwise…well, there we’ll be again, getting our glasses broken in the locker room.

I really, really, really seem to have a hard time expressing this.

I am very aware of the fact that the memories of what it was like to be me until, oh, around tenth grade, when I went off to my Catholic girls’ school, have a lot to do with how I respond to people like W. and Palin, and even more to the standard Republican Party rhetoric about the ” educated class.”  I even wrote a third of an essay about it, called “The Stupid Thing,” which you can find under the larger essay title “Why I Don’t Vote Republican” on the home page of this web site.

When I hear the Republicans talk about the “elitism” of “the educated class,” what I hear is Ellen Kelly and Becky Hull slamming me into a corner of the second floor girls room in seventh grade, to tell me that I’m weird, I’m boring, I’m stuck, and nobody wants to talk to me, so I should just shut up and go away.  I suppose that beats the time a girl told me I ought to die.

When I hear Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity say that “liberals think they’re better than you,” I don’t hear a statement about some “disconnect” between liberals and the general public.  I hear my less pleasant cousins telling me how stuck up I am–because right there in my bag there was a copy of Great Expecations, this huge book–nobody really reads books like that!  they only carry them around to make other people feel bad!

I could probably spend the next several weeks on this blog doing nothing but telling various stories of this kind of harassment–my own, and what Bill went through, and then some choice examples from half a dozen friends. 

I’m not going to do that, because I don’t really see the point.  Robert thinks I live in an alternate universe, but I can think of a dozen movies that make reference to the same phenomenon–and a hundred books–and that makes me think that it’s more widespread than he realizes.  Even Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion manages to make a point of it.  Romy and Michelle may not have been in the A group, but at least they weren’t in the D group, with, you know, all the smart kids and honor society people.

My kids are abysmally ignorant of almost everything.  They don’t know when anything happened.  They don’t know the difference between state and federal law. They think the Constitution of the United States includes the words “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” and then guarantees them a right to happiness. 

But it isn’t their ignorance that bothers me.  Their ignorance can be fixed, if they want to fix it.

What bothers me is a climate that says that asking them to fix that ignorance is to be “elitist,” that to love the music of Beethoven or the plays of Shakespeare or the ideas of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is automatically to be a stuck up snob who thinks you’re better than everybody else when you’re really just pretending to like that stuff anyway.

And I would like to know when that happened.  As close as the 1950s, the community college system largely ran night classes in things like philosophy,  history and art for people who hadn’t had a chance to get a “real” education.  These days, the classes that fill up tend to be in solidly practical subjects and students are mad as hell if they’re asked to take a few distribution courses in the liberal arts to get their degrees.

Hell, John F. Kennedy was admired, not denigrated, for liking classical music and “hard” books–but Eisenhower wasn’t marketed as good to vote for because he didn’t like those things.  My impressions growing up were not wrong.  There was an adult world where the things that mattered were, in fact, the things that “educated” people found valuable, and conservatives were actaully more likely to insist on the importance of those things than liberals were. 

That is, after all, the subtext of the Sixties–that liberals had abandoned standards, educational and otherwise, and that conservatives had to be the last line of defense against the barbarians at the gates.  Welcome to William F. Buckley, Jr.

What happened to our philosopher farmers, the guys we were going to educate at the land grant universities, so that they’d run their farms better and build better bridges and then go home and read Plato and Catullus?

I don’t envy the period of the founding for any supposed “deference’ they had for their political leaders.  I envy them for the farmers and mechanics and bookkeepers who crowded the halls of the Athenaeums and the Cattaquas to hear lectures on the fall of Rome and the letters of Cicero. 

I don’t doubt that such people would have voted for ignorant men if those men represented the principles and policies they wanted in their government.

I do doubt that they would have voted for ignorant men because they were ignorant. 

And right now, I think I live in a world where not only will a large number of people vote for an ignorant candidate because of their ignorance, but where one of the major political parties seems to think that appealing to this impulse is a good idea.

And no, that doesn’t mean I think Gore or Kerry are geniuses. 

I just know that they didn’t go out and try to sell themselves as people who knew practically nothing, didn’t want to know anything, and thought it was a virtue that they’d never read a book.

There’s something wrong about the approach here, if that makes any sense.

Guys?

I don’t want to be snotty or anything here, but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is not in the US Constitution.

It’s in the Declaration of Independence.

And I think all it’s supposed to mean is that citizens get to set their own priorities without interference from the state–that the state shouldn’t get to tell you you have to be a Methodist and not a Catholic, a carpenter and not a brain surgeon, a vegetarian and not a meat eater.

They used to define “happiness” differently than we do.  We tend to mean by it an emotion.   They tended to mean by it something like a state of intellectual satisfaction–a knowledge that your life was properly ordered and being lived in accordance with virtue.

I sometimes think it’s remarkable that somebody like Jefferson–who, for all his radicalism, was not a moral relativist–could have come up with the idea that the state should not impose virtue on its citizens, but allow them to live out their own conception of it as long as it did not breach the peace.

I sometimes run into people on the net triumphantly proclaiming that the US was not founded on the idea of natural rights but on the idea of protection of property owners, because after all, the original formula, Locke’s formula, was that people had the right to “life, liberty and property.”

But Jefferson changed the formula, and he was right–and considerably more right than you could expect him to be, given his personal circumstances.

The usual formula I learned in school was that Jefferson was a great man but not a good one, and Adams was a good man but not a great one. 

But I think that the entire situation at the start of the US is a direct challenge to the idea that we are all held hostage (in our ideas) to our circumstances, that all argument about morals and politics is necessarily self-serving.

And I come back, you know, to the feeling that these guys were the intellectuals of their time.  The American revolution was conceived and ordered by men with what we know call “classical educations”–with the knowledge of Cicero (LOTS of Cicro) and Scipio as well as the Bible.

And yes, of course, the revolution only actually happened because these men were speaking for and to a broader range of men with less in the way of education.

But if that broader range of men had turned their backs on Jefferson and Madison and Adams and Washington as a bunch of “elitists” who couldn’t talk to the “folks”–we’d still be singing “God Save The Queen.”

I’ll stipulate right now that people like Chomsky are not what we’re looking for, but neither are people who scream “elitist” every time somebody else references Aristotle or uses a polysyllabic word.

When Jefferson started the University of  Virginia, he was certainly interested in the “useful arts,” but among the arts he found useful was a working knowledge of Latin and Greek authors, in philosophy as well as history.  He wanted a country not of philosopher kings, but of philosopher farmers. 

Ah, well.

You can tell I’ve started teaching again.  I’m in that mood.

And I’m going to go off and listen to elitist music, with harpsichords in it.

So, I’m sitting here at a halfway decent computer–not one of the really great ones, but better than anything I have at home–and the first thing that comes into my head is this:  is it possible to teach people to be happy?

Traditionally, this was the great question for philosophy and religion, and there’s a lot out there from classical Greece and Rome that addresses it particularly.  It interests me, though, that when you look at classical writing on happiness, it almost never addresses what sometimes feels to me to be the human drive to be unhappy.   I could count for half an hour the number of people I know who seem almost dedicated to being miserable.

Rather,  classical writing on happiness, the philosophies of everybody from Plato and Aristotle down to just before Augustine, assumed that people wanted to be happy, but were kept from being so by one circumstance or the other.  There was so much chance and circumstance out there, endless wars, the scheming of other people.

Christianity, at least from the time of Augustine, tended to be more cognizant of the fact that some people either don’t want to be happy, or can’t be made happy by any of the usual means.  Most of us have known rich, talented people who either never have enough or who don’t recognize what they do have.

There’s another kind of person, though, who seems to love to wallow in misery, and, more than that, to intrude upon anybody in the vicinity to make sure they acknowledge that misery.    If you ever speak before groups, you know these people on sight.  They’re sitting in the first row, or not far back, with their arms clasped around their torsos and and mulish looks on their faces.  As soon as you open the floor to questions, they’ve got complaints.

A friend of mine says that I should not count such people as unhappy, because they’re actually just overjoyed in their unhappiness.  They love what they do and they way they do it. 

There are unhappy people in the world, though, and it often seems as if there are more unhappy people when the world in question is relatively well off.  Augustine would have said that our true desire is to see the face of God, even if we don’t know it, and that anything else will always seem to us to be unsatisfactory.

Modern psychology seems to treat unhappiness as a disease, which we should be medicated out of.  And the assumption seems to be that “normal” equals “happy,” so that even long-recognized human responses (say, tending to get depressed in the dead of winter) become “disorders” we need a prescription for. 

This sort of thing is often urged along by modern biochemistry, which assumes that all our emotions are chemical reactions in the brain.  On that score, the prescriptions sound like a good idea.  At least they address the “root cause” of the problem.

More and more, though, I think that happiness is a decision.  That it’s not about giddiness or euphoria–which are biochemical responses in the brain–but about coming to some kind of resting place.

Blech.  I’m describing this badly.  Maybe I just mean it’s about developing a sense of  proportion, about knowing that although things may not be perfect in 21st century America, they beat 99% of everything else I can think of.   I’m not fond of Glenn Beck or Noam Chomsky or Lady Gaga, but I’d rather have all of them in a room than be stuck with Torquemada. 

Maybe I just know that, being who I am, and who I honestly want to be, there isn’t any society anywhere, in actuality or in theory, that would have made me the most successful person on the planet.

Maybe it’s just that that’s all right with me.

Well, whatever.

I told you I was feeling scattered.

I don’t know why, but I’m really having a lot of trouble getting over this particular novel–no, not getting over the novel, exactly, but getting over the weird physical side effects of writing. 

I have no idea if this is something every writer, or even every writer of fiction, experiences.  When writers get together, they don’t talk a lot about writing.  Money, now, they talk about money.  But.  Ahem.

Anyway, for me, writing a novel is a little like taking speed.  But only a little.  It’s not just that I’m revved up, but that I’m in a brain zone that is very unlike myself in the everyday.  One of the reasons I tend to read only fiction during the time when I’m seriously concentrating on writing fiction is that during that time I have a lot of difficulty focusing on anything else–hell, I have a lot of difficulty focussing on other people’s fiction. 

I’m usually a read-a-big-book kind of person.  I like whole books, and I like them long, fiction and nonfiction both.  When I’m writing, though, I’m either unable to concentrate on any sustained line of thought, or I am able, and my own book is going badly.  So while I write novels, I read short stories or, if I have to have real life, magazine articles.  And I mean short magazine articles.  Anything above, say, twelve hundred words, and my mind wanders.

At the moment, I’m working my way through a Christmas present, called Too Big To Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin–an extended (very extended, it’s a long book) look at the meltdown that led to the financial collapse of last year.

And there are some interesting things in it that would remain interesting even if all the money angst didn’t interest me intrinsically.  Some of the people are fascinating as examples of psychological something or the other.  I don’t mean that they’re unusual types, only that in some cases I was surprised at finding some types in some places.

There is, for instance, the acting head of Lehman Brothers, a venerable investment bank and one of the iconic Wall Street brands of my childhood (along with Merrill Lynch, who’s next up in the book)–anyway, I find it difficult to believe that a man could have had a career that long and varied without anybody ever noticing that he was absolutely useless in a crisis.  The guy responded to the implosion of his firm the way my younger son responds to thinking he’s about to get a bad grade–anxiety all over the landscape, unable to shut up, unable to control his impulses to jump in and make things worse, unable to think straight.

A lot of us are like that.  It’s not an unusual trait.  I just can’t believe somebody who is like that ended up heading one of the largest and most important investment banks in the world. 

But although that kind of thing is interesting in itself, and although I’m interested in the general subject matter of the book, I find I’m having a hard time keeping my mind on it when I’m reading.  I wander off into the kind of thinking I usually only indulge in when I have nothing else to think about–having mental fights with people that are better than the ones I actually had because now I know what I wish I said; calculating the bills for the next month; singing country songs I vaguely heard once a couple of months ago and thought I had successfully gotten out of my head.

Sometimes this sort of thing happens because the book I’ve been writing managed to create a world I’d rather live in than the one I live in now.  That was not the case in this book, although a lot of it takes place on Cavanaugh Street.  Things on Cavanaugh Street are moving in a few new directions, and I was laying the foundations for that.

Maybe it’s just a matter of this last push at the end having been so heavy-duty and so panicked.  I do think the book I just handed in is infinitely superior to what the book was when I first handed it in.  I also tend to pace myself with writing, because I don’t like panics.  Maybe it’s that I know I have a few corrections to do–although, next to the fourteen page editorial letter my editor sent me about the original version, the few changes he wants in this one are chocolate cake.

Maybe I should take Robert’s advice and do a little more self-promotion.  He hadn’t realized I wrote short stories, and I actually write a lot of them, although they’re not much like the books I write.   They tend to be both incredibly dark and incredibly bloody. 

But I always feel uncomfortable with blogs that are all about a write pushing his latest thing in print–look here!  I wrote this book!  Buy this book!  This book is good!

Maybe it’s just that I always feel uncomfortable with self-promotion.  I also tend not to get out into public much.  You pretty much have to drag me kicking and screaming. 

Every once in a while, my favorite reality show obsession, America’s Next Top Model, has a thing where the girls are asked who most deserves to win the competition, or who has the most potential, and all but one of them picks herself.  Then the one that doesn’t gets lectured by the judges on how wrong it was for her to pick somebody else.

But if it were me, I’d pick somebody else–because ingrained in the back of my head is the idea that it’s just rude to vote for yourself right out there in public like that.

I’ll admit I have the same feeling about people who vote for themselves in private, like when they’re running for things, but I do recognize that that’s a little odd.