The Third Target

I love Joel C. Rosenberg’s fictional books. He is noted for ripping stories from the headlines before they became headlines. He will say he is not a prophet, but someone who reads the prophets and takes them seriously. So he thinks, what would this prophecy look like if it came true today. Then it does. So I guess that kind of does make him a prophet!

Anyways, his books are always fun, quick reads. The Third Target is no exception. He began by asking his circle of experts what terrorist group most scared them but was not on the radar yet. To a person, they replied, “ISIS.” So he began to write about this group planning a massive terrorist attack on a mysterious “third target,” after Israel and the US. 

While what he wrote hasn’t exactly happened yet, it could. And ISIS has become a household word. When Rosenberg was writing this book, Obama was calling them a JV team. From Politifact, “At the time, Islamic State (often referred to as by its acronyms ISIS or ISIL) was not a household name. It was often referred to as an al-Qaeda-linked group in press reports.” Once again, he nailed it. 

Good read. I won’t give away the ending, except to say… it doesn’t really have an ending. Curses on Joel Rosenberg and his sequel style of writing books. I have to wait for the next one The First Hostage to see what happens!

The Odyssey by Homer

The second book I read along with Hillsdale online course Great Books 101 was The Odyssey. I enjoyed this one more than the Iliad. It was nowhere near as bloody! Odysseus comes alive as he tells his tale to each group he runs into. Plus I actually read this one instead of listening to it. That makes a difference.

The book opens with, "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns..." This contrasts to the Iliad that opens with, "Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles..." Both openings set the tone for the rest of the epic. This will be a story of the adventure of a wily man, in contrast to the tale telling the results of the rage of a warrior.

We start with Athena telling Odysseus' son Telemachus to go and try to find out what happened to his father. He has grown up in the 20 years Odysseus has been away fighting at Troy and trying to return home to Ithaca. The others arrived 10 years earlier, yet Telemachus and his mother, Penelope, hold out hope for Odysseus' return. His home has been overrun by gluttonous suitors who have plans to kill him and marry his mother.

Telemachus starts his journey to the island home of King Nestor. Nestor can give him details of the fight, but not much more after that. So Telemachus heads off to the home of Menelaus and his wife Helen, she being the cause of the Trojan War in the first place. Menelaus can give him more information, but not what he is really seeking. Neither can tell him where his father is now.

Suddenly, the scene switches to Olympus where Athena convinces Zeus to send Hermes to tell the nymph Calypso, who has been holding Odysseus hostage to let him go. Off he sails, but because he has incurred the wrath of Poseidon, he is shipwrecked on the utopian island of Phaeacia. He makes his way to the palace where he is asked to tell the tale of how he came to be upon their shores. So follows most of the rest of the book.

He left Troy with his men and plenty of plunder. They first stop to gain more plunder at the nearby Ismarus. Returning to the homeward journey, they are blown off course for nine days. They arrive at the island of the Lotus-eaters. There, some of his men join the natives in consuming this plant which causes memory loss. Odysseus must drag his protesting and crying men back onto the boat to proceed with their journey or they may never have remembered their task.

Their next stop is the island of the Cyclops. There he meets a murderous son of Poseidon, and we learn the cause of his fury. In order to escape the fierce clutches of the monster, Odysseus blinds the one eye with a red-hot poker. As part of his innate trickiness, he has told the giant that his name is Nobody. Then, as the monster cries in agony, "Nobody is attacking me." Odysseus can be assured that none will come to the rescue.

The remaining crew set sail again and land at the island of Laestrygonia, where giants proceed to eat the men for dinner. They flee to the island of the nymph, Circe. She turned Odysseus' men into swine! When he goes to rescue them, she seduces him and keeps him trapped with luxurious living on her island for a year. Finally he and his men plead to leave. She agrees as long as he agrees to go to Hades and speak to a dead prophet, Tiresias. He will tell Odysseus the way to go. In the kingdom of the dead, he meets not only the prophet, but his own dead mother and the dead warriors from the Trojan War. He sees that although death can seem an easy way out of his troubles, this is not where he wants to be.

They return to the island of Circe to bury the body of one of the shades met in the underworld. She gives Odysseus further direction: they must avoid the siren's song at all cost. Odysseus is to plug up the ears of his men and ties himself to the mast as they pass. Otherwise they will be tempted to join the beautiful women who promise love and companionship and the means of reliving the past. But death is their destination. She also words of warning about a pass with a raging whirlpool, Charybdis, on one side and a "grisly monster," Scylla, lurking on the other. Finally she warns them not to kill the cattle of the sun god, no matter how tempting.

They pass through these trials, losing a few men to Scylla, but Odysseus' men, starving by this point, cannot pass up on the chance to eat the cattle of the sun god. He has warned them, but it is too late. They set off and the sun has his revenge. He destroys their vessel and all in it save Odysseus. Clinging to piece of the ship, he is swept onto the island of the nymph, Calypso.

Hearing his whole story causes the compassionate and hospitable Phaeacians to load him with gifts and safe passage home. They leave him on Ithaca with his treasure in a deep sleep. When they return to their island, still angry Poseidon gets permission from Zeus to turn them to stone and ring the island with a mountain so they can never again help a stranger home.

Once home, Athena disguises him as a beggar. He wants to see the lay of the land. Odysseus finds his son and reveals himself to him. They make a plan to kill the suitors with the help of a few faithful servants. When Odysseus finally reveals himself to Penelope, she is wary that he is a trick of the gods. She offers to have her bed moved out into another area for him to sleep on. He becomes enraged that the bed he made from the trunk of an olive tree would be something to be moved. She sees he is the real thing and they are reunited.

All that remains is to reveal himself to his father and make sure the dead suitors families are held at bay. The story ends happily for Odysseus' family.

The book is ultimately about the importance of family and home. Odysseus is an ambitious man, sure of himself in any situation, yet even he becomes weary. It is only the siren call of home that keeps him going. Many times, he is tempted to give up. He can give into the sirens and momentarily converse with those who know the details of his glorious battles in Troy. He can live happily with Circe. Beautiful Calypso has offered him immortality. He can let down his guard for a minute and be consumed by the cyclops or Scylla or the Laestrygonians. But he continues to battle, even when all is against him. His journey into hades has convinced him that death is not an option. His certainty in the faithfulness of his wife, the desire for his son,  and his mission to reclaim his place keeps him going.

Discussion questions from the course:

1. Why does Homer begin by invoking the Muse?
   I believe that Homer wants the Muse to help him tell the story as accurately as he can. He wants the details preserved and he wants to represent Ulysses honestly in the story. He wants the moral lessons to come shining through to his audience.
2. How does the cleverness of Odysseus reveal timeless truths about human nature?
   Ulysses is constantly referred to as "clever Ulysses." There seems to be this idea that our lives can be summed up in a word. Perhaps that's true. Perhaps when all is said and done, our characteristics morph into one overriding trait. Ulysses is many things. He is brave. He is a loving husband. He wants to be a faithful father. He is a loyal son. He is a tremendous warrior. He is a risk taker. He wants to experience all life has to offer. Yet in the end, he is called "clever" or "wily." Why? Because no matter what Ulysses puts his mind to, the cleverness, the sense of manipulation is always present. He wants to experience the Sirens call, so he finds a way to hear it without succumbing to it. He wants reunite with his wife, but he must do it under a disguise, ostensibly to test her faithfulness. He wants to explore the land of the Cyclops, but must resort to trickery to escape it. He repeated lies about who he is and where he came from. It seems that Homer is right. Maybe most people can be reduced to a single trait.
3. What are some major themes of the poem, and how are they represented by Homer?
   One major theme is the importance of family. Ulysses is constantly guided by his desire to return home to his wife and son. While the extreme length of the journey leads one to wonder just how committed he is to the cause, he always returns to the forgotten path. Even when offered immortality by Calypso, he eventually pulls himself away and begins the journey home again. I think this points to the fact that family is the ultimate good. No matter what twists and turns life throws at us, we can always go home. We should always strive to maintain those relationships, because in the end, nothing else satisfies like family.
   Other themes referenced in the work are hospitality, appearances, faithfulness, and maturation.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

The title of my latest reads intrigued me greatly: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations; Why some are so rich and some so poor. That’s a good question that David S. Landes asks. He does a very in depth job of researching how and why some nations succeeded and some failed. But in all his rich historical data, it was easy to miss a unifying theme. I tried to tease one out however. 

He begins with the reason why it is important to know what exactly contributes to a prosperous or poor nation. “Our task (the rich countries), in our own interest as well as theirs, is to help the poor become healthier and wealthier. If we do not, they will seek to take what they cannot make; and if they cannot earn by exporting commodities, they will export people. In short, wealth is an irresistible magnet; and poverty is a potentially raging contaminant: it cannot be segregated, and our peace and prosperity depend in the long run on the well-being of others.”

He begins with “Nature’s Inequalities” and discusses the role that geography plays in the success of a nation. He states, regular access to fresh water and temperate weather played a huge role in the early success of civilizations. “Life in poor climes, then, is precarious, depressed, brutish. The mistakes of man, however well intentioned, aggravate the cruelties of nature.” The patterns created by the well-suited geography led early people groups to form social and political organizations to help regulate the society. 

In the west, the notions of economic development and property rights began to develop. Part of this was due to the influence of Christianity. This belief system did not hold rulers to be gods, who could squeeze the people for more and more and take whatever they wanted. They believed everything belonged to the Lord, and we are His stewards. This transformed the economic development in Europe. In addition, the middle ages saw power decentralized in Europe. Unlike China, which considered itself the center of the universe, Europe offered somewhere else to go if one was unhappy with the current situation. The fall of Rome’s centralized authority led to decentralization and competition between areas that paradoxically added to the power of the overall supreme. The king knew that free people made the aristocracy less powerful and therefore less able to challenge his authority. And the free movement of people and goods led to higher tax revenues. In places like China which did not have free farmers but peasants under the control of a particular lord, the sense of rights and contract, to negotiate as well as petition, did not develop. 

Europe's decentralization proved a plus. Landes states, “In those middle years between ancient and modern, fragmentation was the strongest brake on willful, oppressive behavior. Political rivalry and the right of exit made all the difference.” In addition, within Europe the fragmentation created by the Protestant Reformation led to greater freedom of thought as compared to those areas under the dominion of a more controlling Catholic church. Yet even the more Catholic southern Europe suffered nothing like the thought-crushing Islamic countries. Even China, with no established faith, had a morality and belief system rigorously enforced by the mandarin class with no threats to the status quo allowed. In addition, the fragmentation made it difficult for the entire society to fall victim to a group of interlopers. An invading force would have to defeat myriad small kingdoms to gain a large territorial victory. 

As to the early success of Europe, Landes says, “The economic expansion of medieval Europe was thus promoted by a succession of organizational innovations and adaptations, most of them initiated from below and diffused by example. The rulers, even local seigneurs, scrambled to keep pace, to show themselves hospitable to make labor available, to attract enterprise and the revenues it generated.” The division of labor and widening of the market led to “one of the most inventive societies that history had known.” Some examples of technological innovations that Europeans, while not necessarily inventing them, exploited them like no other societies, were the water wheel to produce power, the eyeglasses, the clock, and printing. Many other places, like Islamic regimes or China, feared these developments as a threat to the stability of their societies and tried to shut them out rather than exploit them. Better to protect their power and religious interpretations if they could maintain the status quo than risk losing everything to an innovative and productive people. Once again, the Judeo-Christian character of Europe helps explain the difference. It promoted the value of work, believed in the subordination of nature to man, had a sense of linear time and progress, and promoted the basic equality of man to achieve and work to better himself. 

These western innovations eventually led to better weapons and transportation. This led, as it inevitably does, to expansion at the expense of the native inhabitants. Portugal led the way. Although China had some of the same advantages, they “lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity.” They believed they were the center of the universe and had no need of outside goods or ideas. They disdained foreigners as inherently inferior. Why would they want to trade with or learn from them? 

Unfortunately this desire for expansion eventually led to the Atlantic slave trade. But this led in part to the Industrial Revolution as Europe sought to make products to trade. Landes believes the Industrial Revolution would have occurred without the slave trade, but it definitely helped fuel it. The Industrial Revolution then fueled a global search for markets, leading to empire building. 

We see that countries that industrialized quickly became more prosperous than those who resisted. This began a growing gap between the economic haves and have nots. “Paradox: the Industrial Revolution brought the world closer together, made it smaller and more homogenous. But the same revolution fragmented the globe by strangling winners and losers. It begat multiple worlds.” Even the apparent “winners” like the wealthy Spain and Portugal, wasted their wealth fighting wars. It was an industrial use of capital the spurned the economic growth of nations, not just the existence of wealth. Nations like Britain did not have the windfall gains made by early empire pioneers like Spain. Instead, they had to develop the habits of hard and innovative work. Additionally, some of the early economic players of Europe, like the Italians, were caught in a web of old structures like guilds, that suppressed innovation. Remarkably, Islamic and Chinese societies actively suppressed intellectual and technological advances. Whereas places like England were experiencing a “buildup — the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow; and breakthrough — reaching and passing thresholds.” Fame and a growing body of knowledge and technology spurred scientist to continue to push boundaries. 

Once again the Catholic/Protestant differences rise up. Landes quotes Max Weber’s thesis that the Protestantism of northern Europe created capitalism “by defining and sanctioning an ethic of everyday behavior that conduced to business success.” The doctrine of predestination led people to want to prove they were chosen by their moral and ethical work habits. Even after the belief in predestination faded, the habits remained. The Protestant Reformation also changed the rules for knowledge dissemination. Previously areas like Italy were great centers of the latest and greatest thinking. But then the Protestant Reformation came along and provided “a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”

As the European empires began to grow, those founded by Catholic nations suffered from this insularity. They “did their best to close themselves off from foreign and heretical influences.” Dangerous new ideas and free thought were discouraged. This led to intolerance, superstition, and ignorance which continues to contribute the backwardness of some areas today. “The religious persecutions of old — the massacres, hunts, expulsions, forced conversions, and the self-imposed intellectual closure — proved to be a kind of original sin. Their effects would not wear off until the twentieth century… and not always even then.”

This Catholic/Protestant division led the Protestant Dutch to try to outcompete their erstwhile Catholic Spanish overlords. But the Dutch, where the Protestant Reformation flourished, valued tolerance and free thought. This upstart group of disparate provinces was able to challenge the very wealthy Spanish empire because the most innovative, free thinking, and freedom loving people fled from the tyrannical Spanish into the waiting arms of the Dutch. 

Britain soon followed the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch in empire building. They rapidly moved into India to create a colony there, which humiliated the resident Muslim rulers. Because Islamic fiefdoms operated fundamentally differently from the European system, the local rulers of India did not create the same barrier to entry as they did in Europe. In Europe, the local lords formed a largely hereditary system where they came to be intimately connected to the land and the people and competed with one another for free citizens. But in Islamic rule, the local lords were often randomly moved to prevent just such a possible threat to the Sultan. This led to a weakness the British were able to exploit. In fact, Landes makes the case that India was always going to fall to someone. It had been conquered multiple times throughout its history and never had a strong sense of nationalism to cohere it together in order to repel invaders. 

Eventually Britain moved well beyond its competitors. But why Britain? “By the early eighteenth century, Britain was well ahead — in cottage manufacture, seedbed of growth; in recourse to fossil fuel; in the technology of those crucial branches that would make the core of the Industrial Revolution: textiles, iron, energy and power. To these should be added the efficiency of British commercial agriculture and transport.” Britain, more than any others, was an ideal society to produce industrial, economic growth. He delineates 5 characteristics of an ideal foundation: “[The society] 1. Knew how to cooperate, manage, and build the instruments of production… 2. Was able to impart this knowledge and know-how to the young… 3. Chose people for jobs by competence and relative merit; promoted and demoted on the basis of performance. 4. Afforded opportunity to individual or collective enterprise; encouraged initiative, competition, and emulations. 5. Allowed people to enjoy and employ the fruits of their labor and enterprise.” This also implied gender equality, no irrelevant discrimination, a preference for scientific rationality over superstition, secure property rights, secure liberty rights, enforced rights of contract, stable government, responsive government, honest government, and a moderate, efficient, ungreedy government. In addition, there must be a sense of nation, “a self-aware idea characterized by common identity and loyalty and by equality of civil status.” There’s the formula for economic growth. Unfortunately, this has defined very few countries throughout history. 

This kind of readiness for industrial growth largely existed in northwest Europe and rapidly declined as one moves southeast on the map. While leftist political economists and economic historians like to blame poverty on the exploitation by richer nations, that is not the correct explanation. “Europe’s development gradient ran from west to east and north to south, from educated to illiterate populations, from representative to despotic institutions, from equality to hierarchy, and so on. It was not resources or money that made the difference; nor mistreatment by outsiders. It was what lay inside — culture, values, initiative. These peoples came to have freedom enough. They just didn’t know what to do with it.” He further states, “It is not want of money that holds back development. The biggest impediment is social, cultural, and technological unreadiness — want of knowledge and knowhow. In other words, want of the ability to use money.”

This explains most of the world. What then, explains America? “America’s society of smallholders and relative well-paid workers was seedbed of democracy and enterprise. Equality bred self-esteem, ambition, a readiness to enter and compete in the marketplace, a spirit of individualism and contentiousness.” America started with a tabula rusa and an optimistic open culture. Because Americans did not have to overcome a fossilized culture, all the fundamentals for success were already in place from the beginning. “The decisive and most distinctive American innovation, though was not any particular device, however important, but a mode of production — what came to be called the American system of manufactures.” Europeans eventually fell behind because the “found it harder than Americans to accept the ruthless logic of productivity.” America began to set the standard for productivity and ruthlessly pushed for more, faster, and cheaper. 

Landes then looks at why South America and Asia, specifically China, lagged so far behind. South America fell because of the same things that held southeastern Europe back. China suffered from “cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny [which] made China a reluctant improver and a bad learner.” 

He also spends time discussing Japan. Unlike China, they were learners. While initially open to trade and Christianity, this very traditional society began to feel threatened when the newly converted seemed to owe more allegiance to God than to their emperor. So like China, they shut down and turned inward. In a reactionary vein so common around the world, they wanted to “freeze the social order, fix relations of social and political hierarchy, prevent disagreement and conflict.” Eventually they saw how far they were falling behind the rest of the industrial world and made an incredibly valiant effort to catch up. Eventually they put their European and American competitors to shame. They were exemplars of the catch-up model, proving that sometimes, it pays to be late.

He looks at what ails the Islamic regions of the world. It starts with the dysfunctional Ottoman Empire. “The Ottomans had originally filled a power vacuum — they had taken over a region once strong, now enfeebled — looting as they went. Now they could no longer take from outside. They had to generate wealth from within, to promote productive investment. Instead, they resorted to habit and tried to pillage the interior, to squeeze their own subjects. Nothing, not even the wealth of high officials, was secure. Nothing could be more self-destructive.” Today the heirs of the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic countries “are without exception despotisms, where leaders are not responsible, actions are unpredictable, loyalty is a ruse or a mirage of propaganda, and everything, including the economy, is subordinated to politics and can be turned around by an event. Instead of courting legitimacy by appeals to material improvement — have I made you better off? — Arab leaders have boasted of victories over colonialism or Zionism and waved the bloody shirt of jihad, promising to put history right….[Arabs] had more pressing things to do — first of all, to defeat Israel. Prosperity could follow.” Which is to say, prosperity never.

Today, we see, what Landes calls, the losers. The Middle East is a failure. “Its political, social, and cultural institutions do not ensure security of enterprise or promote autonomous technological development. Also, cultural attitudes, and above all, gender biases, inhibit industrial undertakings.” “Most Latin nations have resorted to the manipulation of trade and money: import barriers and quotas, differential rates of exchange, a carapace of restrictions that some have called the ‘inward-looking model’ — and, of course, to borrowing.” These measures exact a heavy price. “Among the heaviest losers in this period of record-breaking economic growth and technological advance were the countries of the Communist-Socialist bloc… The striking feature of these command economies was the contradiction between system and pretensions on the one hand, performance on the other… The joke had it, they made believe they worked, and the state made believe it paid…” “All the ills that have hurt Latin America and the Middle East are exponentially compounded in sub-Saharan Africa: bad government, unexpected sovereignty, backward technology, inadequate education, bad climate, incompetent if not dishonest advice, poverty, hunger, disease, overpopulation — a plague of plagues.” Until these areas develop the cultural attitudes that lead to prosperity, they are bound to fall further behind. No amount of western meddling can pull a society out of its self-imposed limitations. 

Going forward, Landes states, “Until very recently, over the thousand and more years of this process that most people look upon as progress, the key factor — the driving force — has been Western Civilization and its dissemination: the knowledge, the techniques, the political and social ideologies, for better or worse.” “If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.” Yet here we are, by far the most successful economy on the planet throughout all of history and our colleges and universities are working feverishly to destroy all that that prosperity is based on. Pick a place where Western Civilization has not invaded, Somalia, Pakistan, and figure out which one we should become, because that is life apart from Christianity and Western Civ. 

Iliad by Homer

I'm currently taking the Hillsdale online course on Great Books 101. In order to deepen the course as much as possible, not only am I listening to the lectures and doing recommended reading, I'm trying my best to read the whole book referenced. So I started with The Iliad. I vaguely know the story, but I've never read the whole thing. Actually, I listened to it. This isn't the best way for me to read a book, but it was the most efficient, since I have a LONG list of books to actually read.

I enjoyed it. Of course I am in no position to criticise it. I suppose I could say it was awfully bloody for my taste. Perhaps boys would have their ears tickled by descriptions of brains and bowels gushing out, or eyeballs being impaled.

But I suppose all the blood and gore was meant to reinforce the theme of Achilles rage causing so much destruction. He certainly comes to a bad end, and loss of life seems to humble even him as he reflects on the dishonorable way he treated Hector.

Discussion Questions from the course:

1. How do the characters' desires both make them who they are, but also lead to their destruction?
   There is a sense in the book that the characters innate personality traits lead them inexorably to their destinies. Achilles is offered the opportunity to settle down with a family and live to a ripe old age or die young with everlasting fame. It's almost not a choice for him. He simply cannot pass up on the glory. Similarly, Hector feels the weight of having to represent Troy in the battle with Achilles. He cannot not fight. It is his destiny and his personality will allow for nothing less. His wife knows this and foretells his death.
   
   
2. Discuss the rage of Achilles. How does it make him great, but also lead to his downfall and eventual transformation?
   Achilles rage leads to all the bloodiness. He is so angry with Agamemnon that he calls for the destruction of his fellow Greeks in their battle with Troy. He is irrational to the point of calling for the defeat of his own side. Even his best friend is killed in the ensuing battle. Then, after Hector kills Patroclus, Achilles rage once again undoes him. Not only does he kill Hector, but he shamefully parades his body for 12 days. He is finally forced to apologize and humble himself before Prius, but it is clear his rage leads him to behavior he ultimately regrets.
3. What does the Iliad have to teach us about free will?
   Certainly, the gods are playing on this field. They cause arrows to hit or miss their targets. They cause the battle to rage one way or another. They put thoughts and desires into the heads of the mortals. Yet, there still seems to be a good deal of free will. Achilles is offered a choice of destinies. He is offered a choice of how to respond to Agamemnon's treachery. He does not have to treat Hector's body in such a degrading manner. Patroclus does not have to don Achilles' armour and fight. All along the way, people make choices. It's their choices that allow such fertile ground for the gods mischief.

At the end, Tim reminded me that we had seen a movie based on the tale, Troy. So we had to watch that to relive the tale of Achilles. At least it gave me the opportunity to see how the movie diverged from the book. I suppose that's unavoidable. Still, I enjoyed both.

Cities of God by Rodney Stark

I’m not sure how Cities of God by Rodney Stark got on my list. Probably it was after I read his book, How the West Won. The subtitle describes the thesis of the book: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. 

The book uses statistical analysis to follow the rise and spread of early Christianity. He is able to use data, not easily available to create multiple hypothesis and test them. This leads largely to verifying what we already know, but he is able to quantify why what we already know is true and to what extent it is true. Yet a few times he offers new insight. One particularly interesting statistical fact shows that Paul’s ministry did not necessarily spread Christianity. He definitely helped define and focus Christian theology, but he seems to have gone where churches either already were or would have eventually been. 

He begins by pointing out that most early converts were in fact Jews, not mostly gentiles as we so often picture. This is because they were already open to a monotheistic faith and Christianity stripped it of “ethnic encumbrances.” In addition, the church found its early success in large cities, not far from Jerusalem, with large diaspora communities of Jews, which were largely hellenized. He goes into why all this is so in the book. In addition, cities which had experienced an influx of the near-monotheistic religions of Isis and Cybele seemed the most open to Christianity. 

He makes some interesting points contrasting monotheism with polytheism. He states that monotheism always wins this contest. It seems that polytheism creates a system in which people “god-shop.” Their level to any one particular god is relatively low. But when there is One True God, people are much more likely to engage in a “lifelong commitment and devotion.” After discussing the success monotheism engenders when confronting polytheism, Stark states, “Monotheism prevails because it offers a God worth dying for—indeed, a God who promises everlasting life.”

He goes on to explore Gnostic writers and ideas. He makes a convincing case that the Gnostics were not a sect of Christianity, but of paganism with Christian overtones. They were rightly and immediately rejected by early Christian fathers. 

He also discusses the rise of Christianity within the Roman Empire. He shows that Christians were very tolerant and mixed well with the pagan religions that still existed. But he also shows that when Emperor Julian attempted to stamp out Christianity, it was in actually an attempt to stamp out effective religion. He states, “Julian’s effort to restore the temples was a fool’s errand that achieved nothing because when monotheism and polytheism collide, monotheism always wins. Easily. It does so precisely because it offers far more, and does so with far greater credibility, making it the choice of philosophers as well as of the people.”

He ends the book with a plea for historians to begin counting. Literally. He encourages them to back their assertions with quantifiable data as he has done repeatedly throughout the book. He believes the data is there for the finding and historians can avoid making claims later proved to be wrong if only they search for statistically quantifiable data.

This is a quick and easy read for those wanting to understand the spread of the early Church and what kinds of variables played a role. 

The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis

I have such deep respect for C.S. Lewis, but if I’m being honest, I haven’t really read much of his stuff. Of course the Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, but that may be it. So when I saw The Abolition of Man as recommended reading on one of my classical education sources, I jumped at the opportunity. Ironically, I already had a copy. 

Now I know another reason why C.S. Lewis is so revered. This book was written in 1944, but it is timeless. He deals with human nature so how could it not be.

His book deals with three separate, but related ideas. The first is the famous “Men without Chests.” This section opens with a discussion of textbooks. I suppose this is why the educators are interested in it. Although the idea he espouses certainly transcends education. 

He discusses the apparently new trend in textbooks to disavow any characteristics intrinsically related to a thing and rather reduce those characteristics to a mere feeling we have about the thing. For example he cites a person saying a waterfall is “sublime,” but the textbook author quickly points out that the waterfall is not objectively sublime, rather the feelings the man gets when looking at the waterfall causes him to feel sublimity towards it. They do this under the context of trying to teach the young not to fall for pretty words, but to analyze what is actually going on. Lewis says they actually “cut out [a student’s] soul, long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and humane.”

Although he wonders if these kinds of authors really intend to create a “trousered ape,” he does not dismiss the possibility that some do intend to “make a clean sweep of traditional values and start with a new set.” Yet more likely, these authors are simply engaging in some armchair philosophy without realizing the consequences. He muses that the motivation may simply be that actual literary scholarship is hard. They may also feel a pressing need to disabuse the youth of over-sentimentality. Yet Lewis says, if so, they have misdiagnosed the problem and failed to notice most “need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity.” As he very succinctly states, “A hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”

Rather, an educator’s job is “to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” Rather than be overly critical and reject all emotion, the teacher is to help the student know what emotion to feel, what to praise and what to condemn, what to value and what to disregard. This leads to the conclusion that there exists a kind of truth. A central set of ideas which are not open to interpretation. A waterfall is either sublime or it isn’t, but it is not a subjective opinion. 

He refers to this “doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and other really false” as the “Tao.” The Tao tells us that there are qualities that demand “a certain response from us whether we make it or not.” And he believes that if we do not respond as the Tao would call for, we are in error. The defect is in ourselves. “Therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it)… The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”

He goes on to state, “The head rules the belly through the chest — the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest - Magnanimity - Sentiment — these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.” (p. 24) He believes those textbook authors are producing “Men without Chests…. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so… You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.” (p. 25)

The second idea he elaborates on he calls “The Way.”  In this section Lewis seeks to show that those who operate outside the Tao, in fact have their own version of it. They reject traditional idea believing their own ideas are immune from the same debunking process. But in rejecting fundamental truths, they have nothing on which to base their own ideals and values. “The direct frontal attack [on the Tao] ‘Why?’ — ‘What good does it do?’ — ‘Who said so?’ is never permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because no values at all can justify themselves on that level. If you persist that kind of trial you will destroy all values, and so destroy the bases of your own criticism as well as the thing criticized.” (p. 48) Those things the Tao holds to be “self-evident” have been debunked. What now is self-evident? Those Lewis calls Innovators stand on sinking sand. They both seek to discredit the Tao and use its axioms simultaneously. To which Lewis replies, “Only by such shreds of the Tao as he has inherited is he enabled even to attack it. The question therefore arises what title he has to select bits of it for acceptance and to reject others. For if the bits he rejects have no authority, neither have those he retains: if what he retains is valid, what he rejects is equally valid too.” (p. 41) In other words, we don’t get to pick and choose our truths or the very concept of “truth” has no meaning at all. 

He  goes on to state the case very succinctly, “This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.” (p. 43) This doesn’t imply that all values are therefore static. The Tao can develop from within based on its own spirit. But it cannot be superseded by an outsider.

In the third section he moves on to discuss those who would say, “Let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him be such.”(p. 51) In short, let us make man in our own image.

People will point to man’s increasing “power over nature” to prove we can just as easily obtain man’s power over human nature. Yet Lewis convincingly argues that man’s power over nature is in reality “a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”(p. 55)  In fact, what we call “power over nature” is actually the recognition of the truths within Nature. As we discover more and put those discoveries to use, we are actually adding to the power of Nature. Once we discover how gravity works and put it to use, for example, we are now at the mercy of gravity. Whereas before we discovered the truth, we imagined we could harness it or repudiate it or make it work for us in whatever way we we pleased. Instead we discover we must follow the dictates of gravity. It will not follow our dictates.

As to creating a better form of man going forward, Lewis says, “In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger.” (p. 57) “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”(p.59)

But how will they decide what kind of new man to make. They have rejected the Tao and so all values are necessarily rejected. They have no right to the use of the words “good” or “bad.” Those exist within the Tao. These people, which Lewis calls the Conditioners, “have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.”(p. 64) They have created a redefined man, which leads to a definition-free man as the Conditioners compete for the definition that serves them best. And without a definition, they have undefined man. There is now no such thing. 

Lewis points out the irony of man seeking to control Nature, has now been wholly taken over by nature. That is in rejecting the Tao, he is controlled by impulse. His base nature is all that is left to govern him. And “nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.” (p. 68) Apparently, reality really is a b—.

Lewis sums up his argument with this, “Either we are rational spirit obliged forever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.” (p. 73)

Bringing all this up to the issues we face today, we see once again, man trying to remake man in his own image. Or no image at all. We see marriage redefined but increasingly undefined. We see gender redefined and increasingly undefined. These two concepts, which are defined within the Tao, are now rendered meaningless by those who seek to reshape them. Because Truth will always win out, the Conditioners will not succeed. But they will wreak a lot of havoc in their wake. We cannot truly abolish man, but we can almost destroy him. 

The Art of Teaching by Gilbert Highet

Another book recommended by the classical educators is The Art of Teaching by Gilbert Highet. This book was written in the 1950s, so after the Progressive reforms and furthermore, he’s from Teachers College of Columbia, so… let's say I was surprised that it was recommended by classical educators. But I really liked this book. He takes a different view from John Gregory and believes that teaching is much more art than science.

He begins by introducing the book with, “Our interest here, therefore, is not to distinguish the good subjects from the bad subjects, but to work out the principles by which a subject — once it has been chosen — can be well taught.” Because bad teaching can have such a tremendous impact on the students, spoiling “lives which might have been full of energy and happiness,” he felt compelled to write this book. That is a breath of fresh air to me!

He begins, like Gregory, with a discussion of the importance of the teacher. “A teacher must believe in the value and interest of his subject as a doctor believes in health. The neglect of this principle is one of the chief reasons for the bad teaching that makes pupils hate schools and universities and turn away from valuable fields of knowledge.” A teacher must know and LOVE his subject! And not only love it, but like it and desire to continue to grow in the field. In addition, the good teacher must actually like young people. “You must not be the policeman watching the mob. You must be the leader of a group.” These characteristics seem so obvious, but clearly Highet has seen examples of teachers who do not like their subject or their students.

He here inserts an aside. He believes that when the idea of universal, public education arose, it necessarily swept up people who had no interest in being a student. Simultaneously, it changed the idea of an education as a privilege to one of drudgery. I think he is onto something, however, that genie cannot be put back in the bottle. I think that is why charter schools are a good solution. At least with choice, families can feel they have a stake in the game and are more likely to see the education their child is getting as a privilege. 

Back to the teacher. He must know his students names and faces. He must see them as individuals. If the teacher wishes to mold them into “real people” he must see them as real people. At the same time, he warns against the impossibility of knowing each student on a deeply personal level. He suggests “typing” them as a way of short-handing the student. However, he says be aware that a few students will not fit a type. They are the “eccentrics.” These must be treated “with extreme care. They are explosive mixtures.” Some of these are the brooders, but some are the geniuses. They can be hard to spot at first, but the teacher must be on the lookout for those that don’t fit the normal stereotypes and work in a way to maximize their education. “The best way to avoid wasting the powers of a good pupil is to plan his work for him… Make him keep records. Make him  write… Then, at the end of three months, give him a rest and congratulate him, and while he is still elated, take him rapidly over his whole achievement. This gives him a sense of unexpected power.”

Not only do teachers need to know their subject and their students, they need to have wide and varied interests. “Teachers in schools and colleges must see more, think more, and understand more than the average man and woman of the society in which they live.” This helps the teacher connect the student to the outside world. It also tells a student that the subject under consideration is being taught by an interesting person. This reinforces the student’s desire to learn the subject and thus become interesting himself. 

The essential abilities of a teacher include a good memory, determination, and kindness. This describes someone with that essential strength of personality that exudes confidence. HIghet calls this quality “largeness of heart.” In short, a good teacher will love and enjoy his students and the world around him.

Then he moves on to the teacher’s methods. First of all, he advocates the teacher provide for a class a summary of the ground to be covered. This allows the students to see the subject matter as a cohesive whole and allows them to begin preparing questions for the material to be covered. As for what is in the plan, he says, "The first essential would be to cut down the monotonous reading and scansion, and to increase the quantity of explanatory lectures and discussions; the next would be to vary the types of teaching, so that the class should not always expect exactly the same tasks; and the third would be to conceive the subject-matter of the course not a as shapeless stream of foreign words to be read, translated, and scanned, but as an intellectual and artistic whole composed of various parts." He also cautions against "teaching the same old stuff year after year." This is a fault because the world is changing, the knowledge of the subject is changing, and therefore the teacher should be changing. He also highlights the need to read and know the original sources. This can freshen up teaching when you know the original documents and can add your own original commentary.

He moves on to a discussion of the "three main methods of communicating knowledge from teacher to pupil." The first one he deals with is lecturing. The purpose is the steady flow of information from teacher to student. A good lecturer knows the students cannot copy down everything said, so he therefore knows how to emphasize that which is noteworthy by delivering slowly and emphatically. It is also very important that the teacher, while not reading a lecture, come prepared for what he is to say. "Before he opens his mouth, the lecturer must know exactly what points he wishes to tell his audience, in what order, and with what emphasis." 

The second is the Socratic Method in which the teacher asks a series of leading questions designed to get the student to arrive at a predetermined point in his thinking. "This system is the most difficult, the least common, and the most thorough way to teach. It is most difficult because it demands constant alertness, invariable good humor, complete earnestness, an utter self-surrender to the cause of truth, on the part of both teacher and pupil.” He calls this the best form of education because if it has been done well, the student is convinced that he has not been taught, but has discovered on his own so many wonderful truths.

The third form is simply doing a lesson. “The pupil learns from three different activities: first, from doing his own work alone; second, from observing the mistakes he has missed, and also from defending himself on points where he believes he is right; third, from looking over the completed and corrected work and comparing it with the original assignment and his first draft. The first of these is the work of creation, the second is criticism, the third is appreciation of wholeness.” These must all work seamlessly together. 

Elaborating on this most common of methodology Highet says the students must first prepare privately for the class. Then the teacher fills in gaps in the understanding. Then the students are questioned to see if they have in fact prepared beforehand and if they are understanding what is being presented. This questioning should not be simply parroting back information from the text. It should be used as a means to integrate the information in a meaningful way, and make it more vivid. Allow the students to problem solve or find connections with what they just read. One method had the teacher writing, “What is the problem?” boldly on the chalkboard. Then the class discusses possible problems and solutions and comes to a conclusion. This energizes the class and leads to a spirit of competition which prods all students to really think about the issues presented. 

Like Gregory, Highet emphasizes the importance of fixing the lesson in the mind of the students. The first method is review. He cannot overemphasize the importance of this step. Never end a unit on the final lesson. Never end a lesson on the final thought. Always review. Next, use questions to fix an idea. One method that sounds particularly intriguing is called “quodlibets” which means “whatever you like.” The students fired questions at the teacher as a means of review. And the teacher makes sure to clarify any misconceptions while leaving his students with the distinct impression there is much more to be learned on the subject. Finally and obviously related, never exhaust a topic. Leave the students feeling like there is more to know and implicitly provide a challenge to go further in their studies. 

In a discussion of great teachers, Highet reminds us that a good teacher knows, “What he stimulates his pupils to think out for themselves often has a far more potent influence upon them.” In addition, “the wise father and the good teacher will challenge their sons and pupils to equal them, and help them, where it is wise, to differ and even to excel.”

As he continues to discuss great teachers he illuminates the Renaissance style of teaching. He states that they began early and immersed small children in letters, reading, and writing. “Next, the subjects were more limited in number, so that the energies of the pupils were not dissipated. But, at the same time, teaching was not rigidly departmentalized, as it tends to be nowadays.” This integration led to a more natural love of learning and little compulsion. “How did [the good schools] get the young to study difficult subjects?” The the teachers so love their subjects and "talked so interestingly about them that their pupils were fascinated.” Sometimes this flamboyance of learning led to a lack of complete accuracy, but it engendered a pure love of learning. Highet seems somewhat unconcerned about the mistakes communicated during a time that produced Shakespeare and Montaigne. Finally, the Renaissance teachers made learning fun! They incorporated games and plays. “They emphasized the fact that learning is a pleasure.” They created competitions and “encouraged the boys to compete with one another… They invented difficult tasks, challenging their best boys to complete them.”

He also gives high marks to the Jesuit teachers. Their primary characteristic was their ability to adapt. They recognized that each student and class was different. The teacher must learn to “adapt his teaching to different classes, and tread different pupils differently.” Today we call this “diversity,” a mushier version of what the Jesuits practiced. But it is interesting to know that unlike the stereotypes we hear of pre-Progressive education, teachers were well aware that students and classes differed and must be adapted to. He also points out as an aside the Jesuits' ability to talk in pictures. Everything was a metaphor. This ability to create analogies is extremely important in the teaching process. In addition, they set high expectations and used the great books to hook the souls producing “a long list of wise and learned Jesuit preachers, writers, philosophers, and scientists.”

Once again, he bemoans universal education as the source for all that ails education today. Education came under the purview of Boards and Ministries of Education and, “the result of the grim quasi-religious moral attitude of the early nineteenth century, which thought that important subjects could only be treated in a deadly serious way, which admired the discipline of floggings and harsh examinations as a preparation for life, and which believed the aim of education to be the collection of large masses of useful facts, as the aim of life was the collection of large masses of stocks, bonds, and landed properties.” In short, universal, mandated, publicly-funded education sucked the soul out of true education.

He concludes with a nod to advertisers who definitely have something to teach the teachers. They know how to communicate a message effectively. “1. Make it vivid… 2. Make it memorable…3. Make it relevant.” They might be using these techniques for “debased” ends, but they are quite effective at teaching. 

As teachers, we can offer something so much better than a new brand of toothpaste or a flashy automobile. We offer the ability to help create great souls, people who are better and more capacious than they otherwise would be except for being in our classroom. We have an amazing opportunity learn with and love young people and to help them become more. I can't wait!