A collection of reviews and news pieces regarding former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis's 2006 book Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (subtitle in paperback: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?)

Jacques Barzun turned 100 on November 30th.

Happy Birthday Jacques Barzun
ACTA online

December 05, 2007

A Georgetown senior reflects on their current core curriculum.

GU Liberal Education Needs a Liberal Dose of Change
Stephen Kenny

The Hoya - Georgetown University Newspaper

Dec. 05, 2007
 

Do we need a literary canon?

"Jonathan Sacks is right that we need a common culture, but wrong to think it should be based on a canon. Forcing young people to read the Bible won't foster a sense of belonging. Shared references must evolve more organically"

-Richard Jenkyns, Prospect Magazine, December 2007

 

 

The Daily Orange, an independent student newspaper published in Syracuse, New York, takes a look at Shimer College .

For the next month, New York Times' Reading Room bloggers will discuss the new translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf). Mr. Pevear has a recent  essay int the NYT Book Review about the new translation.

On the Uses of a Liberal Education (Part 2: As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor) (pdf)

Earl Shorris, Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1997

 

(Apparent companion piece to Mark Edmundson's.)

"Forget Plato, Aristotle and Descartes, we've got Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup, the single work of required reading for the entire [Cornell] freshman class this year."

For a Core
Rob Fishman, senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University

Bellow brouhaha.

James Kugel, former professor of Hebrew Studies at Harvard and an Orthodox Jew has a new book out, How to Read the Bible, which is getting positive press. From a NY Times piece on the book:

"Most unsettling to religious Jews and Christians may be Kugel's chapters about the origins of God and his chosen people. Kugel says that there is essentially no evidence -- archaeological, historical, cultural -- for the events in the Torah. No sign of an exodus from Egypt; no proof that Israelites ever invaded, much less conquered, Canaan; no indication that Jericho was ever sacked. In fact, quite the contrary: current evidence suggests that the Israelites were probably Canaanites themselves, semi-nomadic highlanders or fleeing city dwellers who gradually separated from their mother culture, established a distinct identity and invented a mythical past."

A first chapter of the book is also available:

"In going through the Bible, however, this book will focus not only on what the text says but on the larger question of what a modern reader is to make of it, how it is to be read. This will mean examining two quite different ways of understanding the Bible, those of modern biblical scholars and of ancient interpreters."

(via kottke)

Elevating the Great Books Anew (Inside Higher Ed)
   
"In his new book, Anthony T. Kronman argues that the American college curriculum is seriously flawed for not giving students a true grounding in the classics that explore the human condition. Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press) mixes Kronman's assessment of the problems in academe with a set of proposed solutions. Kronman, the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University, responded to questions about the book."



Edit 10/19/07
Another review:
Jacob Laksin (City Journal)
Dissenter Inside the Tower
Yale professor Anthony Kronman laments the politicization of the humanities.
12 October 2007

Some musing on higher education in which Meiklejohn, Barr, Buchanan, McKeon, Hutchins, and Adler are all briefly discussed.

Thought for the day:

"If you haven't read the book you should shut the hell up," said Daniel Born, vice president at Chicago-based the Great Books Foundation and editor of the Common Review. "That should maybe be the central rule of etiquette for any book club or book discussion."

Read 'em the riot act
MEETING | Discussion hogs, bullies and non-reading slackers must be shelved for group to reach potential

September 18, 2007 | Chicago Sun-Times

More from Jim Sleeper (via tmpcafe)

Time For a Review of the Times Book Review?

 

"[Allan] Bloom was eccentric, and not, shall we say, my cup of tea. But some of his arguments deserve rescuing from conservative ideologues and from journalists addicted to "left vs. right" scenarios or confused and embittered by what they think liberals did to their own educations. Such journalists thought I must be trying to rescue Bloom from the right in order to claim him for the left. They didn't notice that liberal education is endangered far more now by conservative capitalist surges than by tenured radicals – an important distinction.

"As it turns out, some of these confused journalists were working at The Times Book Review itself. "

Allan Bloom, 20 years later

"His famous critique of the academic left had merit, but the problem today - as Bloom himself recognised - is his neoconservative champions."

Jim Sleeper
Guardian, September 17, 2007

Chasing down the John Searle quote from Rachel Donadio's aforelinked Revisiting the Canon Wars piece.

 

"There is a certain irony in this in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked."

John Searle
The Storm Over the University
The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990


 

Reading List
Books on the Canon Wars
By RACHEL DONADIO
New York Times, September 16, 2007

"Shelves of books on the state of American higher education have appeared over the years, ranging from the historical to the analytical to the downright polemical. The following list presents some highlights from the last half-century of debate over what an educated person should know."

Revisiting the Canon Wars
By RACHEL DONADIO
New York Times, September 16, 2007

"Today it's generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there's a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations."

Michael Silverblatt chats with David Foster Wallace on the occasion of the publication of Infinite Jest. (KCRW's "Bookworm" 4/11/96)

MS: Well, what thrilled me about the book is that around two hundred pages in what I felt about it was that it just began to get better and better and better. I started to like it more and more, and look forward to going back to reading it and felt a kind of, I don't know, tenderness toward it, toward both its characters and its narrator, because of the extraordinary effort that was going into writing it. It didn't seem like difficulty for difficulty's sake; it seemed like immense difficulty being expended because something important about how difficult it has become to be human needed to be said, and that there weren't other ways to say that.

DFW: I feel like I want to ask you to adopt me.

Our Compassless Colleges
By PETER BERKOWITZ
Wall Street Journal September 5, 2007

"At universities and colleges throughout the land, undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for -- and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support -- "liberal" education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or failing to honor, a coherent concept of what constitutes an educated human being."

HEROES
The Champions of Our Literary Imagination
By Bruce Meyer
HarperCollins, 273 pages, $34.95

Reviewed by KEITH GAREBIAN
Toronto Globe and Mail, September 8, 2007

"From Gilgamesh to Jesus, from Beowulf to King Arthur, from Hercules to Superman, from Hamlet to King Lear, the most extraordinary heroes live through the pages of literature, tempting us to accompany them on their special quests through life's labyrinths, where they battle foes and obstacles and show how we, ordinary mortals, are joined to them collectively as they attempt to solve the puzzles of their own being."

Canon fodder
For forging higher ideas in young minds, Waller Newell says, there's nothing like the classics of Western civilization.  (Toronto Globe and Mail Sept. 8, 2007)

The Great Books Newsletter, Summer 2007 (pdf) announces the commencement of the eighth academic year The Great Books Academy has offered homeschooling curricula, books, enrollment services, and online classes.

Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children (pdf)
by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Diane Ravitch
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
7/11/2007

"America's true competitive edge over the long haul is not its technical prowess but its creativity, its imagination, its inventiveness. And those attributes are best inculcated not by skill-drill or "STEM" [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education] but through liberal arts and sciences, liberally defined. Thus argues this new Fordham volume, edited by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Diane Ravitch, which also explores what policymakers and educators at all levels can to do sustain liberal learning and sketches an unlovely future if we fail."

A review of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, by Elizabeth Kantor

 

"Elizabeth Kantor has undertaken the monumental task of reviving the Western literary canon."

"The [College of the University of] Chicago faculty wondered how students, many just freshmen, could possibly read a classic a week. The eminent classicist Paul Shorey put this question to [President Robert M.] Hutchins, recalling that 'when I was a senior at Harvard, it took us a whole year to study Dante's Divine Comedy.' 'The difference," Hutchins shot back, 'is that our students are bright.'"

THE WAR OF THE GREAT BOOKS
American Heritage Magazine, 1989
by Benjamin McArthur

Speaking of Chomsky, I'm not sure I was aware of this unitl now: here is a transcript, Realaudio soundtrack, and hyperlinked supplementary material to Part I of the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.

Hoover Institution partial digital archive of William F. Buckley's Firing Line. Noam Chomsky? Priceless.

At the end of an annual meeting of the Annapolis Group, a loose association of liberal arts colleges, it was announced that the presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges had decided to stop participating in the annual college rankings by U.S. News and World Report.

Are Liberal Arts Dead?  Far from it. In fact, liberal arts grads are in high demand in the corporate world.

-By Jamienne Studley

"TheGreatBooks.com  is designed to help Christian educators use the classical model to help each high school student own his or her faith as a total worldview."

A new report contends that fewer and fewer college English majors are being required to study Shakespeare. In a 60-page report titled " The Vanishing Shakespeare," the non-profit American Council of Trustees and Alumni reports that only 15 of the 70 colleges and universities it examined require their English majors to take a Shakespeare course.

10 Great Books about Education. A short reading list of works that have inspired the vision of Habele , a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of educational opportunities in the remote islands and atolls of Micronesia, an impoverished former American trust territory in the Central Pacific.

1777 and 1843 editions of the New England Primer .

Mark Edmundson's 1997 Harper's essay On the Uses of a Liberal Education As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students.

 

Also, a video clip and transcript of his appearance on Booknotes in support of his book Why Read?

1937 Time magazine piece on the 'New Program' at St. John's College.

Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism.

A blog chronicling one family's experience educating their boys through what they call classical Christian homeschooling .

First Harvard College 'Core' curriculum overhaul in 30 years.

Liberal Education, Then and Now: J.S. Mill's idea of a university, and our own.

Peter Berkowitz, Hoover Institution Policy Review

Philip E. Lewis Appointed Vice President for the Liberal Arts Colleges Program of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation .

Some reflections from a current student in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults (Graham School of General Studies, University of Chicago).

Complete text of Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir, by Milton Mayer.

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: essay ca. 1915 by John Erskine, early central figure in what has come to be known as the "Great Books movement" in the U.S.

Lion: A Memoir of Mark Van Doren  by Dan Wakefield (Ploughshares, Fall 1991)

One day I'll get round to these books by Susan Wise Bauer:

The Well-Educated Mind
A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

The Well-Trained Mind
A Guide to Classical Education at Home

What Should College Teach?  Rountable discussion with distinguished professsors.  MP3 from radioopensource.org .

 

 

Chapters One and Two of Robert M. Hutchins' Education for Freedom .

Complete text of the 1965 version of Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book (with Charles Van Doren).  The Jesus thing and the annoying language pack installation prompt?  No idea.

Liberal Education & Global Community by Martha Nussbaum.

I feel as though I should have known about this essay before now:

The Lost Tools of Learning
by Dorothy Sayers

Richard Dawkins on Why There Almost Certainly Is No God.

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

Education for Mutual Understanding?
Les Reid Jul 21, 04
Humanists and the Religious Education review in Northern Ireland

"Can believers and non-believers find common ground? In N Ireland we are so used to the perennial squabble between two varieties of Christianity that other forms of disagreement (and reconciliation, we hope) tend to be overlooked."

The End of Education
The Fragmentation of the American University

Commonweal
by Alasdair MacIntyre  

"What should be the distinctive calling of the American Catholic university or college here and now? It should be to challenge its secular counterparts by recovering both for them and for itself a less fragmented conception of what an education beyond high school should be, by identifying what has gone badly wrong with even the best of secular universities. From a Catholic point of view the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it is not Catholic. It is at fault insofar as it is not a university."

Sustainability: the Ultimate Liberal Art
October 20, 2006 issue of The Chronicle Review
By FRANK H.T. RHODES, president emeritus of Cornell University

"Ironic as it may now seem, the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic were regarded by the ancient Greeks as practical and useful skills — so useful, in fact, that they were seen as the indispensable preparation for citizenship, for participation in a free society. And it was in Greece, the same Greece, that science was "invented." How doubly ironic, then, that in our science-driven age, we have so little place for the wisdom of Greece."

Dan Dennett on TEDTalks

Noam Chomsky - Santa Fe in January 2005

Review of Michael Berube's book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? 

"In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom said that the goal of a liberal education was to acquaint students with the real alternatives that have been offered to answer the question: "How should I live my life?"  That question is as much aesthetic as political, as much religious as social or intellectual.  At the deepest level, I suppose, we think of The New Criterion as a handmaiden in that never-ending task."  -- Interview with Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher of the New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books

Famed First Amendment scholar Leonard W. Levy dies

By Ronald K.L. Collins
First Amendment Center scholar
08.30.06
Leonard Williams Levy, noted educator and American constitutional historian, died last week. His death, previously unreported, was confirmed by his friend and co-author, UCLA Law emeritus professor Kenneth L. Karst. Levy died at his home in Ashland, Ore.

. . .[His] Legacy of Suppression was commissioned by Robert Maynard Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic as a pamphlet; it was a revisionist interpretation of the speech and press clauses of the First Amendment. Levy argued, among other things, that freedom of the press as understood by the Framers meant merely the absence of prior restraints. Objecting to Levy's findings, Hutchins refused to print the work.

Years later, Levy noted that he published Legacy "to spite Hutchins and the Fund."

"Philosophical Stages [is] an interdisciplinary research project experimenting with using dramatic arts to teach philosophy to Bay Area high school students and Stanford undergraduates. " (Stanford News)

 

A description of the project and examples of student work can be found at http://philosophicalstages.org/.

 

 

"Most [business or technology majors] are conservative, not in any intellectual sense, but in the sense (which they admit) of fearfully conforming to the political and economic status quo, to the attitudes that will be expected of them as compliant employees, and to the necessity of looking out for number one in the "Survivor" sweepstakes of the global economy. Such students are not likely to welcome the cognitive dissonance forced on them by humanities courses demanding Socratic self-questioning of their sociopolitical or religious dogmas."

Rethinking the Culture Wars — I
By Donald Lazere
Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 22 '06

"What happened to the precision, discrimination and critical humanism that we celebrate as the hallmarks of liberal education and the Western heritage?" asked the late Edward Said in the June '86 issue of The Nation. This in the context of terrorism, American foreign policy, consensus, and dissent.

"Universities may be churning out capable earners and consumers, says THOMAS HIBBS*, but they are failing to equip students for meaningful lives." (Dallas Morning News, 8/20/06)

* Philosopher and dean of the Honors College at Baylor University

Discussed:

-Harry Lewis' Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education -Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons
-Sex!
-Animal House!
-Happy Days!
-Madeleine Levine's The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material -Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids
-Newman's The Idea of the University

. . .and more!

Appreciated seeing this editorial in the Seattle Times on the value of a liberal education.

Some of my recent iPod listening

http://www.thegreatideas.org/videosandbooks.html

 

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/csdi/index.html

Dallas Morning News piece in which former deep-sea diver recalls enrolling at Thomas Aquinas College* as "middle age was rapidly closing in."

 

* Catholic "great books" college in Santa Paula, CA modeled on the secular program at St. John's College.  Check out their reading lists:

 

TAC

 

SJC

 

Aspen Times article on the recent controversy surrounding the proposed renaming of the Paepcke Auditorium at the Aspen Institute to Resnick Auditorium, in recognition of a $4 million donation to upgrade the facility from Stewart and Lynda Resnick.

 

And some letters to the editor regarding same.

 

 

A wealth of Walter Kaufmann material I've not seen available online until now, including the complete text of the out-of-print Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy.

Some thoughts on the work of Walter Kaufmann.

The Mortimer Jerome Adler Papers (1939-1944) at UT Austin.

East Valley/ Scottsdale Tribune -- Fight for students goes old school

Fight for students goes old school

By Andrea Falkenhagen
Tribune

An elite charter prep school wants to bring its traditional approach to education -Socrates, uniforms and all - to Scottsdale. More than 200 Scottsdale families have already shown interest in Scottsdale Preparatory Academy, which could open in fall 2008, said Daniel Scoggin, chief executive officer of Great Hearts Preparatory Academies,...

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Great Books and The Great Book

Marc Fisher over at the Washington Post remarks on the academic freedoms at Patrick Henry. Can a school study the scripture as well as Aristotle and what weight should be given to each text? Does having a statement of faith mean that you can’t learn and grow from the truths of non-biblical texts? (via scriptoriumdaily)

Sven Birkerts reviews The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read, By Stuart Kelly. (Boston Globe)

"Stories and legends are the meat of Kelly's book. Take the case of Aeschylus and the Ptolemys. It was Ptolemy I who traveled the known world with Alexander the Great, and later ruled Egypt, building there the monumental Alexandrian library. His grandson, Ptolemy III, devoted to the great institution, discovered 'an anomaly of unthinkable proportions' -- the lack of a complete text of the master Greek dramatist. The only extant version, in scrolls, was in Athens, so Ptolemy III arranged to borrow the text for copying purposes, leaving as collateral the staggering sum of 15 talents. A small amount to sacrifice, though, for what was known to be 'a unicum, a nonpareil, a one and only.'"

You have to love a page that begins "You may never have heard the name of the World's Smartest Man, Richard McKeon."

And, further: "To the best of my knowledge, he is the smartest man in known history. For a rough approximation of his brilliance, think of ArIstotle [sic], about 2,000 years SMARTER [sic]."

Wiki begins their entry with the rather more restrained "McKeon is a pivotal but neglected figure in 20th Century American Philosophy. In a career which spanned seven decades, he published 158 articles and 11 books. He received most of the honours possible for an American philosopher, including being given an invitation to deliver the Paul Carus Lectures in 1969."

One more about him.

The Trivium

Chapter One (pdf) of a book titled The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, by Sister Miriam Joseph. Originally published in the 1930s, an updated edition appeared in 2002, reformatted with extensive notes, references, and biographical information.


"Sister Miriam Joseph, the author, wrote the book from a strong academic perspective. Holding degrees from Saint Mary’s College in Indiana, University of Notre Dame, and Columbia University, Sister spent her life supporting her belief that women could be fine journalists and that more quality writers with a Christian and Catholic faith would help to address the ills of society. When she began teaching as an English professor at Saint Mary’s in 1931, she was assigned the courses on rhetoric, grammar, and composition. In 1935 after hearing Mortimer Adler speak, Sister Miriam Joseph was asked to "revive the united Trivium again in the freshman class." After studying closely with Mortimer Adler for several months, Sister returned to Saint Mary’s to begin putting together the text, The Trivium in College Composition and Reading, to be used in her class, a required course for all freshmen." (via homeschoolchristian.com)

Great Books Lists

Ancient Wisdom from Dead White Males

"We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves."

From the preface of "The Great Conversation", book one of "Great Books of the Western World," edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler - December 1, 1951. (via Curmudgeon)

New York Times review of Happiness: A History, by Darrin M. McMahon

A brief recollection of Mark Van Doren.

A Q&A With Darrin M. McMahon

...author of Happiness: A History

"In the 1990s, Darrin M. McMahon was teaching a "Great Books" course
at Columbia University ("from Plato to NATO," he calls it), and one
subject - happiness - 'was leaping off the page in all these major
texts'. . . .

"Times: Why did the ancient Greeks believe that you had to be dead if
you wanted to call yourself happy?"

Four Things Meme

Matt tagged me.

Four jobs I've had:
1. paper boy
2. fast food jockey
3. selling home stereo speakers out of a white van by flagging down other motorists
4. postproduction audio engineer for small broadcast TV studio

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Annie Hall
2. The Godfather
3. Barfly
4. Brazil

Four places I've lived:
1. Kansas City, MO
2. San Diego, CA
3. Pasadena, CA
4. Big Sandy, TX

Four TV shows I love:
1. The Sopranos
2. The Larry Sanders Show
3. The Office (BBC)
4. Home Movies

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Vail, CO
2. Jerusalem
3. Amman, Jordan
4. Some sugary white beach in Florida when I was a boy

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. potato leek soup
2. yer good ol' pepperoni pie
3. spicy Thai dishes
4. turkey 'n mashed taters

Four sites I visit daily:
1. news.google.com
2. kottke.org
3. blogger.com
4. bookfinder.com

Five places I would rather be right now:
1. in a bar
2. in the sack
3. somewhere far, far, away from computers with like babbling brooks and hiking trails and whatnot
4. on stage playing my drums
5. NYC

 

I tag  . . . wait I don't know any more bloggers.

Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts Launches Major National Study

 

CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind., Jan. 30 (AScribe Newswire) -- The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College announces the launch of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. This four-year, multi-million dollar program is one of the most comprehensive national studies of the effects of American higher education. The study will focus on the impact of liberal arts education, exploring how students develop during their college years and how key educational experiences promote this development.

NITLE

"NITLE is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting liberal education. We provide opportunities for teachers in liberal arts contexts to create transformative learning experiences for and with their students by deploying emerging technologies in innovative, effective, and sustainable ways.

"Our mission is to catalyze innovative teaching to enrich and advance liberal education in the digital age."

“Freedom, Piety, and the Perpetuation of Our Institutions”

Keynote Address: American Academy of Liberal Education Annual Meeting
By Christopher B. Nelson, President,
St. John’s College i n Annapolis , MD
June 28, 2004

The American Academy for Liberal Education

The American Academy for Liberal Education is a national organization dedicated to strengthening and promoting liberal education through accreditation and research.

Eva Brann: Exploring Great Books

2005 National Humanities Medalist Eva Brann calls herself a latecomer to St. John's College and its great books program. "I've been here only forty-eight years," she says, laughing.

Bonanza for liberal arts

Christopher Pearson: Bonanza for liberal arts
Have your say, email The Forum theforum@theaustralian.com.au
January 21, 2006
LAST week's column was a series of bleak reflections on the declining levels of literacy in Australian schools and universities. This column, in contrast, is about some welcome developments in tertiary education - the opening for business of Campion College in Sydney and its new degree course in the liberal arts.

A Small Niche for Great Books

An Armenian Studies professor's lonely accomplishment in general education
Published On Friday, January 20, 2006  12:01 AM [ thecrimson.com]
By TRAVIS R. KAVULLA
 

Is Intelligent Design the same as traditional Natural Theology?

When zealots coerce the uninformed

By DALE BRAIMAN
COMMUNITY VOICES

Daytona Beach News Journal

"Someone to Read Up To"

Someone to Read Up To

 

-The Weekend Australian, 14 January 2006

 

The Kelso Institute

"Louis Kelso's vision of Capitalism was, in Dr. [Mortimer J.] Adler's description, 'the economically free and classless society which supports political democracy and which, above all, helps political democracy to preserve the institutions of a free society.' To Dr. Adler's mind, this conception was 'the most revolutionary idea of the century.'"

Some Great Books and Philosophy Discussions

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreatConversation/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreatConversationToo/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/more_great_conversation/

Reference Page for the above three.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/socratescafe/

Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir by Milton Mayer

Hutchins' University of Chicago

Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Audio Archive

The Corporation and the Republic

By Scott Buchanan

Originally published in April 1958 as a pamphlet issued in connection
with The Fund for the Republic's discussion of the Free Society.
(c) 1958 Fund for the Republic
There are no restrictions on the use of this work.

"Suffering and the Bible"

[Note: The following is a cleaned up version of a page located here. I fixed a number of what were presumably scanning glitches.]
------------------
Walter Kaufmann (1921--1980) was born in Germany. Raised as a Lutheran, he found himself unable to accept many features of Christian doctrine and converted to Judaism at the age of eleven. Nazi attacks on Jews compelled him to leave Germany in 1939. He came to the United States and studied philosophy at Williams College and later at Harvard. By this time he had given up belief in religion. He began a long association with Princeton University in 1947. Around this time he discovered the work of Nietzsche, whose philosophy he believed to have been widely misinterpreted as a forerunner of Nazi ideology. This was the thrust of his landmark biographical study, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950). Kaufmann also translated many of Nietzsche's works. Among his other books are Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958) and a translation of Goethe's Faust (1961). The Faith of a Heretic (1961) is his most exhaustive and personal statement on religion. In the following extract from chapter 6, "Suffering and the Bible," Kauffmann keenly analyzes several arguments that attempt to justify God's benevolence in a world full of suffering, and concludes that the popular conception of God is irremediably flawed.

From Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 149-52, 168-69, 170-72, 177-78, 180-81. Copyright 1960, 1961 by Walter Kaufmann. Reprinted by permission of David Kaufmann, trustee of the Estate of Walter Kaufmann.
-------------------
NO OTHER PROBLEM OF THEOLOGY or the philosophy of religion has excited so sustained and wide an interest as the problem of suffering. In spite of that, people keep saying, as if it were a well-known truth, that you cannot prove or disprove God's existence. This cliché is as true as the assertion that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of y. Of course, it is easy to construct a formally valid proof that y, or God, exists—or, for that matter, that they do not exist: x said that y exists; x always spoke the truth (in fact, he said: I am the truth); hence, y exists. Or: y is a z; no z exists; hence, y does not exist. But whether the existence or non-existence of y, or God, can be proved from plausible premises depends on the meaning we assign to y, or to God. And the term "God" . . . is almost, though not quite, as elastic as the symbol "y." One's strategy in trying to defend or to attack the claim that God exists obviously depends on what is meant by "God." It may be objected that it is not so difficult to isolate what might be called the popular conception of God. The problem of suffering is of crucial importance because it shows that the God of popular theism does not exist.

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know? Dogmatic theology. . . has no monopoly on dealing with this problem. Let us see how a philosopher might deal with it, after repudiating dog­matic theology and endorsing the importance of the "critical, historical, and psychological study of religion." My approach will be part philo­sophical, part historical—only partially philosophic because the problem can be illuminated greatly by being placed in historical per­spective. What matters here is not to display philosophic acumen but really to remove some of the deeply felt perplexity that surrounds this problem; and toward that end, we shall have to draw on history as well as philosophy.

There are at least three easy ways of disposing of the problem why there is suffering. If we adopt the position that everything in the universe, or at least a great deal, is due to chance, the problem is answered in effect. Indeed, as we reflect on this solution, it becomes clear that the "why" of the problem of suffering asks for a purpose; a mere cause will not do. Immediately a second solution comes to mind: if we say that the uni­verse, far from being governed by chance, is subject to iron laws but not my purpose, the problem of suffering is again taken care of. Thirdly, even if we assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add that this purpose—or, if there are several, at least one of them—is not especially intent on preventing suffering, whether it is indifferent to suf­fering or actually rejoices in it.

All three solutions are actually encountered in well-known religions. Although the two great native religions of China, Confucianism and Taoism, are far from dogmatic or even doctrinaire, and neither of them commands assent to any set of theories, both approximate the first solution which accepts events simply as happening, without checking either laws or purposes behind them.

The second solution, which postulates a lawful world order but no purpose, is encountered in the two great religions which originated in India: Hinduism and Buddhism. Here an attempt is made to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to deserve his wretched fate; it is a punishment for the wrongs he did in a previous life. We are all reborn after death in accordance with the way we behaved during our lives: we receive reward and punishment as our souls migrate from one existence to the next. The transmigration of souls proceeds in accordance with a fixed moral order, but there is no purpose behind it. The scientific world-view also disposes of the problem of suffering by denying that the laws of nature are governed by any purpose.

The third solution is familiar from polytheistic religions—for example, the Iliad and the Odyssey—but present also in the Persian religi­on of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), who taught that there were two gods, god of light and goodness (Ormazd or Ahura-Mazda) and a god of darkness and evil (Ahriman). Here, and in many so-called primitive reli­gions, too, suffering is charged to some evil purpose.

In all three cases, and for most human beings, the problem of suffering poses no difficult problem at all: one has a world picture in which suffering has its place, a world picture that takes suffering into account. To make the problem of suffering a perplexing problem, one requires very specific presuppositions, and once those are accepted the problem becomes not only puzzling but insoluble.

For atheism and polytheism there is no special problem of suf­fering, nor need there be for every kind of monotheism. The problem rises when monotheism is enriched with—or impoverished by—two assumptions: that God is omnipotent and that God is just. In fact, pop­ular theism goes beyond merely asserting God's justice and claims that God is "good," that he is morally perfect, that he hates suffering, that he loves man, and that he is infinitely merciful, far transcending all human mercy, love, and perfection.

Once these assumptions are granted, the problem arises: why, then, is there all the suffering we know? And as long as these assumptions are granted, this question cannot be answered. For if these assumptions were true, it would follow that there could not be all of this suffering. Conversely: since it is a fact that there is all this suffering, it is plain that at least one of these assumptions must be false. Popular theism is refuted by the existence of so much suffering. The theism preached from thousands of pulpits and credited by millions of believers is disproved by Auschwitz and a billion lesser evils.

The use of "God" as a synonym for being-itself, or for the "pure act of being," or for nature, or for scores of other things for which other terms are readily available, cannot be disproved but only questioned as pettifoggery. The assertion that God exists, if only God is taken in some such Pickwickian sense, is false, too: not false in the sense of being incorrect, but false in the sense of being misleading and to that extent deceptive.

It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the exis­tence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow. And a great deal of theology as well as a little of philos­ophy—the rationalizing kind of philosophy which seeks ingenious rea­sons for what is believed to begin with—has consisted in attempts to reconcile the popular image of God with the abundance of suffering.

[One] spurious solution, which is one of the prime glories of Chris­tian theology, claims in effect that suffering is a necessary adjunct of free will. God created man with free will, which was part of God's goodness since a creature with free will is better than one without it. (Why, in that case, he first made so many creatures without it, we are not usually told.) Man then misused his free will, disobeyed God, as God knew he would do, and ate of the fruit of the one tree in Paradise whose fruit he was not supposed to eat. This made suffering inevitable. (We are not told why.) The uncanny lack of logic in this supposed solution is gen­erally covered up with a phrase: original sin.

How old this doctrine is, is arguable. Some of the motifs are encoun­tered in pre-Christian times, not only in Judaism but also in Greek thought. But in its familiar form it is a specifically Christian dogma. Augustine thought that he found it in Paul's Epistle to the Romans 5:12: "Therefore, as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men—eph ho panteshamarton." What was the meaning of these four Greek words? The last two clearly mean "all have sinned"; but what does eph ho mean? Augustine did not read Greek but Latin, and wrote Latin, too, and took it to mean "in whom" (in quo), while the King James Bible and the Revised Standard Version translate "in that" or "because" ( eo quod).

As George Foot Moore[1] puts it: "For. . . 'for that all have sinned,' the Latin version has in quo omnes peccaverunt 'in whom (sc. Adam) all sinned.' If the translator had rendered eo quod, it is possible that the Western church might have been as little afflicted with original sin as the Greeks or the Orientals."

The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering. In either case, the following questions must be pressed.

First: if God knew that man would abuse his free will and that this would entail cancer and Auschwitz, why then did he give man free will? Second—and this question, though surely obvious, scarcely ever gets asked—is there really any connection at all between ever so much suf­fering and free will? Isn't the introduction of free will at this point a red herring?...

Far from solving the problem by invoking original sin, Augustine and most of the Christian theologians who came after him merely aggravated the problem. If such suffering as is described ... in the New York Times' annual pre-Christmas survey of 'The Hundred Neediest Cases," and in any number of other easily accessible places, is the inevitable conse­quence of Adam's sin—or if this is the price God had to pay for endowing man with free will—then it makes no sense to call him omnipotent. And if he was willing to pay this price for his own greater glory, as some Chris­tian theologians have suggested, or for the greater beauty of the cosmos, because shadows are needed to set off highlights, as some Christian philosophers have argued, what sense does it make to attribute moral perfection to him?

At this point, those who press this ... pseudo-solution invariably begin to use words irresponsibly. Sooner or later we are told that when such attributes as omnipotence, mercy, justice, and love are ascribed to God they do not mean what they mean applied to men. John Stuart Mill's fine response to this has been cited in Chapter II. In a less rhetor­ical vein, it may be said that at this point the theologians and philosophers simply repeat ancient formulas in defiance of all sense. One might as well claim that God is purple with yellow dots, or circular, or every inch a woman—provided only that these terms are not used in their customary senses. These, of course, are not ancient formulas; hence, it is not likely that anybody in his right mind would seriously say such things. But the point is that when anybody has recourse to such means, argument fails. It is as if you pointed out to someone that eleven times eleven were not equal to one hundred and he said: it is, too—though of course not if you use the terms the way one usually does.

To be sure, one need not remain speechless. One can ask for the admission that, as long as we use the terms in the only way in which they have ever been given any precise meaning, God is either not omnipotent or not perfectly just, loving, and merciful. Some people, when it comes to that, retort: How do you know that we use the words right? Perhaps the way in which we ordinarily use these terms is wrong.

To this, two replies are possible. The first is philosophically interesting but may not persuade many who are sincerely perplexed. When we use English, or Greek, or Hebrew words in conformity with their gen­erally accepted meanings and fully obeying the genius and the rules of the language, it makes no sense to say that perhaps their "real" meaning is quite different. It does make sense to suggest that a particular term has an additional technical sense; but, if that is the case, one should admit that, as long as it is used in its ordinary, non-technical sense, God is, say, unjust, or cruel, or lacking in power.

The second reply interprets the question differently. What the questioner means may well be that our ordinary conceptions of love, justice, and mercy stand in need of revision; that our ideals are perverted. If so, we should presumably model ourselves on God's "justice" and "love." And this is precisely what former ages did. Children who disobeyed adults who broke some minor law or regulation were punished in ways that strike us as inhumanly cruel. Those who do not like reading history find examples enough in Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo.

This last point, which is surely of very great importance, can be put differently by recalling once more Job's wonderful words: "If I sin, ... why dost thou not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity?" The attempt to solve the problem of suffering by postulating original sin depends on the belief that cruelty is justified when it is retributive; indeed, that morality commands retribution. Although Job denied this, most theologians have clung to it tenaciously; and to this day the majority of Christian theologians champion the retributive function of punishment and the death penalty. At this point, some liberal Protestants who invoke [this] pseudo-solution are less consistent than more traditional theologians and ministers: they fight as unjust and unloving what they consider compatible with perfect justice and love. But, as we have seen, the traditional theologians I not solve the problem either, and their conceptions of love and justice are inhuman—especially if one considers that Job and Jonah were part of their Bible.

Indeed, Augustine and his successors aggravated the problem of suffering in yet another way, instead of approaching a solution: by accepting as true Jesus' references in the Gospels to hell and eternal torment, and by bettering the instruction. According to Augustine and many of his successors, all men deserve eternal torture, but God in his infinite mercy saves a very few. Nobody is treated worse than he deserves, but a few are treated better than they deserve, salvationbeing due not to merit but solely to grace. In the face of thesebeliefs, Augus­tine and legions after him assert God's perfect justice, mercy, and good­ness. And to save men from eternal torment, it came to be considered iist and merciful to torture heretics, or those suspected of some heresy, for a few days. . . .

"What," to quote Ecclesiastes, "is the conclusion of the whole matter?"[2] There is, first of all, a Biblical notion not yet mentioned—that of vicarious suffering, beautifully expressed in Isaiah 53: "He is despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. . . . Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. . . . He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. . . . The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." Christians have seen in these words a prophecy of Christ; Jewshave applied the words to their own people, in an effort to give theirown perennial sufferings some meaning. The search for a purpose behindsuffering is not a mere matter of metaphysical speculation, nor a frivolous pastime of theologians. Man can stand superhuman suf­fering if only he does not lack the conviction that it serves some purpose. Even less severe pain, on the other hand, may seem unbearable, or simply not worth enduring, if it is not redeemed by any meaning.

It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose. On the contrary, the lack of any cosmic purpose may be experienced as liberating, as if a great weight had been lifted from us. Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it. The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepens his under­standing and sensibility, in growing through his pains. The same is true of some religious figures and of men like Lincoln and Freud. It is small comfort to tell the girl born without a nose: make the most of that! She may lack the strength, the talent, the vitality. But the plain fact is that not all suffering serves a purpose; that most of it remains utterly senseless; and that if there is to be any meaning to it, it is we who must giveit.

The sufferer who cannot give any meaning to his suffering may inspire someone else, possibly without even knowing it, perhaps after death. But most suffering remains unredeemed by any purpose, albeit a challenge to humanity.

There is one more verse in Job that should be quoted. At the end of the first chapter, when he has lost all his possessions and then hischil­dren as well, he says: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;blessed be the name of the Lord." Without claiming that the followingremarks represent or distill "the immortal soul" of his words, one can find more meaning in them, or find them more suggestive, than meets the eye at first glance.

Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look. Job personifies the inscrutable, merciless, uncanny in a god who is all-pow­erful but not just. . . .

Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood. "Behold the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of the oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive; but better than both is he who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds done under the sun." Whether Ecclesiastes, who "saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun," retained any faith in God is a moot point, but Jeremiah and Job and the psalmists who speak in a similar vein did. Pagan piety rose to similar heights of despair and created tragedies.

The deepest difference between religions is not that between poly­theism and monotheism. To which camp would one assign Sophocles? Even the difference between theism and atheism is not nearly so pro­found as that between those who feel and those who do not feel their brothers' torments. The Buddha, like the prophets and the Greek trage­dians, did, though he did not believe in any deity. There is no inkling of such piety in the callous religiousness of those who note the regu­larities of nature, find some proof in that of the existence of a God or gods, and practice magic, rites, or pray to ensure rain, success, or speedy passage into heaven.

Natural theology is a form of heathenism, represented in the Bible by the friends of Job. The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that repre­sented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.

Their piety is a cry in the night, born of suffering so intense that they cannot contain it and must shriek, speak, accuse, and argue with God—not about him—for there is no other human being who would understand, and the prose of dialogue could not be faithful to the poetry of anguish. In time, theologians come to wrench some usefulphrases out of Latin versions of a Hebrew outcry, blind with tears, and try to win some argument about a point of dogma. Scribes, who pre­ceded them, carved phrases out of context, too, and used them in their arguments about the law. But for all that, Jewish piety has been a cease­less cry in the night, rarely unaware of "all the oppressions that are prac­ticed under the sun," a faith in spite of, not a heathenish, complacent faith because.

The profound detachment of Job's words at the end of the first chapter is certainly possible for an infidel: not being wedded to the things of this world, being able to let them go—and yet not repudiating them in the first place like the great Christian ascetics and the Buddha and his followers. In the form of an anthropomorphic faith, these words express one of the most admirable attitudes possible for man: to be able to give up what life takes away, without being unable to enjoy what life gives us in the first place; to remember that we came naked from the womb and shall return naked; to accept what life gives us as if it were God's own gift, full of wonders beyond price; and to be able to part with everything. To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

NOTES
1. [George Foot Moore (1851—1931), American scholar on religion.Kauf­mann cites his History of Religions (1913—19).]
2. [Ecclesiastes 12:13: "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter' (KJV).]

Some Books on Liberal Education

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren: How to Read a Book, Simon and Schuster, 1972.

Adler, Mortimer J., and Milton Mayer: The Revolution in Education, University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Barzun, Jacques: The American University, Harper and Row, 1970. Teacher in America, Little Brown and Co., 1945.

Bell, Daniel: The Reforming of General Education, Columbia University Press, 1966.

Bestor, Arthur E.: Educational Wastelands, The University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1953. The Restoration of Learning, Knopf, 1955.

Bloom, Alan: The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Brann, Eva: The Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Bruner, Jerome S.: The Process of Education, Harvard University Press, 1960.

Buchanan, Scott: Embers of the World, edited by Harris Wofford, Jr., Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, California, 1970.

Darkey, William (Editor et al): Three Dialogues on Liberal Education, St. John's College Press, 1979.

Erskine, John: My Life as a Teacher, J.B. Lippincott Co., 1948.Goldwin, Robert A. (Editor): Higher Education and Modern Democracy, Rand McNally and Co., 1967.

Grant, Gerald and David Reisman: The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College, University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Harvard Committee Report: General Education in a Free Society , The University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1945.

Hutchins, Robert M.:
The Higher Learning in America, Yale University Press, 1936.
No Friendly Voice, Greenwood, 1936.
Education for Freedom, Louisiana State University Press, 1943.
The Conflict in Education in a Democratic Society, Harper and Brothers, 1953.
The University of Utopia, University of Chicago Press, 1953.
The Learning Society, Praeger, 1968.

Lewis, C. S.: The Abolition of Man, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1947.

Maritain, Jacques: Education at the Crossroads, Yale University Press, 1943.

Meiklejohn, Alexander: Education Between Two Worlds, Harper and Brothers, 1942.

Smith, J. Winfree: A Search for the Liberal College; The Beginning of the St. John's Program, St. John's College Press, 1983.

Van Doren, Mark: Liberal Education: Henry Holt and Co., 1944