Next book: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

My next book blogging will be about Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard. I came across a reference to this book, while reading something about political correctness. I can no longer find the essay that I read, but the title of this book stuck with me. The reference said that this book discusses the roots of religion, and since the social concerns at the root of political correctness also sit at the root of much that maddens me in modern education, it's worth studying.

The book seems to be very focused on the theme of mimicry as the root of social strife. It's dangerous to try to fit all of human society into one single social theme, but my impression of 20th century French intellectuals is that they engaged in these over-simplifications for playful reasons. They felt that if you want to understand an idea you must take it as far as it can go and then some, and try to fit absolutely everything into it. Even if the fit is awkward, you must keep trying. They never say explicitly that the awkwardness of the fit might be telling in its own way, but instead expected you to figure that out for yourself.  So I'm reading him forgivingly. Also, his ideas about mimicry, and how it can lead to rivalry and contests, while repeated on every page, also seem to be more of an invitation to bigger questions, rather than something that he seriously intends you to fit everything into.

Mostly it has me thinking about religion in general. Abrahamic faiths seem to be particularly versatile religions, in that they provide at least 4 things:

1. A cosmology: God made the world, and that explains it.
2. Morality: You must do good when possible, and atone and repent by the rules of the faith when you fall short, and God will reward you.
3. Ritual: The year is organized by a religious calendar, with rituals for different facets of life at different times of the year. This focuses our time and endeavors, provides cohesion and outlets for our communities, and provides, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a season for all things.
4. Community: The community of believers is distinct from other tribes.

When I contrast with older polytheistic faiths, one omission that I see is morality. One reason is that in ancient mythology it isn't clear which god you should look to for morality. The universe has no undisputed moral leader, but rather a strife between deities with conflicting agendas. And many of those deities are deeply flawed (the Greek gods being particularly flawed, but not unique in having flaws). Are we to look to these murderous adulterers for morality? At least the Old Testament God, when He smites the wicked, has an uncontested claim to moral arbiter status.

Instead, polytheists appeal to different deities for different purposes.  Want victory in war? Sacrifice to the god of war. Want a bountiful harvest? Sacrifice to a harvest deity, or maybe a weather deity. And so forth. Also, while ancient polytheists were deeply concerned with tribal identity, alien tribes have deities whom some societies considered real rivals to their deities, rather than figments of alien imagination.

(Hinduism has morality, but there's also an idea that the multitude of gods reflect some deeper, higher order behind the world, something that might not be a single God like the God of Abraham, but at least brings unity.)

Political correctness offers morality and community, and increasingly ritual (e.g. land acknowledgments), but not (yet) a cosmology. I suspect that as they edge toward "noble savage" tropes we'll see a re-emergence of religious cosmology, particularly as the astronomy community struggles to reconcile their need for mountaintop observatories with traditional religious beliefs about sacred mountains, but we're not yet at the point of a PC cosmology. Maybe we'll eventually get myths about certain groups having not just more sustainable lifestyles but supernatural connections to the land, but we're not quite there (as far as I know).

Or maybe not. Ancient religions didn't check all of the boxes that Abrahamic faiths check, and much of the world gets by without all of those boxes being checked in their belief systems. Still, since PC seems to be quite Christian in its roots, being so focused on guilt and redemption, I am open to the possibility that eventually a full-scale recreation of Christianity will emerge.

Latest Read: The Iliad

I'm reading the Iliad.  I'd only read excerpts before, and that was a long time ago. I won't post every thought I've had on it, but I have two big takeaways from the first 11 chapters:

First and foremost, the Iliad was basically an ancient TV series with an ensemble cast.  It arose from an oral performance tradition, and consists of 24 chapters of roughly equal length.  (No, not exactly equal, but within a factor of 2 of each other.)  Some chapters are very much about the bigger story, the constant back-and-forth between the Trojans and Achaeans, with the Gods wrapped up in the drama and the central characters (e.g. Hector, Achilles, Paris, Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Menelaeus, Nestor) making decisions that will shift the fortunes of war.  Other chapters are more episodic, from that part of the TV season where the writers want to focus on a few characters in side plots.  So you get chapter 10 ("Marauding through the night"), which focuses on an inept Trojan spy who folds as soon as he is caught, spills all of his info, and then gets a dishonorable death in spite of an earlier promise to not kill him.  Or chapter 11 ("Agamemnon's day of glory"), which is largely about a D&D party rescuing their healer after he's been wounded in battle.

Of course, the writers on a TV series can only do so many of these "side plot" episodes before the audience will expect a return to the main story.  So chapter 11 concludes with Patroclus realizing that the Achaeans desperately need help.  It's pretty clear that he'll rejoin the fight soon.  And all of this will lead up to heart-breaking deaths of main characters, and then an epic conclusion as the sun sets on doomed Troy.

In another parallel with TV, the Odyssey is basically a spinoff series about a supporting character who had his own die-hard fans. I can only assume that these parallels arise from ancient poets needing to keep an audience fixated over the long haul, coming back for more as they sang and chanted for their supper, just as modern TV writers need to keep an audience's attention in order to get paid.

Second, having noted analogies between the Iliad and modern popular entertainment, I was pretty astounded by some lines spoken by Achilles in chapter 9 (lines 383-391):

No, what lasting thanks in the long run
for warring with our enemies, on and on, no end?
One and the same lot for the man who hangs back
and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits
for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death,
the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion.
And what's laid up for me, what pittance? Nothing—
and after suffering hardships, year in, year out,
staking my life on the mortal risks of war.

Compare with these lines from Ecclesiastes, in which the author questions the point of wisdom and labor, when the wise man will suffer the same death as the fool, and the wise man who works can take nothing with him, but must leave it behind to a man who may be a fool:

And I saw that wisdom has as much profit over folly as light has over darkness. 

   Wise people have eyes in their heads, but fools walk in darkness.

Yet I knew that the same lot befalls both. So I said in my heart, if the fool’s lot is to befall me also, why should I be wise? Where is the profit? And in my heart I decided that this too is vanity. The wise person will have no more abiding remembrance than the fool; for in days to come both will have been forgotten. How is it that the wise person dies like the fool! Therefore I detested life, since for me the work that is done under the sun is bad; for all is vanity and a chase after wind.

 And I detested all the fruits of my toil under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who is to come after me. And who knows whether that one will be wise or a fool? Yet that one will take control of all the fruits of my toil and wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.

(Ecclesiastes 2:13-19)

Or these, in which he asks what the point of bravery is:

Again I saw under the sun that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the valiant, nor a livelihood by the wise, nor riches by the shrewd, nor favor by the experts; for a time of misfortune comes to all alike. (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

Now, the Iliad was hardly the only ancient work in which a man questioned the point of valor, but it was an influential work in the Hellenistic world, and I understand that the author of Ecclesiastes had at least some exposure to that world.  So I'm left to wonder if these parallels with Achilles' speech were deliberate literary devices.  I understand that the extent of Hellenistic influences on Ecclesiastes are very much debated by people who know the original texts and background far better than I do, so I will merely note the common, resonant themes, but offer no further speculation on the extent (if any) of Homeric influence on Ecclesiastes.

Vanity of vanity! All is vanity!

I didn't write this article...but I could have.  The whole thing is worth reading, but a few choice quotes:

The communities where such universities exist, like jars of pickled eggs themselves, tend to be on the margins and therefore poorer and less resourced than their urban counterparts. A common refrain often heard in these communities is that, because their kids are poorer, we shouldn’t expect too much from them. It’s not fair to them because of where they came from.

Though this is always presented as compassion, it’s not. It’s contempt. It amounts to saying, “Because these kids are poor it’s all right if we also let them be illiterate.” That to me simply adds insult to injury. Intelligence is and always has been a great leveler. It roams the world freely, flagrantly disregarding its divisions and classes. But it’ll settle in and make itself at home anywhere it receives an honest welcome.

The ones who want to dumb it down will ALWAYS talk about disadvantage and diversity.  ALWAYS.  Just by typing the previous sentence I am exiling myself from polite company, but I am beyond caring.

Or, regarding what I suspect is a "flipped" class:

If you’d like a sense of how contentless it can get, I have heard of an instructor, one without a PhD, who assigned his students videos of himself talking about this or that subject as their class text. A digital lecture is assigned as preparation for a live lecture that will be about a digital lecture.

God help us.

The anecdotal evidence I’ve been able to gather tells me that students do not read anymore. In one course I co-taught with several other faculty members, the readings were posted online, which allowed us to map access patterns. In that course, readings were accessed — not necessarily read — by between 5 and 15 percent of the students in the class. The same pattern was confirmed by the textbook sales in a course from the previous year. There were roughly 230 students in that class. I was teaching George Orwell’s 1984 and I had ordered 230 copies based on enrollments. At the end of term, the bookstore informed me that it had sold only 18 copies of the book, a hit rate of about 8 percent. It may be that some students already had the book, or had purchased it from another source. But the quality of essays and midterm exams suggested a very different story, as did students’ own explanations of their actions. If you only remove your professor hat for a moment and allow them to speak frankly, they will tell you that they don’t read because they don’t have to. They can get an 80 without ever opening a book.

It used to be believed that tyrants would ban books that threaten them, but they did us one better:  They trained the public to not want to read the books.  You don't have to ban the book if nobody will read it.  So now nobody reads 1984.

Of course, I have a colleague who has gone on the public record as saying that he does not assign ANY reading in his upper-division "GE Synthesis" course, i.e. an advanced course that is supposed to include substantial reading and writing.  Nonetheless, he has published an article in an education journal in which he BRAGS that students do not need to read to pass his (100% multiple-choice) tests, and his publicly-available syllabi back this up. He's a veritable Frito Pendejo. It is only the thinnest pretext of civility that keeps me from naming names, but maybe one of these days...

Oh, and our masters are sorely lacking in the critical thinking that we all claim to inculcate in our students:

I recall a meeting in which an administrator asserted enthusiastically that the university’s online teaching platform demonstrably improves student performance because one of his tech staff had discovered a correlation between more frequent usage of the platform and higher grades. Never mind that course materials are delivered through the platform and that better students tend to pay more attention to (I don’t say read) such materials; in flagrant disregard of such obvious considerations, this administrator credited a rather pedestrian technical device with the ability to make students significantly smarter and thereby to justify the pressure the institution wished to exert on faculty to deliver ever greater portions of their courses electronically. The fact that such things can be said in public without those who say them being laughed out the room is an indication of how desperate the situation has become.

Indeed.