If you teach composition, you should subscribe to the Economist. Their writing is some of the best journalistic work produced today. Their style is restrained and pointed, and they write in an orderly, logical manner. I refer you to an article I read today for yet another example: The Seven Deadly Sins: It is time to exose some popular fallacies about buying a home. Use this for an example of order and word choice.

They also publish a style guide that I would put next to my Strunk and White (if you don't have Strunk and White you need to get a new career or order it right now - any book store will carry it for about $6).

On this day in 1864 Charles Dodgson gave Alice Liddel a story he had written about education. In it, the Mock Turtle described his understanding of the quadrivium, which followed hard on the more basic subjects of "reeling and writhing." These were followed by "the different branches of arithmetic--Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision."

Thank you, Alice, for inspiring Mr. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) to write one of the great treatises on nonsense.

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow! What a great holiday: Abandon all diets, ye who enter here.

This may be the best thanksgiving ever because congress has passed a law (needless to say, like all important legislation this was passed in the deep dark night) that might actually improve our lives.

You won't have heard about it, so I'll fill you in. The law says, and I quote loosely: "All people everywhere in the world shall immediately cease making a difference."

It seems a movement began in California, where most movements in America begin (the rest of us have to flush for them), following on an environmental rally and its consequences.

The speaker, duly forgotten, was rallying the troop by screaming into his megaphone "you can make a difference" over and over again, thereby illustrating once again the principle that only politicians, lunatics, and professors continue to repeat things after they lose their meaning.

The troop, an actress who had tired of marching for peace and love when the cameras turned away, left the rally with tears of meaning and inspiration dripping from her mascara (which, she was careful to note, had never been tested on rabbits because they preferred testing it on people) into her gas can. All aflush with passion and aflame with values, she poured her tear stained gas onto the nearest SUV, following with meticulous detail the instructions for burning vehicles that she found on the environmentalist Peace-love-and-violencethroughcreativedestruction.com web site she had visited that morning for her daily psycho-pick-me-up.

The police arrested her.

You can imagine the response of the SUV owners. This act of Holly-terrorism would not go unrequitted. True, some SUV owners understood that they were at fault for this sincere woman's act of bravery. They unloaded their SUV's on the people who had bought their Global Crossing shares at the peak and then replaced them with solar powered mopeds sold at a tax deductible premium at peace-love-and-violencethroughcreativedestruction.com. The rest obstinately continued to blame Hollywood paranoia and called for an inquiry into the sources of her behavior.

They didn't have far too look. During her court case, this holly-terror-activist kept repeating the words of her mentor (the politician-professor-lunatic mentioned above), insisting, "but I made a difference," warm and sincere tears running down her mascara stained face and into her faux leather handbag (that's foe, not a misspelling for fox, for you environmentally impaired - make what you will of the homonym). The crowd was divided, those in touch with their feminine side moved to tears of their own by the spectacle (though no one cared much for the plot or characterization - just like a movie!) and the other one demanding blind and insensitive justice.

The judge was a pillar of rectitude. When he asked her why she did it, she merely repeated her bromide once and twice and thrice again. The third time, she rose, faced the crowd, and, with tears continuing to wash away her second face, she held the gaze of both of them and, with the intensity of an oracle, uttered, "I made a difference. I matter." Those in touch with their feminine side went wild, whooping and hollering like on one of those Microsoft Office commercials. The rest, restrained by their masculine side and therefore doubly prohibited from expressing their feelings, sat unmoved, though a trace of a sardonic grin curled the lip for that briefest of moments. The judge breathed a sigh, stood up, and said, "That's it! Get this lunatic out of here and lock her up in the asylum."

As they led her away, the judge hesitated. "Wait. Bring her back," he said. They did.

As she approached the bench, he leaned forward and asked, "How old are you?"

"23," she answered, a gleaming grin of the-meaning-of-nirvana engraved in her features.

"What is the difference between 70 and 23?" He asked.

"46?" She guessed.

"No, child, the answer is 47. You have made a difference. The difference you have made is that instead of the allotted three score years and ten in freedom, you will spend 47 fewer years where you can continue to make a difference." She started to mutter something about more than three scores in the last ten years when the judge turned his back and left the courtroom.

As the sincere victim left the courthouse, she encountered streets clogged with SUV's, most of them owned by the news media. People lined the alleys chanting, "We don't want your difference!" over and over again. One child with large weepy eyes had a sign that said, "Make love, not a difference."

A girl of four or five with pony tails and a precious little pink dress wept meaningful tears that dripped onto a sign she had dropped in despair. "Mother president, please protect us," it said. As a result, unable to resist such poignant imagery, the president forced congress to pass a law against all difference makers. And all because of one little girl who finally gave up trying to make a difference!

While driving to her prison cell in Beverly Hills, the holly-terror-activist cursed the California department of transportation. She blamed them for solar powered mopeds clogging the highway after being run over by road-raging SUV owners.

It seems to me that the secret to happiness is to spend every moment of every day keeping life as simple as possible. Another way of putting that is to say that blessedness is found in an ordered soul, or, more briefly, "Blessed are the pure in heart."

A thought on "gay-marriage," and its relation to the role of women: the ultimate and unique role of women always has been and remains the preservation of the spiritual foundations of the social order. The role of the leader's of that social order is determined by nature to be to protect and enable her in fulfilling her role.

I believe, for example, that much of contemporary homosexuality is rooted in the movement of women away from her role as spiritual foundation and in the cowardly abdication of the men who failed to protect that ultimate foundation of all nobility: motherhood. What I mean is that a large percentage of gay men at least seem to come from homes in which the father and/or mother didn't fulfill their ancient roles of being actively and lovingly fathers and mothers. Personally, I place the primary responsibility on fathers and husbands and on the church. What is troublesome is the way people turn on gay men and women as though they are the source of the cultural stress we are all experiencing as a result of the new morality. They are not. The church is.

----
The trouble in our country is really quite simple: everybody takes himself much too seriously.

The pagan mind separates nature and grace. The Christian mind sees grace permeating and perfecting nature. Homer, for example, sees the gods as separate and sometimes interacting with humans and the cosmos; but he doesn't see them as "upholding all things by the Word of His power" - i.e. by permeating all that is by their essence. He only sees them acting on creation - not filling it. The other extreme is the pagan who makes creation and god one.

11-19-3

My friend Steve, who is no doubt the only person who reads this blog (hi Steve), has responded to my entry yesterday. First, he hinted that I should make a forum available for folks to respond. Then he raised concerns about my great discovery. The one that saved my life. Here's what Steve said:

"The other day I was relating to a friend the genuine joy that I found in college when I finally had a Word that expressed my worldview, yea, my belief system. Now this worldview was one that I held prior to becoming introduced to Christ. And this worldview is prevalent in the music and philosophy of Jim Morrison of the Doors, who happened to be my Idol at the time. Your conclusion in the matter ("I don't matter and nothing I produce matters"), fine teacher, sounds very much like most of Ecclesiastes (which puts you in good company, mind you). Do you need any more hints? If you haven't guessed it by now, the worldview of which I speak is Nihilism.

Please hear me out.

First of all, I fail to see how your premises lead to your conclusion. But, nevertheless...

Please tell me that I am misreading your conclusion...that I am mistaken to think that you have fallen for nothing. Will I awake tomorrow and find an addendum to your Blog? It may read: "Dear faithful friends of Circe, I was only jesting, I do matter and what I produce matters!" Or, perhaps, you'll tell us that you have embraced "Christian Nihilism" ... a little like the "Christian Atheism" that was in vogue in the 1960's? Then again, you could inform us that you joined the radical deconstructionist camp and tell me that your words don't really mean anything...yes, yes, they mean whatever I as the interpreter of your text think they mean. "I think that by using the phrase "I don't matter and nothing I produce matters" you really mean that I matter and what I produce matters...."
Lastly, you have a problem that you must overcome. That is, by your entire life (your faith, marriage, children, commitment to education, yada, yada, yada) you betray the very words that you pen in your Blog. Your very life screams: "Who I am and what I do does matter."

So, I reject your conclusion...whadda ya think of that!?"


Frankly, I'm touched. And I thank you for expressing your concern and even affection for me. Especially in such a public forum. It's nice to know somebody thinks I matter.
Hey, wait a minute. You tricked me into saying that. Since this is no simple matter, I'm going to let my reader digest what Steve wrote (since reader and writer are the same person anyway) and respond thoughtfully and not hastily. More tomorrow. Meanwhile, let me recommend a great website: despair.com.

And let me include the best definition of leadership I've ever heard, this from my friend Jack Hudson:

"Leadership is the knowledge and understanding of where you are and where you need to go and the will and ability to
guide."

11-18-3

What amazing times we live in. I go to a few major sources for my news input. Permit a momentary digression, during which I explain that I am not a news-junkie and that a part of me wants to follow my mentor St. Clive Staples Lewis (yes, he is officially a saint now - the Anglican church said so a few weeks back) who claimed never to read the newspapers. As a big picture kind of guy, I can sympathize. But I also have an extreme vanity that always wants to be in the know. Plus I vote, and I can't respect people who vote but don't know the news. So I do my egotistical and civic duty and read the news. The day before each election. Primarily in the Pakistan Tribune, the only reliable source of unending hysteria west of Al Qaeda.

In addition to the PT, there are a few major, though less reliable, sources I turn to for my news input. I'm a Burke to Kirk conservative, so no source gives me the news from the point of view of truth, but I still value what's out there. My favorite blog is called Realclearpolitics.com. They do the work for me by reviewing Jove knows how many papers and journals. You can count on a good dozen articles on the topics of the day. I also read: The Economist (anybody identified by Lyndon LaRouche as the enemy has to have a lot of good things to say - though they have a firmly socially liberal agenda and they are, apparently, Fabian), The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, World, The Charlotte Observer, The Rhinoceros Times, and, sometimes, National Review. I also like the idea of the Onion, but I've never read it because onions give me nasty heart-burn and I get the impression that the magazine would be no different. They probably tell the truth or something.

I don't like any of them. For one thing, none of them has ever hired me to write for them. For another, except what I can get on-line they make me pay for. For a third, thinking about them forces me into a conversational syntax that turns simple sentences into rhetorical tour-de-forts. Which I did once, out west.

I take that back. I do like World because they publish my co-author on Classical Education, Gene Edward Veith. Otherwise, having attained 40, I am now free to be a curmudgeon. So I will.

By the way, what amazing times we live in. When I was on the aforementioned blog I saw this headline today: Left's Media Monopoly is Ending! John Leo wrote this in US News and world report and he meant it. And of course, given the absolute relativism of politics, it's true. The folks to the right of the left end of the line are now getting a lot more air play. For example, the homosexual conservative Andrew Sullivan is a really, really popular guy. And he writes well too. And Fox News, which is decidedly conservative because if they aren't Anne Coulter will Slander them by accusing them of Treason and other High Crimes and Misdemeanors, has some very thoughtful rightsters like Bill O'Reilly. And of course, we always have Rush Limbaugh to remind us that money is the primal human motivator.

Down the page a bit was this VERY insightful headline (I haven't read the article because the headline gives it all away): Socially Liberal, Fiscally conservative, and Personally Narcissistic. Exactly. That's the America we're growing into. The excessively extreme far right consists of those lunatics who believe in the institutions that prevent the federal government from continuing its global march into the nether reaches of the soul (you know, things like church, private schools, men who talk to each other as representatives of their family's interests) are so far right they've left.

Look, the truth is, the liberals have taken over this country so completely that we don't even know what a liberal is anymore. Nevertheless, as John Leo said, "The liberal worldview still dominates the news business, the arts, the entertainment world, publishing, the campuses, and all levels of schooling. It's the media and educational status quo." Exactly. And until we put first things first and teach children how to think instead of indoctrinating them with word-play (religious or otherwise) they'll continue to call homosexuals conservative (conservatism is first and foremost a commitment to the traditional morality of the west) because they believe in tax cuts, allow intemperate rudeness in the name of the politics of reverence, and follow talk-show hosts who belittle the ideas of others in the name of fair-mindedness. The entertainment value is delightful. And for a narcissistic nation, the two highest priorities are fiscal conservatism (whatever that means - I think it has to do with honouring the King) so they can make a lot of money to pay for the consequences of their social liberalism - that great social experiment in unrestrained entertainment.

So what was my great discovery? Simple really: I don't matter and nothing I produce matters.

What a relief.

11-17-3

I made the greatest discovery of my life about two weeks ago and I've been so excited about it I haven't been able to write. And now I don't have time. Maybe this afternoon, but I doubt it. Hopefully tomorrow morning. Really amazing.

Downright earth shattering.

11-5-3
Western civilization, which is a synonym for classical education, was conceived on the fields of Ilium, gestated in the womb of the Greek dark age, and born, with the aid of Homer as midwife, in the text of the Iliad. He reached adolescence in the argumentative sophists, approached maturity in Plato, took on the duties of manhood in Aristotle, grew senile in Hellenism, and died in the academics. But she was resurrected and raised to glory in the Christ of John's gospel.

Western civilization, which is to say, classical education, is the civilization of the idea. It is rooted in the belief that there is a central organizing and originating principle of all that is - a "rational governing principle of the universe" as the Encyclopedia of Philosophy expresses it. Greek philosophy is the quest for that idea. They often labeled this idea with the Greek word "logos." Some, such as Plato and Aristotle, more often used the Greek word "nous," but they were referring to, at least, very nearly the same thing.

Faith in the logos is what makes western civilization, and thus classical education, what it is.

The belief in the logos and the belief that it was incarnated in Christ is what makes Christianity, and thus Christian education, what it is.

Western art until the modern era has always regarded its function as incarnating the logos, i.e. giving a physical expression to an idea. The history of western literary criticism, again, prior to the modernists and post-modernists, is a discussion about how to most effectively communicate the idea of the logos in poetic and, later, prose forms. How does one measure the quality of a work of art in the western, classical, logocentric tradition? By how well the work of art expresses its logos or idea - its specific central organizing and originating principle. And how do you measure the importance of a work of art? By its proximity to the ultimate and transcendent logos, Him who fills all things.

11-1-3

I was thinking this morning how happiness seems inseparable from pain. Our greatest moments of happiness seem to come when, by striving and endurance, we overcome some great obstacle, accomplish a demanding task, persevere under pressure. Often our times of deepest depression occur when there is no obstacle, no task, no pressure - no pain. I was wondering why that is, especially when you think of how universally people seem to seek bodily pleasure as though it is synonymous with happiness.

I came across this in Berdyaev's work, The Destiny of Man: "Dostoevsky has shown in a masterly way that man is an irrational being and may long for suffering and not for happiness... Man is a creature that torments himself and others and derives enjoyment from it. He does not strive for happiness at all. Such a striving would be objectless and meaningless. Man strives for concrete values and goods... happiness itself cannot be his conscious purpose."

Dostoevsky was a man of gigantic insight. His Brothers Karamazov is indubitably one of the greatest novels ever written. And he did indeed show that man does often long for suffering. But surely Berdyaev meant something when he said that man "derives enjoyment from" his torments. Berdyaev seems to be attacking the logos (see 10-31) in this section. We strive, he tells us, "for concrete values and goods." Particulars. Uncentered things.

Indeed we do. But logocentric philosophers never argued that we don't long for suffering or that happiness is our conscious purpose. Of course we seek baubles and garbage. That is precisely why we aren't happy - the enjoyment we derive from them can't be sustained. We are miserable with them because we don't want what they give us, even though we thought we did. Our hearts remain restless.

But suffering is different.

There is a suffering that seems indispensable to happiness. It's the suffering of hard practice before and relentless effort during a game, direct confrontation before repentance, self-denial in a relationship. And why is it necessary? I don't know, but it does seem to me that we are born a beaten-down creature - like a neglected puppy who runs to his returning master only to be kicked on the ribs. Maybe we are happy when we suffer successfully because something inside us tells us we have some value after all. It seems ignoble, perhaps. But we've fallen a long way. History shows we'll do anything for a smile.

10-31-3

Today is all Hallow's Eve (i.e. the day before All Saints Day). May you move closer to sainthood yourself through the fears and anxieties that God will use to transform you!

What is classical education? Fundamentally, it is logocentric. That means that it revolves around a logos. And what is a logos? A logos is a central, organizing, and originating principle of all that is. The quest for the logos gave birth to Greek philosophy, which is why it's a bit inaccurate to call the Greek philosophers pagan. Granted, they weren't Christians, but they were hardly worshippers of the pagan deities - unless we play the modernist game and make "paganism" meaningless by including everything that isn't explicitly Christian in the definition.

The great revelation of the Bible is that Christ is the logos (word).

The great assault of modernism is on the logos. The 19th century determined that there is no logos. We aren't created, we've evolved. We don't pursue happiness, we respond to internal impulses. We don't seek nobility, we will power. We don't love honor, we love money. And that's that. Even Rush Limbaugh is a Marxist - if he means what he says. "Follow the money," he tells us, and you'll find the truth. In a nation of materialists that is probably true. I believe in the soul.

10-30-3

The fundamental fact of modernist and post-modernist thought is the denial of the logos, in the sense of a centering and originating idea from which all else is derived. This is the final fruit of nominalism. At least, I hope it is. One of its expressions is in the emphasis on method over ideas in education. This unfortunate development had been given a vigorous push by Descartes, but at least he still valued ideas. Now the idea is gone. We are left with facts that can be measured and methods that can be analyzed. Two things that are fine in their very limited role as servants, but two things that destroy the very possibility of education when they become King and Queen. We classical educators need to be careful not to fall into this trap in the grammar stage.