Because he said I could share it, I am going to share this Facebook comment made by Mikhail Voloshin. I am sharing it because he nails so much of what is taking place in the world, especially the West, today and I didn't ever want to lose it:
The Western education system has become very bad at producing people *who feel themselves to be part of Western civilization*. Or of civilization of any kind, for that matter.
The
point of being able to answer questions about Plato or Beckett or
Chaucer, as the author uses as examples, has nothing to do with being
able to show off esoteric knowledge and playing a game of
I'm-smarter-than-you. It has to do with understanding the shared
experience of countless generations, and being in a position to continue
to build upon that edifice.
Humans are utterly
unique in our ability to communicate life experiences from one
generation to the next. In a sense, the advent of language has granted
our species biological immortality.
So when you
study Plato, and Chaucer, and Newton, and Erasmus, and Locke, and
Schopenhauer, and Bach, and Turing, and Lewis... You're not merely
accumulating facts. You are, in fact, retracing the steps of people who
have lived full lives before you, and you are absorbing those lives into
your own. You are, in essence, fast-forwarding through thousands of
years of human life; discovering things that you yourself might discover
eventually if you were biologically eternal, but it might take you
literally millions of years to accumulate the sum total of the
experience at your disposal right here and now.
And
this accumulation of experience doesn't just confer knowledge, but also
wisdom. The humans who have lived before you didn't *just* figure out
why crops grow or how gravity works and what disease is. They also
pondered questions like, "What is virtue?" "What sort of things are
worth being upset about, and what can I let slide?" "When is it okay to
intervene in the actions of other people?" "When is it *obligatory* to
do so?" These are *extremely* difficult questions, and people throughout
history have spent entire lifetimes working on solutions. You can try
to discover them yourself, but you'd literally have to spend millennia
catching up. The whole point of being a participant in a civilization is
to download past minds into your own, internalize their train of
thought, and pick up where they left off. And, of course, to speak
literately with present people who are in likewise the same position,
because all of you are trying to answer the same problems together -- in
effect, you're each extensions of one great mind.
And
different civilizations represent different collections of great
individuals, having left off at different points and coming to different
tentative conclusions.
This is most blatantly
obvious when one looks at Muslim civilization. For all of Islam's
faults, what gives it strength is its ability to unify three billion
people with a common history, a common set of heroes and villains, and a
common set of perspectives about how life should be lived. And while
the state of literacy and education in the Muslim world is beyond
miserable, every Muslim is able to answer questions like, "What do you
believe? Why do you believe it? What templates do you use in deciding
how to interact with people and the world?" (Part of the reason why
Islam is so popular, especially among the poor and uneducated, and why
it spreads so quickly, is that the answers it provides are exceedingly
simple.)
Likewise, the Jews are able to answer this
question very directly. While the Muslim answer for everything is, "What
would Mohammed do?" (with some additional interpretation and
extrapolation by various subsequent philosophers), the Jews have a much
more complex system of both written and oral tradition that can take
decades to internalize (there are books in Jewish mysticism that you're
literally not allowed to read until you're at least 40 years old, on the
premise that there's no way you can be ready for it until then and
exposure to the knowledge would be wasted on you). It's a much more
complicated answer, but it's one of the most complete examples of
civilizational coherence in the modern world. Essentially this means
that every Jew, to one extent or another, is a continuation of the
consciousness of every Jew that came before us; and we can answer
questions about meaning and virtue with precise citations of ancient
philosophers almost as though these were answers that we ourselves came
to. As I said before, that is why we remind ourselves every Passover,
"*I* was a slave in Egypt, and God delivered *me* to salvation."
This
is where the article, and Troy, come in. Schools today, in general, *do
not teach* the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of Western
civilization. They teach the present tentative conclusions, but they
fail to connect those conclusions with the process that produced them;
which not only leaves these conclusions void and pointless, but also
leaves the student in no position to expand upon them. Even in the rare
instances where students today are able to talk about, say, the writings
of Thomas Acquinas, they typically do so by reciting a few Cliff's
Notes takeaways; they don't *put themselves inside the mind of Acquinas*
to understand how he came to his beliefs; they don't imagine themselves
to be dressed in thick wool robes in a monastery in medieval Europe,
bent over a candlelit desk, reading encyclicals on parchment delivered
by horseback pages from the Holy See. Same goes for the writings of the
Founding Fathers, or the speeches of Cicero, or the drafting of the
Magna Carta. At *best*, they are willing to project themselves into the
personae of black protesters during the Civil Rights movement, but even
then it's a distorted simplification of something that happened *within
living memory*; after all, if you think you can understand the mind of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. without understanding the mind of Martin
Luther, you're in for some unpleasant revalations.
My
point is this: If you ask a Westerner today, "What templates do you use
in determining how to act with regard to other people and the world?",
most would literally have no answer; and the few who do, are likely to
cite a cartoonish Manichean Marxist Foucault-ist template along the
lines of, "Well, it's easy: In every interaction between human beings,
there is always an oppressor and there is always someone being
oppressed, and the former is bad and the latter is good, and they are
both defined by superficial and plainly observable physical
characteristics..." For many in the West today, it's as though all of
Western civilization started only in the mid-1800s with the publication
of "Das Kapital". Or in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement. Or,
from the POV of Millennials, there was no Western philosophical
tradition before Tumblr. Some of the *extremely* well-versed can trace
their beliefs back to perhaps Robespierre, but you can probably fit in
my apartment all the people in America who have actually read him.
And
don't think I'm only attacking the Left here, either. Conservatives at
least can solidly trace their beliefs back to figures like John Locke
and Thomas Hobbes, but ask them to go older than that and things start
to get fuzzy.
My point, and the article's point,
and Troy's point, is that Millennials in general have a weaker
connection to the origins of the contents of their heads than any
previous generation in Western history; you'd have to look at
pre-literate Germanic tribes before you find people who knew less about
who they are or where they came from. The question is not whether or not
they can program a computer; the question is whether or not they see
themselves as heirs in the line of logical minds, from Aristotle to
Occam to Russell to Turing to Hopper to Knuth, who led in sequence to
the very program that the kid is writing right now. The question is not
whether or not they can play a piano, but whether or not they feel
themselves personally to be extensions of Pythagoras and Arezzo and Bach
and Brahms. The question is not whether they can point to a case of
people committing violence and say, "This is Bad," but whether they
personally have the wisdom inherent from sharing in the collective
memories of millions of people over thousands of years so that they can
form a cogent and meaningful understanding of *why* it's bad.
And for the most part... No. No, they cannot.
This observation needs to be developed. And it needs to be read and understood by everyone.
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