Paul Vitols's Blog, page 27

the Commonwealth of Life

Over today’s lunch of cold leftover pizza (vegetarian, hold the pineapple, but argh the pineapple came anyway) I browsed through the fall 2012 issue of Finding Solutions, the newsletter of the David Suzuki Foundation. Dr. Suzuki himself always writes a piece for the last page in his “last word” column. In this issue his headline is “We need a new economic paradigm”. I read this with more interest than usual because that thought echoes my own thoughts for the past 20 years.

In my old blog, Genesis of a Historical Novel, I wrote that I have been an environmentalist since at least 1971, when I was 12 and a nuclear bomb was tested off the Aleutian island of Amchitka. My feelings of environmental concern took a new twist in August 1991 when I saw, and bought, a paperback called Blueprint 2: Greening the World Economy, edited by David Pearce. It was a compilation of essays by economists on how to apply the principles of economics to the problems of environmental degradation. I read this rather technical book avidly, excited by the idea that new, incentive-based methods could be used to prompt people to behave in more environmentally responsible ways, instead of relying on the clumsy, compromised, and ineffective methods of regulation and punishment.

This idea still excites me, but in the last 21 years I have come to see how difficult it is to implement even the most rational ideas, such as a carbon tax. British Columbia in 2008 was the first jurisdiction in North America to implement one of these, and even though the rate has been creeping up, it still amounts to only 6.67 cents per liter of gasoline—not enough to change behavior at today’s prices. And despite the proper, revenue-neutral way in which it was implemented, the tax generated much fuss and resistance. Indeed, our current federal government is spending our tax dollars on a ferocious ad campaign to frighten us with the idea that the leader of the opposition has plans to bring in a carbon tax if elected in 2015—an allegation for which there is no evidence.

So much for Canada. Most of planet Earth is more enlightened, but still not enough so. The forces of reaction are successfully frightening us into delaying steps that might alleviate various ecological catastrophes that are already under way. Avoiding planetary disaster is just too expensive; let’s spend those dollars on things that matter.

Cut to Dr. Suzuki, with his need for a new economic paradigm. In his piece he talks about joining with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce former chief economist Jeff Rubin on a combined book tour (the books are Rubin’s The End of Growth and Suzuki’s Everything Under the Sun), discusses the inadequacy of gross domestic product as a measure of prosperity, and notes the novelty of an environmentalist teaming up with a mainstream economist. He mentions with approval Bhutan’s adoption of “gross national happiness” as a social metric over 30 years ago, and says “We need a development paradigm that takes into account well-being and happiness, and that accounts for nature’s services.”

I’m sure he’s right. But my thought is that the intractability of the problem arises from its being not fundamentally an economic one after all, but a philosophical one, or even a spiritual one.

The next milestone in my own environmentalist pilgrimage was in January 2008, when I saw at a Chapters bookstore another paperback, this time marked with an approval sticker by no other than David Suzuki. It was called The Commonwealth of Life: Economics for a Flourishing Earth by Peter G. Brown, a political scientist teaching at McGill University. I snapped up that book too and started reading.

The author launches a bold program to rethink political philosophy in a way that can serve as a foundation for an environmentally friendly politics and economics. The overarching idea is encapsulated by his title, the Commonwealth of Life, which I loved as soon as I saw it. The basic idea, as I understand it, is the notion of acknowledging the rights of those other than human beings alive today: that is, other living things, and future living things, including future humans.

Excited about pursuing various ideas leading off from the points that Brown raises, I have not actually finished reading the book yet. But I will. Much of my thinking and of my search for liberal education in the past few years has been in aid of trying to think through this thing called the Commonwealth of Life. If this is properly worked out, we will have the basis of the politics and the economics of tomorrow. And we will have a principled reply to the reactionaries’ charge that “it’s too expensive.”

I expect to have more to say about this—much more. Earth is our mother, and we can still reverse our unfolding matricide.

hey! teachers! leave them kids alone!

Ideas matter. I suspect that behind every human conflict or disagreement there is an idea—or more than one idea—at stake, and that in most cases the parties concerned are unaware of it. This means that we argue at cross-purposes, never actually engaging with the issue. Much of the time, we never even come to terms, by which I mean we never come to agree on the meanings of the words we use. We just use them, each meaning a different thing. There is no hope of resolving a conflict conducted in this way.

According to the editors of the Britannica Great Books, a liberal education has 2 components:

learning how to think, read, write, and argue
applying those skills to the Great Ideas of the Western tradition

When we do this we become fully civilized, at least in the Western sense. We become true citizens, able to engage meaningfully and productively on the issues.

This morning over my corn flakes I was reading the recent special issue of MIT Technology Review, which contains a long piece entitled “The Crisis in Higher Education”. It contains a 1-page sidebar entitled “Another Way to Think about Learning” by Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. His foundation is devoted to delivering computers to disadvantaged children in the developing world, with the idea that even without classrooms or teachers, kids can learn a lot on their own if they have some tools to do so. In two villages in Ethiopia, children have been using foundation tablet-computers to teach themselves to read, and have been making progress. Negroponte notes:

If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?

He goes on to say that children

can learn a great deal by themselves. More than we give them credit for. Curiosity is natural, and all kids have it unless it is whipped out of them, often by school. . . . Having massive libraries of explicative material like modern-day encyclopedias or textbooks is fine. But such access may be much less significant than building a world in which ideas are shaped, discovered, and reinvented in the name of learning by doing and discovery.

As I munched my flakes I found myself vaguely troubled by this piece. Why? I wondered. Distributing these computers to poor kids around the world can surely only be a good thing. Mr. Negroponte’s foundation is giving the gift of learning to many who otherwise would not have it. What’s not to like?

This thought came to mind: learning is not the same thing as education.

Or, on the other hand, maybe it is. Who knows? Does it matter? If so, why does it matter, and to whom?

Education is one of the Great Ideas. These questions are merely entry-points into it; they have no definitive answers. They are points on which people of good will can reasonably differ. But in thinking about them and discussing them we enrich our understanding of Education.

In the Aristotelian conception, teaching, along with farming and medicine, was regarded as one of the cooperative arts: that is, one in which the practitioner uses his skill to help a natural process along. In the case of the teacher, that natural process is learning. For we are curious and we do learn on our own, as do many other animals. In the same way, nature provides food for us if we take the trouble to harvest it, and when we are injured or fall ill, we usually recover. Usually.

Again in the Aristotelian conception, an art is a branch of knowledge concerned with making or doing things. The art of teaching consists in helping the student learn a lot more, a lot faster, than he can on his own. But it means more than that: it also means guiding the student so that he’s learning what will benefit him most.

But what will benefit him most? I’m going to say: putting into his head and hands the means to work toward his own happiness. But in what does his own happiness consist? Well, it happens that Happiness is another of the Great Ideas. I’m reading a book on it right now. Who is the best judge of where a student’s happiness may lie? The student himself, with his callow, unformed thoughts? The teacher, with his limitations and prejudices? Their society, with its fixed beliefs and coercive expectations?

Who knows? It’s a discussion worth having.

Mr. Negroponte’s foundation is seeding many of these poor villages with sophisticated devices on which children are learning to program computers—a skill that he rates highly. That’s his privilege; it’s his foundation. But those devices, however helpful and useful they are to their recipients, still represent the ideas and values of those distributing them. Or, to put it another way, they represent a position taken on one or more of the Great Ideas.

I’m sure it’s a good thing. I’m less sure that teaching, or education, can be automated.

prose sketch: out the bedroom window

Tue 27 Nov 2012 1:20 p.m. my bedroom

The sun is right above the neighbors’ chimney, a brilliant nuclear egg shining through the layers of cotton-batting cloud. There is a mildness to it, a neutrality. I think of decks of cloud over shaded coastal sea, no wind and no rain, yet. Dark rags of cloud swaddle the sun now, closing its incandescent eye. Slow hands suffocate it, but not quite: it burns through again, a blazing little thing.

Yes: something marine, wide, ceilinglike about this cloud-deck. Over the featureless sawtooth city the air is pink apricot, creating a crepuscular winter feeling, a red-shifted day that never became fully alive, the city air a cool glowing aspic of its own smoke. A quiet day, saying, “if only, if only . . .”

Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus by Jodi Magness

Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus by Jodi Magness

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An archaeologist puts a few aspects of ancient Jewish life under the magnifying glass.

With a strong interest in the time and place that this book examines, and having enjoyed the author’s The Archaeology Of Qumran And The Dead Sea Scrolls, I was more than willing to buy this volume. And in the main I think it delivered the goods, even though I believe that its subtitle, “Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus”, is not really an accurate description of its contents. For, as the main title suggests, this book looks closely at certain material details of that Jewish daily life; it does not set out to give a full, rounded sense of life in ancient Judea.

Those material details, though, are interesting and telling. The author looks at what both archaeology and ancient text sources have to say about the ancient Jews’ attitudes and habits regarding the ritual purity of their bodies and hands; various animals such as locusts, dogs, and chickens; and their household vessels and eating arrangements. Probably my favorite chapter was 10, “Toilets and Toilet Habits”, in which Magness impassively examines this important but often overlooked aspect of everyday life.

Her method in general is to look at various text sources, biblical, ancient, and modern, and see how the current archaeological record fits with the various views. When all the evidence is presented, she offers her own opinions, which are always cautious and reasonable.

The author comes across as sober and conscientious. Fanciful speculation and word-painting are as alien to Magness’s style as levity. She’s not afraid to weigh in on controversial topics, such as the authenticity of the ossuary of James, brother of Jesus, but only after long consideration of all the evidence. Her thoroughness is further reflected in the fact that the text of this 335-page book ends on page 186; the rest is end-notes, bibliography, and index.

The upshot is that while I find Magness’s prose dry and workmanlike, I have a lot of confidence in her as a researcher. She doesn’t mind going through piles of evidence, sifting, assessing, and doing her best to leave her feelings, whatever they may be, out of it. And while this book’s zooming in on the minutiae of ancient Jewish life has a kind of through-the-keyhole quality of seeing only fragments, those fragments are revealing of the bigger picture–and they are well supported.

The ideal readers for this book would be biblical archaeology nerds. After them, those who have a serious and searching interest in the details of life in ancient Judea, and would-be archaeologists.

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sketchbook: Monday 19 November 2012

Mon 19 Nov 2012 ca. 11:50 a.m. my bedroom



The vermilion leaves of the Japanese maple have turned to russet—the color of dried blood. I look down on it from above. The handrails of our balcony angle into its branches, shiny with rain. The boards of the deck are also rain-glazed, the falling drops dimpling their sheen.

Above this little T-canyon of townhouses the sky, usually so expressive, is a misty, almost featureless gray. Just over the roof of Bentley Mews I can see a faint ragged strip of Vancouver, veiled by this sky that is falling everywhere as rain.

Down below, a cat waits at the neighbors’ door. Ten centimeters from my nose, on the far side of the windowpane, a plump spider hangs upside-down in her web spun over the lower half of the glass. Her egg-shaped abdomen is wood-hued, like a fir-cone, with delicate white spots forming a crucifix on it. Her legs, multiply hinged, are striped brown, white, and amber. In the past days I’ve seen some tiny victims in her web, but they’ve been cleared away. The web is pristine and barely visible. The spider is at the center, motionless as a stick or a stone, industrious but also economical of her effort. Each leg rests on a different strand of web. When she moves or works she’s like a harpist plucking the wires of her instrument.

For sound there is the cawing of crows—

Now the spider mobilizes: jiggling, suspended, alert: a tiny fly has run into the intersection of 2 strands maybe 6 cm from her, and she has rotated to face down the radial strand. And quickly she darts to seize her prey—so fast for one who was so still. Faster than I can see she has taken the fly to her mouth and quickly returned to her post, apparently sucking the juice from her victim now rather than saving it for later. She turns herself around and resumes her former position and stillness. The fly is still at her mouth: she caresses it with her mandibles.

sketchbook: Thursday 15 November 2012

Thu 15 Nov 2012 ca. 8:15 am Lonsdale & 19th Medical Clinic

Irregular warren in the dilapidated 1950s building: black steel-framed chairs, corridor walls lined with medical files, potted incandescent lights set in the acoustic tile of the ceiling. The corridors are wide and narrow, with little notches and niches in the walls. A ripply glass-block window opposite me. Rundown institutional feel.

And the feelings? A kind of weekend-morning expectancy.

my election results

A week ago, the day after the U.S. elections, I had my teeth cleaned over at my dentist in Vancouver. While he was inspecting my mouth, to make conversation he said, “And what about the election down south—were you following that?”

“Not really,” I said. “I think they’ve got systemic problems that are beyond the power of party politics to fix.”

My dentist quickly skated away to a different subject, maybe sensing that I might be a fanatic of some kind. I’m not—at least, I certainly don’t want to be. But maybe I’ll try to elaborate on my thought here.

I’ve reflected on what exactly I meant by my term systemic problems, and have put my finger on three specific ones. If I had to list them in order of increasing toxicity to the society in which they occur, this would be it:

militarism
imperialism
credit expansion

Each of these is a virulent cancer in the body politic; together they constitute a formidable and probably fatal disease.

My Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines militarism as:

1a: predominance of the military class or its ideals b: exaltation of military virtues and ideals 2: a policy of aggressive military preparedness

I believe that these definitions fairly describe the United States, at least at the official level. The huge size of its military, the profligacy of its military spending, and the increasing reliance on force as its primary foreign-policy tool all speak to this. The turning-point seems to have been World War II, when the vast forces mobilized for the war were not fully demobilized afterwards, as they had been after World War I. The arrival of the Cold War put the country on a new, more militarized footing. This new militarism was symbolized by the creation of the Pentagon. When President Roosevelt, shocked at the grandioseness of the proposed structure, told its project managers to halve its size, they ignored him and built what was then the largest piece of enclosed space on Earth.

Next: imperialism. Here my trusty Webster’s gives this definition:

the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation esp. by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly: the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence

When I was growing up, the Vietnam War was a staple of the evening news; as it dragged on all through my childhood, I took it for granted. My understanding of it could probably be summarized thus: Communism was something so bad that you had to spend years dropping napalm on villages in Indochina to try to stop it. I remember watching TV alone one day when I was maybe 9 years old, and a documentary showed a Vietnamese woman sitting in a field, clutching her dead baby to her. The woman had been shot three times, including once in the head. I experienced a strange mix of horror and disbelief: it was only on TV, and yet I knew it was real. War somehow was about shooting women and their babies. “She must be about to die,” I thought.

I never found out. But that scene has haunted me through my life, arising with a chill when new situations arise that remind me of it, such as when General Tommy Franks famously said “We don’t do body counts” when asked about civilian deaths in Iraq. Capturing territory from people who don’t want to give it to you is messy work; corpses will pile up. But whatever the official or unofficial reasons for invading Iraq, it was an instance of the United States’ effort to extend its power and dominion. Other instances have not been so spectacular or so costly, but they have been many, and they all conform to the definition of imperialism.

The third cancer, credit expansion, is the worst of the three. Surprised? You may never have heard of it before. Indeed, it does not have its own entry in my Webster’s, but its definition would be something like

the deliberate, persistent increase of the amount of money and credit in a society

The benefits of credit expansion are the same as the benefits of counterfeiting, but they are on a much larger scale, and they have the advantage of being legal. Money is created from nothing, and those who do the creating get to spend the free money before the price-rises that will eventually result from its creation can occur. In effect, wealth is transferred involuntarily and by stealth from those who are far from the money printing-press, who find that their money now buys a bit less than it used to.

To practice credit expansion on a large scale over a long time requires persistence, ingenuity, and the concentration of state power. The methods used in the U.S. have included the creation of a central bank, the Federal Reserve, that fixes interest rates and other banks’ reserve requirements; the introduction of “legal tender” laws that oblige citizens to accept the government-issued currency; and the gradual severing of the convertibility of the dollar with gold. This last, seemingly unconstitutional, measure was fought out in a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 19th century. (Interestingly, Andrew Jackson, the first Democratic president, was elected on a “sound money” platform in 1829; back then a stable currency was seen as a populist policy.)

But what makes credit expansion a cancer? The fact that it’s used by governments to fund projects and policies that they could never fund through direct taxation, and the fact that it ruins economies and eventually brings about mass impoverishment and civil unrest. Because credit expansion is a zero-sum game, there is never any net benefit to society; but the process of surreptitiously enriching the few at the expense of the many eventually brings about the destruction of society. It is this cancer that allows the first two, militarism and imperialism, to grow. For what taxpayer would agree to a 500% or 1000% increase in his taxes to fund foreign wars? Credit expansion means that he will pay anyway, but it will happen gradually and unpredictably and untraceably over time.

Party politics cannot cure these cancers. In the U.S., neither of the mainstream parties has any desire to address them. Whoever comes into power gains power over that printing press, and with it the means to fund their agenda. And both Democrats and Republicans have big spending plans.

Meaningful change in this situation will have to come from the grass roots, as suggested by Dwight Eisenhower in his “military-industrial complex” speech of 1961. That change will certainly come, for people will revolt before they’re bled dry. The question is whether that change will be relatively orderly, informed, and principled, as it might be if led by, say, a Martin Luther King, Jr., or instead chaotic, violent, and vengeful, as it will be if led by just about anyone else.

This then is my response to the U.S. election results. To our neighbors down south I say: good luck. You’re going to need it.

Middle Eastern Mythology by S. H. Hooke

Middle Eastern Mythology by S.H. Hooke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This concise, authoritative text gives an excellent overview of the myths of the ancient Middle East and their interconnections.

I bought this little Pelican paperback in January 1986, which reminds me that I got it while researching my novel Truth of the Python. Now, working on a new opus also set partly in the ancient Near East, I find myself dipping into it again. My copy is mostly disintegrated, but it’s also heavily highlighted.

My own introduction to mythology had been by way of Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell, both of whom I admire deeply. But brilliant and deep as those scholars were, I find myself leaning on the introduction to S. H. Hooke’s little book when I’m looking to remind myself of what myths are. In the first paragraph Hooke says

The myth is a product of human imagination arising out of a definite situation and intended to do something. Hence the right question to ask about the myth is not, “Is it true?” but “What is it intended to do?”

Using this simple, pragmatic question, Hooke discerns five types of myth:

the ritual myth
the myth of origin
the cult myth
the prestige myth
the eschatological myth

He gives a brief description of each, and notes how the diffusion and combination of myths can be partly traced by various methods. Then, having laid the groundwork of the subject and his method in 7 short pages, he launches into the main text, in which he summarizes and discusses Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Ugaritic, Hittite, and Hebrew mythology, and follows that with a look at the role of myth in Jewish apocalyptic and in Christianity. It’s a huge field of survey, which the author makes seem both full and unhurried.

The longest chapter is that on Hebrew mythology, and indeed for us readers in the West the main point of interest in Middle Eastern mythology is no doubt the Bible. Hooke shows how the mythic parts of Genesis (Creation, Cain and Abel, the Flood, etc.) relate to similar tales in the other Middle Eastern cultures, and shows briefly and clearly how the Bible itself contains several mutually inconsistent myths of its own.

The chapter which seemed the most sketchy to me was that on Egyptian mythology—a vast field which Hooke treats in just 14 short pages. Nonetheless, the myths that he does treat are well chosen and simply described.

In all, this is an excellent survey of material that is hard to find all in one place, especially at this short length, and with this level of authority. In that respect it is almost like a briefing document. If you’re wondering, Why should I care about Middle Eastern mythology?, this is a good, quick way to find out.

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my liberal-education report card

In my last post I reviewed the reasons that I think liberal education is so important. Since I’m trying to acquire a liberal education through my own self-study program, a natural question is, what is my own progress?

Without a system of exams, it’s not easy to measure. One thing I can do is to summarize my current activities as they relate to liberal education. I start each day by typing highlights from my reading into Word documents. The typing mainly falls into two categories: liberal education and research for my own writing. This morning the liberal-education component was highlighted text from Book 3 of Aristotle’s Physics, from volume 8 of the Britannica Great Books series. The specific discussion was on the definition and existence of infinity, which Aristotle hesitates to affirm as either existing or not existing, finding that both assertions lead to contradictions. He therefore finds that infinity does indeed have a real existence, but that this existence is potential rather than actual, in that there is no theoretical limit to the number of times that we can, say, divide a line, while in practice, there is such a limit.

After typing a stretch of highlighted material, I then copy the typed text into further “idea” documents which I’ve set up. Today was unusually simple, because I found that all of the material I’d typed I could simply transfer into the document labeled “Infinity”. The intention is that as I come across different topics in my reading, I can copy the contents of my highlights into the various idea documents, creating a kind of briefing document on each idea. It so happens that Infinity is one of the 102 Great Ideas identified by the editors of the Great Books series, and so this document of mine contains a compressed version of the relevant essay in the so-called Syntopicon, the 2 volumes of the set devoted to describing the Great Ideas. (These 102 essays, each about 4,000 words long, were all written by Mortimer J. Adler in a single intensive 2-year push.) So far, that introductory essay is the only other material I have in that particular document, but other documents contain extracts from multiple works, both in the Great Books set and others.

So much for my morning typing. The next liberal-education moment of my day is when I pick up the guitar, which I do most days for an hour or so. Not only was music one of the 7 classical liberal arts, it was also one of the 7 classical fine arts (along with painting, sculpture, literature, drama, architecture, and dance). I still play the same Japanese-made Sigma acoustic guitar I got as a graduation present from high school in 1977. I’ve played it only intermittently since then, but since 2008 I have made a determined effort to improve my playing. Right now I’m working on learning scales and arpeggios, along with a couple of other things. My approach is studious. I love playing, and as a bonus I understand that playing music is one of the best exercises for the brain, making it much less likely that one will suffer from dementia in old age.

Next on the liberal-education curriculum is my reading block starting at teatime. I always start off with fiction or other imaginative writing, and my priority is to read all the imaginative literature in the Great Books. Right now I’m reading Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor from volume 27. Then it’s on to nonfiction: right now, the aforementioned Physics of Aristotle. I find I can’t read any one book for longer than 40 or 45 minutes, so I keep moving on. Next: I pull out my powder-blue 3-ring binder and push ahead with handwritten notes of The Trivium by Sister Miriam Joseph. I’ve already read and highlighted the book, but it’s so dense, and the material is so central to my liberal-education project, that I’ll keep going through it in different ways until I absorb the content. For the past few days I’ve been going through the chapter on induction, or how we intuit knowledge based on our experience.

I find I can spend about 20 minutes on The Trivium before I have to put it away. By then I’ve moved from tea to red wine. But I’m still not quite done. I count one more book in my current reading stack as part of my liberal education: The Idea of Happiness by V. J. McGill, a volume published as part of a project by Adler’s Institute for Philosophical Research. The project was to elucidate each of the Great Ideas in its own volume. In the event, they only got 6 of them done before the Institute itself apparently dissolved in 1967 or soon after. I’ve acquired all the volumes myself online. It was a wonderful project and it deserves to be finished.

With that my day of liberal education ends, ready to start again the next morning. Around it I work in my other activities, including my fiction writing and this blog.

But what about my actual progress? How liberally “educated” am I? As a self-directed student I have the luxury of being able to write my own report cards—that is if I feel like it—but I’d like to have an honest and objective measure of my progress.

I’ve decided that there’s probably no better one than a measure suggested by the Robert Frost quote I placed in my last post: “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.” My liberal-education dashboard consists simply in noticing my emotional response to what I hear, see, and read. Many news stories I read, especially about politics and the economy, trigger feelings of anger and fear in me. I might not actually lose my temper—but I could. As I now see it, those responses are the measure of how far I have yet to go on the path of liberal education. It is a path, solitary though it may be, that I tread with great joy.

why liberal education, again?

Why do I feel that a specifically liberal education is so important?

I see it this way. People are different. While we all belong to the same species, we have different backgrounds, characters, interests, and aims. Sometimes these aims come into conflict. Then what?

As I see it, the ways of managing interpersonal conflict boil down to two:

violence
negotiation

Violence, which includes not just brute force but also intimidation and deception, is how animals resolve their differences. The bigger and the stronger prevail, the smaller and the weaker give way. This is the law of the jungle.

It is also how a great many human conflicts are managed. From sibling spats to the invasion of Iraq, people use force in an effort to make their will prevail. In doing so, humans show themselves to be animals, not different in this respect from sea urchins or caribou.

But humans, in possessing reason and language, have access to resources that those other animals do not. Reason and language make it possible for us to work out our differences not by violence but by agreement. But resolving conflicts by agreement requires a lot of, well, humanity. For not only are reason and language required, but also things like mutual respect, honor, and good-will. These civilized values need to be deliberately and widely cultivated in order for them to do their magic. Then, assuming they’re in place, the would-be conflict resolver or negotiator needs something further: persuasive power. When words are your main conflict-resolution tool, advantages flow to those who master their use better.

This is where education, and more specifically liberal education, comes in. For the whole purpose of a liberal education, as its name is intended to convey, is to prepare the free man to live a free, self-responsible life. The ancients contrasted it with a servile education, which meant an education that better enabled one to serve others. This meant mainly what we would call vocational training—which does not demand the same skills as training to be free. When we’re serving others, we’re intentionally subordinating our own will and making ourselves the tools of their will.

For the most part we don’t get into domestic service nowadays; rather, we’re serving bosses, clients, and customers. But service is what it is, and ancient thinkers such as Aristotle believed that such service disqualified one from being a citizen.

Liberal education prepares one for a life of full self-responsibility in a civilized world. Liberally educated people are exactly those most likely to foster a culture in which conflicts are resolved by negotiation, as they are also those best able to make their views prevail in that culture.

Robert Frost said that “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.” The education he was referring to was liberal education. If you think about it, violence is exactly the acting-out of people who have lost either their temper or their self-confidence, or both.

The tradition of liberal education was already dying by the dawn of the 20th century. Since then it has continued to disappear like Earth’s glaciers. Technically educated people have created weapons of ever greater lethal power and placed them in the hands of other technically educated people to try to impose their will on others. This process has given us the world we live in now.

I want to change that. I want a world in which people resolve their differences by negotiation, not violence. That is why I’m pursuing a self-directed liberal education. My intention is that the civilized view and values that it represents will not die so long as I am alive.