More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Weil wrote an essay about the Iliad—one of the most famous, and indeed one of the most powerful, things ever written about Homer’s great poem.
When Andromache pleads with Hector not to return to the fighting, when Achilles weeps and rages over the death of his beloved friend Patroclus, when old King Priam goes to his knees to beg his son’s killer for his son’s body, a powerful electrical current leaps across the millennia, from that distant pole to our immediate one.
what we need to do is keep all our values in play, not just some of them.
Baggini’s chief argument is that none of these figures had the good fortune to be confronted with eloquent proponents of opposing views. They did not have the benefit that we have of being able to read Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King
“Becoming aware that even the likes of Kant and Hume were products of their times is a humbling reminder that the greatest minds can still be blind to mistakes and evils, if they are widespread enough.” And a reminder also of how extraordinary
Here’s an example: there will be a time, I am certain, when our descendants will be positively aghast that we ever ate animals. How could we possibly have been so thoughtlessly cruel?
But imagine that visitor from the future going back to, say, London in the year 1500, a place and time in which vegetarianism had scarcely been heard of and veganism altogether unknown. (In south India the story is rather different.) Would those people even be able to make sense of the visitor’s admonition?
Positive selection is about encouraging the good, negative selection about eliminating the bad.
but in each case the logic is generally the same: find the shortcomings of candidates, any old shortcomings, so you can send them to the reject pile. Vance doesn’t say this, but I believe that in any situation that requires a lot of informational triage—which
If we follow the practice of negative selection we’ll dismiss Isaac Newton because he had weird and wrong ideas about secret messages in the Bible. Similarly, we’ll dismiss Edith Wharton because of her anti-Semitism, David Hume because of his racism, and Aristotle because of his sexism.
pool of candidates for our attention will get smaller and smaller—which is, after all, what negative selection is meant to do—but there’s a point at which a hyperdeveloped feature can become a bug.
My problem with the disregard of the past that we typically manifest today is that we are highly selective in what elements of a historical person’s character we are willing to take seriously. We tend to consider only those elements that reflect the dominant concerns of our moment, which are not the only concerns that are relevant to human judgment.
In looking at figures from the past, we behave, as Vance and Alexander suggest, rather like admissions officers at elite colleges and universities: We look for ways to send them to the reject pile. And we do this for exactly the same reason that college admissions officers do. We are overwhelmed by data, we are continually at the mercy of a fire hose of information, and anything we can do to limit the amount of data that we have to deal with, we do.
Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (published in 1644—despite the title it wasn’t a speech). There Milton makes a rigorously logical and deeply impassioned plea for the freedom to express even the most outrageous political ideas—for, the poet argued, when “books freely permitted are,” this freedom conduces “both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth.” It is surely “more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled.”
“I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions
To us, his denial of freedom to Catholics and blasphemers seems evidently absurd; to his fellow radical Protestants, the real absurdity was giving freedom of the press to the bishop-loving enemies of all that was godly and good.
And it is vital to see that they were not wrong. A society in which the dissemination of information is controlled by the government will almost surely be more orderly than one in which information and disinformation are free; and the more complete the control, the more perfect will be the order.
In many ways, this is the human predicament: We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas. Why should Washington and Jefferson and Milton have been any different? We should not be surprised that they failed to live up to their ideals; we should, I think, be surprised that in their time and place they upheld such ideals at all. They pushed the world a little closer to freedom and justice. Of how many of us can that be said?
possible to, as Christians say, “hate the sin and love the sinner,” it’s easy: we do it to ourselves every day.
Through most of my childhood my father was in prison, and my mother worked long hours to keep us financially afloat; my world was narrow and limited and showed no signs of broadening. I am therefore enormously grateful for a social order that allowed me economic and professional mobility, that showed me open doors and encouraged me to go through them. But I would be lying to you and deceiving myself if I denied that that mobility came with costs. I have not had the intimacy with family that my parents and grandparents had; I have not known lifelong friendships. When I say this I do not wish my
...more
What is true for me on a personal level is, I believe, true for all of us in one way or another, and true culturally. Our culture has made certain decisions on our behalf, decisions we individuals have participated in with varying degrees of willingness, and even when we fully endorse those decisions we should not, we must not, be afraid to count the costs—to notice the ways in which the rum we make lacks the savor of that made in the old, abandoned ways, even when we affirm that abandonment.
Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.
But as much as sheer presentism, an outlook like Schliemann’s is also a diminishment of temporal bandwidth. The way that you expand your Now is not by treating the distant past as though it were present; rather, your task is to see it in its difference as well as in its likeness to your own moment. You can’t close that distance by naming your son after an ancient king.
A common assumption made by Jews and Christians and Muslims is that their sacred texts can speak to them more or less directly across the centuries.
Throughout most of the past two thousand years or so in the West, a common belief held that a person could best navigate the challenges of life by taking his or her bearings from famous figures from the past.
ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.
In offering his advice to Lorenzo, Machiavelli was consciously setting himself apart from a long-standing tradition, one that made the leaders of the past somehow contemporary with later readers, and object lessons for them. The person who did more than any other to create this tradition was the Greek-speaking Roman historian Plutarch, who lived from around 46 CE to around 120 CE, and who wrote his series of lives of Greek and Roman
statesmen and other notables explicitly in order to provide examples, mirrors in which people could perceive their own virtues and vices.
He wrote a number of Moralia—moral essays, essays that offered sage advice for good living—but he came to feel that mere precepts were inadequate for communicating to people the best way to live. We need examples of virtue and vice in action in order to see their outlines clearly, and the lives of the Great wrote their examples of virtue and vice in very large letters that all could clearly read. Thus he emphasized that his lives were biographies, not histories, which did not mean that they were inaccurate but rather than he sought primarily to include evidence of character, which might come
...more
in the sense that I treat the narrative as a kind of mirror and try to find a way to arrange my life and assimilate it to the virtues of my subjects.
Plutarch’s way of appropriating and drawing on the experiences of the great political and military figures of Greece and Rome proved to be profoundly influential for many centuries.
His model was one that the whole educational system of western Europe embraced for a very long time. Thanks to Plutarch it not only seemed natural to George Washington to perceive himself as a modern analogue of Cincinnatus—the great general who saved the Roman Republic and then retired to his farm—but it was equally natural to everyone else who knew Washington or merely observed him to assess him in comparison to the character of Cincinnatus.
In a wonderfully illuminating book, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, Garry Wills
And by accepting the association Washington bound himself to certain standards, invited others to judge him by them, and made the same judgments upon himself.
The Plutarchian frame of mind was essential to the thinking of Winston Churchill, for instance, who as a writer as well as a statesman perceived the past with an immediacy that seems strange to most of us today.
“Any man who is cut off from the past, and content with the future, is a man most unjustly disinherited; and all the more unjustly if he is happy in his lot, and is not permitted even to know what he has lost.”
I have argued that we can sometimes be deterred from what an old book offers by noticing where it falls short—our inclination to negative selection can blind us to the virtues of positive selection. But we can also get ourselves into something like the opposite problem—a determination to read in a sanitizing way—when faced with a text that we know is in some sense a “classic” but which offends, or seems to offend.
To say “This text offends me, I will read no further” may be shortsighted; but to read a “great book” from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong,
But Calvino also talks about “your classics,” books that take on classic status for a particular reader: “Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him” (that second emphasis mine).
That is, a book becomes a classic for you in part because of its power to compel you to hear something that you not only hadn’t thought but might not believe, or might not want to believe. In this sense a book can become very much like a friend:
When we speak our thought, we want more than agreement, we want addition: we want our friend to develop that thought, or to push back at
William Blake had something like this in mind when he wrote “Opposition is true friendship.”
work that is classic for me is the one that can give me, among other things, that kind of opposition.
Calvino says something very shrewd and very subtle about this: “A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.”
Moby-Dick in an essay for The Guardian of London in which he praises the book for being “relevant” to our climate crisis, for being a “very queer book,” for being “genuinely subversive”—for, in general, being all the things that Guardian readers already approve of.
The person who did more than anyone else to shift the energies of educators from the model that Churchill and Chesterton loved to the one most of us today have experienced is the American philosopher John Dewey, but if you look at Dewey’s understanding of what education is, you can see the possibility for a sensitive encounter with the past. In a book of a hundred years ago, Dewey wrote,
by Chaucer: “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.”
Instead, she suggests, you should look for what she calls a “utopian moment”—a moment when something deeply and beautifully human emerges from that swamp of patriarchal ideology. Another phrase she uses for this is the “authentic kernel,” something perhaps hidden deep inside the book that speaks to you, that articulates an experience you can share.
you read in a double fashion.
Earlier I spoke of giving voice to the dead with the blood of our attention.
