"True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus."
I read this call for free speech and a free press, hallmarks of those liberal Ameri-Brits of the late eighteenth century, and I agree heartily. Perhaps what they say about college teachers' being liberal is true after all.
Click on the post's title for the full article.
28 September 2006
27 September 2006
Nihil sub sole novum
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you haven't been around that long, cynic.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you haven't seen nearly as much, traditionalist.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you stand on the earth under its light, not beside it as its brother.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But in your threescore and ten, there is plenty new before you.
But you haven't been around that long, cynic.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you haven't seen nearly as much, traditionalist.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you stand on the earth under its light, not beside it as its brother.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But in your threescore and ten, there is plenty new before you.
26 September 2006
An Extra in Bartholomew Fair
I'm about to head upstairs to play the Puritan for my office mate's surprise classroom production of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. Typecasting? Probably. No matter; one has to love a play in which a Puritan loses a theological debate to a puppet, even if one doesn't entirely dislike Puritans.
I'm looking forward to digging back into Republic with my classes. These conferences have been valuable, I think, but Plato is just more fun. I think we're coming up on the wives and children passage--if they don't get riled about that, they're just not reading.
I'm looking forward to digging back into Republic with my classes. These conferences have been valuable, I think, but Plato is just more fun. I think we're coming up on the wives and children passage--if they don't get riled about that, they're just not reading.
22 September 2006
Plato's Guardians and UGA's... what?
We finished up our second Plato "unit" (actually just read enough pages to get to paper 2's revision days) with a haphazard discussion of whether or not UGA students are somehow analogous to Plato's guardians. Some folks seem pretty comfortable with the assertion that college students are there for self-improvement primarily, while others have some idea that they (we) ought to benefit "society" but have trouble articulating who counts as "society" and what concrete benefit college-educated folks confer that high-school-educated folks couldn't.
At Milligan the answers were much clearer. From our opening-week Matriculation ceremony to the commencement ceremony, Milligan let us know that we are indeed the next generation's guardians and that our intellectual pursuits ought to serve the Church make meaning out of God's fallen world even as our vocations, be they education or business or preaching, ought to seek justice, the corrollary of God's good ordering of the world. The "we" was clear, and the expectations were clear.
There are days when I wish I could give the same sort of clarity to my students here at the University, but every time I try, I fade into some fuzzy sentimental idea about "universal humanity" or "local community" or some such. There's nothing wrong with either of those, but without a clearer sense of who "we" are and whom "we" serve, concrete action is hard to imagine. Like my students, I'm not quite sure why we're here. I think that Plato's basic idea of morality, the strong working to benefit the weak, ought to apply, but I'm not sure how.
I think this is at least partly why my students want to return to a sort of omission-model when they talk about morality. UGA students must not be a guardian class, because they don't refrain from smoking, drinking, chewing, and screwing. Plato names those vices as well (along with pastries), but in his treatise, to abstain from such things would not itself be morality but would open up more space in which morality could take place.
To bring this back to the particular, my students look at me as if I were from another planet when I tell them that Milligan had no football team and that a significant hunk of the students, from majors as diverse as business and television communications and Bible and nursing, would consider as a viable option for a Friday night a long night at the coffee house talking philosophy and theology. I'm not making that up--I can think of a number of nights and a wide swath of people who indulged in just that on a regular basis. We also played games and watched movies and took in local bands on other nights, but there was no sense that the weekend necessarily had to involve turning off one's brain for three days.
Admittedly, I'm not as familiar with undergrad culture here as someone ought to be before making these kinds of statements. There might be pockets of weekend intellectuals I just haven't encountered. But in the absence of a clear guardian-vocation, I do see that there's a massive business of turning these four (or six) years of students' lives into one long spring break--do whatcha needs to do to graduate, but certainly don't order your life around intellectual activity.
That's not to say that Milligan is necessarily superior in every way. But in these ways, it is clearer.
At Milligan the answers were much clearer. From our opening-week Matriculation ceremony to the commencement ceremony, Milligan let us know that we are indeed the next generation's guardians and that our intellectual pursuits ought to serve the Church make meaning out of God's fallen world even as our vocations, be they education or business or preaching, ought to seek justice, the corrollary of God's good ordering of the world. The "we" was clear, and the expectations were clear.
There are days when I wish I could give the same sort of clarity to my students here at the University, but every time I try, I fade into some fuzzy sentimental idea about "universal humanity" or "local community" or some such. There's nothing wrong with either of those, but without a clearer sense of who "we" are and whom "we" serve, concrete action is hard to imagine. Like my students, I'm not quite sure why we're here. I think that Plato's basic idea of morality, the strong working to benefit the weak, ought to apply, but I'm not sure how.
I think this is at least partly why my students want to return to a sort of omission-model when they talk about morality. UGA students must not be a guardian class, because they don't refrain from smoking, drinking, chewing, and screwing. Plato names those vices as well (along with pastries), but in his treatise, to abstain from such things would not itself be morality but would open up more space in which morality could take place.
To bring this back to the particular, my students look at me as if I were from another planet when I tell them that Milligan had no football team and that a significant hunk of the students, from majors as diverse as business and television communications and Bible and nursing, would consider as a viable option for a Friday night a long night at the coffee house talking philosophy and theology. I'm not making that up--I can think of a number of nights and a wide swath of people who indulged in just that on a regular basis. We also played games and watched movies and took in local bands on other nights, but there was no sense that the weekend necessarily had to involve turning off one's brain for three days.
Admittedly, I'm not as familiar with undergrad culture here as someone ought to be before making these kinds of statements. There might be pockets of weekend intellectuals I just haven't encountered. But in the absence of a clear guardian-vocation, I do see that there's a massive business of turning these four (or six) years of students' lives into one long spring break--do whatcha needs to do to graduate, but certainly don't order your life around intellectual activity.
That's not to say that Milligan is necessarily superior in every way. But in these ways, it is clearer.
19 September 2006
Censorship
Discussion went well yesterday, though I should have planned better in both cases. We established that censorship can happen in all kinds of contexts and all kinds of reasons but did not have enough time in the end to explore the possibility of evaluating those acts of censorship.
Ah, well. At least we got to think about it.
Tomorrow we finish the section on the city-guardians' education and take a week's break from reading to do revision groups, so no Plato for a little while.
On October 15 I'll be doing another team-sermon with Ben, this time on Amos and Mark, so I suppose the respite from Plato reading won't leave me with nothing to read.
Ah, well. At least we got to think about it.
Tomorrow we finish the section on the city-guardians' education and take a week's break from reading to do revision groups, so no Plato for a little while.
On October 15 I'll be doing another team-sermon with Ben, this time on Amos and Mark, so I suppose the respite from Plato reading won't leave me with nothing to read.
16 September 2006
14 September 2006
The Ring of Gyges
Imagine that there's a ring that turns one invisible, that one could do anything, moral or immoral, without being seen.
(No, not even by the hellish bad guys in Lord of the Rings.)
Now imagine that one had the resources to hire sorcerors, wizards who could by magic arts convince even the gods that one's life were perfectly moral.
(I know, I know--they wouldn't be very impressive gods if sorcerors could thus fool them. Work with me here.)
Would anyone still be moral?
Thus ended one of the best discussions that we've had in freshman comp thus far. I started the final segment of class with a little game. In a blind-voting exercise, I had them raise their hands if they thought they'd remain moral if they could remove all heavenly and earthly consequences of their immorality. Neither class had more than two out of twenty raise their hands. Then I had them raise their hands if they thought that they knew three people who, under the same circumstances, would remain moral. In both classes, more than half the class knew such people.
Such self-doubt is encouraging, really--in a Chesterton sense, these folks believe that good life is possible but doubt that their own capacities can reach it. That's not bad for a bunch of folks whom some commentators have called a relativistic and self-absorbed generation. (Those of us who spend our lives around college students know it's a hair more complicated than that.)
We also delved into the categories of good-in-itself and good-for-the-consequences, and both classes were quite willing to categorize, reconsider, and debate whether such things as love, family, and puppies belong properly in either of those categories. For a thirteen-page reading assignment, we dug into some pretty heavy material yesterday.
A colleague of mine, who has the classroom after the period I teach, asked when I'd start introducing some Derridean deconstructions of Plato's project. I think Plato's project is more than enough for one semester; I've been coming back to it for a dozen years and don't have a strong grasp yet. In fact, Derrida famously said at a talk at Villanova that "Plato is always before me."
I'll leave deconstruction to the deconstructionists.
(No, not even by the hellish bad guys in Lord of the Rings.)
Now imagine that one had the resources to hire sorcerors, wizards who could by magic arts convince even the gods that one's life were perfectly moral.
(I know, I know--they wouldn't be very impressive gods if sorcerors could thus fool them. Work with me here.)
Would anyone still be moral?
Thus ended one of the best discussions that we've had in freshman comp thus far. I started the final segment of class with a little game. In a blind-voting exercise, I had them raise their hands if they thought they'd remain moral if they could remove all heavenly and earthly consequences of their immorality. Neither class had more than two out of twenty raise their hands. Then I had them raise their hands if they thought that they knew three people who, under the same circumstances, would remain moral. In both classes, more than half the class knew such people.
Such self-doubt is encouraging, really--in a Chesterton sense, these folks believe that good life is possible but doubt that their own capacities can reach it. That's not bad for a bunch of folks whom some commentators have called a relativistic and self-absorbed generation. (Those of us who spend our lives around college students know it's a hair more complicated than that.)
We also delved into the categories of good-in-itself and good-for-the-consequences, and both classes were quite willing to categorize, reconsider, and debate whether such things as love, family, and puppies belong properly in either of those categories. For a thirteen-page reading assignment, we dug into some pretty heavy material yesterday.
A colleague of mine, who has the classroom after the period I teach, asked when I'd start introducing some Derridean deconstructions of Plato's project. I think Plato's project is more than enough for one semester; I've been coming back to it for a dozen years and don't have a strong grasp yet. In fact, Derrida famously said at a talk at Villanova that "Plato is always before me."
I'll leave deconstruction to the deconstructionists.
11 September 2006
Morality as Reason
10 o'clock class was tired today.
That or I'm just not connecting with their corporate personality the way I connect with 9 o'clock. However one slices it, my first discussion session went better than my second.
Teaching Republic once again has me thinking about "western culture" as an abstraction and the alienness of the texts that folks name as the classics of "western culture." For instance, just about all my students (in both sections) named something other than Reason as the source of morality. I would have too were I not teaching Plato. Folks' opinions certainly differ, but whether a student espoused a quasi-solipsism or a divine mandate, nobody seemed to want to put reason in the driver's seat of the morality bus.
I realize that such developments are modern developments, that Augustine and Aristotle would have named reason as an engine of morality where Hume and Freud would not. But that's precisely the problem with abstracting "western culture" from its tangled history--there's no there there!
Anyway, I've got to get a better set of notes going for Friday's discussion. Until I'm convinced that the disconnect is insurmountable, I'm going to have to keep plugging away at my sleepy section.
That or I'm just not connecting with their corporate personality the way I connect with 9 o'clock. However one slices it, my first discussion session went better than my second.
Teaching Republic once again has me thinking about "western culture" as an abstraction and the alienness of the texts that folks name as the classics of "western culture." For instance, just about all my students (in both sections) named something other than Reason as the source of morality. I would have too were I not teaching Plato. Folks' opinions certainly differ, but whether a student espoused a quasi-solipsism or a divine mandate, nobody seemed to want to put reason in the driver's seat of the morality bus.
I realize that such developments are modern developments, that Augustine and Aristotle would have named reason as an engine of morality where Hume and Freud would not. But that's precisely the problem with abstracting "western culture" from its tangled history--there's no there there!
Anyway, I've got to get a better set of notes going for Friday's discussion. Until I'm convinced that the disconnect is insurmountable, I'm going to have to keep plugging away at my sleepy section.
09 September 2006
Morality and Power
Friday (yesterday) we covered the rambling opening to Republic and the first salvos between Socrates and Thrasmychus. Once again, unlike the three-year-old comp anthologies, which always seem dated, my classes dug into the two-millennium-old debates about morality and power with a vengeance. As C.S. Lewis promises, the students have found this stuff, thus far, for the most part, delightful.
Within a few minutes each section helped me diagram the basic difference between Socrates' position and Thrasmychus': For the latter, morality is a tool by which the strong make the weak work the strong's benefit. For the former, morality is the strong working for the benefit of the week. (Incidentally, I did better Friday at having two distinct conversations.) In both classes, we found Socrates' account more logical but could generate more cases of Thrasmychus' bearing out.
As we keep cooking through this, I've got to remember to set time aside early for writing instruction; I ran out of time on Friday. Already, having marked only ten papers up, I can tell that I'm going to have to do some instruction on independent and dependent clauses. No surprises there; such is the stuff of the early weeks of FYC.
Within a few minutes each section helped me diagram the basic difference between Socrates' position and Thrasmychus': For the latter, morality is a tool by which the strong make the weak work the strong's benefit. For the former, morality is the strong working for the benefit of the week. (Incidentally, I did better Friday at having two distinct conversations.) In both classes, we found Socrates' account more logical but could generate more cases of Thrasmychus' bearing out.
As we keep cooking through this, I've got to remember to set time aside early for writing instruction; I ran out of time on Friday. Already, having marked only ten papers up, I can tell that I'm going to have to do some instruction on independent and dependent clauses. No surprises there; such is the stuff of the early weeks of FYC.
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