If I could chat with Alisa Harris, I'd ask her why she chose to subtitle her book "How I Untangled My Faith from Politics." The process she describes doesn't sound like an untangling as much as it does a reconciliation. She doesn't throw Christianity in the trash when she learns about the poor, but learns the true meaning of Matthew's gospel. She doesn't put her Bible on the shelf when she learns how corrupt politicians can be, but rather becomes as "shrewd as a snake." Still, she insists on delineating her faith (a socially conservative Pentecostalism) as something provincial and outgrown while only thinking about the Faith, the timeless and universal truth of which her parents were a variation, in doubtful language.
Alisa's story is a common one; she grew up buying into the unthinking fundamentalism of her church and friends, believing her little congregation privy to all truth. She traveled, and realized the world was a bigger place than she had originally suspected. Her story is printable largely because of the stringency of her particular background--a simplified version of Christianity with all the peripheral and minor doctrines magnified to distortion--and because of her ardent and over-susceptible childhood, which she paints as rather tragicomic.
I'm still not sure why the book, in the end, was necessary. Alisa becomes a Democrat, which is a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do; but it doesn't sound like her decision was a reasoned one. She records no arguments or debates; she unveils no revelations. She simply finds the world big, weeps a bit, and then, apologetically, votes for Obama. She finds that the litmus tests of homosexuality and abortion are insufficient to keep her voting red; but says anything about homosexuality or abortion beyond "I once was much more sure about these issues." It's fine to doubt, and indeed, better to doubt honestly than to be stupidly sure. But did young Christians need another book of heartfelt doubts? I believe Ms. Harris to be a talented writer. Perhaps in her next book we'll hear some development on these doubts as she makes her way through the wide world.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011
Neolithic Man
by Charoltte Perkins Gilman
There was once a Neolithic Man,
An enterprising wight,
Who made his chopping implements
Unusually bright.
Unusually clever he,
Unusually brave,
And he drew delightful Mammoths
On the borders of his cave.
To his Neolithic neighbors,
Who were startled and surprised,
Said he, "My friends, in course of time,
We shall be civilized!
We are going to live in cities!
We are going to fight in wars!
We are going to eat three times a day
Without the natural cause!
We are going to turn life upside down
About a thing called gold!
We are going to want the earth, and take
As much as we can hold!
We are going to wear great piles of stuff
Outside our proper skins!
We are going to have diseases!
And Accomplishments!! And Sins!!!"
Then they all rose up in fury
Against their boastful friend,
For prehistoric patience
Cometh quickly to an end.
Said one, "This is chimerical!
Utopian! Absurd!"
Said another, "What a stupid life!
Too dull, upon my word!"
Cried all, "Before such things can come,
You idiotic child,
You must alter Human Nature!"
And they all sat back and smiled.
Thought they, "An answer to that last
It will be hard to find!"
It was a clinching argument
To the Neolithic Mind!
There was once a Neolithic Man,
An enterprising wight,
Who made his chopping implements
Unusually bright.
Unusually clever he,
Unusually brave,
And he drew delightful Mammoths
On the borders of his cave.
To his Neolithic neighbors,
Who were startled and surprised,
Said he, "My friends, in course of time,
We shall be civilized!
We are going to live in cities!
We are going to fight in wars!
We are going to eat three times a day
Without the natural cause!
We are going to turn life upside down
About a thing called gold!
We are going to want the earth, and take
As much as we can hold!
We are going to wear great piles of stuff
Outside our proper skins!
We are going to have diseases!
And Accomplishments!! And Sins!!!"
Then they all rose up in fury
Against their boastful friend,
For prehistoric patience
Cometh quickly to an end.
Said one, "This is chimerical!
Utopian! Absurd!"
Said another, "What a stupid life!
Too dull, upon my word!"
Cried all, "Before such things can come,
You idiotic child,
You must alter Human Nature!"
And they all sat back and smiled.
Thought they, "An answer to that last
It will be hard to find!"
It was a clinching argument
To the Neolithic Mind!
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
An Email
Sent to several friends regarding this column:
http://aggreen.net/beliefs/heaven_hell.html
This was an interesting read. I'm writing straight from my notes here instead of organizing a true written response, so please be patient if it comes a little scattered.
First, I'd like some more clarity on what Green means by "not a place" but still "real experienced conditions." Does he mean, then, that heaven and hell are states of mind detached without any physical conditions? (i.e. in eternity we are disembodied, and our minds/consciousnesses are the only conduits of perception) This will lead quickly back to talk of the resurrection of the dead, which I didn't find much developed in this article, but in the way I understand heaven and hell, is the central fact. I can entertain the notion that hell is more a state of mind than a plotted place on a map, but whether its experienced with or without the body (i.e. whole person) is very important to distinguish.
Second, I think that Green overplays his hand very badly on two points. First, that the Western Christian imagery of hell-as-a-place was nowhere to be found before the Great Schism, and second, that the biblical language supports his pet theory that hell is within the presence of God. More on these later as well.
He's probably right that Sheol ought to be transliterated. That's about as much as I'm able to say, with my very little Hebrew, about translations in the O.T. He's certainly right about the Greek view of Hades paralleling that of the old Jews; Hades/Sheol is the abode of the ghosts of both the righteous and the wicked, but these ghosts are not whole people. They are echoes of the men, while (as it says in the Iliad) the men themselves lie in their graves. This is all quite different than the Platonic notion that the body is merely a temporary home of the real person, the leaving of which will provide a higher, more spiritual existence. To nearly all ancient people there wasn't really a life-after-death to speak of. With time, the Greek view became more nuanced. The particularly wicked had punishments imagined for them in Hades, and something like Elysium (still in the same "locality") was imagined for the blessed. The Platonic philosophers talked about the soul as the seat of existence, and believed it to be immortal, while other schools dabbled in something like re-incarnation. (You see this in Virgil, which I blogged about here.) And of course, as was often the case in Greco-Roman religion, none of these contradictions really bothered anyone. There was a comfortable jumble of possibilities in Hades, and no one really had anything staked on it. Life (except for a very few, like Socrates) was only really had in the body, and what came afterwards was a number of varied, but ultimately inconsequential possibilities.
In Jewish thought, hints of resurrection creep in by the late psalms and minor prophets, and there is a full blown expectation of it (though it wasn't the center of their religious hopes) by the time of the Maccabean uprising. Indeed, it was the subject of their dying words as they were executed in the temple. It's fairly well established that by N.T. times, the Pharisees and Essenes represented religious interests whose defining dogmas concerned the resurrection. For the Jews of Jesus' time, Hades was still the abode of the righteous and the wicked after death, but it was a stopping-house before a bodily resurrection. (And when I say Jews, I should note that there was pluriformity in Israel as well, although not to the extent of the rest of the Hellenistic world)
So, then for the Old Testament. Again, I can't speak for his specific accusations about bad translation and word study, but I think he's generally on the right track in his representation of the Jewish/Hellenistic interplay. I would make, in transitioning to the New Testament, one observation about Gehenna: no one seems to be able to mention the word (which appears in Hebrew and transliterated Greek) without the obligatory explanation about how it was Jerusalem's burning garbage heap, therefore the association with fire, therefore hellfire, etc. I can't find any evidence of this "fact" before the 19th century. It isn't present in the scriptures, the early church fathers, or any of the rabbinical literature I've read. I wonder if, like the bell attached to the high priest's ankles when he entered the Holy of Holies, or the low gate in Jerusalem that was called the Eye of the Needle, it's actually a Christian urban legend, something that might've come from the 19th century version of Wikipedia. All three of these "facts" would make sense given their context and clarify a confusion, but without seeing any real historical evidence for them, I think we have to leave them as theories. (If anyone has any solid historical evidence, please let me know, and I'll be happy to be corrected)
What then, do we know about fiery Gehenna? It might have actually been a burning rubbish-heap, or perhaps "going to Gehenna," like "going to Timbuktu" might have meant exactly what one would think it means from it's N.T. context. (Not going to the place per se, but to a separate, excluded place of eternal torment.)
I don't know how much we can take from the Lazarus parable. I strongly suspect that it tells us only that a locative heaven and hell were used as a story-telling device (like we use St. Peter at the pearly gates as a joke-telling device) and is not Jesus' systematic exposition of his views on the subject. Also, I'd like to know which passage in the Retractions of Augustine he's talking about. I don't remember anything about this, and don't have a copy at hand.
Onto some Greek...I make no claims to be anything other than barely competent, but I can spot a quack when I see one. Mr. Green is either overreaching his capabilities, or was taught very poorly. The preposition apo, in all dialects of Greek, means "from"/"away from," or "by means of." (It matches the Latin preposition ab/a almost exactly) Just this morning in reading Luke I translated verses saying "full of many people from (apo) all Judea and Jerusalem and the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they came to hear him and to be healed from (apo) their sicknesses. The passage from II Thess. could be read with a sense of apo instrumentally (the word from, with it's locative/instrumental vagueness would be the closest match) but to change it to the meaning of kata or dia (because of, on account of ) is to take a very bold liberty with the text. It's an interesting theory, but it's far from the closed case he makes it out to be. Calvin might be able to clarify this further if he has his Wallace Grammar nearby, which I do not.
Similarly, all of his talk about Tartarus is misrepresenting. Tartarus, in Homer, is just lower hell. Yes, it is the home of the banished Titans, but it is also the abode of Sisyphus and Tantalus. It's the seat of Tisiphone...it is Hell, if ever there was a Hell with a capital H. (I wrote about it in the Aeneid here).
In addition to his interesting but hardly conclusive theories about God as fire, Green does his worst work talking about energeia. Yes, energeia sounds like energy, and the two words do have common relatives. But translators are absolutely right to translate the word the way they do; it is most often the verb ergo (work, accomplish) with the preposition en tacked on. The Holy Spirit energei is the Holy Spirit working in us, and that, not some kind of electrical force, would have been the most accurate connotation. All of his talk about the energies of God is a retrojection of 20th/21st century language on texts that had no clue about them.
All of these language discussions don't really come together into anything more profound than "there appears to be variegated language in the New and Old Testaments about hell." This is not new information. The leap from all which is discussed before to Green's own theory rests entirely on the syllogism: God loves all unconditionally; Unconditional love couldn't possibly lead to separated eternal torment; Therefore God would not torment anyone eternally. Now, I probably wouldn't choose the word unconditionally here. God's love is unconditional, but in the same sense that his justice and his holiness are unconditional. If God is the great First Mover, he doesn't require "conditions" to fully be any of the essential qualities of his person. So in that sense, yes, God loves unconditionally. But does it mean that God will disregard all acts of choice, righteousness, wickedness, virtue, vice, and circumstance in his dealings with mankind, both corporately and person to person? I don't think there's any evidence that's true.
Here are the two things we know for sure from the New Testament: 1) There will be a resurrection of the dead. (1 Cor. 15 for an explicit account of this) and 2) Everyone will appear before the bema seat of Jesus. (A judge's bench) (Rom 14:10, 2 Cor. 5:10). We don't know what the judgement of Jesus will be, and we don't know who will get what. We should, if we have any decency, pray regularly for universal mercy. Wouldn't it seem wonderful to us if all was forgiven everyone? It may even be hard for us to imagine how a God whose essence is love could do anything otherwise, but consider our circumstances: We live in an age in which the principal measure of a person's life-story is success or failure in romantic love. (Try to imagine any novel without this as the driving theme if you don't believe me; now try to imagine inserting that theme into any ancient text.) Couple that with our profound ignorance of fear and evil. When was the last time any of us were truly afraid? We do, I believe, all remember some moment of real fear, perhaps being alone outside in the dark, or hearing footsteps downstairs that shouldn't have been there. Yet most of the time we eat safe, sanitized food, and we can drive out darkness with electric lights, stave off the cold with gas heating, and lock our sturdy doors to the conditions of most of historical humanity. And despite our wish to ignore it, there is evil. Indeed, if we let down our puffery and pride for half a moment and look honestly at how we've cheated and deceived, we can acknowledge how each of us really are split ourselves, not to mention the corporate (oppression by a group of people) or natural (tsunamis, hurricanes) evils. And thus we stand, an age living in denial of danger or evil, and overly enamored with shallow meanings of "love." Is it any surprise that we should be discomfited by the idea of real danger in the beyond, or of a containment of evil?
Again, let us pray for universal mercy. But let's not think that just because we don't like the idea of hell that we can erase it from our theology, just as we've done to the angels. (Another topic that was vague in the scriptures, over-played in the Middle Ages, and now written of as superstition today.) It's in thinking about the angels that I almost would subscribe to Green's theory, that the presence of God (see, by the way, Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, on the terror of the numinous is a searing pain to the mortal eye and mind. Anytime an angel enters the pages of scripture, his first words must be Fear Not...they certainly inspire fear! Yet does this mean that hell is the experience of our own poor choices? It is just as likely it means that the Holy, even when it comes in peace, is a terror...so what about when it comes in judgement?
Here's an interesting idea of what Hell might actually look like from N.T. Wright: Our distinguishing characteristic as living organisms is our partly divine heritage. We are animals, like mammals in most outward respects, but partly descended from the gods. We are, being made, in imago Dei, bearers of a divine likeness. The principal effect of sin (original and otherwise) is a defacing of that image. In fact, the further one is given into sin, the less Divine and more animal he becomes; the more he begins to bear the image of the idol he worships, be that lust, greed, or sloth. Wright suggests that Hell might be the final removal of the divine image...a giving over unto animal nature, to be tormented forever by being subjected to their own idolatry. (Like in Narnia, when the beasts that are given speech revert back to being just dumb beasts.) I like the reasoning behind this idea, though of course it's just a theory and no more absolutely proven than Green's...but isn't it curious that they move in such opposite directions? That one is the removal of the divine and the other is it's nearer presence?
The curious thing about this whole recent muddle over hell (and I still haven't read Rob Bell's book...is there anyone who has a copy?) is that it isn't nearly as controversial or interesting as the muddle we should be having over heaven. There may or may not be human souls in hell following the end of all things, but there certainly won't be human souls in heaven...the astounding truth of the resurrection of the dead is that heaven is coming here.
http://aggreen.net/beliefs/heaven_hell.html
This was an interesting read. I'm writing straight from my notes here instead of organizing a true written response, so please be patient if it comes a little scattered.
First, I'd like some more clarity on what Green means by "not a place" but still "real experienced conditions." Does he mean, then, that heaven and hell are states of mind detached without any physical conditions? (i.e. in eternity we are disembodied, and our minds/consciousnesses are the only conduits of perception) This will lead quickly back to talk of the resurrection of the dead, which I didn't find much developed in this article, but in the way I understand heaven and hell, is the central fact. I can entertain the notion that hell is more a state of mind than a plotted place on a map, but whether its experienced with or without the body (i.e. whole person) is very important to distinguish.
Second, I think that Green overplays his hand very badly on two points. First, that the Western Christian imagery of hell-as-a-place was nowhere to be found before the Great Schism, and second, that the biblical language supports his pet theory that hell is within the presence of God. More on these later as well.
He's probably right that Sheol ought to be transliterated. That's about as much as I'm able to say, with my very little Hebrew, about translations in the O.T. He's certainly right about the Greek view of Hades paralleling that of the old Jews; Hades/Sheol is the abode of the ghosts of both the righteous and the wicked, but these ghosts are not whole people. They are echoes of the men, while (as it says in the Iliad) the men themselves lie in their graves. This is all quite different than the Platonic notion that the body is merely a temporary home of the real person, the leaving of which will provide a higher, more spiritual existence. To nearly all ancient people there wasn't really a life-after-death to speak of. With time, the Greek view became more nuanced. The particularly wicked had punishments imagined for them in Hades, and something like Elysium (still in the same "locality") was imagined for the blessed. The Platonic philosophers talked about the soul as the seat of existence, and believed it to be immortal, while other schools dabbled in something like re-incarnation. (You see this in Virgil, which I blogged about here.) And of course, as was often the case in Greco-Roman religion, none of these contradictions really bothered anyone. There was a comfortable jumble of possibilities in Hades, and no one really had anything staked on it. Life (except for a very few, like Socrates) was only really had in the body, and what came afterwards was a number of varied, but ultimately inconsequential possibilities.
In Jewish thought, hints of resurrection creep in by the late psalms and minor prophets, and there is a full blown expectation of it (though it wasn't the center of their religious hopes) by the time of the Maccabean uprising. Indeed, it was the subject of their dying words as they were executed in the temple. It's fairly well established that by N.T. times, the Pharisees and Essenes represented religious interests whose defining dogmas concerned the resurrection. For the Jews of Jesus' time, Hades was still the abode of the righteous and the wicked after death, but it was a stopping-house before a bodily resurrection. (And when I say Jews, I should note that there was pluriformity in Israel as well, although not to the extent of the rest of the Hellenistic world)
So, then for the Old Testament. Again, I can't speak for his specific accusations about bad translation and word study, but I think he's generally on the right track in his representation of the Jewish/Hellenistic interplay. I would make, in transitioning to the New Testament, one observation about Gehenna: no one seems to be able to mention the word (which appears in Hebrew and transliterated Greek) without the obligatory explanation about how it was Jerusalem's burning garbage heap, therefore the association with fire, therefore hellfire, etc. I can't find any evidence of this "fact" before the 19th century. It isn't present in the scriptures, the early church fathers, or any of the rabbinical literature I've read. I wonder if, like the bell attached to the high priest's ankles when he entered the Holy of Holies, or the low gate in Jerusalem that was called the Eye of the Needle, it's actually a Christian urban legend, something that might've come from the 19th century version of Wikipedia. All three of these "facts" would make sense given their context and clarify a confusion, but without seeing any real historical evidence for them, I think we have to leave them as theories. (If anyone has any solid historical evidence, please let me know, and I'll be happy to be corrected)
What then, do we know about fiery Gehenna? It might have actually been a burning rubbish-heap, or perhaps "going to Gehenna," like "going to Timbuktu" might have meant exactly what one would think it means from it's N.T. context. (Not going to the place per se, but to a separate, excluded place of eternal torment.)
I don't know how much we can take from the Lazarus parable. I strongly suspect that it tells us only that a locative heaven and hell were used as a story-telling device (like we use St. Peter at the pearly gates as a joke-telling device) and is not Jesus' systematic exposition of his views on the subject. Also, I'd like to know which passage in the Retractions of Augustine he's talking about. I don't remember anything about this, and don't have a copy at hand.
Onto some Greek...I make no claims to be anything other than barely competent, but I can spot a quack when I see one. Mr. Green is either overreaching his capabilities, or was taught very poorly. The preposition apo, in all dialects of Greek, means "from"/"away from," or "by means of." (It matches the Latin preposition ab/a almost exactly) Just this morning in reading Luke I translated verses saying "full of many people from (apo) all Judea and Jerusalem and the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they came to hear him and to be healed from (apo) their sicknesses. The passage from II Thess. could be read with a sense of apo instrumentally (the word from, with it's locative/instrumental vagueness would be the closest match) but to change it to the meaning of kata or dia (because of, on account of ) is to take a very bold liberty with the text. It's an interesting theory, but it's far from the closed case he makes it out to be. Calvin might be able to clarify this further if he has his Wallace Grammar nearby, which I do not.
Similarly, all of his talk about Tartarus is misrepresenting. Tartarus, in Homer, is just lower hell. Yes, it is the home of the banished Titans, but it is also the abode of Sisyphus and Tantalus. It's the seat of Tisiphone...it is Hell, if ever there was a Hell with a capital H. (I wrote about it in the Aeneid here).
In addition to his interesting but hardly conclusive theories about God as fire, Green does his worst work talking about energeia. Yes, energeia sounds like energy, and the two words do have common relatives. But translators are absolutely right to translate the word the way they do; it is most often the verb ergo (work, accomplish) with the preposition en tacked on. The Holy Spirit energei is the Holy Spirit working in us, and that, not some kind of electrical force, would have been the most accurate connotation. All of his talk about the energies of God is a retrojection of 20th/21st century language on texts that had no clue about them.
All of these language discussions don't really come together into anything more profound than "there appears to be variegated language in the New and Old Testaments about hell." This is not new information. The leap from all which is discussed before to Green's own theory rests entirely on the syllogism: God loves all unconditionally; Unconditional love couldn't possibly lead to separated eternal torment; Therefore God would not torment anyone eternally. Now, I probably wouldn't choose the word unconditionally here. God's love is unconditional, but in the same sense that his justice and his holiness are unconditional. If God is the great First Mover, he doesn't require "conditions" to fully be any of the essential qualities of his person. So in that sense, yes, God loves unconditionally. But does it mean that God will disregard all acts of choice, righteousness, wickedness, virtue, vice, and circumstance in his dealings with mankind, both corporately and person to person? I don't think there's any evidence that's true.
Here are the two things we know for sure from the New Testament: 1) There will be a resurrection of the dead. (1 Cor. 15 for an explicit account of this) and 2) Everyone will appear before the bema seat of Jesus. (A judge's bench) (Rom 14:10, 2 Cor. 5:10). We don't know what the judgement of Jesus will be, and we don't know who will get what. We should, if we have any decency, pray regularly for universal mercy. Wouldn't it seem wonderful to us if all was forgiven everyone? It may even be hard for us to imagine how a God whose essence is love could do anything otherwise, but consider our circumstances: We live in an age in which the principal measure of a person's life-story is success or failure in romantic love. (Try to imagine any novel without this as the driving theme if you don't believe me; now try to imagine inserting that theme into any ancient text.) Couple that with our profound ignorance of fear and evil. When was the last time any of us were truly afraid? We do, I believe, all remember some moment of real fear, perhaps being alone outside in the dark, or hearing footsteps downstairs that shouldn't have been there. Yet most of the time we eat safe, sanitized food, and we can drive out darkness with electric lights, stave off the cold with gas heating, and lock our sturdy doors to the conditions of most of historical humanity. And despite our wish to ignore it, there is evil. Indeed, if we let down our puffery and pride for half a moment and look honestly at how we've cheated and deceived, we can acknowledge how each of us really are split ourselves, not to mention the corporate (oppression by a group of people) or natural (tsunamis, hurricanes) evils. And thus we stand, an age living in denial of danger or evil, and overly enamored with shallow meanings of "love." Is it any surprise that we should be discomfited by the idea of real danger in the beyond, or of a containment of evil?
Again, let us pray for universal mercy. But let's not think that just because we don't like the idea of hell that we can erase it from our theology, just as we've done to the angels. (Another topic that was vague in the scriptures, over-played in the Middle Ages, and now written of as superstition today.) It's in thinking about the angels that I almost would subscribe to Green's theory, that the presence of God (see, by the way, Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, on the terror of the numinous is a searing pain to the mortal eye and mind. Anytime an angel enters the pages of scripture, his first words must be Fear Not...they certainly inspire fear! Yet does this mean that hell is the experience of our own poor choices? It is just as likely it means that the Holy, even when it comes in peace, is a terror...so what about when it comes in judgement?
Here's an interesting idea of what Hell might actually look like from N.T. Wright: Our distinguishing characteristic as living organisms is our partly divine heritage. We are animals, like mammals in most outward respects, but partly descended from the gods. We are, being made, in imago Dei, bearers of a divine likeness. The principal effect of sin (original and otherwise) is a defacing of that image. In fact, the further one is given into sin, the less Divine and more animal he becomes; the more he begins to bear the image of the idol he worships, be that lust, greed, or sloth. Wright suggests that Hell might be the final removal of the divine image...a giving over unto animal nature, to be tormented forever by being subjected to their own idolatry. (Like in Narnia, when the beasts that are given speech revert back to being just dumb beasts.) I like the reasoning behind this idea, though of course it's just a theory and no more absolutely proven than Green's...but isn't it curious that they move in such opposite directions? That one is the removal of the divine and the other is it's nearer presence?
The curious thing about this whole recent muddle over hell (and I still haven't read Rob Bell's book...is there anyone who has a copy?) is that it isn't nearly as controversial or interesting as the muddle we should be having over heaven. There may or may not be human souls in hell following the end of all things, but there certainly won't be human souls in heaven...the astounding truth of the resurrection of the dead is that heaven is coming here.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Ken Robinson on Education
I'm terribly concerned that I might be interested in education after all. This is disturbing for me, an avowed professional musician who teaches grade school "just to pay the bills." I'm afraid that if I start participating in the conversation, I'll have compromised my position aloof. If I'm particularly careless I might accidentally stay late or start having conversations with the other faculty members. This has all been prompted by watching this video, a presentation by Sir Ken Robinson on education at a TED conference several years ago. I appreciate Mr. Robinson on several levels. Trivially, he has a charming accent. He speaks with a cadence at the end of his statements that you never hear in American English; it's very engaging. He is also to be highly commended for his use of language, especially on his chosen topic. When was the last time you heard or read someone on the subject of education and you didn't start counting cliches? Contrast Mr. Robinson's thoughts with this recent address by President Obama. The White House address is full of meaningless teacher-babble like "modernizing our schools," "teaching to the test," "out-educate us today, out-compete us tomorrow." Mr. Robinson, on the other hand, doesn't employ a single word without an evocative meaning and value.
Enough, however, about style; the substance of what he says is the really critical part, and here we find ourselves in agreement on several points. First, the world is changing around us, and the instrument of education is our only real hope to keep that change somewhat under control. The technical advances of the past 150 years (I begin with the telegraph) have radically changed the way in which people live in the world. We are presently hurling headlong toward whatever changes the next year of technical advances may bring, without any notion of what those changes will be, and without any realistic opportunity, should we desire it, of putting brakes on the progress. In fact, the world seems only to be changing faster. These changes do not only touch our use of machines. Our political and religious discourse have been funneled through new media, and accordingly reshaped. Sex, after birth control, is changed. Our ideas of privacy and identity are being reshaped. We are deluged with information, images, and ideas. How will anyone learn to make sense of it unless through education? Mr. Robinson argues that education only adds to these problems by "educating children out of their creative capacity."
Mr. Robinson urges us to leave off the practice of stigmatizing "wrong" responses. It is in every child's willingness to be wrong, he says, wherein lies their capacity to be creative; a capacity that we cure them of. He says this comes from an obsession with only one organ of the child's body, and one side of it; a particular set of correct answers to be known and stored in the brain.
Here I would make my contribution to the great conversation Mr. Robinson has started: There is little chance for art if we aren't willing to set boundaries, and little chance for preserving our Western history if we aren't willing to observe what CSL calls the Tao. As regards creativity, it must be observed that most of the great triumphs of the arts have come from strict requirements about form. There are, of course, in most great works (and artists) alterations or progressions of form, but still a fundamental mastery of loyalty to a pre-determined pattern. Mozart was brilliantly creative, but Leopold corrected his mistakes. When Mozart learned composition, he wasn't given a blank sheet of manuscript paper and told to be original; he was given a cantus firmus and told to harmonize it without writing parallel 5ths or crossing voices. John Cage has thrown away the cantus firmus and the rules of counterpoint to liberate his "creativity" and is left still only with the blank paper. The same is true of dance and the visual arts. A child's creative capacity in dance may be a splendid thing, but at some point she must learn the difference between a foxtrot and a gavotte if she wishes to create anything really original; and that means that she can't do the gavotte steps during the foxtrot, or vice-versa.
The parallel truth to the importance of forms in the arts is the truth of form in education. Mr. Robinson advocates that the arts be given equal status with literacy and math. (On an aside, it grieves me to think that "literacy" has somehow become something other than one of the arts...shouldn't it be called the art of letters?) This is a very democratic idea, but I don't think it's quite right, and Mr. Robinson's own example illustrates my point. He has a laugh at college professors for living only in their heads, and leaving their bodies off as some sort of necessary casement for their brain. This is, of course, both humorous and true. But it is also true that the head is the head. If there must be a head (in the authoritative sense), the head ought to be the head of the body. This doesn't mean that there's only a head, or that all the other parts must be headlike, but a head is important in a pre-eminent way, and in a way that fingers or belly buttons are not. Now, what are the things that a child ought to learn in school in order to be a healthy human being in the Western world? If the question were being asked of a child in some African tribe, where there were no radios or books, but a complex system of drumming that was used to communicate, entertain, organize, and inspire, we would say that the child must learn drumming. Even if he wouldn't be a great drummer himself, it would be absolutely vital that he understood what the drums meant; otherwise, how could he participate in his own society? The great storehouses of Western society is our literature. (Using the term in the broadest sense...one might almost say, our literacy). We have other repositories as well; we have classical music, the visual artistic tradition, the ability for rational thinking, and any number of contributing cultural traditions, but it is in light of this fact that the literary arts really do merit their primacy in our education. Our use of mathematics is closely tied to our value for rational thinking (what some call "abstracting") but mathematics has, in my opinion, overstepped its bounds in importance.
My words are not intended to be final words, especially in my own thinking. This talk is a continuing talk, and one that may not have fixed answers at the end. Perhaps in five years we shall have to scrap all the conclusions anyway. But in this grand talk, let's hope for more people who talk like Ken Robinson.
Enough, however, about style; the substance of what he says is the really critical part, and here we find ourselves in agreement on several points. First, the world is changing around us, and the instrument of education is our only real hope to keep that change somewhat under control. The technical advances of the past 150 years (I begin with the telegraph) have radically changed the way in which people live in the world. We are presently hurling headlong toward whatever changes the next year of technical advances may bring, without any notion of what those changes will be, and without any realistic opportunity, should we desire it, of putting brakes on the progress. In fact, the world seems only to be changing faster. These changes do not only touch our use of machines. Our political and religious discourse have been funneled through new media, and accordingly reshaped. Sex, after birth control, is changed. Our ideas of privacy and identity are being reshaped. We are deluged with information, images, and ideas. How will anyone learn to make sense of it unless through education? Mr. Robinson argues that education only adds to these problems by "educating children out of their creative capacity."
Mr. Robinson urges us to leave off the practice of stigmatizing "wrong" responses. It is in every child's willingness to be wrong, he says, wherein lies their capacity to be creative; a capacity that we cure them of. He says this comes from an obsession with only one organ of the child's body, and one side of it; a particular set of correct answers to be known and stored in the brain.
Here I would make my contribution to the great conversation Mr. Robinson has started: There is little chance for art if we aren't willing to set boundaries, and little chance for preserving our Western history if we aren't willing to observe what CSL calls the Tao. As regards creativity, it must be observed that most of the great triumphs of the arts have come from strict requirements about form. There are, of course, in most great works (and artists) alterations or progressions of form, but still a fundamental mastery of loyalty to a pre-determined pattern. Mozart was brilliantly creative, but Leopold corrected his mistakes. When Mozart learned composition, he wasn't given a blank sheet of manuscript paper and told to be original; he was given a cantus firmus and told to harmonize it without writing parallel 5ths or crossing voices. John Cage has thrown away the cantus firmus and the rules of counterpoint to liberate his "creativity" and is left still only with the blank paper. The same is true of dance and the visual arts. A child's creative capacity in dance may be a splendid thing, but at some point she must learn the difference between a foxtrot and a gavotte if she wishes to create anything really original; and that means that she can't do the gavotte steps during the foxtrot, or vice-versa.
The parallel truth to the importance of forms in the arts is the truth of form in education. Mr. Robinson advocates that the arts be given equal status with literacy and math. (On an aside, it grieves me to think that "literacy" has somehow become something other than one of the arts...shouldn't it be called the art of letters?) This is a very democratic idea, but I don't think it's quite right, and Mr. Robinson's own example illustrates my point. He has a laugh at college professors for living only in their heads, and leaving their bodies off as some sort of necessary casement for their brain. This is, of course, both humorous and true. But it is also true that the head is the head. If there must be a head (in the authoritative sense), the head ought to be the head of the body. This doesn't mean that there's only a head, or that all the other parts must be headlike, but a head is important in a pre-eminent way, and in a way that fingers or belly buttons are not. Now, what are the things that a child ought to learn in school in order to be a healthy human being in the Western world? If the question were being asked of a child in some African tribe, where there were no radios or books, but a complex system of drumming that was used to communicate, entertain, organize, and inspire, we would say that the child must learn drumming. Even if he wouldn't be a great drummer himself, it would be absolutely vital that he understood what the drums meant; otherwise, how could he participate in his own society? The great storehouses of Western society is our literature. (Using the term in the broadest sense...one might almost say, our literacy). We have other repositories as well; we have classical music, the visual artistic tradition, the ability for rational thinking, and any number of contributing cultural traditions, but it is in light of this fact that the literary arts really do merit their primacy in our education. Our use of mathematics is closely tied to our value for rational thinking (what some call "abstracting") but mathematics has, in my opinion, overstepped its bounds in importance.
My words are not intended to be final words, especially in my own thinking. This talk is a continuing talk, and one that may not have fixed answers at the end. Perhaps in five years we shall have to scrap all the conclusions anyway. But in this grand talk, let's hope for more people who talk like Ken Robinson.
Monday, October 10, 2011
The Business of Soaking
Musicians don't really get days off. They work, by default, during the evenings and weekends. This means that when you attempt to work during the day and be a musician, you don't really ever have "time off." You work during the morning and afternoon, then you teach and perform in the evening. On weekends, you perform some more. On Sundays, you perform in church. And then it's Monday again! Fortunately, this Monday is a holiday, and I don't ever recall being so happy for one. Though I do still have to teach some lessons tonight--and thereby miss Canadian Thanksgiving at home--I've had a perfect day off.
The sad business about working so much is that it really leaves you very little time to get any work done. I've wanted to clean our nursery for some time now, and finally started the project today. I practiced for an upcoming audition, and caught up with some clerical household business. But fear not--I did "relax" as well. I spent a good hour sitting under the tree in our yard reading Cymbeline, as well as reading the Aeneid aloud. There's even a bottle of wine waiting for the end of lessons tonight.
Highlights from the weekend include moving Calvus and Beka into another apartment (to their mild frustration) and chatting with S about college plans. The lowlight was the first marching band parade of the year, which was a disaster. Our marching band
Didn't quite measure up to the others
Not to mention how much I loathe marching band music/culture in general...
Calvus and I read Merchant of Venice recently, and I've also been reading a Lewis Mumford book, a biography of Lorenzo di Medici, Faerie Queene, and Luke, Virgil, Homer, Aquinas, Bede, and Euripides.
The sad business about working so much is that it really leaves you very little time to get any work done. I've wanted to clean our nursery for some time now, and finally started the project today. I practiced for an upcoming audition, and caught up with some clerical household business. But fear not--I did "relax" as well. I spent a good hour sitting under the tree in our yard reading Cymbeline, as well as reading the Aeneid aloud. There's even a bottle of wine waiting for the end of lessons tonight.
Highlights from the weekend include moving Calvus and Beka into another apartment (to their mild frustration) and chatting with S about college plans. The lowlight was the first marching band parade of the year, which was a disaster. Our marching band
Not to mention how much I loathe marching band music/culture in general...
Calvus and I read Merchant of Venice recently, and I've also been reading a Lewis Mumford book, a biography of Lorenzo di Medici, Faerie Queene, and Luke, Virgil, Homer, Aquinas, Bede, and Euripides.
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