As undergrad I read Plato. I didn't read Confucius. I never encountered the names Harun al-Rashid, Ibn Battuta, or Saladin. In high school I learned of the Medicis, Marco Polo, and a little about the crusades. Back in college I enjoyed reading Bentham, JS Mill, and Rawls and their conversations.
As an adult an anime led me to a short story by the Japanese author Motojirō Kajii - it's a standard in Japanese high schools. Over at X Kamil Galeev has referenced the Volga: maybe I could situate it on a map now +/- 1000 miles.
There's a huge reservoir of great stuff in translation, but not quite part of the Anglosphere.
It's a tough one, but I would focus more on exposing students to different styles of thinking than any particular content. Statistical reasoning, legal argumentation and formal logic, close textual study of a complex work, problem solving in engineering, testing hypotheses by experiment, finding originality in the visual arts, tracing the flow of ideas through time and how society and thought influence each other, thinking big in macro history, then going really narrow into one period and seeing contingency and complexity.
And of course, they should get all of this in a curriculum designed around econ, queen of the social sciences.
"I would dearly love to know what Judith Shklar saw in the years after she got to Harvard in the late 1940s that led to that remark about “young men who… may have been tempted by… fascism, and now recoiled…”).
Please enlarge font size and bold this part of your text. And post every few days:
"For one thing, there was never any such thing as an “‘actual’ west”. There was not any entity of any sort that was at all like a “west” historical through-line starting in Uruk, stopping in Babylon, Memphis, Jerusalem, Athens, Sparta, Rome, Florence, and London before winding up in New York. What entities there were were not conspicuously good. The did set up a chain of historical contingency in which we have been conspicuously lucky. And after the fact we want to pretend that we are the legitimate heirs, by descent or adoption, of those in the past who created things we like.
But that we like to pretend it does not make it in any real sense true."
And please don't prescribe Adam Smith in the reading list. Nobody reads it. How do I know? If people had, then the term "invisible hand" would not be as popular as econ professors from the Univ of Chicago and elsewhere made it out to be. You could counter this by saying, well, that IS all the more a reason Smith should be on the reading list. But no undergrad (less so grad) student has the patience or the time to read about demand and supply in several pages of 18th century prose. They'll do that in intro economics anyway. Say "crowd sourcing" instead of "invisible hand." Say that how it (coordination) works is still a mystery, but the results are better under configuration X versus Y. And instead of The Wealth of Nations, go for The Theory of Moral Sentiment. Kids will see the Wealth of Nations in various forms in econ courses, but not the Theory of Moral Sentiment. Prudence is good, but it isn't everything. And to your point in particular, show that Smith, too, didn't have a distorted view that the teaching of Western Civ.-type courses etc may bring.
I thought the Gandhi quote would turn up. Not this time. (It's a favorite.) Anyway one should learn enough at least to understand it, which requires quite a lot of information. At some point one needs to have an idea what is in the bible, and what curious effects that has had over the years (a point you manage to slip in, which I single out).
That's OK, the people at Quote Investigator looked deeply the sources for that clever bit about Western Civilization, and pronounced it spurious. I forget what the real source was.
"an idea what is in the bible". Which Bible? Which parts, which version (King James?). While ME religions certainly had a strong influence on European history, they have done little beyond create horrors of conflict and and uncivilized behaviors. The US founders understood this, which is why the US Constitution is a secular document, even if the Christian fundies want to pretend otherwise.
There are so many books and so much stuff in the Bible that you can find anything you want. Nevertheless, it's a pretty remarkable discourse on the human condition, especially given how little its authors actually knew of the wider world.
"The US founders understood this, which is why the US Constitution is a secular document." More probably the existence of Maryland and Pennsylvania, relations between church and state being left to the states. Cuius regio, eius religio and all that, adapted to circumstances.
"Trying to teach people that there was a “‘good’ west… [different from] the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward…”, as Judith Shklar once snarked, is likely to backfire because it is not true."
I read the 1989 address by Shklar that you linked to and found it extremely impressive. If anyone whose life experiences provided her with a reason to cast a cold eye on "the West", it was Shklar. But who are her heroes? Dickens, Rousseau, Montaigne, and, yes, Plato, all long time residents of the Pantheon of the West. Her speculation about incipient fascism at Harvard prior to WWII is pretty cheap innuendo, but I suspect that she was using "fascism" as a placeholder for "antisemitism", in which case she was undoubtedly correct.
Any liberal arts education is worthless unless it makes you 1) despise the Catholic Church and 2) understand USA was colonized by the British, French, and Spanish. How many college students anywhere in America understand this type of timeline?
It seems to me that your Czarist program is a bit parochial for a student is interested in a history of how we came to think the way that we do, rather than how we came to have the economic prosperity that we presently enjoy. I think it is entirely possible to teach intellectual history without being either triumphalist or teleological; in fact, I know it is possible because I have recently taken such a course: "Monks to Voltaire", by Ada Palmer.
That said, I do believe that an unfortunate strain of sanctimony is common in academe. Not that this is *new*, necessarily, but that doesn't make it any less tiresome. Consider Patrick Wyman's interviews of Eske Willerslev and Jennifer Raff. Both are saying the same thing, substantively (that native Americans are justifiably possessive of the remains of ancient humans found in North America.) But where Willerslev is honest, humble, and persuasive, Raff preaches only to the choir, using her opinions as a tribal marker rather than a fact to be demonstrated. She is in fact a neo-colonialist, but the savages that haunt her imagination are, you know, ordinary Americans. One can't imagine anyone coming around to her point of view who didn't start there. And she is hardly alone; many of Wyman's interviewees - and indeed, Wyman himself - share this vice.
Isn’t the first question, which Yglesias certainly neglect, and I’m not sure that Brad really discusses, “What are our goals?” I mean, it’s awfully hard to know if you’ve arrived when you’re not sure what your destination is.
I had a longer reply drafted but your point saves me a lot of exposition that I had to revise anyway...
I think Brad's point is presented in a way that's unfortunately positioned as a throwaway transition:
"And I do not think that a Platonic guardian-education values-implantation program is proper for American universities—not least because I think we have no idea how to do it any better than Plato did, and that there is much more value in teaching people true things and how to accurately reason about the world than to try to inculcate them with whatever your personal preferred version of IngSoc happens to be."
I'm less sure I agree with Brad here (I suspect a lot of social problems throughout the developed world have a decline in unity of purpose among elites at their root) but Matt tends to write in a broad-strokes, general audience voice even when something more precise would be helpful.
In a nutshell, my first-draft version of the goals is "Post-Enlightenment, there is no longer any set of values which has an a priori claim to represent Truth. So the first thing to educate people on how to steel-man their own values and truth-claims, and the values and truth-claims of others. That includes what makes for a good society, a good person, etc." I'm not sure how Brad is defining "true things". Consensus?
I think Brad's use of 'truth' in the essay just refers to what humanities courses at Berkeley actually cover rather than what Yglesias claims that contemporary humanities courses cover. I don't see him asserting anything else in particular as true (in the essay), but suspect that true things are, by definition, supported by evidence.
As undergrad I read Plato. I didn't read Confucius. I never encountered the names Harun al-Rashid, Ibn Battuta, or Saladin. In high school I learned of the Medicis, Marco Polo, and a little about the crusades. Back in college I enjoyed reading Bentham, JS Mill, and Rawls and their conversations.
As an adult an anime led me to a short story by the Japanese author Motojirō Kajii - it's a standard in Japanese high schools. Over at X Kamil Galeev has referenced the Volga: maybe I could situate it on a map now +/- 1000 miles.
There's a huge reservoir of great stuff in translation, but not quite part of the Anglosphere.
I think the Volga boatmen song was used in cartoons when I was a child.
It's a tough one, but I would focus more on exposing students to different styles of thinking than any particular content. Statistical reasoning, legal argumentation and formal logic, close textual study of a complex work, problem solving in engineering, testing hypotheses by experiment, finding originality in the visual arts, tracing the flow of ideas through time and how society and thought influence each other, thinking big in macro history, then going really narrow into one period and seeing contingency and complexity.
And of course, they should get all of this in a curriculum designed around econ, queen of the social sciences.
"I would dearly love to know what Judith Shklar saw in the years after she got to Harvard in the late 1940s that led to that remark about “young men who… may have been tempted by… fascism, and now recoiled…”).
That would probably be Eugenics.
No, I think it was antisemitism. See my comment above.
Please enlarge font size and bold this part of your text. And post every few days:
"For one thing, there was never any such thing as an “‘actual’ west”. There was not any entity of any sort that was at all like a “west” historical through-line starting in Uruk, stopping in Babylon, Memphis, Jerusalem, Athens, Sparta, Rome, Florence, and London before winding up in New York. What entities there were were not conspicuously good. The did set up a chain of historical contingency in which we have been conspicuously lucky. And after the fact we want to pretend that we are the legitimate heirs, by descent or adoption, of those in the past who created things we like.
But that we like to pretend it does not make it in any real sense true."
And please don't prescribe Adam Smith in the reading list. Nobody reads it. How do I know? If people had, then the term "invisible hand" would not be as popular as econ professors from the Univ of Chicago and elsewhere made it out to be. You could counter this by saying, well, that IS all the more a reason Smith should be on the reading list. But no undergrad (less so grad) student has the patience or the time to read about demand and supply in several pages of 18th century prose. They'll do that in intro economics anyway. Say "crowd sourcing" instead of "invisible hand." Say that how it (coordination) works is still a mystery, but the results are better under configuration X versus Y. And instead of The Wealth of Nations, go for The Theory of Moral Sentiment. Kids will see the Wealth of Nations in various forms in econ courses, but not the Theory of Moral Sentiment. Prudence is good, but it isn't everything. And to your point in particular, show that Smith, too, didn't have a distorted view that the teaching of Western Civ.-type courses etc may bring.
I thought the Gandhi quote would turn up. Not this time. (It's a favorite.) Anyway one should learn enough at least to understand it, which requires quite a lot of information. At some point one needs to have an idea what is in the bible, and what curious effects that has had over the years (a point you manage to slip in, which I single out).
That's OK, the people at Quote Investigator looked deeply the sources for that clever bit about Western Civilization, and pronounced it spurious. I forget what the real source was.
Still a pretty good sentiment, though.
Good to know, person from Porlock! As you say, they seem to have sorted it out pretty thoroughly.
"an idea what is in the bible". Which Bible? Which parts, which version (King James?). While ME religions certainly had a strong influence on European history, they have done little beyond create horrors of conflict and and uncivilized behaviors. The US founders understood this, which is why the US Constitution is a secular document, even if the Christian fundies want to pretend otherwise.
There are so many books and so much stuff in the Bible that you can find anything you want. Nevertheless, it's a pretty remarkable discourse on the human condition, especially given how little its authors actually knew of the wider world.
"The US founders understood this, which is why the US Constitution is a secular document." More probably the existence of Maryland and Pennsylvania, relations between church and state being left to the states. Cuius regio, eius religio and all that, adapted to circumstances.
"Trying to teach people that there was a “‘good’ west… [different from] the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward…”, as Judith Shklar once snarked, is likely to backfire because it is not true."
I read the 1989 address by Shklar that you linked to and found it extremely impressive. If anyone whose life experiences provided her with a reason to cast a cold eye on "the West", it was Shklar. But who are her heroes? Dickens, Rousseau, Montaigne, and, yes, Plato, all long time residents of the Pantheon of the West. Her speculation about incipient fascism at Harvard prior to WWII is pretty cheap innuendo, but I suspect that she was using "fascism" as a placeholder for "antisemitism", in which case she was undoubtedly correct.
Any liberal arts education is worthless unless it makes you 1) despise the Catholic Church and 2) understand USA was colonized by the British, French, and Spanish. How many college students anywhere in America understand this type of timeline?
https://matthewrafat.substack.com/p/se-asian-history
Does this (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y1c8iDIP_siBnyiLSDQRahcHRPmVOCw4/view) from Jacob Light influence your thinking on these issues?
It seems to me that your Czarist program is a bit parochial for a student is interested in a history of how we came to think the way that we do, rather than how we came to have the economic prosperity that we presently enjoy. I think it is entirely possible to teach intellectual history without being either triumphalist or teleological; in fact, I know it is possible because I have recently taken such a course: "Monks to Voltaire", by Ada Palmer.
That said, I do believe that an unfortunate strain of sanctimony is common in academe. Not that this is *new*, necessarily, but that doesn't make it any less tiresome. Consider Patrick Wyman's interviews of Eske Willerslev and Jennifer Raff. Both are saying the same thing, substantively (that native Americans are justifiably possessive of the remains of ancient humans found in North America.) But where Willerslev is honest, humble, and persuasive, Raff preaches only to the choir, using her opinions as a tribal marker rather than a fact to be demonstrated. She is in fact a neo-colonialist, but the savages that haunt her imagination are, you know, ordinary Americans. One can't imagine anyone coming around to her point of view who didn't start there. And she is hardly alone; many of Wyman's interviewees - and indeed, Wyman himself - share this vice.
I do not read MY that way.
Isn’t the first question, which Yglesias certainly neglect, and I’m not sure that Brad really discusses, “What are our goals?” I mean, it’s awfully hard to know if you’ve arrived when you’re not sure what your destination is.
I had a longer reply drafted but your point saves me a lot of exposition that I had to revise anyway...
I think Brad's point is presented in a way that's unfortunately positioned as a throwaway transition:
"And I do not think that a Platonic guardian-education values-implantation program is proper for American universities—not least because I think we have no idea how to do it any better than Plato did, and that there is much more value in teaching people true things and how to accurately reason about the world than to try to inculcate them with whatever your personal preferred version of IngSoc happens to be."
I'm less sure I agree with Brad here (I suspect a lot of social problems throughout the developed world have a decline in unity of purpose among elites at their root) but Matt tends to write in a broad-strokes, general audience voice even when something more precise would be helpful.
Thanks!
In a nutshell, my first-draft version of the goals is "Post-Enlightenment, there is no longer any set of values which has an a priori claim to represent Truth. So the first thing to educate people on how to steel-man their own values and truth-claims, and the values and truth-claims of others. That includes what makes for a good society, a good person, etc." I'm not sure how Brad is defining "true things". Consensus?
I think Brad's use of 'truth' in the essay just refers to what humanities courses at Berkeley actually cover rather than what Yglesias claims that contemporary humanities courses cover. I don't see him asserting anything else in particular as true (in the essay), but suspect that true things are, by definition, supported by evidence.
Thanks-that's helpful.
And then, of course, we need to look at what our criteria for evidence are...