Travelogue 1067 – 27 Oktober
The Voice of Authority
Questions have been posed. They hang suspended above the Greek landscape like arrows released from a hundred bows and arcing across the blue sky.
When is the passive voice used? It is recommended for situations in which the subject of the verb is not known, or is obvious, or is unimportant. It’s October break, and I’m writing grammar lessons. Due to lack of time and funds, our travel plans have been abandoned, and I’ve been reassigned to extended papa duty and to lesson planning for next term.
It is stipulated that the passive voice should stand as a voice of authority. Laws are passed, as though by agency of gods. Your proposal has been denied, your application has been rejected, very rarely by anyone with a name. The curbs and guidelines for life are presented to us in this voice.
The sophists’ work was done. The youth of Athens had been corrupted. The questions had been posed, and they hung suspended above the Greek landscape like - it’s only fair that a martial analogy be chosen because the ancient Greeks were a warlike people, and because the classical age was put to an end by the Peloponnesian Wars – like arrows released from a hundred bows and arcing across the sky.
An opposing force is needed for a good martial analogy. That force will be called the conservatives. The sophists shall be acknowledged as the radicals, the ones for whom the prevailing social order is no good until stirred and rebuked. Stability, on the other hand, is solidly determined to be the first priority by the conservatives. The past is inextricably linked to the future. Where conservative thought can be seen to diverge is in how to define tradition. For the analogy’s sake, the conservative army will be cloven into two divisions. The first division is already routed. For this faction, the past must be preserved exactly as it was, without change. That’s understood to be impossible even by the soldiers themselves, even before those arrows suspended above earth have been seized by gravity. They are defeated.
Enter Plato, leader of the second faction. Yes, he was a conservative, someone for whom social order and coherent philosophical systems were culture’s treasures to be guarded. He was forced to acknowledge that the world had been irreversibly changed by the sophists and by the classical epoch. But city-states could not be governed by chaos. Tradition can be kept, he announced, if it is reinvented. Listen to Socrates, he said, but listen to my Socrates, the one who believed in souls and heaven. Let the arrows fall, he cried. Not all of us will be killed. Those who are left will fight, and the arrows will be turned to our own use.
Was the Socrates we know a fabrication? I’m sure of it. Was the Jesus that we know edited and re-edited? And all the great agitators, as passed down to us by historical record? There’s no better sign of the true radical than his or her indifference to the historical record. The radical is indifferent to systems of thought or answers to big questions. The question is the important thing, the provocation, the action. The one we are given to know is Plato.
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
It’s October. It’s a beautiful month freighted with the dread of winter. It’s a pretty season cursed to bear the angst of our frenzied lives. September may have been a gentle start, but October sees us at full throttle. Work has become manic. School has resumed for children, and so have all their myriad activities. What may have begun as a delight in being busy again has become something more like a runaway train. We’re hanging on for dear life. History mocks poor October by pinning Halloween to its final day, a holiday that serves as a kind of witch’s mirror reflecting to us our distorted lives and our tortured souls.
In fact, it is a pretty season. The showers come and go, it’s true, but the girls and I have discovered big, glorious rainbows in the sky on a number of occasions. The temperatures are dropping, it’s true, but slowly enough for open jackets. We can still stop for ice cream. The days are getting shorter, it’s true, and that may be the worst of it. But the leaves are turning. Yesterday, the girls brought home three huge leaves they had found, fallen from a plane tree, leaves turned bright red.
And there’s a light to the air in this season that I love. It’s as though everything has a rose tint. The colours in our brick lanes come alive. I find myself entranced by this light and wondering if the architects in our past were inspired when they chose the colours for their work. Were their choices unconscious? Are the colours as much a part of us as they are of the autumnal air? It all seems part of a magical formula.
Saturday, October 22, 2022
And why did Saul Goodman make me think of Socrates and the sophists? He was a questioner. Kind of like the sophists, but different. Overall, I would say the sophists had a positive impact. They may have been self-interested, but they concerned themselves with issues like the public good. The sophists tested the boundaries of tradition to expand the mind. It was an optimistic, expansive project.
There is a darker type of questioner, who preys upon the weaknesses in systems for personal gain. Saul, for example, tested the boundaries of the law in a pessimistic drive for self-aggrandizement.
What made the TV series work was the tension between his better and worse natures. His darker nature prevailed. That’s the nature of Gilligan’s enterprise. In Saul’s story and “Breaking Bad”, viewers understand things will turn out badly, but they are still transfixed by the prospect of redemption.
In America, the dark questioners flock to the law. It’s only natural. They’re taught on TV that the law is a matter of semantics. Twist a word here, compromise a phrase there, and they’re free on all charges. There’s an entire life of crime there in the questioning of legal boundaries. Donald Trump, a supremely cynical questioner himself, was tutored early in life by the sleazy lawyer Roy Kohn. In a matter of four short years, he found every curb to presidential power that for two hundred years had relied on tradition and honour. He found and exploited every flaw in the electoral system. The inherited norms were left in tatters.
Saul at least had the grace to own his selfishness and even to do the right thing once in a while. That was because other people were flesh and blood. To the Trumpistas, the world is a stage set and people have no feelings.
Trump’s 30% of the electorate are vulnerable to the grifter’s cynicism because they need scapegoats for their disappointments. The Reagan Revolution taught them that business was the model for life. ‘Business’ was code for authoritarianism. The social media revolution has taught them that rage is good business. If life lets you down, lash out. It’s philosophically sound. Rage is efficacious and, by extension, it doesn’t matter what you say or how consistent your rhetoric. Words have been proven by the grifter’s law to be unreliable. Emotion is reliable, and self-interest is the moral compass.
Friday, October 21, 2022
Healthy, robust, safe and secure. Prosperous. Growing. How often do we see all these descriptors put together? It’s a rare convergence, rare enough in the life of an individual, and even more so in the history of civilizations. Spinning the globe now, where do we feel comfortable putting a finger down, identifying the classic up-and-coming society? Even China, darling of every unoriginal prophet, doesn’t meet those criteria, with its new, house-of-cards look.
Greece in the fifth century BC fit the profile pretty well. Fresh from unexpected victories over the massive Persian army, they were feeling their oats. They were a successful civilization, accruing wealth and achievement and status. They looked outward rather than inward, curious about the world, building a cosmopolitan society. And that golden era was the heyday of the sophists.
I’m contending that it’s these societal phases that produce history’s great questioners. They captivate the zeitgeist in times of growth. They’re the pop stars. Everything is in expansion, including the collective mind. It’s an exciting time to be alive, and questioning is a stimulating exercise.
To be fair, broadly speaking, the sophists were everything their adversaries said they were, perverse corrupters of the minds of the youth. Yes, perverse in the sense that they undermined prevailing values and belief systems. Every society spends its youth under fairly ironclad regimes of religious and political belief. Those beliefs provided a foundation for their success. Suddenly, in times of prosperity and wider commerce, they become less necessary. The old beliefs also begin to seem faintly ridiculous in a cosmopolitan society, in which new influences are many and compelling. And of course the youth are particularly keen to break conventions.
Questioners don’t need to be reliable or provide answers. That explains their freedom of spirit. It also explains why we find them frustrating. It’s impossible to run society on questions. Eventually we need answers. The popularity of questioners has a short term.
One breed of conservatives perishes before the onslaught of the questioners, the ones enforcing tradition. A new breed arises, the ones who make new systems out of the mess. Enter Plato, the codifier.
Sunday, October 16, 2022
I can recommend having kids as a course in humility. Young children ask lots of questions. My girls are at an age where the questions are becoming intelligent and very urgent. They must have knowledge, and I am coming up short. It can be frustrating. The things they ask are often things I should know, things I tell myself I did know at one time.
We boil eggs; suddenly I’m on the spot. What is the difference between the yellow part and the white part? Which one is healthier for you? Where is the baby chicken? What does each part of the egg do for the baby chicken? How long does it take to hatch? What is the membrane just inside the shell? Why don’t we see it when we crack the egg before it’s cooked? Why would a chicken lay an egg without a baby inside?
“Look at the moon, Baby Jos!” Suddenly, I need to explain the phases of the moon, and why sometimes we see the moon during daylight hours and sometimes we don’t. She needs to know when the next eclipse is. She wants to know if I’ve seen an eclipse. I say yes. When? I can’t remember. Why not? “Where were you?” she asks. I’m embarrassed. “I don’t remember.”
Papa feels his hold on knowledge slipping: his hold on memory, identity, sanity. How could it have all been so fragile?
Socrates had children. Maybe the dialogues with his sons inspired all the later dialogues. The boys had convinced him he knew nothing. It inspired rather than humiliated him, and he turned it into a method of forming knowledge. Or maybe he was just embittered by his humiliation at the hands of his own children, and he looked to inflict the same on his friends. Who knows?
One has an opportunity in the Socrates story to see how adults who are not your parents react to intensive questioning. Not well. They convict you of perversity and sentence you to death by poisoning. That’s a very literal form of punishment, administering a deadly chemical to the human infectant.
As we age, we become comfortable being authority figures. We feel authority is our due. But to shoulder authority is to take on a certain vulnerability. Anyone honest feels insecure exercising authority. Humility bonds well with insecurity, creating a stable compound that won’t flare up or become corrosive. Then authority can alloy with innovation. Brittle pride, on the other hand, is unstable and doesn’t bond well. It repels anything new. It defends positions arbitrarily. It challenges all questions as irreligious or unpatriotic. It reduces itself to juvenile slogans some idiot has printed on a red baseball cap.
What makes the egg yolk yellow? What does “great” mean? Why isn’t the white part of the egg white? If you don’t know what “great” means, then how do you know America was great … or isn’t now … or can ever be again?
Friday, October 07, 2022
She was crying with such abandon. Her magnet set had failed her, providing one less bar than she had needed to complete a tower she was building. Then my sweet Baby Jos was in her mother’s arms crying. She had so surrendered to her heartbreak, that I could only marvel. She cried and cried.
Baby Jos was tired. She becomes easily frustrated, tears of protest coming to her during violin practice or when she is trying to learn something new. But this is heartbreak of a different order. She is grieving the humiliating state of being human, feeble and fallible. We all fell silent in the presence of this pain, even Little Ren, who is usually critical of Jos’s tantrums.
Some of this we retain in age. We throw on the ground some task our fingers are fumbling over, punch the pillow that will not take the right shape in the middle of the night. Is there any communication in that? I feel real protest in Baby Jos’s tears. It is so sad to realize that we are something less in the world than we had hoped. Adults can feel the same. We think we know our limits and powers, but they shift. When I am tired, I can barely walk straight, I bump into everything in the tight little space we call home.
We turn to our parents. We cry a question. It could be, why? It could be, what; like, what do I have to do? We know there are no answers.
But to question is our power. It expresses our true position in the world, as novice and suppliant and child. When humans give answers, there is something grey and impotent to them. The answerer is off-putting. The questioner is our friend and comforter.
That is why I think there is something to the rhetoric of the question. It is the tool of the teacher, like Socrates. It’s the tool of the counsellor, like Erasmus. It is also the tool of the charlatan, like Trump. The questioner in history leaves a mark.
It is a thought that came to me when “Better Call Saul” was over, and I mourned it. The character was a kind of tribute to the questioner. I want to explore the thought a little more.
Sunday, October 02, 2022
We start with stories; we move to the ring. We play a game, and then we snack. It’s all outlined in pictures up above Meester Jim’s smart screen. Each day follows the same pattern.
Last week was an opportunity for parents to sit in class and observe. Little Ren asked me to go. She was so happy I came that she held my hand in class most of the morning.
As other children came in, they had a choice among areas of the room, sectioned by activity. In one area, they could play with puzzles. In another, there were blocks. In another they could draw. Ren wanted to read. We read a story about little children (in animal form) deciding what they wanted to be when they grew up. The only one I remember is the bulldog who wanted to be a dancer. The book depicted her in a tutu, frowning like a bulldog and bursting out of her little costume. Was that meant as a joke?
The class gathered in a circle. It took a while. Meester Jim gently guided the children as they put toys away and they moved chairs into a circle. Once everyone was seated, the meester went through a series of little lessons, structured with questions, turning attendance into a math problem, reviewing the days of the week, and setting the agenda for the day. Nicely done.
Again, the class broke, and children chose their activity. Johanna had asked Little Ren as we walked in if they could play together, and so the two sought each other out. They decided to choose a game from the cabinets. They chose the game in which you make little frogs jump by pressing down on them with your finger, trying to land them all in a small bowl. My frogs always flew off the table, but I was enjoying myself. Johanna wasn’t great at the game, either. She became absorbed in arraying her little team of frogs in neat little lines.
The frogs taught me I need help with motor skills and teamwork. Johanna needs some help staying on task. Little Ren showed great team and leadership skills, picking up my frogs and encouraging me, gently reminding Johanna that it was her turn. And she won every game. I was proud.
Education is friendly questions and friendly frogs. Our Socratic heritage tells us that knowledge is in us; or, at least, the urge to knowledge is in us. The meester leads us with gentle questions; he creates an environment of learning opportunities.