It might--or it might not--seem trivial to object to the use of the third person singular feminine pronoun to refer to an indeterminate person of either sex instead of the traditional masculine. But it makes a difference to the meaning of both words and one that is pertinent to your subject. In the paragraph in question where, until quite recently, you and everybody else would have thoughtlessly used 'he' and 'his', you deliberately and, I am sure, self-consciously use (I would say, myself, make a show of using) 'she' and 'her'.
Now, given the long history of our language, in which the masculine form of the pronoun in this usage has, as it were, shed any sexual reference and beern made purely grammatical, if you now start using the feminine form you import, whether you want to or not, an irrelevant and distracting sexual reference not only into the feminine form of the pronoun but into the masculine too. This new practice of yours would abolish the previously handy non-sexual, purely grammatical form--to universal inconvenience. You create occasions for political conflict where there ought to be none.
You declare (this is why I say you are 'making a show' of the thing) that upholding 21st century feminist principles is more important to you (and ought to be to everybody else) than the centuries of practice of not just the novelists you otherwise profess to admire but of the whole nation throughout its history. You and some of your contemporaries know better! Here is a bit of your cultural inheritance you want to get rid of.
Politicize too much and no one knows where politics begins and ends. We don't know where we are.
(And I don't like your (internet derived?) Americanised spelling of the English verb 'to practise' either.)
In the author's defense, I personally didn't take anything away from this piece in terms of ham-fisted political posturing. Put aside the potential origin of the modern convention of using both gender pronouns when describing abstract individuals for the sake of illustration and read the piece for its overarching message, not some minutiae that ultimately grinds your personal gears.
What you call 'the modern convention' is the loss or throwing away of a convention; and if it were truly a minutia people wouldn't insist on it as they do. Dr McGrogan's use, my attack and your defense (another spelling, by Englishmen, that grinds my gears) are three examples that something is at stake in it. Dr McGrogan flies a flag, I try to pull it down and you either (I'm not sure) put it back up or declare it to be no flag at all.
What about the possibility of reading too deeply into that one detail to the exclusion of other, potentially more salient ones? In other words, the piece wasn't about the use of pronouns, though you redirected it towards a discussion of such via your comment. Do you dispute the overall point McGrogan was making about why our societies are struck with persistent malaise?
I think some of his comments on our use of the internet are very good--strikingly so--the following, e.g., "a meandering process of purposeless internet activity - a not entirely unpleasant sensation of floating aimlessly on a Dead Sea of mildly diverting entertainment which, while composed of many very short, individuated rushes of interest (twenty seconds of this video here; thirty seconds of that news story there; this meme over here; that gif over there), has an oceanic quality to it - like a single, vast abyss of content that is somehow uniform for all of its ostensible variety." That is a first rate bit of writing, one that anyone might be proud of.
But it does seem to suggest--as his general drift does in this essay--that what has gone wrong with our world has done so since and because of the internet and related technology but I am older than he (and taught for 17 years at Newcastle Polytechnic, which our Mr Major magically turned into the university Dr McGrogan now teaches at, the more evocatively named, Northumbria); and I have no doubt that, whatever it was that has gone wrong, it started going long before the internet was thought of. My years of teaching English Literature at the old Poly and elsewhere suggest that disbelief in literature (as the instance of our "cultural inheritance" I am most familiar with) began with the teachers not the taught. The list of English academics, who earned their livings saying how much they despised the means by which they earned it, is a long and dishonourable one. The mere ignorance of schoolchildren is nothing to it.
But Dr McGrogan's pronouns seem to me rather to belong to, or at least alongside that disbelief, and that is why I picked on them. If I had been merely scornful of his writing, I don't suppose I should have bothered.
why were our universities so susceptible to these corrosive ideas to begin with?)
That last quotation got left in by mistake but I did, twenty-odd years ago co-author a book (with Ian Robinson) that, even if it didn't exactly explain the susceptibility and the corrosiveness, did do its best to display them, The New Idea of A University.
Thanks for the clarification, we're in very close agreement on the issue -- I happen to think that the activists disguised as teachers and the generally-discontented professors of the 60s and 70s got drunk on Postmodernism, Marx, and Critical Theory and produced this current blend of oikophobia that is endemic to people of the West, namely the younger generations. Turns out that it takes a certain warm sentiment towards one's own country in order to put forth the persistent effort needed to maintain one, and these younger kids struggle with accessing the deeper meaning that would inspire truly transformative and constructive change. Instead, they're taught to deconstruct everything, including their own human will to evolve, innovate, and progress.
I am -- for better or worse -- an American lol Congratulations on such a long and busy life! I'm still in my 30s and watching with a fair bit of dread at the continued dissolution of our cultural pillars on behalf of "the greater good", "liberation", "the transformational future", etc.
This is a wonderful rambling reflection, David, and I must apologise in advance for the length of my response, for I can already feel that this will not be a short comment, and that alas it will also tend towards cross-country ramble and away from 'thinking as the crow flies'.
I should like to begin by remarking that this essay is not at all about the ARC, and I almost didn't read it because of the framing given at the start, as I am weary of the half-hearted celebrity interventions that are in vogue, and for which ARC seems to be representative. Yet you discard the ARC within a few paragraphs as a booster rocket and then proceed into far more interesting territory, never to return.
Of course, I'm not your editor (although I think that anyone who gets to edit your work should count themselves lucky), but if this had been one of my own essays I either would have returned to ARC and committed towards making this the subject of the essay, or framed it differently and either moved or excised the discussion of the ARC. I mention this not to 'back seat drive', but rather to make a point about stories that is relevant to the one you are developing here, and that requires me to take yet another digression.
I started blogging in 2005, at the suggestion of a friend who simply had an impression it would agree with me. He was correct, and within a few years I had settled into a comfortable space where I was cranking out essays on a wide range of topics which were thoughtful, well-received, and even provoked conversation, since this was before social media sank the bold fleet of the blogosphere, and before Substack found a business model to revive it.
My intuition is that you are in a similar state now - that you are carving out time to write whatever the spirit moves you to reflect upon, and this is why your essays come out in the manner they do. I set off from discussion of games (my profession), you set off from law (yours), but where we may end up was and is equally unconstrained. Yet oddly, despite this capacity to suggest a connectivity between what is happening here with you and what was happening then with me, it is not possible for me to give you any advice beyond that universal advice that I have come to treasure as applicable to almost every situation: keep going.
The fact of the matter is that I don't know where you are going, and it is almost certainly not to where I have ended up, not least of all because you are vastly better connected than I am, and much less likely to be drawn too deeply into philosophy, as has been my weird and perhaps my doom (for philosophy is a ruined practice in academia, and of limited appeal without).
Now as I say all this, it draws attention to a point that is relevant to your essay, and was brought to my attention by Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, a book that I had no idea was going to influence me as much as it did when I first encountered it. As much as I stoutly concur with much of what you say about the novel here, and even more so of the atomisation of thought brought about by the fragmentary compulsion of the internet, I feel like you may be misjudging 'the premoderns'.
MacIntyre draws against the 'heroic age' to make the point that the virtue of that era was also anchored upon the concept of a personal story, but unlike the era of the novel, the sense of the unifying narrative of this time was anchored upon the inevitability of death. Thus it was that it mattered a great deal to the Greeks, and no-less the Chinese people of this era (although MacIntyre does not cover this), how one died. The novel, on the other hand, is concerned with how we live, and MacInytre suggests that Jane Austen (who, along with Dickens, has been the focus of much of my reading this year) may have been the last writer in the virtue tradition in so much as her characters exist within a framework that takes into account the whole of a life.
Before I quit in disgust both my academic positions, I was struck by the damage that had been done to my students by the recent Nonsense - for whereas my circle of friends at university had affected the course of my life with every bit the impact of a Viking saga or a Victorian novel, so many of my final students had left university having failed to make friends at all, for they were forbidden to do so. This, in many cases, accelerated their nihilistic tendencies, which the internet in all its amorphous infinitude rose up in order to meet their demand, as it remarkably will do for anything provided that it is trivial or vacuous, and almost never at all for matters of substance.
And here I dovetail with your conclusion - about the intersection between technology and our children, and the reckoning that has not yet come about but that, you suggest "will have to happen". I hope that you are correct, but I am doubtful, for the most certain thing in our contemporary situation is that critique of technology is all but forbidden, in part because of the enthusiasm (in the negative Enlightenment sense) for the technological, and in part because the international censorship regime of Google Rex (the subject of an essay of mine coming out at a new publication next year, if I may foreshadow) is absolutely committed to denial about itself, and thus the resolute defence of its own borders.
So I return to my earlier advice, such as it is: keep going! That tiny enclave of us who have acquired a sensitivity to this aspect of the contemporary crisis are few, and we shall receive little support from the powers that shouldn't be in any attempt to push back against what has happened.
I hope, but cannot trust, that something in these remarks was worth the time it took to write them.
I agree with you that the big problem is that for a critique of technology to take place it has to take place through technological means, and that the owners of the technology will object to the critique most strenuously and may have the power to stifle it. This is a really thorny problem. But I am optimistic that in the long-term it will become a high status indicator to limit one's own screen use (and I think we can see signs of this happening already). Once that process begins, it will filter down through society. There will be a lot of ruin in the interrim, but ultimately there will be a correction.
I greatly appreciate your optimism in this regard, David. There is cause for optimism, if only because belief in the possibility of change is a necessity for change to happen.
This works well, on first pass, as an account of how personal and social atomisation is caused by being digitally networked with endless content streams and parasocial interactions. It's the first time I've seen this as clearly posited, even though I obsess continually on the subject.
The point about literature plays straight into my existing prejudices. Only recently I wrote about how I learned more from reading Dostoevsky than I did from Arendt.
Nice observation about story telling. But isn't the issue more like the current story is a lack of a coherent story because a coherent story is now by definition racist or elitist. What multiculturalism does is disallow each cultures story as a proper narrative and instead denigates them to a museum or circus of curiosities. The new narrative needs to be a reaffirmation of such along with the foundation of how different narratives must get along. I e reciprocity.
Thank you for writing this David. I'm a mother of two bright and perceptive teenage boys. Your article has expanded my own thoughts and concerns. I agree, we are becoming an overly "left-brained" society - how do we combat the simplistic, infantile and mechanical thinking, and take sensible steps to stop it from taking over? I've lost count of the number of times I've told my sons: "Smart people read books. Read one of the books I put in your room." and for it to not result in anything.
I've started a "Thought for the Day" WhatsApp group with them which we then discuss on the way to their woke high school (whose leftist ideas seem not to work on them - for now). In their school environment there is no allowance for debate or exploring nuanced ideas - indeed, there is a "right" and "wrong" opinion with zero tolerance for asking why or deviating from the set vocabulary with an independent thought.
As an artist, English teaching professional and musician I feel so sad that they are denied intellectual and creative freedom, and angry that our taxes fund an education system like this. But if I had access to a smart phone and computer games in the 90s, would I even have the interests and abilities I have now? What can we do?
There's something more...David..and that's creating engaging thought provoking stimuli...and you succeeded with this post. It's the first article I've read from start to finish this month.
I think ARC should start by calling ‘Western Civilisation’ what it is and what it used to be called: Christendom. The Biblical stories give us a set of shared stories, engendering a shared identity. This does not mean we need to all become devout; Alex Ryrie’s brilliant book Unbelievers shows we were never a monolithic mass of God-botherers. You do not need to believe in the Kalergi Plan to see the Count’s fundamental premise is correct: flood a country with enough people and you will destroy national identity, because they will not share the story that creates that identity. I await it becoming ‘racist’ to ask someone what their grandparents did in the war, as a coda to the sad events around Remembrance Sunday.
I arrived here from Daily Skeptic, and found this a brilliant, wonderful essay. In my neighborhood in Detroit, Gangster Rap thrums bass from the fast cars, with "bitch" "ho" and other derogatory argot melting the drivers' hipoocampi. I'd been thinking Gangster Rap is to music as social media (especially X/Twitter) is to conversation and relationship.
There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story about some townspeople, having read the epistolary novel Clarissa, rang the bells in the town for her wedding or birthday. It was that immersive. Here in America the kids do not own books. They do not hear stories told, they do not have stories read to them. They watch. Images are sluiced into their brains from the earliest days. Since the first hominin hummed or gestured or drew with a stick in the dirt to impart a sequence of events that carried knowledge, we have been making representations in our brains. Images. That is no longer happening here on a large demographic scale. TV and film and social media images pollute that capacity. Forget the osmosis of sentence structure, vocabulary, point of view, mental simulation of characters ("Our hypotheses die in our stead"), empathy, identification---the kids are not making images in their right hemispheres. Add to that all experience of art is now classified according to what Dr. McGilchrist calls "the Procrustean bed of the category," as some "ism" or other, which centrifugally pulls towards the left brain. Childhood has lost what Frederick Turner calls "neurocharms" and it is causing, not to be too hysterical, de-evolution of the human. We're Benjamin Buttoning back to before the Upper Paleolithic. The late Walter Burkert, in Origins of the Sacred, mapped the sequence of food getting behavior in mammals over the Propp Sequence for an almost exact match. The left hemisphere driven world pooh-poohs what it doesn't understand as decorative or inconsequential or "cheesecake" (Pinker), but here's Frederick Turner and Ernst Poppel in 1983 arguing that losing the forms of poetry (a universal, and to include children's rhymes) leads to fascism. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=60259 I think about this all the time, and am so glad to find this essay. The next ARC should be held in the woods, around campfires, with musicians (to jolt everyone into their right hemispheres), the woods being where the great story might be lurking, like the Girl Without Hands, wandering the forest, after being sold by her father to the devil, who thought he was only selling a bit of land with an apple tree on it.
Thanks - I have nothing really to add except that since thoughtful people are noticing this problem more and more, we may ultimately stumble to a solution.
This is a brilliant analysis (once again!), and one that parallels the arguments I've been making at analogy. Happy to find a tack I'd missed about the anti-narrative force of gadget addiction. The schooling issue has been bothering me owing to, as you explain, the lack of impact there. The Charlie Brown teacher is a perfect avatar of how we attend to our teachers: "wanh wanh-wanh, wanh wanh-wanh, wanh wanh-wanh-wanh-wanh." But I do hesitate to be quite as dismissive of schooling because there are elements there (narratives) that undermine meaningfulness and promote accidentalism (the idea that the universe and life are an elaborate accident). In terms of chicken and egg, accidentalism came first and no doubt informed the technology and social reactions to it. Moreover, schooling often enough results in discussions at home regarding homework and what this peer or that teacher said in class or in the schoolyard. Most folk have stories to tell about these events, ones that can resonate for many years, if not for a lifetime. In short, accidentalism is a grand theory, a grand narrative... one that supports the anti-narrative thrust... but is still a narrative. I wonder if folks wouldn't get bored of the addictive tech were the underlying narrative of our culture one of meaningfulness.
Nov 23, 2023·edited Nov 23, 2023Liked by David McGrogan
Very much yes and no. Our woes arise not because we have no meaning but because, as Heidegger pointed out, we cannot help but make meaning - and in modernity that meaning can be too easily painfully vacuous. As for why stories are important and the deeper causes of ineffectual modern education, see The Bug in our Thinking - https://www.hughwillbourn.com/book or Amazon.
It might--or it might not--seem trivial to object to the use of the third person singular feminine pronoun to refer to an indeterminate person of either sex instead of the traditional masculine. But it makes a difference to the meaning of both words and one that is pertinent to your subject. In the paragraph in question where, until quite recently, you and everybody else would have thoughtlessly used 'he' and 'his', you deliberately and, I am sure, self-consciously use (I would say, myself, make a show of using) 'she' and 'her'.
Now, given the long history of our language, in which the masculine form of the pronoun in this usage has, as it were, shed any sexual reference and beern made purely grammatical, if you now start using the feminine form you import, whether you want to or not, an irrelevant and distracting sexual reference not only into the feminine form of the pronoun but into the masculine too. This new practice of yours would abolish the previously handy non-sexual, purely grammatical form--to universal inconvenience. You create occasions for political conflict where there ought to be none.
You declare (this is why I say you are 'making a show' of the thing) that upholding 21st century feminist principles is more important to you (and ought to be to everybody else) than the centuries of practice of not just the novelists you otherwise profess to admire but of the whole nation throughout its history. You and some of your contemporaries know better! Here is a bit of your cultural inheritance you want to get rid of.
Politicize too much and no one knows where politics begins and ends. We don't know where we are.
(And I don't like your (internet derived?) Americanised spelling of the English verb 'to practise' either.)
In the author's defense, I personally didn't take anything away from this piece in terms of ham-fisted political posturing. Put aside the potential origin of the modern convention of using both gender pronouns when describing abstract individuals for the sake of illustration and read the piece for its overarching message, not some minutiae that ultimately grinds your personal gears.
What you call 'the modern convention' is the loss or throwing away of a convention; and if it were truly a minutia people wouldn't insist on it as they do. Dr McGrogan's use, my attack and your defense (another spelling, by Englishmen, that grinds my gears) are three examples that something is at stake in it. Dr McGrogan flies a flag, I try to pull it down and you either (I'm not sure) put it back up or declare it to be no flag at all.
What about the possibility of reading too deeply into that one detail to the exclusion of other, potentially more salient ones? In other words, the piece wasn't about the use of pronouns, though you redirected it towards a discussion of such via your comment. Do you dispute the overall point McGrogan was making about why our societies are struck with persistent malaise?
I think some of his comments on our use of the internet are very good--strikingly so--the following, e.g., "a meandering process of purposeless internet activity - a not entirely unpleasant sensation of floating aimlessly on a Dead Sea of mildly diverting entertainment which, while composed of many very short, individuated rushes of interest (twenty seconds of this video here; thirty seconds of that news story there; this meme over here; that gif over there), has an oceanic quality to it - like a single, vast abyss of content that is somehow uniform for all of its ostensible variety." That is a first rate bit of writing, one that anyone might be proud of.
But it does seem to suggest--as his general drift does in this essay--that what has gone wrong with our world has done so since and because of the internet and related technology but I am older than he (and taught for 17 years at Newcastle Polytechnic, which our Mr Major magically turned into the university Dr McGrogan now teaches at, the more evocatively named, Northumbria); and I have no doubt that, whatever it was that has gone wrong, it started going long before the internet was thought of. My years of teaching English Literature at the old Poly and elsewhere suggest that disbelief in literature (as the instance of our "cultural inheritance" I am most familiar with) began with the teachers not the taught. The list of English academics, who earned their livings saying how much they despised the means by which they earned it, is a long and dishonourable one. The mere ignorance of schoolchildren is nothing to it.
But Dr McGrogan's pronouns seem to me rather to belong to, or at least alongside that disbelief, and that is why I picked on them. If I had been merely scornful of his writing, I don't suppose I should have bothered.
why were our universities so susceptible to these corrosive ideas to begin with?)
That last quotation got left in by mistake but I did, twenty-odd years ago co-author a book (with Ian Robinson) that, even if it didn't exactly explain the susceptibility and the corrosiveness, did do its best to display them, The New Idea of A University.
Thanks for the clarification, we're in very close agreement on the issue -- I happen to think that the activists disguised as teachers and the generally-discontented professors of the 60s and 70s got drunk on Postmodernism, Marx, and Critical Theory and produced this current blend of oikophobia that is endemic to people of the West, namely the younger generations. Turns out that it takes a certain warm sentiment towards one's own country in order to put forth the persistent effort needed to maintain one, and these younger kids struggle with accessing the deeper meaning that would inspire truly transformative and constructive change. Instead, they're taught to deconstruct everything, including their own human will to evolve, innovate, and progress.
Sorry. You are American and, in that case, it would have been 'defence' that ground my gears.
I am -- for better or worse -- an American lol Congratulations on such a long and busy life! I'm still in my 30s and watching with a fair bit of dread at the continued dissolution of our cultural pillars on behalf of "the greater good", "liberation", "the transformational future", etc.
For better. May there always be an America (as well).
Gears now all running smoothly.
This is a wonderful rambling reflection, David, and I must apologise in advance for the length of my response, for I can already feel that this will not be a short comment, and that alas it will also tend towards cross-country ramble and away from 'thinking as the crow flies'.
I should like to begin by remarking that this essay is not at all about the ARC, and I almost didn't read it because of the framing given at the start, as I am weary of the half-hearted celebrity interventions that are in vogue, and for which ARC seems to be representative. Yet you discard the ARC within a few paragraphs as a booster rocket and then proceed into far more interesting territory, never to return.
Of course, I'm not your editor (although I think that anyone who gets to edit your work should count themselves lucky), but if this had been one of my own essays I either would have returned to ARC and committed towards making this the subject of the essay, or framed it differently and either moved or excised the discussion of the ARC. I mention this not to 'back seat drive', but rather to make a point about stories that is relevant to the one you are developing here, and that requires me to take yet another digression.
I started blogging in 2005, at the suggestion of a friend who simply had an impression it would agree with me. He was correct, and within a few years I had settled into a comfortable space where I was cranking out essays on a wide range of topics which were thoughtful, well-received, and even provoked conversation, since this was before social media sank the bold fleet of the blogosphere, and before Substack found a business model to revive it.
My intuition is that you are in a similar state now - that you are carving out time to write whatever the spirit moves you to reflect upon, and this is why your essays come out in the manner they do. I set off from discussion of games (my profession), you set off from law (yours), but where we may end up was and is equally unconstrained. Yet oddly, despite this capacity to suggest a connectivity between what is happening here with you and what was happening then with me, it is not possible for me to give you any advice beyond that universal advice that I have come to treasure as applicable to almost every situation: keep going.
The fact of the matter is that I don't know where you are going, and it is almost certainly not to where I have ended up, not least of all because you are vastly better connected than I am, and much less likely to be drawn too deeply into philosophy, as has been my weird and perhaps my doom (for philosophy is a ruined practice in academia, and of limited appeal without).
Now as I say all this, it draws attention to a point that is relevant to your essay, and was brought to my attention by Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, a book that I had no idea was going to influence me as much as it did when I first encountered it. As much as I stoutly concur with much of what you say about the novel here, and even more so of the atomisation of thought brought about by the fragmentary compulsion of the internet, I feel like you may be misjudging 'the premoderns'.
MacIntyre draws against the 'heroic age' to make the point that the virtue of that era was also anchored upon the concept of a personal story, but unlike the era of the novel, the sense of the unifying narrative of this time was anchored upon the inevitability of death. Thus it was that it mattered a great deal to the Greeks, and no-less the Chinese people of this era (although MacIntyre does not cover this), how one died. The novel, on the other hand, is concerned with how we live, and MacInytre suggests that Jane Austen (who, along with Dickens, has been the focus of much of my reading this year) may have been the last writer in the virtue tradition in so much as her characters exist within a framework that takes into account the whole of a life.
Before I quit in disgust both my academic positions, I was struck by the damage that had been done to my students by the recent Nonsense - for whereas my circle of friends at university had affected the course of my life with every bit the impact of a Viking saga or a Victorian novel, so many of my final students had left university having failed to make friends at all, for they were forbidden to do so. This, in many cases, accelerated their nihilistic tendencies, which the internet in all its amorphous infinitude rose up in order to meet their demand, as it remarkably will do for anything provided that it is trivial or vacuous, and almost never at all for matters of substance.
And here I dovetail with your conclusion - about the intersection between technology and our children, and the reckoning that has not yet come about but that, you suggest "will have to happen". I hope that you are correct, but I am doubtful, for the most certain thing in our contemporary situation is that critique of technology is all but forbidden, in part because of the enthusiasm (in the negative Enlightenment sense) for the technological, and in part because the international censorship regime of Google Rex (the subject of an essay of mine coming out at a new publication next year, if I may foreshadow) is absolutely committed to denial about itself, and thus the resolute defence of its own borders.
So I return to my earlier advice, such as it is: keep going! That tiny enclave of us who have acquired a sensitivity to this aspect of the contemporary crisis are few, and we shall receive little support from the powers that shouldn't be in any attempt to push back against what has happened.
I hope, but cannot trust, that something in these remarks was worth the time it took to write them.
With unlimited love and respect,
Chris.
I agree with you that the big problem is that for a critique of technology to take place it has to take place through technological means, and that the owners of the technology will object to the critique most strenuously and may have the power to stifle it. This is a really thorny problem. But I am optimistic that in the long-term it will become a high status indicator to limit one's own screen use (and I think we can see signs of this happening already). Once that process begins, it will filter down through society. There will be a lot of ruin in the interrim, but ultimately there will be a correction.
I greatly appreciate your optimism in this regard, David. There is cause for optimism, if only because belief in the possibility of change is a necessity for change to happen.
Brilliant analysis, as usual. Thank you.
This works well, on first pass, as an account of how personal and social atomisation is caused by being digitally networked with endless content streams and parasocial interactions. It's the first time I've seen this as clearly posited, even though I obsess continually on the subject.
The point about literature plays straight into my existing prejudices. Only recently I wrote about how I learned more from reading Dostoevsky than I did from Arendt.
A great novelist can help you understand the world in a way that no amount of theorising really could. With that said, I do very much like Arendt!
Nice observation about story telling. But isn't the issue more like the current story is a lack of a coherent story because a coherent story is now by definition racist or elitist. What multiculturalism does is disallow each cultures story as a proper narrative and instead denigates them to a museum or circus of curiosities. The new narrative needs to be a reaffirmation of such along with the foundation of how different narratives must get along. I e reciprocity.
Thank you for writing this David. I'm a mother of two bright and perceptive teenage boys. Your article has expanded my own thoughts and concerns. I agree, we are becoming an overly "left-brained" society - how do we combat the simplistic, infantile and mechanical thinking, and take sensible steps to stop it from taking over? I've lost count of the number of times I've told my sons: "Smart people read books. Read one of the books I put in your room." and for it to not result in anything.
I've started a "Thought for the Day" WhatsApp group with them which we then discuss on the way to their woke high school (whose leftist ideas seem not to work on them - for now). In their school environment there is no allowance for debate or exploring nuanced ideas - indeed, there is a "right" and "wrong" opinion with zero tolerance for asking why or deviating from the set vocabulary with an independent thought.
As an artist, English teaching professional and musician I feel so sad that they are denied intellectual and creative freedom, and angry that our taxes fund an education system like this. But if I had access to a smart phone and computer games in the 90s, would I even have the interests and abilities I have now? What can we do?
There's something more...David..and that's creating engaging thought provoking stimuli...and you succeeded with this post. It's the first article I've read from start to finish this month.
Thanks, Andy.
I think ARC should start by calling ‘Western Civilisation’ what it is and what it used to be called: Christendom. The Biblical stories give us a set of shared stories, engendering a shared identity. This does not mean we need to all become devout; Alex Ryrie’s brilliant book Unbelievers shows we were never a monolithic mass of God-botherers. You do not need to believe in the Kalergi Plan to see the Count’s fundamental premise is correct: flood a country with enough people and you will destroy national identity, because they will not share the story that creates that identity. I await it becoming ‘racist’ to ask someone what their grandparents did in the war, as a coda to the sad events around Remembrance Sunday.
I arrived here from Daily Skeptic, and found this a brilliant, wonderful essay. In my neighborhood in Detroit, Gangster Rap thrums bass from the fast cars, with "bitch" "ho" and other derogatory argot melting the drivers' hipoocampi. I'd been thinking Gangster Rap is to music as social media (especially X/Twitter) is to conversation and relationship.
There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story about some townspeople, having read the epistolary novel Clarissa, rang the bells in the town for her wedding or birthday. It was that immersive. Here in America the kids do not own books. They do not hear stories told, they do not have stories read to them. They watch. Images are sluiced into their brains from the earliest days. Since the first hominin hummed or gestured or drew with a stick in the dirt to impart a sequence of events that carried knowledge, we have been making representations in our brains. Images. That is no longer happening here on a large demographic scale. TV and film and social media images pollute that capacity. Forget the osmosis of sentence structure, vocabulary, point of view, mental simulation of characters ("Our hypotheses die in our stead"), empathy, identification---the kids are not making images in their right hemispheres. Add to that all experience of art is now classified according to what Dr. McGilchrist calls "the Procrustean bed of the category," as some "ism" or other, which centrifugally pulls towards the left brain. Childhood has lost what Frederick Turner calls "neurocharms" and it is causing, not to be too hysterical, de-evolution of the human. We're Benjamin Buttoning back to before the Upper Paleolithic. The late Walter Burkert, in Origins of the Sacred, mapped the sequence of food getting behavior in mammals over the Propp Sequence for an almost exact match. The left hemisphere driven world pooh-poohs what it doesn't understand as decorative or inconsequential or "cheesecake" (Pinker), but here's Frederick Turner and Ernst Poppel in 1983 arguing that losing the forms of poetry (a universal, and to include children's rhymes) leads to fascism. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=60259 I think about this all the time, and am so glad to find this essay. The next ARC should be held in the woods, around campfires, with musicians (to jolt everyone into their right hemispheres), the woods being where the great story might be lurking, like the Girl Without Hands, wandering the forest, after being sold by her father to the devil, who thought he was only selling a bit of land with an apple tree on it.
Thanks - I have nothing really to add except that since thoughtful people are noticing this problem more and more, we may ultimately stumble to a solution.
This is a brilliant analysis (once again!), and one that parallels the arguments I've been making at analogy. Happy to find a tack I'd missed about the anti-narrative force of gadget addiction. The schooling issue has been bothering me owing to, as you explain, the lack of impact there. The Charlie Brown teacher is a perfect avatar of how we attend to our teachers: "wanh wanh-wanh, wanh wanh-wanh, wanh wanh-wanh-wanh-wanh." But I do hesitate to be quite as dismissive of schooling because there are elements there (narratives) that undermine meaningfulness and promote accidentalism (the idea that the universe and life are an elaborate accident). In terms of chicken and egg, accidentalism came first and no doubt informed the technology and social reactions to it. Moreover, schooling often enough results in discussions at home regarding homework and what this peer or that teacher said in class or in the schoolyard. Most folk have stories to tell about these events, ones that can resonate for many years, if not for a lifetime. In short, accidentalism is a grand theory, a grand narrative... one that supports the anti-narrative thrust... but is still a narrative. I wonder if folks wouldn't get bored of the addictive tech were the underlying narrative of our culture one of meaningfulness.
Very much yes and no. Our woes arise not because we have no meaning but because, as Heidegger pointed out, we cannot help but make meaning - and in modernity that meaning can be too easily painfully vacuous. As for why stories are important and the deeper causes of ineffectual modern education, see The Bug in our Thinking - https://www.hughwillbourn.com/book or Amazon.