Published in France, by the Jesuits

I have posted before about George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation. I came across a text by Francis Hawkins printed in England in the 1640's which was in turn his translation from a text in France printed in 1595. The strong similarities to Washington's practice piece led me searching and found this piece by Charles Moore in 1926 that provides the background. The nub of the logo-genealogy is:

Here, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter as it now stands: The Rules of Civility were composed originally, or compiled, and published in France, by the Jesuits, about 1595; they were translated into English by Francis Hawkins about 1640, and passed through no fewer than eleven editions down to 1672. From the Hawkins book the one hundred and ten Rules written by Washington were selected, simplified and arranged by some person at present unknown. One copy came into the hands of George Washington, who from it wrote out the manuscript that is among the Washington Papers purchased: from the family by Congress in 1834 and 1849, and held in the Department of State until 1903, when they were transferred to the Library of Congress.

The road to education lay through great books

Here is a site with a wealth of quotations from Robert M. Hutchins' seminal essay that served as the introduction to the great University of Chicago venture, Great Books of the Western World. Here also is an essay, Learning for Everyone, by Robert M. Landers prviding some context for the origin of the Great Books project.

I am not much of a fan of the chicken little, the sky is falling, form of alarmism. It is also worth noting that Hutchins's essay was written in 1952, fifty-eight years ago, and I think it would be hard to argue that the US and US culture plays a significantly less pivotal global role today or that we are materially less financially privileged than we were in 1952. Indeed, perhaps the reverse. Directly and indirectly, the world looks more shaped in the mold of western traditional enlightenment ideas today than it did in 1952. While I think that the degree of alarm expressed in the essay is wrong, I instinctively feel there is some merit to Hutchins' underlying argument - that the ideas of the enlightenment in particular and Western civilization in general are constantly under assault and we are remiss if we underestimate just how critical they are to our continued progress and development.

Here are a few of the juicier snippets from Hutchins' essay, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education.

"Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books." p. xi

"...education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange [for the great books] has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone." p. xiii

"The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves." p. xiii

"...the idea that liberal education is the education that everybody ought to have, and that the best way to a liberal education in the West is through the greatest works the West has produced, is still, in our view, the best educational idea there is." p. xiv

"...we believe that the obligation rests on all of us, uneducated, miseducated, and educated alike, to [go on educating ourselves all our lives]." p. xv

Quoting Sir Richard Livingstone: "We are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our own." p. 2-3

"...the task of the future is the creation of a community. Community seems to depend on communication.... The effectiveness of modern communication in promoting a community depends on whether there is something intelligible and human to communicate. This, in turn, depends on a common language, a common stock of ideas, and common human standards. These the Great Conversation affords." p. 30

"[the great books] afford us the best examples of man's efforts to seek the truth, both about the nature of things and about human conduct, by methods other than those of experimental science; and because these examples are presented in the context of equally striking examples of man's efforts to learn by experiment or the method of empirical science, the great books provide us with the best materials for judging whether the experimental method is or is not the only acceptable method of inquiry into all things." p. 37-38

"What is here proposed is interminable liberal education. Even if the individual has the best possible liberal education in youth, interminable education through great books and the liberal arts remains his obligation; he cannot expect to store up an education in childhood that will last all his life. What he can do in youth is to acquire the disciplines and habits that will make it possible for him to continue to educate himself all his life. One must agree with John Dewey in this: that continued growth is essential to intellectual life.

"The twin aims that have animated mankind since the dawn of history are the conquest of nature and the conquest of drudgery. Now they seem in a fair way to be achieved. And the achievement seems destined, at the same time, to end in the trivialization of life. It is impossible to believe that men can long be satisfied with the kind of recreations that now occupy the bulk of their free time. After all, they are men. Man, though an animal, is not all animal. He is rational, and he cannot live by animal gratifications alone; still less by amusements that animals have too much sense to indulge in. A man must use his mind; he must feel that he is doing something that will develop his highest powers and contribute to the development of his fellow men, or he will cease to be a man.

"The trials of the citizen now surpass anything that previous generations ever knew. Private and public propaganda beats upon him from morning till night all his life long. If independent judgment is the sine qua non of effective citizenship in a democracy, then it must be admitted that such judgment is harder to maintain now than it ever has been before. It is too much to hope that a strong dose of education in childhood and youth can inoculate a man to withstand the onslaughts of his independent judgment that society conducts, or allows to be conducted, against him every day. For this, constant mental alertness and mental growth are required." p. 52-53

"The only civilization in which a free man would be willing to live is one that conceives of history as one long conversation leading to clarification and understanding." p. 58

"Yet there will not be much argument against the proposition that, on the whole, reasonable and intelligent people, even if they confront aggressively unreasonable or stupid people, have a better chance of attaining their end, which in this case is peace, than if they are themselves unreasonable and stupid. They may even be able by their example to help their opponents to become more reasonable and less stupid." p. 59

"The Great Conversation symbolizes that Civilization of the Dialogue which is the only civilization in which a free man would care to live. It promotes the realization of that civilization here and now. This set of books is organized on the principle of attaining clarification and understanding of the most important issues, as stated by the greatest writers of the West, through continuous discussion. Its object is to project the Great Conversation into the future and to have everybody participate in it. The community toward which it is hoped that these books may contribute is the community of free minds." p. 60

"The question for you is only whether you can ever understand these books well enough to participate in the Great Conversation, not whether you can understand them well enough to end it. And the answer is that you can never know until you try. We have built up around the 'classics' such an atmosphere of pedantry, we have left them so long to the scholarly dissectors, that we think of them as incomprehensible to the ordinary man to whom they were originally addressed. At the same time our education has undergone so drastic a process of dilution that we are ill-equipped, even after graduation from a respectable college, to tackle anything much above the level of the comic book.

"The decay of education in the West, which is felt most profoundly in America, undoubtedly makes the task of understanding these books more difficult than it was for earlier generations. In fact my observation leads me to the horrid suspicion that these books are easier for people who have had no formal education than they are for those who have acquired that combination of misinformation, unphilosophy, and slipshod habits that is the usual result of the most elaborate and expensive institutional education in America." p. 77

"Do you need a liberal education? We say that it is unpatriotic not to read these books. You may reply that you are patriotic enough without them. We say that you are gravely cramping your human possibilities if you do not read these books. You may answer that you have troubles enough already.

"This answer is the one that Ortega attacks in The Revolt of the Masses. It assumes that we can leave all intellectual activity, and all political responsibility, to somebody else and live our lives as vegetable beneficiaries of the moral and intellectual virtue of other men. The trouble with this assumption is that, whereas it was once possible, and even compulsory, for the bulk of mankind, such indulgence now, on the part of anybody, endangers the whole community. It is now necessary for everybody to try to live, as Ortega says, 'at the height of his times.' The democratic enterprise is imperiled if any one of us says, 'I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of the world republic of learning.' The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." p. 80

Quoting Thomas Jefferson: "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." p. 81-82

The usual transmogrification

From The Murder Room by P.D. James.

Ouch!

Mrs. Faraday's house was the eighth in a mid-nineteenth century terrace on the south side of an Islington square. The houses, no doubt built originally for the superior working class, must have gone through the usual transmogrification of rising rents, neglect, war damage and multi-occupancy, but had long been taken over by those of the middle class who valued proximity to the City, the nearness of good restaurants and the Almeida Theatre, and the satisfaction of proclaiming that they lived in an interesting, socially and ethnically diverse community. From the number of window grilles and burglar alarm systems, it was apparent that the occupants had protected themselves against any unwelcome manifestation of this rich diversity.

Auld lang syne

I have never been a particular fan of Robert Burns; but never say never. I think one of the lessons any enthusiastic reader soon picks up on is that there is a time and season for just about everything and just because you haven't taken to a particular work or author doesn't mean you never will.

The one piece of Burnsiana that has stuck with me is his poem Auld Lang Syne, sung at the changing of the year and other occasions of passing. Of course my fondness for it is in part that rich bank of associations which it evokes; friends and family and parties of years past. There was also, and frankly still is, a fascination with the almost otherworldliness of the language. Phrases you feel you ought to know and understand but don't quite.

I came across this passage in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods which captures a little bit of that other-wordliness frontier of the poem, the boundary between the here-and-now and the tapestry of the past. A little bit of that feeling as a small child when you stayed up with your parents as they visited with friends, drifting softly into that half-world of eyes closed but ears open, ebbing into sleep with the sound of laughter occassionally intruding.

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"

"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

Children's books as present in libraries

The Online Computer Library Center is an organization helping link libraries and members together and to the vast repository of knowledge sitting on shelves. They did a study in 2005, identifying the 1,000 most commonly held titles in all their member organizations. I have identified all those on that list of 1,000 which are either explicitly children's books (such as Goodnight Moon) as well as those that are frequently read by children before they graduate high school even if they might nominally be adult books (Catcher in the Rye or Slaughterhouse Five for example). I have also included adult books which are frequently abridged and read by children such as the Odyssey, Iliad, some of the more popular Shakespeare plays, Pilgrim's Progress and the like.

Of the 1,000 most commonly held titles, the Bible is, not unexpectedly, the most commonly held book amongst all libraries, with more than twice as many libraries holding it over the next most commonly held book which is, intriguingly, the US Census. Mother Goose is the third most commonly held book.

This is an interesting list because it reflects both what librarians think ought to be in a library as well as, presumably, what is being demanded. It would be interesting to see the circulation numbers for these titles. I assume that in any given year the top of the charts would be dominated by whatever was being promoted by publishers that year, or had become a fad or was in the process of being made into a movie. Over a decade though, I suspect that the cumulative circs would generate a list very close to what follows.

Another observation; children's books represent 29% of the total titles on the list. However, when you look at the number of copies held by the libraries, children's books come in at 52% of all the books cited (59% if you exclude the Bible from the base).

Following are the twenty-five top children's books:

Mother Goose
Odyssey by Homer
Iliad by Homer
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Beowulf
Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore

Garfield by Jim Davis
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Aesop's Fables by Aesop

Arabian Nights

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Other members on the list include Wizard of Oz (#54), Little Women (#62), Peanuts (#69), and Goodnight Moon (#363). Let me know if you are interested in seeing the whole list.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

When Good Guys Lie: Misleading the public is no way to make the world a better place - baseless, alarmist statistics in publicizing social concerns in the Washington Monthly, February 1997 by Glenn Hodges. An evergreen article if ever there were one. Look at the date - 1997.

Hodges's thesis is that one's argument for any issue is undermined to the extent that that argument is based on false data or falsely presented data and that too many advocates, in their enthusiasm for their cause, seize on exciting or startling statistics which on subsequent investigation turn our to be false or misleading. I couldn't agree more with his argument. We too often make arguments based on enthusiasms and feelings rather than on the facts. If the data are not there or are not reliable, then it becomes clear that the argument is one of belief and faith and not of demonstrable fact. That clarity has value.

This relates to reading because we have so little clarity as to the true nature of the challenges we face. We have many enthused reading advocates who seize on the thinnest of straws to make arguments that fly in the face of reality and thereby undermine addressing the real issues. In our report, Growing a Reading Culture, we have attempted to bring some clarity regarding what are the real facts about reading and what parents can do to create an effective reading environment.

Glenn Hodges illuminates a series of statistically fallacious fads and frenzies from the past thirty years ranging from the 1980's paranoia about kidnapping to the 1990's alarms about banned books in schools (an alarmism that persists to this day independent of the actual numbers). It is not that that these aren't serious issues requiring vigilance, but if we are not to lose all focus, we must accurately understand the relative prevalence of the issue.

Of particular note is Hodges's comment, now so prescient, of some of the early global alarmism. Despite being written thirteen years ago, the revelations from the East Anglia University Climate group and the errors riddling the IPCC report now look almost inevitable given Hodges's description of the dynamics of the debate.

Crusaders who withhold the whole truth, mislead, lead exaggerate often unwittingly strengthen their opposition and weaken their own cause, especially when they're claiming the moral high ground. No one seems more prone to this than environmentalists, and it's on the biggest and most contentious issues that the problem is most pronounced. The worst-case scenarios for global warming and overpopulation, for instance, foretell changes so catastrophic that most other concerns would be rendered virtually moot. Some people, looking at those high stakes, throw caution to the wind and use everything in their arsenal, no matter how loosely tethered to scientific data, to get people's attention and force action.

On a 99-degree day in June 1988, as the nation sweltered through the latest hot, dry summer in a decade of record high-temperature years, climatologist James Hansen appeared before Congress and proclaimed that he was 99 percent certain the earth was in the midst of man-induced global warming. "It's time to stop waffling so much and say that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now," Hansen told reporters that day. Newspapers had a field day, and Hansen's colleagues had conniptions. After all, concern over global warming was barely a decade in the making, and 10 years of high temperatures do not a climate change make. "The variability of climate from decade to decade is monstrous," oceanographer Tim Barnett told Science in 1989. "To say that we've seen the greenhouse signal is ridiculous "

Most climatologists believed there just wasn't enough data to make a conclusive judgment. Only a decade earlier, after 30 years of relatively cool temperatures, climatologists feared we might be entering a new ice age. Though there was certainly reason to believe in 1988 that global warming was a real possibility, even a probability - atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, had increased 25 percent since the 19th century - there was no way of knowing yet whether the higher temperatures of the '80s were a trend or a statistical blip.

Even Stephen Schneider, a Stanford climatologist who has been at the forefront of the push for action against global warming, thought Hansen made a mistake by overstating the case. While Hansen's assertions got the attention of the public and Congress, "there was a risk of severe credibility loss for climatology if nature rolled a cold, wet summer or two soon, and this was quite possible," Schneider wrote in his 1990 book, Global Warming. Meanwhile, the '90s have seen some record-hot years (notably 1990,1991 and 1995), but it's also had some cooler ones. 1992 and 1993 were cooled by sunlight-reflecting particles from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, and 1996 is looking to go down as a relatively cool year too. None of this is inconsistent with global warming models, but in bringing scrutiny to individual years instead of a longer-term pattern, Hansen risked confusing the public over the issue; he also "gave ammunition to his detractors," as Schneider wrote, a take that is shared by many, including MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel.

In another section, Hodges tackles the issue of how efforts to suppress books is represented in the press. This continues to be an issue of huge misconception (as highlighted in this blog post from last year, Burying the Lede).

Every fall People for the American Way releases a report called "Attacks on the Freedom to Learn," which purports to highlight the growing problem of censorship in America's public schools. In tandem with the American Library Association's "Banned Books Week," PFAW is the source of scores of news stories on how closed-minded parents and religious zealots are targeting our best literature - Of Mice and Men, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Catcher in the Rye - for elimination from public school libraries and reading lists. PFAW's press release this fall exclaimed that "Public education weathered a recordbreaking 475 attacks on curricula, library and textbooks, student expression, and other components of public education in the 1995-96 school year."

But what PFAW classifies as an incident of "attempted censorship" is a single complaint, usually from a parent, who in many cases thinks a certain book is inappropriate for his or her child's age group. Most of the books PFAW describes as threatened have had no more than a half-dozen complaints nationwide, and it's not necessarily the classics that are drawing the most ire.

In the 1994-1995 school year, according to PFAW's 1995 report, the two most frequently challenged books in US. schools were Alvin Schwam's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Scary and More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which include tales like "Wonderful Sausage," about a butcher who gets such culinary raves for his ground-up wife that he embarks on a town-wide sausage-making rampage, collecting children and, for good measure, "their kittens and puppies." But the report's 30-page introduction, which winds up being the main source for news stories, makes no mention of Schwartzs books. Meanwhile, Of Mice and Men and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings get four mentions each. It's a classic bait-and-switch. When you think of censorship, you don't imagine a university professor complaining that his first-grader is too young to read stories about murder and dismemberment.

Distorting the debate over what is or isn't suitable reading material for children certainly has its repercussions repercussions, but the most tangible consequence is probably extra checks from direct mail solicitations (PFAW's annual "censorship" report is a fundraising centerpiece). When social science research uses the same tactics, however, the consequences can be much more serious.

So - interesting article, interesting how prescient some of Hodges's comments are and interesting that, for all that Alvin Schwartz's stories (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3) might have drawn a few harsh complaints, they have stood the test of time well and are frequently mentioned as favorite books among young boys today.

History as defined by Ambrose Bierce

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Of Roman history, great Niebuhr's shown
'Tis nine-tenths lying. Faith, I wish 'twere known,
Ere we accept great Niebuhr as a guide,
Wherein he blundered and how much he lied.

Salder Bupp

From The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce.

This Is Just To Say

I keep coming across this in the past three months, having never seen or heard of it before.

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Meaningfulness and Mortality

An essay by Max More, Meaningfulness and Mortality.

There is no guarantee of being engaged with life, but ennui has to do with laziness rather than the availability of too much time.

Mysterious and unfamiliar

From The Murder Room by P.D. James.

For her the museum after five became mysterious and unfamiliar, as public places often do when everyone human has departed and silence, like an ominous and alien spirit, steals in to take possession of the night hours.