Against the 'isms'

It is very easy to stick labels on things. In the nominalist tradition, labels are all that there are in terms of language and thought. The word 'tree' is merely a human label applied to a set of phenomena (sensible aspects of the imagination) seemingly bringing together likenesses, but not actually capturing anything universal behind them. The tree is just one thing, which bares a likeness, perhaps to other things, but which is not a 'kind of thing' (i.e. the label does not describe the essence, or being, or form of the thing). There is no being, or set of beings, whose essence is that of 'tree', or more specifically say 'Oak', just individuals with likenesses to one another (brought together arbitrarily by the human mind (which is also not an thing)). As a result everything which seems to ground rationality and reason, literally ratios, as well comparison, differentiation disappears. Since, 'tree' and 'not-tree', cannot signify any real unity but only 'this' single thing.

Of course nominalism has one fatal flaw. It assumes the truth of essentialism in order to refute essentialism. One needs to say that this 'Oak' is not an instansiation of 'Oakness', but merely 'this Oak here in front of me'. But in pointing out an instance of a thing is simply to assume the essence of the thing, you are still saying 'this Oak'. An argument for nominalism needs essentialism to get off the ground, because the words used in the debate must point to, symbolise some-thing, that is to say some object beyond the horizon of individual thought that can be understood. If nominalism were true it is difficult to conceive of any way for knowledge of the world to be passed on from generation to generation, indeed from one individual to the next, further from one moment to the next in the same individual.

But just because nominalism is flawed doesn't mean that all labels are essences. This is where a key distinction can be made. Not everything that the mind apprehends necessarily reflects a real form or essence. For instance, vending machines are merely a set of parts collected together in one place to dispense various consumable goods. (The parts to be sure have essences of there own, for example the glass, metals and food stuffs). The machine have no meaning outside of the function it performs with reference to human beings. Likewise, many scientific abstractions, though they help to describe the world, are not really what the world is like. For instance, chemicals are not made up of collections of balls and sticks, but this is a useful abstraction to enable human beings to visualise something that is otherwise invisible or only describable in mathematical language. Additionally, Descartes famously describe the world (including human bodies) as the res extensa and the mind (abstract thought, imagination and sensations, the stuff of consciousness) as the res cogitans. These abstractions were reified by Descartes to the point that he made a substance out of them, separating in a fixed way these corporal and incorporeal realities. They may be useful abstractions to help describe the world but they were not what the world was actually like.

In a different light we often today apply labels to intellectual or political or religious positions. We say someone is a Marxist, or a Feminist, a Christian or a Muslim, a liberal or conservative. In the religious sense, the label is somewhat helpful but it is misleading. Hilaire Belloc declared that there was no such thing as Christianity, or indeed Catholicism as such, but only 'the Thing', (the title to an excellent book by G.K. Chesterton), which is to say the Church, the mystical body of Jesus Christ. One was not 'a Christian' but rather a member of the body of Christ, which was in fact every-Thing. He would have had little time for C.S. Lewis' 'mere Christianity', seeing the Church not as a position to taken up but as a way of being, as the souls complete transformation into Christ.

In some ways many of the 'isms' we attach to things turn out not to be things, but merely arbitrary labels which categorise. The political 'isms' are another more obvious instance. Liberalism and conservatism are typical categories we use as labels for political positions as well as individuals. But the obvious verbal absurdity arises when the meaning of the words are brought out, for what 'conservative' is not also in favour of freedom, and what 'liberal' is not also in favour of preserving society, laws and the very freedoms that allow him to be a liberal. Rodger Scruton believes that these categories, liberal and conservative should be seen in a sociological, rather than ideological, light. This means seeing these things as elements of social discourse as well as saying something about the psychological makeup of the conservative or liberal mind. Seen in this light these categories might have some meaning, but otherwise they are unmeaning nonsense. In politics, as in all of the intellectual life, thought is far more important ideology and slogans. Actually applying the reasoning faculty and thinking is much more important than toeing party lines. After all, conservatism can't be all wrong, and liberalism all right, or liberalism be all wrong and conservatism all right (pun not intended).

And this, I think, should be applied in most cases were an intractable 'ism' pops up its ugly head. Darwinism (as opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection), while it is based on a powerful set of analytical tools and theory for understanding the origins of present day life, is false because it seeks absolute imperial control over every discipline of thought; as though appealing to natural selection will help to explain who is the hero of Pride and Prejudice, or what the basis of morality is. Materialism (indeed, all materialisms, including historical materialism, naturalism, empiricism and indeed Darwinism) is false because it seeks to reduce everything to an elegant theory. Marxism, while simplicity itself to understand, needs to subsume all contrary evidence showing its major premises and conclusions are false into itself. It becomes and system to fit evidence into, rather than tool to unlock the truth of historical happening. Clean theories, while simple to understand, are rarely, if ever, able to explain 'everything'. Scientific theories explain precisely that which they set of to explain in the narrow confines of the measurable and observable, nothing else. Ideological theories, including scientism, seek to reduce into themselves everything, and in the end explain more about the theorist than the world.

So what are we to do? Abandon the use of labels? I think probably not. For conventions sake as well as for clarity labels can be of some use. What should not happen though is the lazy habit of fitting with a label, rather than fitting a label to a situation. If our labels are to have any meaning, it is because they are dynamic, they are products of the human mind and they are reasoned.

G.K Chesterton Library, Oxford

Chesterton was one of the greatest men of letters of the 20th century. Brillant in almost any subject that he set his mind to, Chesterton could move from a criticism of litearture the profoundest insights into philosophy and theology.

Presently I have the honour of cataloguing the work of this great man in the G.K. Chesterton Library. This is the premier collection of works by Chesterton as well as housing numerous realia of Chesterton including his own library. The collection is a labour of love, brought together by the dovoted Chestertonian Aidan Mackey. It now has, at long last a web site, a blog, in preperation for its new home at the Oxford Oratory.

The site can be found here:

http://chestertonlibrary.blogspot.co.uk/

If you have never read anything by Chesterton, you are in for a treat. No matter what subject or genre you pick you will be amazed, amused and delighted.

Gulliver's Travels I: A Voyage to Lilliput

This great classic of Western literature was written not as a novel but as a series of satires not only of politics and the age, but of travel literature itself. There is a tension between what Gulliver, the narrator, is saying and what his audience should think, indeed what Swift is telling (or showing) his readers. Gulliver is very serious in giving every factual detail to convince his readers not only of his varsity but also to ensure that we take on his point of view. In point of fact, we are taken on this very serious journey to fantastic lands and find much that amusing, much that is bemusing, that which is shocking and that which is exceptional. If we are not offended by the satire and can only see others folly in it then we ourselves become the butt of the joke. The book instructs us as well as entertains us.

On the surface the Voyage to Lilliput is fairly easy to understand. Lemuel Gulliver (whose name means "beloved of God" and "to trick by means of the truth" (Gull-vere)) sets out on a voyage as ships surgeon. He is ship-wreaked and it seems is the only survivor. He lands on the Isle of Lilliput and soon finds himself captured by the inhabitants who are about 6 inches tall compared to Gulliver. He is transported back to the city and housed in a disused cathedral Church. Over time Gulliver learns the language of the Lilliputians and is granted his liberty by the Emperor upon certain conditions.While he is there he discovers that Lilliput is the sworn enemy of Belfusca another Empire situated to the North-East on a different island. The principle divide between the two Empires is one of doctrine, the Lilliputians open their eggs at the small end (Small-Endians) and the Belfuscians open their eggs at the large end (Big-Endians). Upon this point neither side will budge (it is in point of fact the Lilliputians and their prince of some time past who instigated the Small-Endian schism), and so they are at war, and presently the Belfuscians have a larger fleet ready for fair winds. Gulliver is drawn into the politics and agrees to take the principle ships of Belfusca for Lilliput. Upon successfully returning the principle part of the enemy navy the Empire commands Gulliver in effect to subjugate the people of Belfusca, turn them into a province of Lilliput and stamp out the Big-Endian heresy. Gulliver refuses on moral grounds and so then precipitate a series of events that lead to Gulliver taking leave of Lilliput, seeking refuge in Belfusca and escaping back to England.

Clearly, Swift here has in mind the petty disputes between England and France. Though he was a Church of England clergyman (Dean of St Patricks in Ireland), and he disliked Catholic practice, he here shows that the differences between the French and the English were minor. They both have a fine and expressive language, with attendant cultures. The differences in religion are not as wide as many might make out, after all do they not enjoy the same yoke! It is also easy to see here that the Lilliputians have a cramped and narrow vision of politics and morality. Faced with Gulliver they have a choice, kill him (which they contemplate doing), or use him for their own ends. The list of criteria Gulliver is given so that he might be set free are all very practical things meant to increase the 'glory' of the Empire. He must crush the fleet of Belfusca, assist in building projects, take measurements of the entire kingdom and so on. The preamble to the list of demands makes the Empire to be a mighty prince, whose domain 'covers' the earth, and Gulliver points out that his kingdom is about 12 miles square. The cramped and narrow political views of the Lilliputians is therefore, exemplified in the fact that they themselves are small. Later when Gulliver visits Brobdingnag he is the small one, Europeans are thus the cramped and narrow ones.

When Gulliver refuses to humble and crush the Belfuscians the Emperor takes a dim view. Gulliver argues that it would be unjust to subjugate a free people and quash their culture, this boarder, more moral view is rejected by the prince. Thus, from that time onwards the court plots to get rid of Gulliver. They are a very careful and precise people, able to calculate the needs of Gulliver (he requires the food and drink for 1728 Lulliputians), they move him while drugged from the coast to his residence by as Gulliver says ingenious means, they fashion clothes for him, take precise notes on his personal effects and so on. They realise that if they were to kill Gulliver outright that his corpse would rot and likely induce a plague, so instead, for a crime he committed earlier and for which he received a kind of pardon, they decide to blind him, and hope that this will firstly punish him sufficiently and make him docile to the needs and (often capricious) wants of the Emperor. (Gulliver empties his bladder on the Royal Palace that is set ablaze in order to put out the fire, however, to do so is a crime punishable by death in Lilliput. This shows again that the Lilliputians know nothing of mercy and magnanimity. It is also part of Swifts jibe at travel literature, where minute details are related about the daily lives of the travellers, Swift therefore has Gulliver relate the precise details of how he 'answers a call of nature', using the grotesque and the scatological). Again, this broadness in science but narrowness in morality (the punishment is hardly fitting to the crime and is decided in secret, without taking evidence and without a defence for Gulliver) shows why the Lilliputians are small. Their stature matches the metaphysical reality of their lives.

The theme of Science and ancient wisdom is one that is pervasive throughout the Travels and we meet it most explicitly in the third travel book (reviewed here). The Lilliputians do indeed display their qualities in terms of physical science and in engineering. What they lack is the ancient moral wisdom and virtues of governance. They lack common humanity in raising of families and children, seeing marriage as a means of propagating the race and sending their children to be raised elsewhere. They lack the courage to reward virtue and good office, using acrobatics as a means for promotion at court to win various sashes (a direct satire on the various knightly orders in Great Britain). For all this, the Lilliputians are smaller than the Europeans. In the second travel book (reviewed here) we see science taking a secondary place to moral virtue and political magnanimity and hence it is the Europeans who are small.

Chesterton on progress(ivism)

Attacking the cult of progress was for Chesterton, the work of a moment. Throughout his copious output you will find references to or critiques of progressivism. Chesterton was concerned about this cult in all its various manifestations, he is critical of evolutionism/scientism (the concept that we must inevitably be moving upwards), of the Übermensch of Nietzsche (particularly in its Shavian guise), or the eugenic programmes of Wells, of Whig historical analysis (borrowing as he does from Belloc), of imperialist, cosmopolitanism and (as he puts it) the heresy of race supremacy and so on and so forth. Chesterton is the premier conservative, not because he defends all that is in the past, right and wrong, but rather because he defends all that is right both past and present! This is best expressed with Chesterton's famous line:

Tradition is the extension of Democracy through time; it is the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn.

Tradition may be defined as the extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition. (Orthodoxy, Ethics of Elfland, 1908)

Thus, Chesterton is telling us that the best things whether they are expressed today, yesterday or 2000 years ago should be given equal hearing by us today.

Chesterton was a realist both philosophically and morally and saw through the sham of progress for its own sake, or for the sake of some ideal(ology), or for the sake of change. But he was not against progress when it was progress towards the good. Reform for Chesterton could spell an improvement in the world, as reform is limited, self-conscious and for definite improvement in a single area. This exemplifies Chesterton's loathing for the large scale project. British Imperialism, socialist welfare statism, monopolistic capitalism were all repugnant to Chesterton, because they ignored the essential values of man, and mans individual needs. The local, the limited, the boundary (the frame around a picture to invoke a Chestertonian image) were for Chesterton to be extolled because they are humane, they are genuinely human.

Chesterton saw that in his age, and age dedicated to fads and fancies, where no one knew what was real, or what to do, progress was merely the continuation of nothing. Without a definite (or absolute) creed, something to progress towards, then we have not progress but blind movement. As Chesterton says in Heretics (1904), "we meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress - that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what." Chesterton saw that with the decline of religious and moral codes, especially concepts such as 'the good' and 'human flourishing', all modern mass projects, education, welfare or social reform were doomed to a sterile futility. Not that progress as a word or a concept was to be condemned, but, "I say it is unmeaning with the previous definition of a moral doctrine, and it can only be applied to groups of persons who hold that doctrine in common". We see here the budding of what later will be called virtue ethics. Progress is something with a direction, a direction towards the (moral) good. It is achieved individually by those with a moral creed and collectively by those who share it. In the modern age the direction however is always disputed and so no progress is made, we are merely left with progressivism!

Chesterton tells, in his G.K.'s. Weekly, a marvelous parable regarding progress called 'The Legend of the Sword". It goes:

A strange story is told of the Spanish-American War, of a sort that sounds like the echo of some elder epic: of how an active Yankee, pursuing the enemy, came at last to a forgotten Spanish station on an island and felt as if he had intruded on the presence of a ghost. For he found in a house hung with ragged Cordova leather and old gold tapestries, a Spaniard as out of time as Don Quixote, who had no weapon but an ancient sword. This he declared his family had kept bright and sharp since the days of Cortes: and it may be imagined with what a smile the American regarded it, standing spick and span with his Sam Browne belt and his new service revolver.

The Spaniard 'captures' the American in his ancient boat but it falls apart almost immediately and they both end up marooned on a raft which finally ends up on a desert island. Chesterton goes on:

The shelving shores of the island were covered with a jungle of rush and tall grasses; which it was necessary to clear away, both to make space for a hut and to plait mats or curtains for it. With an activity rather surprising in one so slow and old-fashioned, the Spaniard drew his sword and began to use it in the manner of a scythe. The other asked if he could assist.

"This, as you say is a rude and antiquated tool," replied the swordsman, "and your own is a weapon of precision and promptitude. If, therefore, you (with your unerring aim) will condescend to shoot off each blade of grass, one at a time, who can doubt that the task will be more rapidly accomplished?"

As they continue after days the Spaniard remains remarkably well kempt while the American doesn't. So one day the American wakes up early to solve the mystery and "found his comrade shaving himself with the sword, which foolish family legend had kept particularly keen".  It continues:

"A man with no earthly possessions but an old iron blade," said the Spaniard apologetically, "must shave himself as best he can. But you equipped as you are with every luxury of science, will have no difficulty in shooting off your whiskers with a pistol"

Chesterton's characteristic wit and high farce shines out of these lines. The American of course is slightly put out by the Spaniards words but seeks to show how effective the revolver really is, "unslinging his revolver, "Well, I guess I can't eat my whiskers, anyhow; and this little toy may be more use in getting breakfast." He then shoots down five birds to eat. The Spaniard is obviously impressed proclaiming his success and declaring that they shall feast elegantly more than once. However he does rejoin, "Only after that, your ammunition being now exhausted, shall we have to fall back on a clumsy trick of mine, of spiking fish on the sword".

"You can spike me now, I suppose, as well as the fish," said the other bitterly. "We seem to have sunk back into a state of barbarism"

We now proceed rapidly to the moral, which should have been obvious from the beginning:

"We have sunk into a state," said the Spaniard, nodding gravely, "in which we can get anything we want with what we have  got already."

"But," cried the American, "that is the end of all Progress!"

"I wounder whether it matters much which end?" said the other.

Now this parable appears in Chesterton's own paper which defended his doctrine of distributism which was fraught with disputes about the value of modern technology and advocating "three acres and a cow". It is beyond the scope of this post to discuss this the value of this, but what is pertinent for this discussion is the rich symbolism of this tale.

The sword represents tradition and proud tradition at that. It is paradoxically the most useful and most useless object. By 'use' I mean utility for the sword can slash and cleave, shave, hunt fish even fulfil its function of killing a man! But it is also useless in its simple beauty, as a treasured possession, as an aesthetic object. It stands for honour, for courage in battle (as one stands face to face with ones foe), it is provincial (for it represents ones local tradition), it stands for the strong arm of justice, it even incorporates the cross (Christ brings to the world a Sword!). With the sword, progress is made in sheltering, grooming and feeding the stranded men. The sword is the voice of tradition proclaiming small is beautiful and efficenicy is only worth while if it points to and is directed to something good!

The gun by contrast is the maximal symbol of modern efficiency and progressivism. The gun is so efficient in its purpose (namely killing other men) that it turns out to be totally useless in every sense. It delivers one impressive round of use and falls redundant. It is a great project directed at little else than its own narrow end, which falls, literally dead after its own completion. Progress needs to be directed towards something, some real value or else it is merely activity. No it is not progress that the gun is destined to bring but sterile waste (think of the modern city scape with their monstrously efficient, inhumane concrete buildings that no one can find a use for!). All that we can and should do with the gun is toss it aside and let it rust!

Notes from underground

I have finished the first book on my classics list, Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read the Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes translation in the OneWorld Classics series. The title of the book is slightly misleading to a modern reader. In the original translation it was titled Notes from the Underground, which suggests something of a revolutionary, perhaps subversive movement. Dostoevsky means nothing of the kind, it is perhaps better thought of as notes from under the floorboards, a psychological rather than political concept. (But more on that in a little while). The book is divided into two parts. In the first part of the book the Underground Man (UGM) lays out some philosophical reflections on life, but all of these are tied to his own life. In the second part the UGM moves around in some petty encounters in which he attempts to prove the thesis of the first half of the book. There are three such encounters in the second half, the first is the UGM's determination to revenge himself on an army officer; the second is his attendance of a party of old school friends; the third his encounter with the prostitute Liza.

This short book is by common acknowledgement regarded as the first existentialist novel and it isn't hard to see why. On the surface the protagonist, the Underground Man, a nameless minor official in the Russian civil service, potters about exposed to the mere folly and existence of his own soul. He commits petty acts of immorality and revels in his own degradation. There is no small about of boasting regarding his own enlightenment and his own vileness. The book is riddled with contradictions, assertions and tension. The opening line of the book reveals that the UGM is no ordinary protagonist, "I'm a sick man... a spiteful man... an unattractive man, that's what I am"(p.7). He is telling us this but nevertheless his character is not merely one of degradation it is a kind of nothingness. "I have failed not only to become spiteful - but to become anything else for that matter: vicious or kind, scoundrel or honest man, hero or insect"(p.8). He has failed to make of himself a good or evil man, he is literally nothing to no one.

"And I am now living out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the vicious and useless consolation that an intelligent man of the nineteenth century can't seriously make himself into anything and that only a fool and seriously make himself into something"(p.8). This line gives us a clue as to the plot of the book. Throughout the UGM assures that he is the only intelligent person of his acquaintance and that it his intelligence, his book learning, that makes him unable to follow good or evil. He simply gets along, revelling in depravity and in beauty, not really affected by these realities and yet totally immersed in them - he is a soul alone.

Dostoevsky is not to be identified with the Underground Man, who is decidedly an anti-hero. In some respects the UGM is the archetype of anti-hero. What is interesting though is that Dostoevsky allows his protagonist to express ideas that he (and potentially his readers) would agree with. Thus, while we are plainly not supposed to sympathise with UGM in his actions, yet his thoughts and ideas are ones that we can (perhaps should) agree with. For instance, Dostoevsky is clearly sceptical of the age of progress and in the perfectibility of man through reason alone. The UGM expresses this scepticism of Utopian visions of rational organisation of man, typified by the Crystal Palace. This is both the Crystal Palace of London, where all mans achievements were rationally collected and organised, and rationalist commune of Nikolai Chernishevsky's What is to be done?. While we may agree that communes and utopias are ridiculous (and we may wish to be reformers, even if not totalitarian reformers), nevertheless the arguments of the UGM are not always the ones we would want to use to repudiate utopia.

The concepts of freedom and determinism are vital to understanding this text. Dostoevsky, is once more challenging those who would take away the freedom of man in the name of science (or rather rationalism). A scientistic and rationalist concept of man is surely inadequate to understand what it is to be human. The UGM sneers at his reader "you're repeating to me that an educated and sophisticated man - a man of the future, that is - cannot knowingly desire something disadvantageous for himself, that this is mathematics." However, men "have a right to wish for himself even the silliest of things and not be bound by the obligation to wish for himself only something intelligent." This then, "at least preserves what is dearest and most important to us: our personality and our individuality". Though the UGM believes in the precepts of science (here expressed as mathematics) that men strive for their own good, still he holds out that men must have a right to wish for their own destruction and to do that which is totally foolish. In other words, he wishes to show that man is free to escape not only his nature but his reason. The UGM wants to be free to follow his reason, if he wants to, but also to follow his desires and to be free from his mind.

While we may agree that our freedom, our personality and individuality are more important to us than science allows for, nevertheless we might not wish to take the UGM to the logical conclusion that we are free from our natures. Rather we should be free to fulfill our natures, not merely conform to some scientific scheme which tells what to think. The strictures of a strictly logical concept of our nature is what we may oppose as it strips of our humanity and our liberty. If we are nothing but a sack of chemicals, radically determined by our genetics and social upbringing, then we have no freedom. No freedom to practice the virtues or to avoid vice. We need not indulge in vice just to prove our freedom, but avoid them precisely because we are free. The UGM is a contradiction because in spite of his call to freedom in depravity he is compelled by the force of the situation to act in a certain way. the repellent and vicious way. This shows that we may wish to be free, but his argument that he was free to choose folly is in fact itself a kind of slavery. What we are shown, but not told, is that we need to be free to choose the good and this will free us from from compulsion and rationalism.

At the end of the book, when Liza comes to see him, he manages to destroy not only her hope but his own. After their first sexual encounter at the brothel, the UGM goes on a moralising sermon regarding her chosen life. It evidently touches her (and we believe the UGM in his (one) act of sincerity). Afterwards, he gives her his address which he immediately regrets. He hopes she will visit him (and regrets that she might). He has a genuine pity and compassion for her, but when she arrives he nevertheless gives over to his passions (knowing full well the terrible consequences for himself and for her). As he says, "I was angry at myself but of course it was she who had to suffer the consequences". Ashamed of his poverty, his servant and everything else he would rather destroy her and wipe away the hope he had kindled in her. After breaking down into despair in front of her, he takes sexual advantage of her pity for him and seals his anguish at himself by handing her money for the service. In all this, the UGM acknowledges the pure folly of the choice, he knows full well that his pride and lust are clouding everything and destroying all hope. It is not hard to see that the UGM is a slave to his passions, that while he exalts in the freedom to choose folly, he is actually enslaved by his passions. A genuine freedom would have been afforded him if, swallowing his all encompassing pride, he could have helped Liza free herself from her disreputable profession. His own, and her, happiness would have been secured if he followed his reason, subdued his passions, and done what his intellect knew to be the good.

Thus, we come to the conclusion. The UGM is the archetype of the anti-hero, but he is also, strangely the archetype of the modern man. Bored with the 'sublime and beautiful' (concepts expounded by 18th idealists such as Kant and Burke), and wrapped up in his own intellect, he self creates a little hell of his own, his 'corner', underground. Here Dostoevsky, happily writing before Freudian psycho-analysis, uses the rather traditional image of the house to represent the psychology of the person. Thus, we creep underground, with the UGM, as a mouse and discover all his demons, his pride and foremost his Acadia. He is bored with world, it is nothing but that which science describes, there is no transcendent principle (apart from the escape into 'sublime and beautiful' books). The UGM is stuck with the reality of his own soul and his demons. He revels in his sloth and inflicts his presence on the world. He is a slave to his passion, even while extolling this slavery as freedom. Genuine freedom would come not from exploiting the demon within but in the pursuit of the good, of the virtues and in forming a good character. Instead, he lazily justifies himself with his notes having nothing else, literally no-thing else to turn to.

Inaugural ramblings

Conversion to Catholicism has brought many things into my life. One thing was the realisation that I was gravely ill-educated. Another, was the vast spaces that Catholicism opens up intellectually and spiritually. Quite simply no amount of life times is enough to explore its rich depths (we have eternity for that).

Chesterton was the first 'great' that I really read and fell in love with. Chesterton's own story of conversion, along with the multitudes of literary figures who found their way into Rome (see J. Pearce for more), was a great influence on my own journey into the Church. Chesterton was certainly proved right when he said that Catholicism does not restrict your thinking, it rather lets you think. No matter where you travel, if you travel with the Church, or specifically with Our Lord, you'll find the vast richness of the Cosmos and become a whole person.

What these rambles are trying to get at is the real possibility of education which is opened up with the Faith. Not that education is the exclusive preserve of the Faith but that Western culture simply is the Faith in one way or another. Every book you pick up that deals with ultimate questions is in dialogue (however imperfectly) with western culture and with Catholicism in some manner or other (although the Greek and Roman classics have a slightly different place).

Now the point of this blog is really to clear my own mind about the Great Tradition. This is the educational tradition of the West going back to Socrates and Plato, through the medieval liberal arts and into the Great Books programmes of today. It is the Great Conversation. The world is divided into two camps (I'm excluding for the moment the great far Eastern traditions), those who follow the Great Tradition, whose master is Truth, Beauty and Goodness, and those who follow their own inclinations and live in the present (presentism). Loosely speaking most modern philosophies, ideologies, programmes for reform, theologies and so on are stuck in the present. In England, the National Curriculum is constantly being modified (and watered down) to meet short term objectives and to get  meaningless results. It does not open up a dialogue with the Great Tradition, but perpetuates an atomised, individualism, "meaninglessness" and radical subjectivism.

So with the help of Chesterton and friends I hope to formulate at least in my own mind the dialogue with the Great Tradition and to get to grips with schooling. Perhaps my ramblings will be of use to others and certainly laying out my thoughts in essay form helps to bring together all the loose ends that float around endlessly in my mind.