Are lefties created by conservative education?
A recent article calling for a bipartisan approach to attacking Howard and his ilk, with merest mention of Cicero, exposed a clique of classicists among lefty DeadRoo readers, and prompted me to think that an ultra-conservative education pushes people to red-green politics. The modern true believers in "Traditional Western Values" are the progressives (lefties and wet conservatives), rather than neocons and dries who give them mere lip-service.
The more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
The classics are full of questions, rather than pushing preconceptions. The common dialogue form usually gave fair treatment of all views. The constant questions were "What is Good?", "How can society achieve it?", "How can we moderate our desires?"
Is this the education agenda of Julie Bishop?
In our most ancient epic, Gilgamesh is a warrior, frets about death, wastes time searching for eternal life, but learns his duty is simply to be a good king. At the end, his greatest pride, and immortality, is in the walls he built to protect his people, and a town square paved with fired brick.
Do our pollies concentrate on justice and infrastructure?
The goriest war-poem, the Iliad, describes in anatomical detail the death of each soldier, while lamenting that no longer would he enjoy the simple beauty of the valley where he tended his sheep and played flute to the sunset. Odysseus, the Greek given most sympathetic treatment, was a good fighter, but his true glory was as a conciliator.
Have the warmongers learnt from this?
A constant theme in epics was the demand to show hospitality to strangers and travellers, offering them hearth, food and clothes, lest the wrath of the gods descend on you. If someone clasps your knees, or an altar, you must grant protection.
Our treatment of refugees and immigrants falls short.
A core thesis repeated through the Histories of Herodotos was that weather and landscape were the key shapers of societies and conflicts.
Climate change skeptics take note.
The teaching of stoics makes the "Golden Rule" seem selfish: want everything for others, nothing for yourself but the chance to serve.
Consumerism does not bring contentment.
Some time back, I was asked by some 3rd year philosophy students to be tutor for their Classical semester. They thought it would be simplistic and dusty. I took them to the sources, sometimes giving them the originals and a dictionary, and they were amazed at the subtlety and freshness, their amenability to a 21st century progressive reading.
"Get past the blinkers of the Edwardian translators" I urged, showing them Cicero, pointing out that "the common bonds between all men", so fundamental to Enlightenment constitutions, could be more accurately rendered "the duties all sapient beings owe each other". Cicero would have accepted chimpanzees, dolphins and martians as deserving "human" rights, upon evidence of Mind.
The rights we give others define our own humanity.
They nearly wept reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (the good Emperor in "Gladiator" for novices), wondering why we humans have so rarely enjoyed such a diligent, humble, and truly spiritual ruler. He is one of the very few in history who deserves the title of "Philosopher King" that Plato thought necessary to bring about a good society.
Absolute power need not corrupt the properly educated.
Alexandrian academics, asked whether they were Roman by empire, Greek by heredity, or Egyptian by geography, answered: "None of these, we are citizens of the kosmos."
Nationalism is irrelevant and damaging.
Far from backward-looking, the classics prompt promethean reflection about how visionaries see better alternatives to the status quo. What did their minds imagine that their time-constrained hands could not grasp?
- What new rights would a new Hammurabi infer in today’s constitutions?
- How might Athenians, who leveraged the wisdom of pensioners in juries, create advantage from today’s ageing population?
- Can we invigorate the world economy by forgiving debtor nations, as Solon unleashed a city-state by legislating away debts of the underclass?
- How would early participatory democracies harness the internet?
What advances would an innovative politician achieve today?
Steeped in the classics, you don’t get answers. You learn a process of setting assumptions aside, searching through alternatives, living ideals, and knowing that it is always possible to become ever more civilized. Indeed, this is your duty.
These are the jewels of our heritage. These are what the Howard regime throws in the dust to piss on.
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Posted: by David Bath May 10th, 2007 under Politics, Society, Education, Ethics.
Comments: 16
Comments
Comment from fred
Time: May 10, 2007, 5:38 pm
This particular ‘lefty’ was ‘created’ by being born and working in an industrial city essentially owned and controlled by the ‘Big Australian’.
A wee bit of edjamacashun after that helped, but the essential bit was having [I reckon] good values from mum and dad and seeing the contradiction to them all around me.
Comment from David Bath
Time: May 10, 2007, 5:47 pm
Fred: Fair enough!
I wasn’t saying progressives are ONLY created by a grounding in the classics - just saw the irony that Howard, a self-styled traditionalist, goes against the traditional principles the olde-style education drums into a person.
Comment from Ronald Raygun
Time: May 11, 2007, 8:41 am
I went to a GPS high school and learned soon after that my experiences weren’t shared by all in society. Being exposed to privilege helped me understand that I have a social obligation to those less fortunate than myself.
Comment from David Bath
Time: May 11, 2007, 11:11 am
Ronald Raygun: GPS? What does that mean? But yes, the noblesse oblige you speak of is again, traditionally associated with the mindset of the conservatives, but these days exhibited by the left.
While colonialism generally was a bad thing, English colonialism was tempered by many individuals with “good intentions” (unlike the French and Belgians who sometimes ripped up railway tracks for scrap iron once they’d gutted the place), for which I’d give some of the credit to their heavy dose of classics in their education, as opposed to the French, where the post-Napoleonic education system was much more “practical”.
Comment from The Happy Revolutionary
Time: May 11, 2007, 4:09 pm
I think the present regime has encouraged the instrumentalisation of all learning. If something isn’t a means to suit some end (’vocation’) then it has little value. Studying classical literature, languages or philosophy is obviously a less pragmatic path to take than a marketing degree or something, but I don’t know that it’s inherently progressive.
Curiously, Leo Strauss (supposed inspiration for some neo-cons) gained popularity in teaching politics by returning to classical texts (such as Plato) rather than focusing on statistics and the like, suggesting that conservatives can hijack the classics. Then again, I think Karl Marx did his PhD on Democritus.
Comment from David Bath
Time: May 11, 2007, 5:12 pm
HappyRev: Agree with your points.
However, while apparently not pragmatic, the abstract disciplines tend to give unforeseen benefits.
e.g. The esoteric philosophical field of ontology is now finding wide application in general business management and IT disciplines, even in the military.
And have we got the people with even an introductory understanding of such abstract issues that can carry Australian business forward? Nope.
Will we have people in the future ready to apply whatever abstract discipline becomes applicable? Nope.
This is why even the most liberal of arts studies are better for the economy than a host of accountants and marketeers - unless the vocational courses are rounded out with something that stimulates imaginative thinking. Fat chance, even under Rudd.
Comment from fred
Time: May 11, 2007, 5:54 pm
Lefty/classicists may be interested in Michael Parenti’s biography of Julius Caesar, which looks at an old topic in a new way.
Comment from Mike B)
Time: May 17, 2007, 7:54 pm
Marx did his thesis on Epicurius.
Comment from David Bath
Time: May 17, 2007, 8:06 pm
Would Marx (and Epicurus) have been horrified at the twistedness of the modern usage of the word Epicurean?
(Epicurus was on about NOT having fancy food all the time, because otherwise you couldn’t enjoy plain cheese and chateau armpit when you visited an impoverished friend).
Comment from Dave Bath
Time: May 18, 2007, 12:19 pm
Are you punning? Epicurus (Latinized) or Έπίκουρος
(Greek) was certainly (at least on the surface) curious (as in searching for truth). I reckon what was considered “weird curious” at the time, the inclusion of women as part of the Garden, perfectly reasonable.
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Time: May 18, 2007, 2:04 pm
[…] Are lefties created by conservative education? 6 Dave Bath, Mike B), fred, The Happy Revolutionary, Ronald Raygun, fred […]
Comment from Kieran
Time: May 19, 2007, 8:22 pm
Nothing conservative or classical about my education.
Public school all the way.
The fact that I ended up a leftie had little to nothing to do with my formal education.
Comment from Dave Bath
Time: May 19, 2007, 8:43 pm
Wasn’t talking about where you went to school, or whether exposure to classics was part of the curriculum.
We have a all-greeks-are-human, Xerces-is-a-human therefore Xerces is greek problem.
I was pointing out the irony between (a) the uber-conservatives love the classics (b) the classics teach values that will make you humane and thus lean more to the left than you otherwise would.
See Unsane’s note about this page.
Comment from Kieran
Time: May 19, 2007, 9:12 pm
We have a all-greeks-are-human, Xerces-is-a-human therefore Xerces is greek problem.
Have re-read the thread.
I don’t think “the classic’s” lean one way or another. They are products of a bi-gone society, albiet one which had a great impact upon educated thinking in our own society. As such, they can be read from a number of point of views, be they conflict theory based (a left wing point of view) or functionalist (a conservative point of view).
Seeing as we’re using the words left and right a lot in a thread about historic literature, perhaps we should discuss the beginnings of the terms themselves?
Quick quiz:
1. from which institution do the terms left and right wing come from?
2. Who were the original left wing?
3. What were the hard left wing called and why?
No wikipedia, no google. I’ll post the answer late tomorrow.
Comment from Verity
Time: May 20, 2007, 12:49 pm
Well, obviuously the terms left and right wing first originated during the French revolution when the groups with different views sat on different sides of the room at the National Assembly. They were also referred to as the mountain and the marsh. I would love it if we could use those terms again for modern politics and have Johnny championing marshian values. As for who the left wing were, I could never keep the wildly vascillating allegiences of the French Revolution stright.
In terms of classical education I think the claim that it leads naturally to a progressive outlook is pretty flawed. I’m a classics student and of the various original Latin i’ve studied none have impressed me with a particularly humane outlook. Cicero, who we had such a nice discussion of the other week, certainly espouses a lot of lovely notions of protecting the public good and public safety above himself but he is really just self-agrandizing. Cicero did very few things in his life which did not benefit Cicero in some way or other.
The ideals of democracy and the republic ring very hollow to me given that both these institutions were only open to adult male citizens, a very small proportion of the population, and were based on the wealth of politicians every bit as much as American presidential elections are today.
In a society where war was the most prestigious occupation, corruption was rife, women and children were considered chattels and men had the right to own other human beings as slaves I think conservatives would be very comfortable. The much lauded “Roman values” are very similar to today’s Christian values
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Time: May 21, 2007, 1:08 pm
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