SOBRAN: The Case for Old Ideas

SOBRAN'S ^ | November 20, 2001 | Joseph Sobran

[ouroboros]

Most people who clamor for “new ideas” have never given old ideas a chance. They assume that the old ideas have already been tried and found wanting — by whom, they aren’t exactly sure — so they dismiss them as “ancient,” “outmoded,” or “medieval.” Such labels are supposed to settle, or preclude, argument.

Thus we are told, on all sides, that the Taliban are “medieval.” Only a fool could take this for a reason to oppose the Taliban. It assumes that all medieval things were the same thing; that medieval Islam and medieval Christianity were more or less identical. This would have come as a surprise to the Muslims and Christians of the Middle Ages, who thought they had serious disagreements.

For that matter, medieval Christianity boiled with controversy. Any first-year student of medieval philosophy learns that very quickly. The difference between medieval and modern men is that medieval men debated over which doctrines were true. They never assumed that the new was necessarily superior to the old, or vice versa.

During the Renaissance, there were lively literary debates over whether the ancients were superior to the moderns. Was Shakespeare as great as Ovid? Was Ben Jonson as great as Aristophanes? The debaters on both sides argued from merit, not age. They believed there were permanent criteria for deciding such questions. They would have thought it absurd to take for granted the superiority of any period, including their own.

Our own age is so silly, so uncritical, that it ignores the most elementary distinctions of truth and logic. It exalts the recent and fashionable and assumes that everything old has been superseded like the Model T. A modern university is less the custodian of a heritage than a cauldron of fads — liberalism, feminism, multiculturalism, and so forth. Whatever isn’t “progressive” must be “reactionary” and therefore ineligible for tolerance. Its pet fads, as every campus conservative soon discovers, are not open to debate.

Yet the New Ideas of the twentieth century are showing their age. Until recently, at least, and maybe even now, many college professors have insisted on treating Marxism as a New Idea, though every state that has adopted it as a governing philosophy has produced only terror and misery. Other New Ideas, such as those of John Maynard Keynes, have lost their luster and survive only as bad habits survive.

One of the distinctive traits of the modern mind is its insuperable prejudice against the past. The very word modern has become a term of praise. The Old is Bad, the New is Good. We mustn’t listen to the Old; it has nothing to teach us. So the modern man, living in fear of being “behind the times,” prefers any new intellectual fad to actually reading the ancient Aristotle or the medieval Aquinas.

C.S. Lewis used to urge his students at Oxford and Cambridge to read all the old books they could — not because the old authors were always right, but because they at least made different errors from those of modern thinkers. By studying ancient and medieval writers, Lewis knew, the student could achieve a certain detachment from the pressures of the present; he could see his own environment, the modern world, with fresh eyes.

That mental detachment is one of the greatest blessings an education can bestow. Without it, we are doomed to be manipulated by all the worst forces of the modern world. We live in an age of politics and its handmaiden, state propaganda. We can’t isolate ourselves from these things, which relentlessly seek to control the masses of people and to reduce all of us to passive mass-men. In defense of our own humanity, we desperately need to breed the internal resource of the independent mind. This is the task of a lifetime, not just a four-year curriculum.

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the great parable of the modern society in which the individual becomes a mere product of the state. That individual is so thoroughly conditioned by state propaganda that he accepts even its self-contradictions without question and feels only the emotions it demands at a given moment.

The book’s lesson is that when your mind is a vacuum, the state will fill it. With what? With New Ideas, of course.

[2ndMostConservativeBrdMember]

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Come visit us at Freepathon Holidays are Here Again: Let's Really Light Our Tree This Year - Thread 5

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[ouroboros]

bump

[supercat]

C.S. Lewis used to urge his students at Oxford and Cambridge to read all the old books they could — not because the old authors were always right, but because they at least made different errors from those of modern thinkers.

Indeed, it would probably be good if programmers and microprocessor designers were required to read any portions of Knuth's Fundamentals of Algorithms that related to anything they were doing. To be sure, Knuth is a bit old (first published 1969) but some of the algorithms given in there are better than some newer algorithms I see in use today.

[ouroboros]

Is there a FUNDRAISER going on?? I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA! What you guys should really do is place a HUGE HONKING GRAPH on the main forum page so that everyone will be aware and you won't have to run willy-nilly from thread to thread p*********g. Thanks for the update though.

[William Terrell]

Thank you for the belly laugh.

[ouroboros]

Thank you for the belly laugh.

You're certainly welcome...but where's the apple? I gots to have the apple!

[redrock]

"Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the great parable of the modern society in which the individual becomes a mere product of the state. That individual is so thoroughly conditioned by state propaganda that he accepts even its self-contradictions without question and feels only the emotions it demands at a given moment."

Wow...

redrock--Constitutional Terrorist

[RLK]

What Sobran says is true. The question is, will we ever get over it. The answer is, probably not in the next 50 years. By then, it will be too late.

[The_Expatriate]

Our own age is so silly, so uncritical, that it ignores the most elementary distinctions of truth and logic...One of the distinctive traits of the modern mind is its insuperable prejudice against the past.

A sad but true commentary on our times. One cannot participate in what Mortimer Alder called "the Great Conversation," the ongoing conversation of great minds down through the ages, without hearing what earlier participants had to say. Unfortunately, all too many people unfamiliar with ideas and thinkers of the past believe that material differences in lifestyles have somehow altered the basic human mindset and that nothing earlier ages have concluded or conjectured has any relevance to life in the 21st century.

A problem very much connected with this is the almost exclusive focus of modern education on what to think rather than on how to think, perhaps the natural consequence of government schools run by government employees for the purpose of molding "good little citizens." One old idea that merits (and is getting some) new attention is the trivium of ancient and medieval education:

1) Grammar, or skill in comprehending the facts,
2) Logic, or skill in reasoning out relationships between these facts, and
3) Rhetoric, or skill in wise, effective expression and application of the facts and their relationships.

These are skills needed in every field of endeavor, indeed in every reasoning and reflective human being, and Sobran is absolutely right in pointing out that the acquisition of these skills is a lifelong effort.

[Mercuria]

Truth and outspokenness about absolutes...

...such OLD-FASHIONED ideas.

**wry smile**

[George Frm Br00klyn Park]

"That mental detachment is one of the greatest blessings an education can bestow."

Guys, Modern "education" {Propaganda} teaches feelings more than anything else. A "mental detachment" in thinking skills is the furthest thing from educating todays "good citizens", wanted by those who would control all. Peace and love, George.

[steve-b]

Our own age is so silly, so uncritical, that it ignores the most elementary distinctions of truth and logic. It exalts the recent and fashionable and assumes that everything old has been superseded like the Model T. A modern university is less the custodian of a heritage than a cauldron of fads — liberalism, feminism, multiculturalism, and so forth. Whatever isn’t "progressive" must be "reactionary" and therefore ineligible for tolerance. Its pet fads, as every campus conservative soon discovers, are not open to debate.

Yet the New Ideas of the twentieth century are showing their age. Until recently, at least, and maybe even now, many college professors have insisted on treating Marxism as a New Idea, though every state that has adopted it as a governing philosophy has produced only terror and misery. Other New Ideas, such as those of John Maynard Keynes, have lost their luster and survive only as bad habits survive.

The underlying problem here is that science and technology (where, for the most part, new ideas are demonostrably superior to old ones) have created an impression which is carried over to other areas (where there is no such clear-cut progression).

[William Terrell]

Glad to oblige.

[Steve0113]

The underlying problem here is that science and technology (where, for the most part, new ideas are demonostrably superior to old ones) have created an impression which is carried over to other areas (where there is no such clear-cut progression).

Good observation, particularly where morals are involved. The new-is-better attitude toward morality is another manifestaion of the sloppy, uncritical thinking of today.

[AshleyMontagu]

Bump

[NoCurrentFreeperByThatName]

ping

[Twodees]

Thanks for the ping. Joe makes me want to reread some Robert Catlett Cave and Robert S. Henry. I know, that's not going back very far in terms of years, but in terms of changes in conventional wisdom, it's a trip back through the ages.