Free Republic

“What I like doing best is Nothing,” Christopher Robin tells Winnie-the-Pooh in A. A. Milne’s 1928 collection of stories, The House at Pooh Corner. The capitalization of “Nothing” is not a typo. Milne is introducing children (and re-introducing their parents) to a deep philosophical point through the voice of a fictional boy and his anthropomorphic stuffed bear. “How do you do Nothing?” Pooh asks. Christopher Robin responds that being outdoors on a lovely day—as they are—sitting on a grassy knoll, enjoying one another’s company, with birds singing in the trees above, is: “a nothing sort of thing.” He further explains,...

I mentioned in my last piece that the standard (mis)interpretation of Oedipus Rex—that Oedipus got what he deserved thanks to a moral shortcoming he couldn't or wouldn't correct—traces back to an earlier misinterpretation of Aristotle's comments on tragedy. That provides a nice segue, because what Aristotle actually says in his Poetics (and his Politics) provides further insight into our current problems. What Aristotle actually points out in Chapter 13 of Poetics is that great tragedies revolve around hamartia (ἁμαρτία) inherent in, or committed by, a protagonist. All this Greek word refers to is error. It does not necessarily imply moral...

It could go without saying that clearly the world has a dark history full of injustice and oppression. Moreover, in terms of evil, certainly it is those who wielded the greatest power in an utmost destructive manner, who are the ones history remembers the most. It should be asked, however, if the sins of the infamous are greater than the sins of many more wicked men who were forgotten, merely because they had not the power to accomplish greater deeds. How can this comparison be one may ask? Because the motives of the heart of many poor wicked men were...

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy... ...Arendt dubbed these...

Schooling underpinned by critical thinking is the bedrock of civilisation. It could save us from today’s infantilised discourse. The discipline of critical thinking invites us to consider the origins of our knowledge and convictions. ... The natural human instinct for confirmation bias presents a further problem, one especially prominent among ideologues. Anything can be taken to support one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment. We can see this most notably in the proponents of Critical Social Justice, who start from the premise that unequal outcomes—disparities in average earnings between men and women, for...

Reason #10: LITERATURE What is literature, and what is it for anyway? Have you ever wondered that? It’s not practical like science and math, so what is its purpose? Why do we include literature in our curriculum, how do we choose it, and what do we hope to achieve by reading literature? These are some of the questions that puzzled me most in my own education. The ancients thought about all of these questions too. Plato brings up the question of poetry, by which the ancients meant literature, and he famously bans the poets from his ideal Republic. Because, he...

Tertullian, the toughest and most uncompromising of early church fathers, once asked a question that is still with us today: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? That is to say, is there— indeed, should there be—a meeting ground between the Judeo-Christian strain that proceeds out of Jerusalem and the Greco-Roman (humanist) strain that proceeds out of Athens? As far as Tertullian was concerned, the answer to his question was simple: nothing. Nevertheless, despite Tertullian’s rejection of the link between Athens and Jerusalem, Christian thinkers for the past two millennia have continued to ponder his question. Can the basic tenets...

Reason #9: HUMAN CONDITION When it comes to the human condition, we may think that Scripture is all we need. After all, Scripture does show us our true human condition in a way that the Greeks did not and could not: our relationship to God, that we are sinners, that we are a fallen race in need of redemption, that sin separates us from God, that God loves us and offers us grace and salvation. This is the good news that has been revealed by God in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ and nowhere else. Indeed, the...

American government and political science will come alive when you read the Greeks and Romans, the same way that words come alive when you study Latin and Greek. There were many influences on the Founding Fathers, and certainly the modern philosophers—Locke and Hume—were important along with the tradition of English liberty. But separation of powers, mixed government, and checks and balances are the principles that first come to my mind when I think of the genius of the American political system; and where did these concepts come from? Plato in the Republic describes five types of government and says they...

REASON #5: NATURAL LAW What did the first Continental Congress mean when it appealed to “the immutable laws of nature,” or Thomas Jefferson when he referred to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the unalienable rights of man”? Natural law. The principle of natural law is embedded in Western civilization, the Declaration of Independence, and our whole history as a nation. The concept of natural law was first articulated by Aristotle in Rhetoric, where Aristotle notes that, aside from the “particular” laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a “common” law that is...

REASON 4: EDUCATION A classical education focuses on the study of the classical languages, Latin and Greek, and on the study of the classical civilization of Greece and Rome. But why is the word classical reserved only for the languages of the Greeks and Romans and only for their civilization? What really is so special about the Greeks and Romans and why should Christians study them? After all they were not Christians, they were pagans. Some have objected to the word pagan and misunderstood its meaning. Pagan is a word Christians coined in the later Roman Empire to refer to...

Reason #3: SCIENCE Because we live in the aftermath of what has been called the “scientific revolution,” we modern people consider ourselves quite superior to the ancients in regard to the study of the natural world. We are polished practitioners of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” We think ancient people were ignorant of the natural world and that we, with all our advanced scientitic knowledge, have little to learn from them. But one of the problems with having your nose so high in the air is that you can miss the thing right in front of you. Science, as...

REASON #2: VIRTUE In the last article, we learned that the Greeks established the first principles of architecture by studying nature. The proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye are those of nature’s greatest work of art—the human body. We learned that God gave man reason and the desire to know, but he did not leave us without guides. He gave us the Greeks, the world’s first systematic, abstract thinkers. And so we study and honor the Greeks because they teach us how to use reason to explore and understand our world, a world that is material and...

REASON #1: ARCHITECTURE Of all of the points that I will make, this is the easiest to understand because it is so visible: we see its evidence every day. The power and beauty of classical architecture is everywhere, from grand buildings like our Supreme Court to our humble everyday homes. The Greeks discovered the proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye which, they tell us, are based on nature’s greatest work of art: the human body. Scale, mass, proportion, and symmetry—the principles of classical architecture—were worked out by the Greeks in great detail and built upon in succeeding...

The power of the word classic cannot be underestimated, communicating as it does the idea of excellence, truth, order, discipline, and beauty. The word “classic” brings to mind something that has withstood the test of time, and by virtue of this fact, participates in some way in the timeless and the eternal. And what is the only thing we know of with these attributes but God and His Eternal Word? When looked at this way, every Christian should want a classical education for their children: It has everything we instinctively want. But when we examine this word “classic,” we find...

The International Monetary Fund anticipates that the economic fallout from COVID-19 will plunge the world into a recession, the likes of which we have not experienced since the Great Depression. This seems increasingly likely. Over 30 million Americans have already lost their jobs, and the Federal Reserve estimates that this figure could climb to over 47 million in the coming months. Adding fuel to this fire is the fact that 78 percent of American workers live paycheck to paycheck, and over 30 percent have no savings whatsoever. There will be lean times ahead. And to whom will Americans turn for...

REASON #8: PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY IS A DEEP SUBJECT THAT CAN BE QUITE INTIMIDATING. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IS SO ESOTERIC THAT FEW CAN UNDERSTAND OR RELATE TO IT, BUT CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IS DIFFERENT. As with so many things, if you go back to the beginning and learn first principles, you can develop a deep and satisfying understanding of a subject that is baffling in its modern form. While philosophy may seem abstract and unrelated to the real world, quite the opposite is true. In fact, we are all philosophers; we all have a view of reality, a worldview, as we say today....

Reason #7: RELIGION Saint Augustine in his Confessions tells us that after many years of wandering in the desert of indecision, it was Cicero who led him to Christ. Cicero’s Hortensius set him on the path to Christian conversion by implanting in him a longing for the immortality of wisdom. The text of Hortensius did not make it to the modern world and thus is probably the most famous lost treatise in world literature. Wouldn’t we all love to read this work that St. Augustine praises so highly? Well, I have read a lot of Cicero and, like most writers,...

It’s often said that most of what the academic elites call “philosophy” is nothing but some underutilized minds worrying themselves about questions that common-sense folk find obvious. The saying came to mind as I listened recently to some of these folks straining to fit their various theories to the Age of Trump. More precisely, they were double-helixing themselves trying to explain why the amoral, relativist, truth-denying theories they’ve championed for so long are actually good reasons for hating the supposedly amoral, relativist, truth-defying current President. Listening to this theorizing crystallized (at least for this initially reluctant Trump supporter) why President...

shorter link to blog bit.ly/2y32EQt political, historical ramifications of long coronavirus shutdown, and governmental response (shoehorning changes into bailout legislation), considering the Hegelian Dialectic, where the "Problem - Reaction - Solution" process takes place as a result of the crisis.