The Conversation Killers -- draft
Nov. 30th, 2006 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arisbeOur civilization has been well called the Civilization of the Dialogue, and the Christian faith grew up, providentially, in that civilization, accepting from the very beginning the worldly authority of a secular, indeed, even of a Pagan empire. Arising outside the rule of Caesar, Islam has always had an ambiguous relationship to civilization based on an seeming inability to recognize the religious legitimacy of the secular state. Catholic Christendom, at least since Petrarch, has realized that our culture is a symphony in which the voices of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem, and, we might now say, other cities then unknown, have their voices. The Reformation, in some ways, took us back to Muhammad, so that many Christians saw themselves as an elite remnant saved from a damned world; but this was not the way of Jesus, nor of the historical Church.
No-one has defined civilization as precisely or as eloquently as President Hutchins in the opening pages of The Great Conversation, the first volume of his (and Mortimer Adler's) Great Books of the Western World:
"The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race."
Or, as Oakeshott put it in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind:”
"As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages. It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails."
Oakeshott's picture of the loquatious Pithecanthropoids has all the quaint charm of an old New Yorker cartoon, now that our pithecine inheritance is once again controversial. We may be forgiven the further fantasy of imagining those primitive humanoids who turn their back on the conversation growing their tail back to hang from the trees again; let us learn to fear their fate, but also to protect ourselves, for these are the terrorists of today. For whatever picture of human origins you may choose to entertain, education remains crucial for our remaining human in any meaningful sense of the term:
"Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance."
Of course for many of us, especially those of us within communities of faith, education is a great deal more than this, but without this initiation into the human conversation it is not education at all.
Education is sabotaged by two kinds of conversation killers. The postmodernist assumes that the great questions of human life are meaningless, and asserts his own intellectual superiority, and indeed, his own moral superiority, to those remaining unwashed unsophisticates for whom the questions are still alive. This is not such a new thing as the postmoderns pretend; John Dewey was there first, and saw to it that the vast majority of the teaching profession in America inculcated this ideology. The fundamentalist, on the other hand, thinks that he has the answers to all possible questions, and that those for whom any questions are alive are enemies of God to be dealt with accordingly. Fundamentalism is a form of idolatry which reduces religion from the encounter with a Person to the possession of an opinion. We fear fundamentalism, especially of the Muslim variety; but Muslims -- and others -- are not so wrong to fear the postmodernism of the West.
©2006 FP Purcell
No-one has defined civilization as precisely or as eloquently as President Hutchins in the opening pages of The Great Conversation, the first volume of his (and Mortimer Adler's) Great Books of the Western World:
"The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race."
Or, as Oakeshott put it in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind:”
"As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages. It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails."
Oakeshott's picture of the loquatious Pithecanthropoids has all the quaint charm of an old New Yorker cartoon, now that our pithecine inheritance is once again controversial. We may be forgiven the further fantasy of imagining those primitive humanoids who turn their back on the conversation growing their tail back to hang from the trees again; let us learn to fear their fate, but also to protect ourselves, for these are the terrorists of today. For whatever picture of human origins you may choose to entertain, education remains crucial for our remaining human in any meaningful sense of the term:
"Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance."
Of course for many of us, especially those of us within communities of faith, education is a great deal more than this, but without this initiation into the human conversation it is not education at all.
Education is sabotaged by two kinds of conversation killers. The postmodernist assumes that the great questions of human life are meaningless, and asserts his own intellectual superiority, and indeed, his own moral superiority, to those remaining unwashed unsophisticates for whom the questions are still alive. This is not such a new thing as the postmoderns pretend; John Dewey was there first, and saw to it that the vast majority of the teaching profession in America inculcated this ideology. The fundamentalist, on the other hand, thinks that he has the answers to all possible questions, and that those for whom any questions are alive are enemies of God to be dealt with accordingly. Fundamentalism is a form of idolatry which reduces religion from the encounter with a Person to the possession of an opinion. We fear fundamentalism, especially of the Muslim variety; but Muslims -- and others -- are not so wrong to fear the postmodernism of the West.
©2006 FP Purcell