E-Pluribus | September 5, 2023
The decline of classical education; the changing climate of the politics of climate change; and what's worse than "Big Brother"? How about Big Parent?
A round-up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Brian Kaller: Our Lost Classical Learning
Educational theories, systems, and methods are perennial subjects of public debate, but at Quillette, Brian Kaller insists that the classics must be a part of any education worth its salt. Kaller reviews the history of classical learning and what a society loses when it believes it has outgrown the “intellectual heritage of the past.”
A classical education involved more than merely reading ancient texts: it meant learning to think critically and debate logically, in the way pioneered by the Greeks. Medieval scholars were trained in these skills, and the legal, political and scientific infrastructures of the West continue to assume such training. Obligations like jury duty and voting assume that ordinary citizens have an ability to assess logical arguments; science assumes the ability to test theories. It is no coincidence that much of our legal and scientific terminology comes from Greek and Latin.
The Western canon was not an unchanging set of texts, but an ongoing conversation that lasted thousands of years—enabling each generation to build on the intellectual heritage of the past. It gave people a set of cultural reference points: Homer, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Milton.
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In 1748, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son that “classical knowledge, that is, Greek and Latin, is absolutely necessary for everybody … the word illiterate, in its common acceptation, means a man who is ignorant of these two languages.” While Chesterfield may have had a somewhat restricted understanding of the word “everybody” here, many people who knew no Latin or Greek would still have been familiar with the classics, through contemporary translations. Thanks to Alexander Pope’s English version, quip the satirists Thomas Burnet and George Duckett in 1715, “every country milkmaid may understand the Iliad as well as you or I.” While this is clearly hyperbole, in 1787, the Scottish poet Robert Burns reported meeting a gardener’s wife who “can repeat ... Pope’s ‘Homer’ from end to end.” In 1788, at the age of ten, William Hazlitt was reading Ovid and Eutropius.
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Familiarity with the classics gives you access to a galaxy of cultural references, since, for a thousand years, paintings, speeches, poems, novels and sculptures were all created for a public familiar with Greek and Roman works. The famous depiction of George Washington in a Roman toga, for example, portrays him as Cincinnatus, the leader who stepped away from the temptation of lifelong power to return to his farm—thereby providing an important model for presidential term limits and for the peaceful transfer of power.
Read the whole thing.
John Fund: When Science and Woke Politics Meet, Guess Who Loses
Progressives the world over continue to insist the world is sliding toward a point of no return on climate change without drastic (and expensive) action. John Fund at National Review says that whatever the risks, real or imagined, voters are revolting against picking up the tab.
Last month, London mayor Sadiq Khan expanded his city’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) from eight neighborhoods to all 32 of them, covering all 9 million of its people. Owners of older gas and diesel cars must now pay $15 a day to drive in the ULEZ or risk a hefty fine.
Everyone from immigrant commuters to delivery-van drivers is up in arms. The ULEZ tax was the key issue that handed the Conservative Party a surprise victory in a July by-election to fill the seat vacated by Conservative former prime minister Boris Johnson. The Labour Party loss prompted party leader Keir Starmer to bluntly admit that it must be doing something “very wrong” relating to ULEZ to have lost the seat.
The backlash has continued. A quarter of all new ULEZ-enforcement cameras in the expanded London ULEZ have already been damaged or are missing, the result of sabotage.
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The reason that climate-change extremists want to hide any facts that will reduce public support for their schemes is simple. They know that voters love to give feel-good responses to pollsters about how they support regulations to reduce carbon emissions.
But voters’ views shift when they are asked how much they are willing to pay for it. In Britain, an August Ipsos UK poll found that a majority of voters feel they cannot afford to pay more to help with the environment.
In the U.S., the results are even more striking. An Associated Press-NORC poll last April found that just 38 percent of Americans say they would be willing to pay a monthly carbon fee of $1, down from 52 percent in 2021. In 2019, the number was 57 percent. Voter support for the fee also decreases as the impact on their energy bills grows.
Read it all.
Tunku Varadarajan: Moms for Liberty: ‘We Do Not Co-Parent With the Government’
“It takes a village to raise a child,” Hillary Clinton famously wrote a couple of decades ago. While few would dispute the value of community in a child’s upbringing, the founders of Moms for Liberty seem to believe that Clinton’s catchphrase too often is more like “the village takes the child,” with the village being the public education system. Tunku Varadarajan interviews the founders of that organization in the Wall Street Journal.
The mission of Moms for Liberty, Ms. Descovich says, is to “unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” She came up with the group’s name, while Ms. Justice wrote its catchiest slogan: “We do not co-parent with the government.”
They met in 2019, three years after each was elected to her local school board—Ms. Descovich here, in Brevard County, Ms. Justice immediately south, in Indian River County. Ms. Descovich had been a Republican, Ms. Justice a politically unaffiliated “floater,” but both were impelled by personal experience to get involved with school politics.
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Why is their group called Moms for Liberty rather than something less neuralgic for the left—say, Moms for Education? “Because it’s about parental rights,” Ms. Justice swiftly answers. The group’s focus is “more than schooling. You have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of your children.” That includes their medical care and “their moral and religious upbringing. And that’s a right that the government doesn’t give you and can’t take away.” Growing more impassioned, she says she’s “fighting for the survival of America, to protect the role of a mother, to protect the autonomy of a parent.”
Transgender ideology is a particular concern. The “first big attack” on parental rights, Ms. Descovich says, happened in 2019, “with the ‘procedural guides,’ which started appearing in districts all across Florida.” These guides excluded parents from all conversations about “pronouns, restrooms, locker rooms, overnight field trips.” Teachers got the green light “to lie to parents.” In 2022 the Florida Legislature turned the light red by enacting the Parents Bill of Rights.
When Covid hit, “this was a whole new thing,” Ms. Descovich says. “We see the districts taking more and more authority away from parents.” On March 13, 2020, the state ordered Florida schools to close for two weeks, and they remained so for the rest of the school year.
“We go to virtual,” Ms. Justice recounts. “There’s no accountability for teaching. There’s no accountability for learning. I don’t know how we graduated all these kids. It was Crazytown until Gov. DeSantis announced on June 6, 2020, that schools in Florida would reopen—period, end of story, full time.”
Yet the shutdown did end up bringing accountability. Watching their kids’ classes on Zoom, parents became far more aware of what their children were learning—“or not learning,” Ms. Justice says. Ms. Descovich heard “stories after stories of parents’ jaws dropping at the lessons being taught and streamed into their own homes. We like to say that when we served on school boards, we saw behind the education curtain. And then 2020 happened, and all of America saw behind the curtain.”
Read it all here.
Around Twitter
Here are some observations from Zaid Jilani on the tendencies of organizations built on fighting prejudice:
Steve McGuire with a great example of understatement from the New York Times: “there is some objective data to substantiate the leftward lean of American college campuses”
And finally, former congressman Justin Amash rightly promotes the importance of the First Amendment. However, concerning his “least understood part of the Constitution” comment, the Ninth Amendment would like a word: