Musings For The Weekend
Why we need heroes to aspire to – Why school is scam – Why you should become a blacksmith
Why we need heroes to aspire to – Why school is scam – Why you should become a blacksmith
Why we need Heroes to Aspire To
I open with the first stanza to Thomas Babington Macauley’s poem Horatius:
Thus spake brave Horatius
Captain of the gate
To every man upon this earth
Death comes soon or late
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temple of his gods
I realised something a few weeks ago from a tweet: we expect that by forcing people through the rigors of modern utilitarian learning – up to university, post bachelor’s degree, and a doctorate – we can make them develop sound ethics and become men of character.
To put it mildly, we expect academic learning to translate to character development. This is far from possible.
There is nothing about sludging through Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, that inspires men to be of good character. Nothing exists within that curriculum that inspires men of their volition to be, in C.S Lewis’ term, men with chests.
Of course, this is an age-long battle between the sciences and the humanities; ‘nothing new here.’ But this is my conclusion on the matter. That for men to aspire to solid characters and integrity, we need heroes – men worthy of our aspiration.
It is not enough to teach people how to become good men. The verbal instructions to be men with chests comes second to having a visible model of a man with chest. Every instruction in character development falls to the ground when we lack men worthy of our imitation–when we lack men to look up to. So then, it makes sense for Paul the Apostle to declare that “imitate me even as I imitate Christ” (Ist Corinthians 11:1).
Men most likely want to be great husbands and fathers either because their father was a great example or he was not. Certainly, a bad father inspires his son by being an antimodel–by being someone his son in sheer horror would not like to be. Perhaps, this is where we need extremes – either be a hero; or be so horrific as a villian that no one wants to be you.
There is no congruence between academia’s sludge and men of moral worth. Without heroes all our progressive learning drives us to madness; to hopelessness; to weakness; to cowardice; to nihilism; and a horrid end.
People are still willing to die. They just haven’t found anything worth dying for. Become a hero first. Instruct later.
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Why school is scam
It follows then from the section above that members of my generation will see academia as a scam. “School is scam” is a popular phrase that captures the disappointment with the current educational establishment. The debate then continues: is school a scam?
I do not think school is a scam. But I can understand why one may think so. If you were told that by investing your life, time, and money into this enterprise, you will have a secure future. But just after all that expense and it seems like your future is insecure hence you have wasted your past, that whispering devil which tells you that you have been duped will seize the day and culture to speak to you boisterously; albeit with seven mouths.
So it is. When school (by school I specifically mean universities. Basic schooling is so important and can only be diluted so much or deviate from its course) diluted their purpose as ivory centres of truth and curiosity with the pressures of industrialisation and vocational learning, they were doomed to become fraudulent; howbeit unknowingly.
Yes, read through the idea and history of university education – be it in Babylon, Assyria, or Egypt. From standing as centres for aristocratic learning ideals to becoming a factory for the economy, it lost its purpose and became the shadow of itself.
Hence, school is a scam to the extent that you promise your constituents that this is the way towards becoming a fine individual and obtaining a prosperous economy. In my lifetime, I have seen this to be a fine lie.
The dilution started decades ago. Even centuries ago. But the people who bought the wine have now realised that this was not the goods they were promised. When you sell schooling to men based on a myth, it is only a matter of time until they find out. When they do, expect them to be disappointed.
“The problem arises when, as has happened in recent decades, we move to extrapolating the benefits of education in much the same mood of boundless and groundless optimism as investors caught up in a stock-market bubble. The result has been expansion as an end in itself: more vocational qualifications and diplomas, more training, more university places are treated as self-evidently desirable.”
—Alison Wolf, Does Education Matter
Why you should become a blacksmith
The best part. In wartime, the person you want to be is the blacksmith; you want to be Hephaestus.
And this post inspired me to think of becoming a blacksmith. How?
I started to wonder what the future would look like when machines make perfect imitations of men and we cannot tell them apart. Are we so dumb now, so lacking in creativity that machines have caught up with us? The answer is yes. We think we have made machines smarter whereas humans have just become dumber. In Nassim Taleb’s words: “The dream of having computers behave like humans is coming true, with the transformation, in a single generation, of humans into computers.” This was inevitable.
This was inevitable as we began deleting fine parts of human beings for the sake of efficacy and optimization. We thought we found the formula for productivity and perfection when all we have done is amputated the fine mess that is the human spirit.
Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, noble, elegant, robust, and heroic life.
—N.N. Taleb Bed of Procrustes
So, if the future is going to be dominated by computers, you might as well become the one who makes the computers. If the future is going to be about war, you should become a weapons manufacturer.
I will not delude myself into thinking that the things I see on Tik-Tok – those mindblowing edited videos that border on magic – is the magic. I aspire to be the one who makes the tools to enable others do the magic. I want to afford people the chance to be “creative.” I want to be the blacksmith.
Lastly, all dystopian fiction feature an unusual population of dumb people with the smartest technologies. It is almost like a parasitic relationship between men and their machines. I know without doubt that it is the machines that afford men to become dumb. So, I close with this quote from the story of the Judgment of Thamus:
Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.
Thank you for reading.