124: Government Shmovernment

Hey everybody, and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know, we're a podcast about old books, old ideas, and generally classical things, trying to bring all of that to you as painlessly and enjoyably as possible. We are three teachers from a school in Austin, Texas called Barrett House Academy. My name is AJ Hanenberg, and I'm joined by my colleagues Thomas Magby. Hello.

And Graham Bellson. Hello. And we are... I was trying to mimic it.

Hi, Thomas. Oh, okay. How'd you do? You think?

On scale 1 to 10? Write in. Let's know. Please.

Please email us and let's know. Okay, and today we will be talking about, apparently, monster government, how monsters interrelate with each other, and who gets to be in charge. I would assume it's the one with, you know, the most heads, right? So heads of state makes a lot more sense.

Yeah, it's like the Hydra is a... No, no, wait, no. We do not hate Hydra on the podcast. But the Hydra is really nice, and, like, think about that internal dialogue.

Like, you can... You can have his own internal dialogue. He has his own brain, right? I think he has his own brain, doesn't he?

I don't know what I'm about Hydra. I bet Hydras are really just ineffective at everything. That's fair, yeah. Like, when they go shopping, it's really easy.

Yeah, a lot of yelling. That's fair. And every time a head gets cut off and two more go back, all the other Hydras are like, Oh, come on, one more? Come on.

Yeah. That is kind of what we're talking about. We are talking a little bit about. That was very polite for us.

So we are teaching... I'm teaching Frankenstein right now to my 10th graders, and we were reading this passage, and I read this passage to my students, and I didn't spend any time talking about it. I continued on with sort of the things that I was talking about in class. But the passage sort of struck me, and it made me realize that it was a passage that sort of, not trade, but showed Mary Shelley's view of government, or the reason why we have government and we have laws.

And it's a pretty familiar one. And I was sort of thinking about it in between classes, and when students sort of went off on my walk home and all that. And I was just sort of... This passage sort of, I've been thinking about it, and it led me to think about just that there are different reasons and different sort of conceptions of why human beings have government.

There's sort of an older one, which I would sort of posit as a medieval one, and then there would be the one that I think we would be most familiar with, and I think maybe it's probably fair to call it the modern one. And so the thesis that I have for this podcast, usually my podcast doesn't have a thesis, but I kind of... I'm humbly submitting a thesis that I actually think the book Paradise Lost... So I know that's different for Frankenstein.

I actually think that Paradise Lost is... Something else that's going on in that story is Milton is wrestling with or is confronting the sort of the clash of these two views of government together that's happening in his time. So he's writing around the time of the English Civil War, and I kind of feel like he has care... Satan...

This is an idea I've been kicking around for a while, that Satan is in many ways a modern thinker, sort of planted in this medieval world, or planted in this world of the medieval cosmos, and he hates it. And so this is where this clash comes in. Anyway, that's kind of the thesis I have. Maybe we'll see if we...

I don't know if we can get to that, but... You know, every one of our seniors is wondering, like, where's Narasio? Yeah, sorry. Where's the city?

Lay out those three points. Anyway, so that's the kind of the conception of the idea I have. Let me just read the passage from Frankenstein that sort of... That was that launched this...

So this is happening where the monster is watching the family in his little hovel, and this is where he's learning to read. If you're confused with what I'm talking about, you can go back and listen to an old Frankenstein podcast that we did many moons ago. But the monster learns to read and write basically by observing human beings. And in many ways...

And just if you read the book with an eye for maybe what Mary Shelley thinks about children or thinks about upbringing, there's very much like a tabula rasa thing going on. The monster is sort of this blank slate, and as he observes human beings, that's how he gets his worldview. So it's very much like a Rousseauian idea of... What do you mean by the human person?

The idea that human beings are blank slates, or that the reason why we have morals or governments or all the things of society all come from the environment that we're in, as opposed to maybe a more... An older, maybe more Christian view, more medieval view that says that human beings are also sort of... You come built with... You're not a blank slate.

You actually have... By being made in God's image, that has some sort of more meaning than just sort of being a blank slate. If you really pick apart the blank slate, human beings can't be blank slates, or we would never learn language. But anyway, that's sort of the size of the point.

You need to have some sort of concept of grammar if you're going to be able to learn... Yeah, the person who reigns that are there for learning language. Yeah. So I feel like a pure blank slate...

Someone who really wants to hold to a pure blank slate version of the human person has a huge battle like, you know, kids not breathing like that, but I don't think no one would review that point. There's more on the personality side of that. The personality side, and then just that society comes from sort of this place of blankness, and we sort of all invented it. So I'm kind of getting ahead of myself.

Let's read the Frankenstein view, and then I can sort of posit these two views that I think are important for ancient and modern man. So the monster is speaking, and he's talking about Felix who's instructing Staphy from this history book. The book from which Felix instructed Staphy was Volani's Ruins of Empires. I should not have understood the purport of this book had not Felix in reading it given very minute explanations.

He had chosen this work, he said, because the declamatory style was framed in imitation of the Eastern authors. Through this work, I obtained a cursory knowledge of history and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world. It gave me an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics, of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians, of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romans, of their subsequent degeneration, of the decline of that mighty empire, of chivalry, Christianity, and kings.

I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with safety over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants. These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man indeed at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of all the evil principle, and at another as all that be conceived of noble and godlike.

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honor that can befall a sensitive being. To be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of a blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments. That's the line that sort of triggered me on this.

Or even that there were laws and governments. But when I heard the details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing. So if I sort of had to... What was he reading?

He was reading, I don't know, someone by Volney, I don't know who Volney is, his book Ruins of Empires, which is presumably a popular history textbook of the time of Mary Shelley. It's not a book I'm familiar with. But if you sort of had to take from that, all right, what's the monster's view of government and politics and laws? What would it be?

Why does he think that we have government and laws? To keep us from... No, because the line was, if virtue is excellent, then there's no need of government. It's supposed to protect us from vice.

It's protection from people who aren't virtuous. The reason that we have government and laws is to, yeah, it's essentially to stop bad things from happening. There's a section from Aristotle on this. I wish I could remember it better.

But basically, maybe it was early Plato in the early Plato episodes, but that laws are only there because we are too afraid to seize the power that we all want. Like, we would rather be the person in charge getting one over on everybody else, but because we don't think we can and we're more likely to suffer, it's basically a communal agreement to prevent somebody from taking all that so that we don't suffer so much. If you sort of ask students, hey, why do we have a government? Why do we have police forces?

And why do we have these sort of things? You know, to keep society in line, to keep people from going out and harming their fellow person. This is why we have laws in government. And I think the key point is we wouldn't need it if we were perfect.

If we were virtuous, we wouldn't need government and law. And that's the point you're questioning? Yeah. And so this sort of goes back to kind of the more romantic view of the human person or the noble savage or these kinds of things that there is a sort of a state wherein there is this kind of blissful anarchy where you do not need government, you do not need law, maybe more importantly, you do not need hierarchy.

That if you were sinless or if you were virtuous, you don't need hierarchy anymore. Yeah, you could all sort of live together in harmony. I'm going to pull up, Eve Simone has a book on this also, General Theory of Authority. I don't know if it's essentially the same question of in a perfect society, is government, is organization still necessary?

I don't look at the title of the book. The answer being yes. Yeah. I'll be curious if you go at it the same way.

Well, I think for the modern person, I think if students sort of work through this, the majority of them would say we don't need government, we don't need order, we don't need hierarchy if we have perfect people. The only reason why we have government is because of specific advice and people are trying to hurt you and kill you and take your stuff and so we have government to make sure that doesn't happen. So do you want to sort of make sure why we need government if not? No, I want to posit that as sort of the one view.

So in other words, government is created by man to protect human beings or created by man for human flourishing, if you want to put it that way. Yeah, and this is the libertarian position too, right? That the purpose of government is protection and war and, you know, the fire departments and police departments. But outside of that, they should totally step out of everything else.

And even if the libertarian party in the United States is small, that's not a language that's pervaded into both democratic and republican. Yeah. It fits very easily into if you believe that sort of nature and the world around you is sort of all there is. It fits easily into materialism.

So if the world has no hierarchy to it, if the world has no created order other than just matter, and human beings come and they can sort of superimpose their order on top of anything, that government is essentially a human creation based out of a biological need or human creation based off of a human need for safety and protection and that kind of thing. And I would posit that I don't think in the Middle Ages that's how they conceived of government. Government was not something that was made by God. Sorry, it was made by man.

Government was something that God did. That there was a government before the fall. There was a hierarchy before the fall. If you think of the Middle Ages, they had all sorts of wacky hierarchies.

They had like seven dominions, principalities, angels, cherubs, seraphs. I don't even know them all. But before the fall, there was organization, there was structure, and there was a government. God himself even has a government inside of him.

God the Father and the Son's eternal obedience to the Father is kind of like this government, this relationship. And so I think, yeah. So the government isn't a product of, the fall is not a product of sin or necessitated by sin. It's not made by beings.

So what government is and should be is a partaking in something that God does, in God's nature. So just as the creation of art is partaking in God's creative abilities, this is sort of an often cited, you know, this is something that we as Christians say why we make beauty is because we are partaking in God's creative ability. The reason we have government, yes, it does do those things of stopping bad things from happening. But even if all bad things stopped happening, we would still want to have government.

We would want, by having a structure and order to society. Now, this goes wrong. And we'll talk about how both of these things go wrong in a second. And I don't know if, even if I fully buy the medieval argument of government.

But we do this not because of practical necessity, but because of almost cosmological reality. Universe is ordered in hierarchy. And so human society is also going to be ordered in hierarchy, even if everybody is virtuous. Well, there also would have been remnants of Plato floating around in the Middle Ages, right?

Because Plato was still one of the most influential writers for them. And so they would still think some people are kind of built to be farmers, right? They're not built to run things. Yeah.

I was just looking... Is that what you're going to argue for? No, I was looking in preparation for this podcast. I was also just looking, refreshing myself a little bit on Aristotle.

And I think this is a way that the Middle Ages differ from Aristotle. Aristotle still has the, like, the practical, we have government to for human flourishing so we don't hurt each other. Whereas I think in the Middle Ages, they push it further and say, even if none of us hurt each other, even if we were all perfectly virtuous saints, we would still do government because it is partaking in God's cosmos. So, and the government that was created was supposed to also mirror the government of how they viewed how God works.

So you have the king who was in charge and then you had his vassals and then below the vassals you had the peasants and everybody had a relationship to one another. So the job of the vassals was to sort of make war because they could raise an army? So were they the spirit element? Yeah, if you wanted to go play tonic on it, yes, you could do it that way.

That the king was like the reason and the vassals were like the fighters and the peasants were the, you know, the peasants who worked in... Sorry, I got played on the brain. I don't know how far... The other thing is about the Middle Ages is that, this is something I want to talk about at the end of the podcast, is that we've got sort of our own modern ways that we were taught about the Middle Ages.

Like, no Middle-aged person would have understood what you meant if you said, oh, you live in a fuel system, right? Like, the fuel system is something that we invented in the 20th century to talk about the Middle Ages. Anyway. So, but in the Middle Ages, if you went and you talked to somebody and you talked about the way society was organized, they would say, well, this is the way the universe is organized.

So, England is a mini-cosmos and King Henry II is a god, is like God. And we are... And then, like, the knights are like angels and the peasants are like us. You know, they would say, this is the way that it's organized.

Henry has a responsibility to be like God to his people. And if you were a tyrant, you were not doing a responsibility. God's responsibility, you know, the way that God shows his love for people is that he sacrifices himself for them, he dies for them, he serves them, he creates an environment where people can live and survive. God, as good king, made the garden of Eden and planted Adam and Eve in it.

Henry, as good king, makes a good England for his people to thrive and survive in it, right? This is sort of how they would see it. And then the peasants had a responsibility, the same responsibility that Adam and Eve did, obedience. And so they would...

Yeah, so the conception of government is that it is a partaking in God's cosmos. Does this make sense? It makes sense. I guess eventually I'm curious of how that sets up a governmental system that's different from ours.

That's one question. And then also... Wait, what do you mean? Just let me throw this one out there.

And then the other one is that to paint that picture makes it sound like everyone... Just stick with me. Everyone has a place. And there's a comfort to that of knowing that that mirrors a divine reality.

But I don't know if that's how we would tell the story of history of people like... There's still a revolution. There's still a conflict. Not everyone likes the place that they are in that society.

And not everyone like the kings. Not everyone like the kings. And the kings often... And the kings didn't act like God.

I'm wondering, is that... Most of the kings. But that first one is then, does that lead to the degradation? So we set up this ideal of the government is set up this way to mirror, again, God's reality.

But then there's so much failure that we can get to this place where we say, well, it can't actually do that. But it can run a garbage system. It can run a fire department. Yeah.

I think the big change comes when you cross over from... We are trying to reach the ideal that God has. And we're trying to bend society to be like that ideal. A form of government, if you want to go even play a tonic of it.

We are trying to create society to imitate the ideal way of society. And then the line is crossed when you say, no, no, no. We invent this from our own reason. Our own way of thinking through this.

And so we don't need to have it be a king at the top and everybody else. We can invent it in however many ways that we want. And that idea took over. That began to begin the time of rebellion and revolutions, like the French Revolution.

So maybe part of it is it becomes sort of decoupled from a teleological model, right? There's no... have an end for government and that's for our own safety but there's no model for what the government should look like because there was no perfect government there's nothing to aim at and so we're left to sort of remake it without any guidebook so this is going to sound and I may lose you on this but maybe some listeners will appreciate this don't appeal to the masses seriously I like thinking about it in the way that European soccer teams organize themselves there's not two schools of thought but broadly speaking there are some kinds of coaches that have a philosophy of how the game should be played so for example my favorite team in the world Ajax which plays in Amsterdam they have a view of how the game should be played they have a teleological view of football or soccer the game should be played in this way what you mean footballer there's a teleological way that soccer should be played and we will train all of our players to do this and we have this ideal and sometimes we play to that ideal but most of the times we don't and then there are coaches who are pragmatic and it's like we will change what we do we will hook the ball up the field if we need to we will who cares what's beautiful we just want to score more goals than everybody else and we'll do that whatever means possible I kind of feel like it's that kind of divide the middle ages has a philosophy of government that they're a telos of government that they're trying to fit into well it's a logical model of government I think it all sort of has the same end perfection and organization of the human race but there's one model that they saw as like this was the functional one that met all the requirements no no no I think it's even stronger than that this is the only way that government should be because it's the way God ordered these that's what I mean and so you take away that model we still have the same telos but we have all kinds of different ways of getting there and we have no perfect model to look at anymore and then the modern man sort of looks at it sort of pragmatically and it's like oh the reason we have government is to stop these bad things from happening so we can stop these bad things from happening that's what government is for and so it's pragmatic is maybe the wrong way to say it but to fit to the soccer analogy that's kind of the way to think about it it's this pragmatism way of government however we do it we can maybe figure out we can maybe if we can tweak the system enough we could probably get to the way of illuminating all these bad things and the elimination of bad things ends up being a really interesting sticking point because for the modern person the modern view of government has in the back of the mind if you keep changing it if you keep tweaking it if you keep putting in new things if you keep applying new data science to it we can get to the point where the perfect system of government can create perfect society and the medieval view has something different it says we had perfect society and we abandoned it when we fell and so now every attempt at government is to we should be trying to imitate perfect society again because that's the way that God's universe is set up and we're always going to fail at it because of the sinfulness of man but we should not abandon the actual form of it we shouldn't abandon the form but we should keep the form of it whereas the modern person says well we can change the form all we want because we need to find out the one that's going to work for the time every time it doesn't work we're like well that wasn't it we've got to move on to something else so if you are a modern person the killing of Louis XVI plus the king of France in 1789 oh I remember it Louis XVI just a second so the the the killing of you are a modernist the killing of Louis XVI ends up being like a necessary step for putting in this thing that you think is going to make society better and if you have a medieval view of mine the killing of Louis XVI ends up being something tantamount to a blasphemy a destruction of the holy order and so this is why you have almost you've got these two points of view that can no longer sort of talk to each other these views are sort of now incompatible that you cannot sort of come to a consensus because you're working off really completely different playbooks if you want the question is ultimately in violence not in discussion yeah or violence violence is the only answer overthrows because those two conversations those two sides can't talk to each other so when we're growing up and we do medieval history or in history class or whatever we have I don't know if you had this experience this was definitely the experience I had that everything was kind of like chugging towards the you know the better way of the enlightened modernity and then when we finally got like charters and you know sort of modern society we were now in a better place and yeah I mean we had to throw off the old shackles of the divine right of kings but that wasn't sort of a necessary thing the French did it in a bloody way the Americans did it in a less bloody way so let's you know focus more on that one than the French one you know like I definitely had this kind of everything is moving up and better view of history taught sure and maybe I think yeah I think the modern you know the modern represent republican representative government of the United States is better for everybody's practical daily life than the the monarchy of the middle ages that's not the point or the oligarchy of France yeah the point of this discussion is not to really to sort of debate the merits of either of those things but it's just to sort of point out that ultimately the way that we sort of tell the story of history often is influenced by whether we're on the the modern side or whether we're on the medieval side well to be super lame with this right history is written by the victors so if a revolution works of course the old government was bad and terrible and worse than the current government so after a series of revolutions you're going to have folks that see that as a horrible like monarchy is bad it's really weird when I actually so when I went growing up to sort of speak to that feeling I always thought kings were like king equals bad king is always bad and that's why it just flummoxed me how the British people love their royal family I was like I do not understand why they keep a queen and king around those guys are tyrants king was synonymous with tyrant growing up in the US and I was just totally baffled by it and then you begin reading some of these old writers and a good and virtuous king is a good thing because he can get stuff done really fast if he's actually a good king there are kings that people unanimously loved everybody loved their king he did a great job he cared about his people he was virtuous hardworking, hearty and he could get a lot done because nobody could stand in his way the closest we have to it now is a CEO if you had a leader of a company that had an open hearted view towards his employees like make Tom Hanks a CEO and that would be a good king so after reading all these old things I thought okay maybe there can be good kings and what does that look like but that was purely an influence of the educational system king equal bad now there's a way that both of these views of the government go bad maybe both of them are tied into the cosmos maybe a view of the cosmos maybe the middle ages view of what makes the perfect government is tied into the cosmos of God's hierarchy and our current view is also tied into the view of the cosmos that it's random and man-made and only matter yeah or that it's chaos that needs the intellect of man to bring order to it sure if that's the view of the cosmos we're fixing something that is broken as opposed to trying to get back to something or making whatever we want because we were randomly made anyway so we might as well make something that we enjoy yeah that it's again it's a pragmatic thing or a utilitarian thing we're trying to make it the best for everybody yeah so all this is the benefit of yeah this was your last episode right about there's progression is not the right word it's a dissent that there is a good form of government that is then degraded and degraded and degraded and then does people actually talk about ending in rebellion I don't know if we we have not hit well rebellion already happened when we went to democracy right we threw off the shackles I think it's oligarchs because we go from aristocracy but then does someone overthrow the tyrant or is that not a category I assume eventually we kill the tyrant and it probably just goes back to democracy so then we I don't know he hasn't talked about that yet we hit a loop of like democracy tyranny and democracy tyranny and I think that's the benefit of learning about Plato same with Aristotle this is what when Aristotle puts monarchy as like the best form of government that should challenge us like that doesn't sound right to me and that feeds into the medieval idea where it's like oh of course it's pagan we realize what's actually true about the cosmos but then Aristotle does have a category for the worst form of government is tyranny it's a mirror the top three is mirrored inversely in the bottom three because an absolute ruler who is good is the best form but an absolute ruler who is bad is the worst form and so in many ways the modern experiment is like okay well let's stop doing this min-max game where you have the best and the worst and let's just sort of go for a better sort of a okay middle and that's yeah democracy for Aristotle is the fourth best option it's the best of the bad options but in the same way that's a pragmatic thing to say well therefore go for that now there so they the story of how the medieval middle ages goes bad is the familiar one that we're taught we're never really sort of taught about how the modern form of conception of government can go bad although I think we can do it or we can figure it out but the one that we were at least I remember what I was taught was at some point the kings thought they were completely divine and that they could you know like the Egyptian gods of old Henry XIV thought or Louis XIV thought that he was a sun king that he was God himself and so this is the middle ages sort of overshooting itself and it became tyranny I think there's a lot of fairness to that that is true but it does not necessarily have to follow therefore that we get rid of king's whole cloth but that is what the sort of the enlightenment wanted to do wanted to do and ended up doing but so yeah so the medieval form of government goes bad when you have bad kings and then you have tyrants and you go from what would be what Aristotle or maybe what the middle ages said was the best form or maybe even the only form of government one that mirrored God's cosmos and you have this terrible situation where you have these kings you know you've got you've got Prince John in England and you have these sort of terrible situations and life is miserable but when you had a bad king everybody knew what the solution was replace the king we will pray that we have that his son is a better man right or get in his cousin find somebody out find one of the other nobles get Henry IV to get Richard II out get somebody who is in the line who's supposedly supposed to be better and then in the modern form there's the belief that just somewhere over the rainbow is the magic formula that we're going to have that is going to solve the problems and I know we talked about this in our current function podcast when we talk about the great man and someone who can finally reorganize society to turn it into the best way even C.S. Lewis talks about this that like we no longer what we try to do is fix people as opposed to punish people that's maybe another rabbit trail to go down but that there's the progressive or the modern view of government is one that is perfectible it's the myth of human perfectibility although what's kind of funny to me is that I mean I could be I would be happy to be proven wrong about this but it seems like we hold that idea that human society and human government and human is perfectible but nobody has put out a comprehensive vision of utopia in the last 60, 70 years we had like Marx didn't Marx put forward like here is a good organizational like here it is here's the utopia I figured it out here's the idea I haven't seen anything since then oh you mean somebody who's actually earnestly believing that they could do it it seems like right now we have a lot of voices but not any single one of them is giving a comprehensive view of here is the actual here it is here's the vision of utopia that we can work towards like maybe it's something small like okay healthcare they focus on one particular element of that utopia but nobody has put forward a comprehensive view I could be wrong wouldn't that be potentially Senator Sanders of like a move from into socialism but isn't his just kind of borrowing from Marx I'm not saying that he's innovating in some huge way but proposals that are I mean I forget the number of $60 trillion like it's total overhauls of the healthcare system and tax scheme so AJ you're saying there's nobody coming out that's proposing a new philosophy but there's tons of people coming out proposing how to make the old philosophies work today yes and maybe not even realizing that that's what they're doing I think that's fair I mean maybe there is no political maybe there is no more political innovation that can happen and now it's just it's arguing over the right way to play the game and the middle ages had their view and then modern man has this other view but how it goes wrong if the middle ages how it goes wrong is you have a bad king how it goes wrong for the more enlightened view of government is that it has to be perpetual revolution like it has to be trying something trying something oh my goodness this didn't work burn it down try something try something oh my goodness this didn't work burn it down and then what I find fascinating is that both the enlightenments and the medievals they can criticize each other's view so the enlightenment looks at the medieval and say well how can you guys stand having a crappy king but the medieval view can also look at the modernist and say you are trying for a perfect society but we had it and even when we had it and had no sin we abandoned it so it makes you think that you can get it back through your work through your social engineering and your social organization you can't so yeah both of them kind of have this misplaced hope that the enlightenment view has a hope in the human perfectibility that we can just sort of get the new science and the new data or the new metric we can finally get the thing sorted and the medieval hope is I hope we get a good man or I hope we get a good person and those are sort of different things can I tell you maybe another thing also that I think is with this Graham what you're saying tying in with Adrian Plato is that there's a descent we just went through this but there's a descent of systems so aristocracy into oligarchy into democracy into democracy did I get that right?

no aristocracy to democracy to oligarchy to democracy whereas Marx's conception of history is that there's a movement toward a better system I'm just reading this off of Marx's artwork with my book that history is a movement from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism to socialism so then you've got it's a progressive view of history moving into the utopia at the end of these inferior systems which is fascinating if you go back to our distributism podcast where we talk about the servile state they say Marx is probably right but at the end at the end of capitalism is slavery or socialism and those aren't good things but anyway so where I also think that this ends up in a fascinating place is that there are many people there are many sort of historical people who live at times of inflection points and as modern people we use them as proxies to explain either the enlightenment or the medieval way of thinking the two that I can think of sort of off the top of my head are Galileo and Thomas More so let's start with Thomas More so Thomas More was executed by Henry VIII because he would not allow the marriage to one of the women was it Jane C. Moore I don't know it was it doesn't matter Thomas More is how I was taught Thomas More was that he was a hero of law over tyrants that he loved the law over tyrants and in many ways he has sort of read through that very good play that was done in the 1960s called and the play of Man for All Seasons has Thomas More sort of held up as this stoic lover of the legal system and the rule of law over the whimsy and tearing of man and so he's held up almost as like this enlightenment hero that here he is who believes in the written word the written code of law over the vicissitudes of the human person I have a little quote here from the book that kind of I think crystallizes this point so Thomas More is the chancellor of England and his buddy Roper says hey you should arrest that guy because he's going to you should arrest this person because he is going to he's your enemy and Thomas More says no I will not thank you so much for watching arrest him um um even if the devil himself didn't break the law i wouldn't arrest him so roper says so you give the devil the benefit of the law thomas more replies yes what would you do cut a great road through the law to get after the devil and roper says i cut down every law in england to do that yeah of course i'd go after um go after him and more said oh and when the last law was down the devil turned round on you where would you hide roper the laws all being flat this country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast man's laws not gods and if you cut them down you're just the man to do it do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then yes i give the devil the benefit of the law for my own safety's sake so it's a great passage it's pretty awesome but it's clearly setting thomas more up as a defender of man's law over the tyranny of henry the eighth he is a champion of the enlightenment law over over tyrannical middle ages um which is one way to read the thomas more story the other way to read the thomas more story is that here's henry the eighth superseding the cosmos of the universe by going against the church and wanting to divorce his wife for his own political game and is telling thomas more to get in line over him you should obey me and thomas more says no henry the eighth you are acting outside of god's created order i'm not going to do that i would die for that if we could go back and pick thomas more's brains and really sort of sit down and talk to him i'm convinced that he would be more the medieval man than the enlightenment man but we set him up as the enlightenment over the right hand side we've got thomas more utopia we've got all sorts of times i mean and maybe and maybe it's more complex than this i'm less concerned about what thomas more think about himself and more interested in how we tell the story how we teach thomas more to sort of bolster a view of of like the sort of progressive history of the progressive government or we both the view of um i don't know what you want to call it wouldn't wouldn't what thomas more thought about himself have a pretty big bearing on that like whether i don't know whether he was defending the church in the way things should be or whether he was trying to support man's law i feel like at least knowing what he thought would make a difference if i was a champion of the enlightenment i would hate to be called but what man should actually know what he thinks in light of how history plays itself out i mean i at least let me see what he thought so i'm drawing i'm maybe incorrectly drawing a hard line between a medieval view and a modern and an enlightenment view thomas more probably rightly had this this um a mix of medieval and modern in his view of the world that made sense to him in his day um but as history moved forward they and as they sort of were more incompatible views but they still mixed in his in his intellectual life i don't know that's sort of bad i'm trying to think this no i get what you're saying hamburg um i think we should at least do a thinking man justice right on that particular point if he is saying yes man's law and i want that's what i want to support then i would teach him as but that's the thing i would teach him as maybe an enlightenment man as opposed to a medieval man like you can still you can still but all of his actions could be explained as somebody who believed in the medieval cosmos just as all his actions could be explained as somebody who believed in laws or man's creation yes but i would hate to spend my entire career teaching children and then have someone come and explain my actions away despite my words as like taking advantage of children trying to put my own ideas that's what i'm trying to look up the anyway just very quickly doing google searching like um the portrayal in the main crawl scenes is not 100 accurate to moore's writings but again it deserves more research and that's your point i would hate to have written down all of my reasons for teaching kids and have someone come and say i guess i guess the point is then we like history is taught in a way to be digestible but in order to digest it we need to turn things into cartoon versions of them or turn things into simplified versions of them and um and maybe that's fine for um in more i don't know stable times maybe it's maybe it's easier to tell the cartoon version of henry ii because he was right smack dab in the middle of the middle ages wherein there was not a lot of diversity of thought on government and so we can sort of say he was you know a king we thought he was in a hierarchy like god was in a hierarchy but then we get to these these points of sort of really big paradigm shifts to put people on one side of the other the paradigm shift is is a little bit simplistic did um but how else do you teach it in an hour and 25 yeah for sure um but then communicating to the students that it's not as simple as we're making it i think it's really important like did um you know does uh luther see himself as a catholic right or does he see himself as a prostitute i was taught that he saw himself as a prostitute i think irrevocably he saw himself as a catholic and you probably and then if you sat down with luther he'd say i'm a reformer just like um just like the people 200 years ago were trying to reform the church and the council of whatever it was um he posted his theses not as a rebellion but as like the discussion he ends up becoming a symbol of something that happened that is happening later and so the other example is galileo galileo ends up becoming this symbol of the noble scientist against the tyranny of um of superstition uh and and sort of ignorant uh church teachings but when you go back and like he is using the telescope in the vatican like the vatican had had an observatory um copernic like the big reason why the church was so grumpy with galileo is not because of his scientific findings was because he was then building a new vision of the cosmos that had political ramifications off of those off of those findings copernicus what a generation before him had also posited a heliocentric universe and everyone's like oh yeah you're probably right but um but copernicus didn't move into then saying um therefore we don't need to you know believe x y and z about the world but galileo he also puts forward a geocentric or a heliocentric universe but then he ties that view of the cosmos to uh something that was um upheaving the the view of the cosmos that i guess the church had at that point then it becomes then he's sort of uh i don't know revolutionary whatever um but he did that to himself because he tied those two together i'm saying the story we tell it is of this like sort of this dispassionate scientist that says oh this is the way the universe is and the church says oh no it's not uh uh if if that's the way the universe is our power is ruined block them up um we're in reality like um um galileo the scenes as if galileo also had his own uh access to grind about power um and so that's what you know was getting him in trouble with the powers that be he wasn't this sort of dispassionate scientist who was just telling it like it is he was using his discoveries to also posit forward a competing vision of government power do you know do you know when we moved from so one thing i noticed about the way we teach writing in schools is that the way we teach scientific writing tries to remove the human actor so all sentences are put in passive voice right the mixture was heated to this temperature it was poured into it like we remove all all pronouns all people from it as much as possible but i don't think that's the way that scientific men did it for a long time right they would have their own ideas they would say i did this i did this i did this and this is what i'm finding and then they would draw conclusions and i'm wondering at what point we moved into a dispassionate non-human view of science what was that because i imagine both galileo and copernicus sort of set forth these visions and then drew conclusions from them because we're still talking about the you know the medieval renaissance man who does many things and could do like all sorts of yeah i don't know enough about about sort of the history of scientific philosophy like the philosophy of science i feel like i'm really interested a really good answer to that um um if any listeners out there are more familiar with the progression of science and scientific writing i've read you know all the writings of copernicus and galileo i'd love to hear about it so if you want to send me an email it's not as sort of smooth curve as i think it's often referred to because you have really competing differences of view when it comes to certainty so you have people like empiricists who uh you have hume who you know um we really break down what uh hard what's empiricism is that you can only know what is what is you only know what is observable is that fair is that you only know what's observable um and um so if you really hold that firmly um then make it uh it is hard to make oh shoot i'm gonna get as wrong as i didn't have a thought about this um no uh we need to jump down this trail yeah maybe this is something for a future for a future episode i was just curious but the um there's not a unity of thought when it comes to um ontology how you know things although oftentimes it's presented there is unity of thought it's the scientific method and that's the and that is the sole way of knowing things but there are people along the sort of the scientific timeline that come in and say listen this like um consensus isn't necessarily what we think it is what's the consensus now i know many actually christian scientists right that are in the scientific field and are christians and so they don't necessarily have a consensus about everything in science but yeah um anyway um so yeah i've been on a google rabbit trail trying to find more on thomas more i'm sorry i have very little that is helpful the other the analog that came to mind is um um darwin and associations of his name with social darwinism or even the use of survival of the fittest which again this is from a quick search so you know let me ask me if this is wrong but even survival of the fittest is not a phrase that originates with darwin in the same way that the use of social darwinism um predates i believe the publication of the origin of all the origin species so like the worldview basically someone hears secondhand the ideas that darwin is working on and comes up with a worldview that fits with what they want again darwin's writing kind of in this gilded age time so if there's a scientific theory that will back up um you know barons who are robber barons who are accumulating assets they're going to take that scientific view and use that as like the justification of why it is the way it is but that's almost closer to your original form of government you're describing that these people who are wealthy are wealthy because you know nature determines that the best of us will become the the top of the heap but i'm just wondering if there are there is still a telos is still there is still a goal with government or an economic system but it's moved from a religious one to a observation that's fair um and maybe so maybe both in the marty logical it's just that the telos has been radically changed um to be an empirical one which you just said it's what we can see we can only point to an ideal that they can't be but if we can point and say well you know because this is how animals behave in nature therefore we as humanity should build a society that matches that those things don't have to flow from each other they can be separate but we're looking for a telos we're looking for an end to the systems we have um when i think about this yeah when i this challenges me when it comes to okay then how do you how do you do history how do you uh you want to avoid these easy explanations as much as possible um but you want to give the student a framework through which they can understand history um but there's really bad but all those lots of really bad frameworks i mean um the one that always kind of rubs me the wrong way is when someone tries to tell the story of history through a pretty um assured way of god's providence that you know these things happen because god wanted this to happen and these things happen because god wanted this to happen and america happened because um because it was going to be the best christian place on earth and i mean maybe that's true that's not true um but that's that's a that is as um simplistic uh telling of history than saying man is moving towards its greatest perfection through the use of its intellect that is a uh simplified version of history that i think is uh that one is just what everybody thinks so are you are you just sort of bumping up against the notion that all history has to be taught within some sort of worldview right it's gonna leak out no matter how you know what teacher you have or how you do it it is incredibly difficult to teach history dispassionately and perhaps even possible and how you how do you teach it in such a way that does honor to the subject itself without too much coloring it from any particular worldview or by choosing or by being obvious about the worldview no i don't think that you can say i'm going to not have a worldview because that's you you literally can't not have a worldview so i think um i think when christians we as christians when we teach history we need to be a little bit more explicit about um uh anthropology this is what man is this is what this is what god is this is uh what we know and believe about god's order of the universe and we will and this is how we understand our place in the cosmos and the story of humanity i may be a little more wary of the undetectable worldviews that we're brought up with yeah that but it's also um i mean um i think it's a lot more profitable to to teach history as kind of like one thing after another than um um like as christians we have what has happened and then we have the future which we don't know and we have the ending which we believe we do know um um what am i trying to say with this um i don't think i i think the the teacher who unwillingly is slipping into a sort of modern view of history thinking that they are being objective when really they're having a worldview about um the myth of human perfectibility um can't do that and um have a and teach history through a christian worldview maybe that's what i'm trying to say is that if you think um you're being um you're removing your bias from it and you're just teaching objectively what you're probably actually doing is you're teaching history like a modern person that's right yeah we're viewing like if we're not like non-teachers you're viewing history through a certain and everything's moving towards like bigger and better and we're gonna figure it out and everything's gonna be fine but even you're saying that we need to be somewhat critical or cautious of the worldview we hold that even just to call something a christian worldview i think if i heard you correctly the medieval christian conception would still be different than the modern christian conception right like we uh our worldviews which class will teach you to talk to i guess that's fair but uh but just to uh but just to say that um our the way we see the world has an has an origin it comes from somewhere you need to be wary of that that what we consider now the right worldview is colored by living in 2020 living in austin like i don't know it gives us a caution also i think if i'm hearing all this crap no that's fair um i don't know what takeaways are from this tell history with tell stories tell the stories but maybe give a little bit of credence and honor to the perspectives that you're bringing to the table and discuss those a little bit rather than treat and treat and try you know done and done try to tell history honestly but i don't know what that means like maybe the takeaway is history is more complicated than we make it um i'm a little more like we should just be more medieval all right well we probably got a call is it there so thank you graham this has been classical stuff you should know i'd also like to know how old is that shirt you're wearing is that from college yes that's awesome he's wearing the university of toronto shirt and i'm always impressed with people still like i wish i still had some of the sweatshirts i had in college they got lost in like the backs of cars yeah the shirt used to be blue it's great and the collar's all like loose all right so this has been classical stuff you should know and if you'd like to contact us you can shoot us an email at classicalstuff at veritasacademy.net our website is classicalstuff.net you can tweet at us at clsscalstuff and we'd love to hear from you if you have questions or comments and i hope you're doing well amidst the the horrors of our time yeah this will come out in the future we have no idea yeah i don't we we're recording right now at the beginning of our spring break which it would be i guess the the rise of coronavirus so either you are listening to this in the decline of coronavirus and you are safe and you have an abundance of toilet paper or there's a dearth of toilet paper and you are in desperate desperate need so our either way our prayers go out to you listener so we're we're staying with you in this and on that somber note i will say goodbye bye you