67: Chronological Snobbery

Hello, and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know, a podcast about the ancient world, the classical world, put on by three classical educators who work at a classical Christian school in sunny, sunny Austin, Texas. My name is Graham Donaldson, and I am joined here with my two colleagues, A.J. Handenberg. Oh, that's me.

And Thomas Fletcher. I know you're looking for the answer there. And gentlemen, as I sit here, I realize that amongst you fine specimens, I am the oldest, and therefore the best. Yes, that is 100% true.

Because things that are older are better. Yes, sir. Younger things are better. There you go.

I am the best member. So I believe, Thomas, that you have a topic today of a... I prefer only present things. Like, something that is there for a moment and then passeth away.

So maybe, like, you know, those chemicals in the periodic table that you can only have for a split second, like a burpatanium, and they only exist for a split second. Those things are my favorite. Little pleasures that pass away instantly, like a small chocolate, or a passing bird. But the bird must be instantly born and then instantly die.

So it's not an old bird or a young bird. It is essence of birds momentary. So A.J. is romantic.

Yes, I'm objectively wrong. I'm not taking away from previous games. Well, the truth is the present doesn't exist. What?

Thomas, Thomas, can we get true references on every episode for the rest of time now? On it. Okay, good. All right, so Thomas, what are we learning about today?

Guys, we're going to, we teased this at the end of the last episode, but our goal for today is to question the entire concept of our podcast and our employer and the movements we've been in the nation of classical education. So only a few minor topics to do for the day. Well, resistance is the burden of the intelligent and subdued. Is that a quote?

No, that's me. I was like, wow, I just made it up. Put that on a t-shirt. Speaking of which.

Cost of stuff you should know. There it is. So what if we're subdued by, like, a heavy, fluffy pillow? I don't know if I want to resist that.

Because it's just so good. Okay, so we will be talking about a few things, but among them are some logical fallacies we discussed before, appeal to tradition, appeal to novelty, and then cultural snobbery, or chronological snobbery, sorry. We are 100% cultural snobs, but the question is whether we should be chronological snobs. So let's start with our definitions.

You called a snob as the burden of people with taste. Isn't that the line? I'm so thankful you finally put that, you finally recorded that. Snobbery is the burden of every man with taste.

There it is. Do I need to say enough to you? But the problem is, I looked up snobbery, and snobbery means, I don't know, denigrating or judging people who enjoy simpler things. I don't know that that's us.

That's not us, right? I think being selective is the burden of every man with taste. But it doesn't sound as good as snobbery. So I say the line, but I don't know that it's actually me.

I'm not a snob, but I won't drink your nasty beer. That's interesting. I probably should look this one up first. A person snob, a person with an exaggerated respect for high social position, or wealth who seeks to associate with social superiors and dislikes people or activities regarded as lower class.

See, that's what I mean. Selectiveness is the burden of every man with taste. Not being willing to, I don't know, drink stuff that is terrible and do things that are dumb, but not adhering to those simply because they're highbrow. So then let's take this with, so chronological snobbery is one of the terms we'll go through.

But let's start with the first two that kind of, well, mostly relate to this. So two logical fallacies that I think we might have grouped together under chronological snobbery, but we at least reference these. So they are the appeal to tradition and the appeal to novelty. You don't want to take either one of those and say what they mean?

Appeal to tradition, this thing is good because we have always done it. And appeal to novelty, look at this new thing, isn't it good because it's new? Yeah. And then A is another form of appeal to novelty.

As a final say on whether or not we should do the thing. I think you can make appeals to tradition or appeal to novelty as part of an argument, but if you have to be the final say saying, we should do this because we've always done it. So I think where it becomes fallacious is where it becomes the premise for a reason to do something. We should do this because we have always done it.

It's not a good argument, right? Appealing to say we have always done it, therefore there's probably wisdom in it. Perhaps wisdom that I don't see is a better argument. But how is it a fallacy?

Why would we call it a fallacy? Yeah. If it's okay to appeal to tradition, why would we say that appeal to tradition is a fallacy? I think it's context.

So if I appeal to tradition in, say, a celebration, say we've always done the cake in the song. That's part of what we do. That might be appeal to a continuation of a tradition just for the sake of the tradition. But if I say we should go to war because we go to war over January, it's maybe a bad way to do things.

I don't know. As with every fallacy, an informal fallacy is contextual. So like a fallacious appeal to authority. If I appeal to, say, Mr.

Donaldson over here on how to write a sentence, well, he is an authority. But if I appeal to him on how to go to war in January, he's maybe not an authority. So his authority changes depending on context. So it matters the type of tradition or the type of novelty we're referencing.

Or really what we're arguing for. If I'm arguing for, like, keep doing a tradition because I like tradition, that's different than saying we should do a thing and tradition is the reason. So yes, we receive a tradition, but then we make a decision for ourselves whether we continue that tradition. Yeah.

Tradition gets complicated because, as with all, chronological snobbery gets complicated. So let's go into that one then. So chronological snobbery then is essentially another form for appeal to novelty. It was coined by C.S.

Lewis in a debate where I believe he was still an atheist at the time. He was debating someone. Lewis has something to the effect of religion is outdated because it's old. And then he was called out for being a chronological snob.

So to say that only things that are modern matter is chronological snobbery. Yeah. So we can broaden that somewhat. Again, I think we might have on the episode.

So what was originally used in 1955 meant only new things are good. But to take the age of a thing as an indication of the value of a thing, we might also call chronological snobbery. This was A.J.'s comment that in classical education, we will sometimes do the opposite of what Lewis meant. We'll say because a thing is old, therefore it's good.

Which, yeah, it might be. I'm not calling you out. I'm agreeing with you. We're going to have three points on my chronological snobbery.

No, I'm agreeing with you, too. So age does not necessarily confer value. But the funny thing is something being old can hint at value depending on that thing. So if it's an old book that we still read, it hints at value because that book has said something valuable to people across the centuries.

It doesn't guarantee that it's a good book. There are some books we still read that were bad when they came out. They were bad when people read them 100 years ago, and they're bad now. But that book has lasted that long, and we continuously read it.

Hints that there's something valuable in it that perhaps we don't necessarily see and can still see. Whereas it is less likely that a new thing be valuable just because it is new. Although that can confer value. With computers, generally, the newer the computer, the better.

So sometimes the age of something can hint at its value, but it's not necessarily a one-and-done premise for its value. Just because it is old does not mean that it's good. The age can hint at a thing. It has some sort of, like, let's say for a book or something that's lasted for a long time, it's had some kind of competitive advantage over its contemporary books.

Sometimes that competitive advantage could be luck. So the reason why this author got popular, the reason why we read The Great Gatsby in every public school or whatever, versus any other, there was other contemporary writers who were writing similar kind of lost generation novels about decadence. But the reason, so, is the reason why we read The Great Gatsby because of the merits of The Great Gatsby? It's probably part of that.

Is it also because of some kind of maybe just complete dumb luck that it had? It was in fashion at the time that curriculum was being talked about? Or even sometimes with a book, it's not popular because it's good, it's popular because it rose in popularity because of the scandal. Jane Eyre comes to mind, right?

When that book came out, no one knew if the author was male or not. It later came out that the author, author S, was female, and that caused a big sensation. So everybody had to read this crazy book that was also written by a woman and accused of being non-Christian, which is weird. It's not.

But a lot of people still read it, and a lot of people still read it. She didn't have that. She's not a married and a missionary. That was an amazing book.

So yeah, if you think about what causes species to compete against a ton of species. Yeah, but that's one of the missionaries. Is there another Jane Eyre? Yeah, but that's not Jane Eyre.

No. There's another Jane Eyre. There's another Jane Eyre. Sorry.

So if you think of species, like what causes a group of species or a culture or any sort of thing to have some sort of staying power, well, it's got to have some kind of competitive advantage. And when we talk about it with books, the competitive advantage I guess we mainly gravitate towards is quality. Quality or it had some sort of emotional resonance at the time. So, I mean, go back and look at the Nobel Prizes for Literature, or go back and even look at the best of the Oscar award winning, all the movies that won awards.

Not all of them have had staying power. So just because they were in vogue that year doesn't mean that they sort of have stayed. So yeah, so there is, because something has existed and continues to be read for, you know, 500 years, for example, if we want to think of like Dante even longer, there's something qualitative about it than a book that was in vogue in 1918, a hundred years ago that we don't read anymore today. Again, age can be a hint at quality, but not necessarily a seal the deal on quality.

So let me take it, I'll go two different, I'm going to come to the same topic, but from two different ideas. One is when people talk about going off to college and picking a major, do we think of something differently if they go off to study the classics versus they go off to study computer science? Um, yeah. Yes, I do, but I mean, I've taken my hand because I'm, you know, a classical.

But the only thing I think is that I can accurately ascribe the adjective nerd to both qualities. So as long as they choose one of those two, I can still call them nerd. And I'm in the clear, you'll be accurate with 100% confidence, yeah. So I think one is like leaning more towards like practicality and the other one is leaning more towards, selfish is the wrong word, but they've sort of found some sort of enjoyment with something that is not in vogue, like studying classics.

Oh, you're just recognizing the basic difference between computer nerd and book nerd. Yeah, yeah. One smells like paper and mold, the other one smells like Mountain Dew and keyboard oil. And future success.

So we will have a reaction than the population at large. So we would say there's some value in studying the classics, maybe university is the wrong place for it, so none of us have degrees in classics, right? It relates to theology, I guess you read classics as part of that. Yeah, I did theology, I did an English literature degree, but I only took classes in books that were over 100 years old.

And philosophy, I did a lot of philosophy. Yeah, so some piece of like, you know, I'm sure you're reading classic works of philosophy, but most people would say, you're probably going to go to college to study the classics, just read those in your free time. I told the story, I think, I forget who I was talking with, someone in your free time. Sure, so last, when I was an undergrad, I was a dual major for marketing and psychology, and I was taking a class in the business school, I told my professor this because we were talking, and he told me, you are wasting your time studying psychology here, you should just pick up some books and read those books, and that's equivalent to you taking any number of classes here.

It's a waste of time to study something. An unnamed university of Texas. Exactly, an unnamed university of Texas that I went to. You mean, hook whom, Thomas, hook whom?

Unnamed? Are you saying it's unnamed Texas? Unnamed university of Texas, yeah. U-U-T.

The U-U-T is where I went, exactly. Oh, we're getting super live. Who are we looking? I'm not, it's not live, I mean, it's an accurate story.

To whom, to a hook, to whom? Who ought to be hooked? So, yes, that is... What is happening?

It's Saturday, everybody. It's a Saturday podcast, and we're at Veritas, and I got very little sleep. So, that was my interaction. Again, psychology is not classics, but the idea was, you're not getting some kind of practical skill, you're wasting your time.

So, there's some value to things that are new and technical, and there is a waste of time to things that are old. That is what was originally meant by chronological snobbery, so there's a type of that right there. Let's take another piece of that. I don't remember who I was talking with, and so if you're a listener, I apologize.

I also don't remember the details of the story. Someone was telling me that their student was... The parent was talking to the student about their, like, Advent, Christmas traditions, and one of the traditions was they do an Advent wreath, and they do an Advent wreath every Sunday leading up to eventually Christmas. That student told the parent, this is appeal to tradition.

We only do this thing because it's been done before. Therefore, we shouldn't do it. We ought to decide for ourselves what we do. We should not just follow whatever tradition has been set before us.

So that would be the opposite form of snobbery. We should question essentially all old things and why they exist. There's no value in the end of themselves. So does that person appropriately use the appeal to tradition?

I mean, essentially, the argument is we only do things because they've been done before. I think that's literally the definition of the fallacy. Yeah, I mean, if you don't understand why you do something. Yeah.

Well, I'm kind of of two minds around that, because part of me says if you don't understand why you do something, you're not going to be able to know how to adapt it when it needs to be adapted for comfort when situations change. So, on the other hand, sometimes you've got to just keep doing traditions even if you don't understand them because they are formative. But formative in what? But I think, as a modern skeptical kind of fella, I think, Graham, you fall easier into traditions than I do.

I tend to be one who questions them more. But I think in all those situations, before disregarding a tradition because you cannot make current sense of it, you should know where it came from. So I would be fine with, say, switching the side of the road that we drive on because I know where that came from and why. And why it's outdated and doesn't make sense.

The other one that I don't quite understand is no elbows on the table. Why that tradition? I don't know if it comes from not wanting to set your elbow in the soup or if it comes from an arrow when we had puffy sleeves. And before I disregard the tradition, I would like to know, okay, this was from puffy sleeve era.

We don't have puffy sleeves anymore. And when I do, I'll be sure to keep my sleeves off the table. But even if it's a totally arbitrary thing, people will still judge you as being as lacking manners if you put your elbows on the table. So even if we go back to the origin and we say, yeah, it doesn't matter anymore, it's still a more, it's still a norm.

And so because it is a norm, and this is probably just me, but certain norms I will respect in certain cultures because it can be a selling block for them. If it's a wedding or a family get-together with someone that I care a lot about. Like you swear less in the South. Yeah, like I swear less in the South or I dress up more for church in the South because that's just something that the South, the people do there.

But other than that, I think that falls into fear of man and my own fear of being judged. Like I don't go out of my way to follow tradition or social mores that are nonsensical just because they are social mores. That's probably just a me thing. It's a small rebellion.

And I guess that's a piece of the question. We'll dive in. I have three things to go through. So the question then is, what do we do with things that are given to us by tradition?

Is the right reaction to them that skepticism to say, we should ask of all traditional things, are they still valid today? Or should we come from the place of questioning them or from the place of accepting them as, this is what comes before us, we should understand them before we just throw them all out. And when I phrase it like that, you know what they're going to go for. I mean, I think understanding it, understanding them is important.

I mean, I think attitudes of this change as you grow older. So I remember a distinct, so when I was a kid, I don't know if you guys have ever watched the movie or seen the play Filler on the Roof. Are you familiar with it? Tradition.

Tradition. When I was a young, when I was a young, hold on, all day long, if I were a wealthy man, I wouldn't have to work hard. All right. Why haven't we started a bar shop?

Because that's how we read it. We just exhibit A. Listener, if you'd like to send a review, send it to classicalstuff at veritualsacademy.net and we will. Anyway, I think you have to read it because you shouldn't read reviews.

When I was young, I remember, so the story has it where Rep Tevye, the main character, he's got five daughters, three of them get married in the course of the movie or the play. The oldest one to the little tailor, the middle one to the Jewish revolutionary who wants to be communist. And then the last one last one marries a non-jew russian and meanwhile in the background the communist revolution is happening and they as jews are getting kicked out of russia and at the end of the play they move to chicago i think they move to america they leave they have to leave their little jewish community in russia and disperse um and the father acquiesces isn't the last half of that where they move to chicago isn't that west side story yeah exactly um anyway so the father acquiesces and allows his daughter to marry the tailor as opposed to the person he set her up for he acquiesces and lets the middle daughter marry the jewish revolutionary communist revolutionary even though like he's a political revolutionary but he refuses to accept his last daughter's marriage to the russian and at this at this point he says like the tradition i am not going to go outside the bounds of the tradition with this i'm not going to allow you to marry outside of the ethnic community and as a young kid i remember thinking that that was such a huge character flaw in reptevia i'm like oh my goodness how can you be so cruel to your daughter she's in love with this russian um and then i remember watching it um one of our teachers was doing well she was part of a theater group that did it at a local church and my wife and i we went we watched it and i remember sitting there through this and by the end of the play i was saying to myself like heck yeah reptevia you made like i was on his side with this decision because yes his daughter was in love but his way of life was being completely threatened by the fact that um uh you know their close-knit community was being destroyed because of um these are outside pressures that didn't understand them and they had to they had to flee and and what what what has kept the jewish people going in living in hostile environments so like judaism after the diaspora in 70 a.d have lived all over europe and all over the world but they have kept their identity for 2 000 years because of traditions now those traditions have adapted and changed and they have the temple now they don't have the temple and they've had to adapt those traditions but but they've so they've had traditions that have had sway but they've also had traditions where they say you know we do not go outside the bounds of this particular thing and for this family do not marry someone who is not jewish don't marry the russian um and i remember just listening just watching that and feeling like yes that makes sense like you need to have a line that you will not cross even if your kid's not going to understand you it's hard it's a difficult one but i think i think that is the right course of action if you want to keep an identity is that you need to have lines that you don't cross did reptavia fully understand why he was why he didn't have his daughter married and he could he give like this huge bird's eye view as to why you shouldn't cross that traditional line or is it so deeply ingrained in him that it was he couldn't have made any other decision even if he couldn't fully articulate why i think there are two sides to that coin first there is an autoquatio thing to traditions thank you sorry right yeah autoquatio traditions there's an adequateness when i when i was 13 i didn't understand all of the traditions that are there and why they're there why a ring is maybe important in marriage something you know what it symbolizes and why it's there uh i don't understand a lot of things and and so part of coming up against traditions is perhaps i just i don't have the the years on me i don't have the miles on me to understand where that's coming from that said just it seems to me that just maintaining an identity is not a good reason necessarily to uphold traditions what if your identity is a terrible one right the ancient spartans they had some traditions that went by the wayside and i think probably for good measure i know mostly why many of them were there but they were incredibly hard to be bludgeoning weak babies yeah and and being cruel to children and teaching them all to steal and i understand why those are functional but it made for a society that may have been cruel very cruel and i mean we use the word spartan as an adjective now for a reason right and so like we do this because it preserve our identity does not seem to me to be a good argument for the jewish community right part of the reason they maintain those is because those traditions were given by god and that's that is a we do what he says so there is an argument therefore tradition outside it is just a tradition this is what we do it is it is a tradition that was given by god and this is the identity he has given our people and we should keep that sacred right then this gets to the individualism you were talking about in the last episode that if we then have the ability to grab your phrase with bird's eye view if i have the ability to look at kind of all options for how my life should be and pick the one that best fits me i create i create a polis of one i create a society of one which separates me from everyone else it's never gonna be satisfying i mean literally lewis's definition of hell is essentially you have this you're left alone left alone and you are always running away from other people it's loneliness forever god says fine your will be done and leaves you alone so i just want to say there's a tension there of you don't always know the reason for a tradition to pass on to you and then also you don't always get to like pick what you think is the best one because you could be wrong in what you pick that's the other that's the other side of it let's let's dive into these three points just to kind of go to them before we jump into it i think we're also living in a time where we are completely bereft of traditions and people are very very hungry for it and um and are wanting and are wanting those traditions and are sort of looking at their kind of modern lives and realizing that we don't really have traditions we've got thanksgiving and we've got christmas and that's kind of what we have um and um and i think that's why you see a lot of lionizing the past in terms of shoot even like putting instagram filters on your pictures to make them look like old code chrome from the 70s right because there's this longing of nothing nostalgia and tradition there's longing for some sort of idealized past where um where things made sense and then nowadays they don't know that i don't think things made any more sense in the 70s than they do now um but there certainly didn't make more sense in the middle ages oh but let's follow this so when we read so when we read the funeral origin on the last podcast yeah everyone agree with that speech that he gave yeah all 40 000 men in athens agree to that and i don't know that i agree with it we have made all places highways for our daring like i don't know if i really want to stomp my way up into canada and make it my own daring highway well yeah that's not my solution but bring it on let's go the thing is you guys wouldn't do anything you just be like have fun in the snow boys and then you just go a little higher and then we would freeze our way out of there you forgot to leave without your hug bye guys thank you sorry sorry it's so cold up here and i'll be again next year let's try again this is the 10 point i think you all are making that we it's easy to over simplify the cohesion of the past and say well everyone felt this way or like this is the classical view on a thing when really we only have one extant work on it and we don't know about people who disagree with this person and i don't know philosophy it's like play-doh disagreed with a lot of people disagree with play-doh even one of his greatest pupils fair as all disagree with play-doh so in the same way that when we read the history textbook it tells us like this is what the 18th century was like and there were millions of people that didn't feel that way i don't know there's complexity to it and there were probably full communities that lived and died and disappeared without any chronicle at all anyone knowing exactly right all right so let's take this so the question i'm going to try to get at and i think you're on with this tension right now is should we be more chronologically egalitarian should we be less considerate of the age of a thing so again if we're going to say that in some way appealing to either tradition or novelty can be a fallacy or is it is possible for appealing to tradition or to novelty is a fallacy then these are kind of three ideas i had and you might push back on these in case i don't reference at any point in this josh gives a very helpful article is classical education just organized chronological snobbery that if i'm not referencing by name i'm referencing many of the ideas in it so just so i say that so the first question on here we kind of got to this is does age give us any insight into the validity of a thing or an idea does age give us any insight into the validity of an idea or a work oh does it i kind of feel like there's a threshold for age so like things written in the last hundred years don't rise to that threshold i kind of find myself ascribing to the to the sort of statement that we really can't make sense of history until a couple of generations have passed so um like it's it's the hundred year anniversary of the end of world war one that happens past november and i feel like it's only really now that we can look back 100 years ago and really make sense of how that catastrophe happened you couldn't have done that in the 40s and you couldn't have done that in the 70s and we really can only kind of get our hands around it now um and it's not going to be until we're old men that we can really look back and get our hands around what has happened what is what happened to america in the 50s 60s and 70s um so i kind of described that idea just in terms of looking back at history i know this is not really your question but i feel like in terms of judgment and assessment of the past of things you do need to have enough time pass for you to be able to accurately assess whether it is useful moving forward sure so there's something that are just so there's a piece of information that anything in the last pick or cut off is too modern to judge you're talking about history specifically yeah it's kind of like our conversation we had about satire right satire was something that was really much really of the moment and at some point it just becomes like a cultural artifact so like uh swift's uh a modest proposal um is now more of a cultural artifact about how people felt about the irish how the british felt about the irish in that time um but it doesn't like it doesn't really have much use nowadays in terms of it's not classic we don't read this because it gives us universal truth it's now this artifact that tells us about attitudes um but you know so like is will the daily show be classical in a hundred years or you listen to or known yeah um so i feel like you need to have a certain amount a long enough period of time passed for something to have fallen out of favor uh or fashion so that we can can actually assess it on its own merits that's a great point so we'll we'll and i suppose we'll be talking about in a hundred years only as uh giving a glimpse into the attitudes of that time period or as an example yeah yes so i i think it depends on what can you restate your question one more time does age give us any insight into the validity of an idea or a work so i think those two things are very different questions the validity of an idea or a work the validity of an idea can be evaluated based on basic logic right is an idea valid is a logic question it's a philosophy question um and we can evaluate those now the validity of a work well a work can't necessarily be valid a work can be valuable right or impressions of the value it is 80% of the insight into the value of an idea or a work oh that's a that's a different thing so the the value of a work again the modest proposal was probably incredibly valuable for its time it is less valuable as a work now because it speaks to a specific problem that passed away rather than a central problem of man um when we talked about what makes a classical work it was that it has to address some of the big ideas and so so i would say that the further a work worms to the core of man the more saying power it will have and the more valuable it will be over time but that isn't to say there are some things that are incredibly valuable now right there are works that might be culturally valuable in the moment and absolutely necessary but will not be valuable a hundred years from now where certain works will be this is great but let's take it probabilistically so if if if the two works being put up against each other the only thing you know about them is that one of them is a work from 1500 years ago that you know we still have access to versus a work that came out last week so my question is has the work been popular for the last 150 years we still have a copy of it is all you know i would say that um it depends on the content of the work if the content is scientific i would say likely the newer work is more valuable um if the work is and not necessarily valuable it depends on who it's valuable to as a scientist the newer work obviously but as a historian the older work um i'm wondering so in so over the last summer or the summer before one of the books i read was the structure of scientific revolutions which is a great book and in the book he talked to some and so part of what he's talking about is how science develops over time this is what you're getting at age so a belief i think is held in the 17th century i'm probably wrong on that is that there was a a particle in matter that there was a thing i forget the name of it but there's like a thing that was in stuff that let it burn so like it wasn't fire there's like an actual uh molecule molecule in there that allowed it to burn and it wasn't like the oxygens in it that's being let off to have that burn but like there's a separate thing other than an element that was in wood or paper whatever that allowed it to burn so that was wrong like that thing doesn't exist that they thought was there but it's still part of the history of science is that should we does that not matter do we not do the mistakes of science not matter to us understanding science today so again i think the value depends on who's looking right is it historical is it for if it's a scientist that's trying to learn about current states of matter that work is almost utterly useless because there's no utilitarian you can't get the answer you're looking for right like right but for a historian the answer he's looking for is what did they believe and that is the only way can get his answer is looking there yes this is so interesting because you this has to then back to the individual of does the individual get a value from that work i'm wondering if there's like a value inherent to the work itself and maybe our answer can be we can't answer that because it depends on the person that would surprise me that you would i don't know so i mean it seems like we are getting too confused the question isn't about the individual the question is what do you mean by definition of value value to whom value to what value for what right if you're talking about what is the value of an idea if we are measuring value by its application to a number of individuals right it will affect the most individuals then that is one evaluation of value there might be a cross-section of 200,000 people that doesn't make any difference to but if the question is can this inform someone who then informs someone else who then makes some big decision right that's true like so it depends on what exactly you are asking yes let me let me take another direction so the question is does age have anything to do with the work so if we could we just erase the published date on all works and then judge them on their own merits is that an okay way to approach literature maybe that's one way or works or ideas but then you run the risk of obliterating the context of things if i read if i read something that claims there's an element an extra element in matter that makes things burn if it's written by a modern scientist that man is a quack if it's written by an ancient scientist who is trying to make sense of the world he may be the originator of many great ideas and it will help to inform the process by which like help to inform how we understand things now and maybe future discovery right the value of something also isn't just derived of one conclusion you can get from it so let's take the example of the guy who has the wrong conclusion about what makes matter burn if he comes to that conclusion and the reason why he came to that what we know is a wrong conclusion is because he doesn't have the right kinds of modern instruments to detect things but his methodology like he came to the conclusion the conclusion and it is a logical conclusion to reach based on this methodology that he did the tools at the time the scientific method that he's applying and we can look at that rigor and see his sort of sequence of thought and then he gets to like a technological gap and then makes some sort of inference oh then therefore there must be some kind of thing i can't see that's causing this to burn um there's something really valuable in going and watching somebody really ascribe to a method and then make conclusions and then also people look back and say okay well he was wrong because he was wrong for reasons why he doesn't even know why he was wrong at the time and then we can say to ourselves like oh dang what are we doing and what conclusions are we what sort of gaps in knowledge or technological abilities are we jumping and saying therefore the universe is x and we don't even know what we don't even know just like how he didn't even know what he didn't even know and so in that sense there's a value but it's almost like a secondary or tertiary value apart from what he apart so the conclusion he gave you're rejecting but you're getting this other value by reading it because of contextualizing it to his time and your time and then thinking about future time i think that even more than that his the the gap that he makes the mistake that he makes in his conclusion if it has informed a series of conclusions from other scientists all the way down to a current belief and we can say wow this current belief is working on an assumption that comes from a far previous assumption that we know now to be wrong it can inform some new discovery in the way that if we look at current philosophy and if we have no idea where that came from not the problem but if i can look back three philosophies three worldviews back and say okay it's coming from this philosopher who was clearly wrong about this one specific thing and i can see that thread worm its way all the way down to modern philosophy that's helpful just as say relativism right everyone feels like relativism is a brand new wonderful thing it's not it was proffered around what 400 by a guy and again around 1200 and again around 1600 and every time it has been summarily dismissed by every other philosopher because it's self-defeating so if i know that then next time somebody says you know what's true for you is true for you and what's true for me is true for me i can say no it isn't exactly we've done this yeah we've done this And that's just an ignorance of history to not know that, to think that you're totally unique. But to claim that the value in a work is just historical information, again, is one type of value, whereas a work that speaks to the inner core of man is another type, versus a work that is rare and should be read for its rareness is another type.

I mean, we have to define what sort of value we're looking for. Sure, that's fine. I'm just saying that, I guess, that, I mean, value means it's worth the paper it's printed on. Let's at least take that.

So even if conclusions are wrong in the sphere of science, is it still worth knowing that history? And the way Graham's talking about it is the way I think about that also. And it's largely the point of Kuhn's book is that most of our breakthroughs in science come as we are able to test things more, as we have instruments that allow us to measure things better. That's when we have our next level of breakthrough.

And so, AJ, to that, we don't know the ways that we're wrong right now, but we can look at the way people were wrong in the past, and that might give us some insight into how we're wrong right now. We're not thinking through things right now. Or we can look back and say, holy crap, that guy was a lot closer than he realized, and then his contemporaries, and then the next 50 years after him realized, everyone thought he was a quack, but turns out, actually, he was really on to something. I think, yeah, for sure, we see that in math.

You see that in, I was reading Nassim Talib's Black Swan, and that's a lot of conclusions that he reaches about probability and about sort of our fundamental inability to predict things, is there was a lot of people who were talking about this in the 19th century that contemporaries thought were wacky because it was so in vogue in the 19th century to think about a scientifically deterministic world, and that was where all the research dollars went, and that's where a lot of people's careers were made, that we look at them as the bright lights of that time, when now we can maybe reconceptualize that and realize that the luminaries of that time were actually not so bright, and the people that were considered, you know, these wacky groups with, you know, very lackluster careers and nowhere universities actually were on to something. Let me, just two thoughts on that. Does the age of the thing give us some insight into, does the age of the thing tell us something about that work? Maybe that's, I keep changing my question.

I don't mean to be cagey with it and jumping around. You're young. Yes, sorry. Because I'm young, I'm better.

But I'm in the now. So does the age of the work tell us anything about the work itself? It's old. Yes, it tells you that for sure.

Let's tell you more than that. It's old. So a piece of that would be to say that we don't have all work that have been created ever. Yes.

There were certain works that were passed on from generation to generation to generation to which monks said, yeah, we should probably write this down, and those things have made it to us. So in that respect, you're getting a really important tension of, we shouldn't say all old things are good, because they're not. I've heard a lot of really bad old things. And sometimes the value in them is just to understand how things were at the time.

But a thing that has been in publication essentially forever, bears are looking at and understanding why it's been around for that long. And there's a certain type of value in that. If people have chosen to manually write that for hundreds of years and then make sure that the next generation would have it, there's something in that that we should at least look at and understand, just as a first thought. Age can give us some indication of the value of the thing.

If this is a grandier point, if it was pre-printing press, then there's probably some value, something that was worthy of being passed on to next generation. There was this bottleneck of history where, like you're talking about the monks, had to make these sort of qualitative decisions. And that's what we have now, like Aristotle, as opposed to some other unknown philosopher that we'll never read. Even though there could have been, no, Aristotle's my boy, but could there have been someone else who's actually smarter than Aristotle and corrected all of his thoughts and was actually better than him?

Maybe. But if you had written anything down, people would have been trying to preserve that for a long time also. I mean, even in scripture we have Paul talking about how awesome Apollos is. It's like hot dang Apollos' letters are fire.

And how many of those? And we've got none of them. As Christians we also believe that there is a divine hand in our canon. That it's not God spoke the words to one man, and he wrote them down, and we can't change any commas.

Christian scripture is very different than that kind of, that's sort of more of an associated with Islam. But we also believe that the canon that we have in the church is divinely guided. But I only think, only the wacky classicists would think that the Western canon is divinely guided. I don't think we have that.

So I think there's a few things to say. I think the age of a work is not necessarily exactly what you're addressing, but the intention of people to preserve that work and its popularity, which can tell me something about the work. If thousands of generations of men have preserved a work, that is different than saying it's simply old. If I find one copy of a thing that's been buried in some dude's basement in Afghanistan for 300 years, that does not necessarily tell me that work is fantastic.

I will also point to several accidents of history, where Gilgamesh was incredibly valuable for thousands of years, and we found copies all the way out in Egypt, and it was spread everywhere, and then people were destroyed. The library at Alexandria, or Acerbanepal's library was lost, and so was that work until we refound it. As with the iconoclasts, right? They came and tried to destroy a whole bunch of art, and that would have meant that one generation of men can destroy something thousands of other generations, not thousands, but other generations have tried to preserve since the beginning.

So sometimes the preservation of a work can be an accident, or simply a function of a printing press, rather than... Oh, interesting. Yes, I think it's called a confounding variable when you have multiple things happening at the same time. So I do agree with you that it's that intention of keeping it, but depending on age, those two are tied together.

Yes, so sometimes the age of something can imply that men have been preserving it, which is definitely a thing. But I think how well it is preserved can also tell us that. We have more copies of the Bible than anything. We have a few copies of, I think, Plato.

We have only one copy of Beowulf, which means that it may not have been as preserved as the others. The other thing I'll say, the other value of old works, this comes from C.S. Lewis, I don't know if we've ever read this on here before, but the other great value of old books is this. So I looked it up.

Sorry, guys, I want to know. Heist here, hijack. Every age has its own outlook. And didn't I promise just last podcast I was going to read the whole thing?

Oh, this isn't the whole thing. Even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of ages past than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal, which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be.

But in fact, they were all the time secretly united. United with each other and against earlier and later ages by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the 20th century, the blindness about which posterity will ask, but how could they have thought that, lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G.

Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it and weaken our guard against it if we read only modern books. Where they are true, they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false, they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there's any magic about the past. People were no cleverer than they are now. They made as many mistakes as we, but not the same mistakes.

I want to get to this last sentence here. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing, and their own errors now open and palpable will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. And here's the kicker.

To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them. So not to say old books are better, they are simply of a different age and give us a new perspective. So yes, I think there's value in preservation, and can tell us that it's spoken to several generations of men, but I think there's also value in reading things that are not from our own period. And if I can read books in the future, awesome, but I can't, so I have to read old books.

Yeah, I mean, we've definitely talked about cultural blind spots on the podcast before, and how those old books can give us fresh insights into the blind spots that we have in our own present culture. Yeah, so a good argument for why you do read and preserve these old things. Are you telling me I'm dredging up the past? Give us some indication of the value, validity, whatever of a work is, a thing called the Lindy effect.

Mr. Donaldson, if you read about this in the same lab. Isn't that a dance to Lindy? Yeah, isn't that a thing?

Only if they're talking? Yeah, it sounds familiar. The Lindy effect is named after this deli in New York where Broadway people are comedians or something, went to go and talk, so it's like where the who's who of New York entertainment went. Anyway, Lindy effect is this idea that the longer a thing has been in existence, the longer a thing has been watched, read, viewed, whatever, the longer it is likely to be in the future.

So it's a form of a power law, wherein things that are popular, things that are read, will continue to be read. And a way of understanding how long it's going to extend into the future is how long it has extended from its origin to today. So a way of understanding what age tells us is, if the Odyssey has been read for... How long has the Odyssey been read?

It was written down around the year 800? ADC? It's almost 3,000 years? So if it's been read for 3,000 years, there's a likelihood of being read for another 3,000 years.

So the longer a thing exists, the longer it is likely to extend into the future. To which, I hope you're thinking, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, because a thing that existed yesterday will extend one day, and then every day it extends it, is likely to extend further and further. No, I don't think that's that. There are a lot of books I think we read simply because they are classics, not because they should be classics.

Oh, interesting. But regardless of their quality, they'll still be read because we call them classics. Yeah. Haven't you ever read a book that someone has called a classic and you're like, that's really not that good?

And part of me says, I'm not ready for it. Catcher in the Rye. Flip and hate that book. My wife loves that book.

In the same way that Great Expectations was a book I hated when I first read it. It was hugely influential to me when I read it two years ago, because it just captured a thing I was going through. Holden Coughlin's such a little twit. I still think...

Personally, I think Jane Eyre isn't all it's going to be. So when a person is born in the United States, they have a life expectancy of 78.69 years. That's me Googling as the first result. So about 79 years, that's the life expectancy.

Okay, guys, when a person reaches the age of 70, is their life expectancy a mere nine years more? No. Because why? Yeah, because there's all sorts of effects, like how healthy they are, how sick they are.

Yeah, the fact that they survive to the age of 70 is an indication of the health of that person. So when we say life expectancy at birth to 79 years, that's taking into account... The fact that all sorts of people die real early. Die younger than 79 years old.

So every subsequent generation of men that reads a book, it means that the book speaks to one more generation of men, which means that it has something to say. So is it more likely that the seven-year-old is actually going to live past 79? Yeah, this is as of 20, again, the first Google search. If you live to the age of 70, your expected life expectancy is 85.3.

But if you make it 85.3, your life expectancy moves out and out and out every year that you grow older. There's information as to how old you will be based on how old you have needed to be. It's an indication of your health. So in the same way, that's what the Lindy effect is capturing.

You'll never die. Every year I live, I'll be like, that's 10 more years, everybody. Which is a wonderful way, wonderful optimistic way to live. I understand math.

Unfortunately, the Lindy effect is limited to non-perishable things. So ideas or technology or things. But as a metaphor, it's helpful to think of life as we live longer than some information about the health of the person. Not to say you will live until 85 because the whole point is that people die before then if you're 70.

But you're more likely to live longer the longer you live. There's information captured in the age of a work that if it lasts for 3,000 years, it is likely to last many years in the future. If your children, your grandchildren, whatever, are going to read this book, it's worthwhile for you to spend some time with that work if it's going to be around for that long. Is that helpful?

Way of phrasing that? Yes. So yeah, we are, there are two other points here that aren't as helpful ones. We can figure out the popular ones very easily.

We can usually figure out the good ones, but to figure out the ones that are going to last 100 years in the future is essentially a guessing game. Yeah, I mean, this is, I think you see this most in music, right? Who knows what is going to be the popular, like on KOTX, which is a local radio station, the guy was reading what were the number one hits in America in like the 60s and 70s, and there was a span of, like throughout the months too, it was a long list, and there was so many songs I'd never even heard of. And I'm a big fan of, you know, classic music, so classic rock.

So yeah, you never can tell what is truly great in the moment, which kind of comes back to my point of, you kind of need that 100-year mark to be able to look back and say, oh, like the poems of, you know, this World War I veteran or the works of this person talking about the war are way better than, or actually do have this sort of staying power, because you never really know. Like, is Childish Gambino the hotness? Is he going to last forever, Hanberg? Who knows?

We have no way of knowing. Childish Gambino is perishable. I don't know. And so then the final one for us to consider, but not, is whether classical education slash classical studies is institutional snobbery.

And we kind of answered this at the very beginning. The intention is not. Of course it's possible for people to be snobbs who follow the classics in the same way that it's possible to be snobbish about new things. So there's a tension on both sides that it's all how you do it.

Yes, so there's a value. What we are attempting to do in classical education is not to say that only the old things were ever good, but there's a value to them that's worth understanding. And 2018, Texas is not going to encourage you to read these things. Like being in an environment like Veritas will encourage you to read these great books, which can be challenging for high schoolers and for adults.

There's value to them. It is not snobbery. It is, we've used this phrase before, it is, I always get the wrong name, it's the feast. We offer them a feast here at the school.

The idea that we offer our feast, but there are other things that are tasty. They got to bring the spork. Yeah, as we always say on classical stuff. That's not true either.

The teachers should give them the skills to eat the food, digest the literature. We don't educate the students. We offer them an education. Always good.

All right, that's everything I got. So we are not... So we offer them to the gods. Wait, what?

That's our graduation. Human sacrifice, which is a great end of the podcast. Are we still recording? Oh, no, it's not a real thing.

But this has been Classical Stuff. Thank you for listening. If you have things to tweet at us, tweet at us at at the Twitter page, you can email us at classicalstuff at veritasacademy.net. You can find us at classicalstuff.net to look at pictures of past episodes and our smiling faces and tiny little bios of written in haste many moons ago.

We thank you for listening, and this is AJ, Thomas, and Graham signing off, and Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Have a good moment. Bye.