Welcome back to the new thing. I'm David Barr with me as always. It's my sometimes friend Alex Preu. How are you doing, Alex?
I'm doing well, David. And I'm well and Greg McBrayer. How are you Greg doing? Great David coming to you live from Agile, Ohio, where I'm currently getting a four to seven inches of snow.
That's interesting. And I'm happy for you. Yeah. We have a guest on our program.
We have a guest. We have a guest. This doesn't reflect on the case. He doesn't know what he's in for.
But we like to research our guests and looking into this guest. Today, I found a student review. Can I share it with you guys? So I can't wait to see this.
OK. And this is on the website, Rate My Professors. You can give a professor a chili for if they're good looking or not. Greg sometimes gets these chilies when his beer isn't down to the floor.
But anyway, the review reads, I really did the quality of this was one. And the difficulty of the class was four. And the student writes, I really didn't like this class. He is awful.
His opinions are not good. He's also extremely hard as a professor. I definitely cried about this class. He is hot, though, which is good, I guess.
But honestly, not hot enough to act the way he does. Yes, that are a guest. We have a guest, man, as you can't do that. That our guest was Flag Taylor the fourth from Skidmark College.
Then you are correct, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. And I actually have that very review laminated and I put it on my office door. Oh, really?
OK. Yeah, it's so funny. It was just like it's the first one also. So more seriously, Flag has a PhD in Master's in political science from Fordham, a BA from Kenyon College, his specialties in the history of political thought and American government, especially the question of executive power.
He's the co-author of the contested removal power of 1789 to 2010, author of numerous articles and the editor of the Great Lie, classic and recent appraisals of ideology and totalitarianism and the long night of the watch and essays by Baselav Abenda, 1977 to 1989. So welcome, Flag. Did I miss anything in your bio? I know that you have an interesting, interesting background.
No, that's good enough. I wrote my dissertation on monoskew and occasionally right on French liberal thought. But at some point, my career started studying totalitarianism and communism and that avenue of research has kind of occupied me for the most part. But it sounds like this was studies related to pedagogy, judging by your student evaluations.
That's right. That's right. So we often, before we start discussing the reading and reading, you selected by Walker Percy for the episode today, we like to ask our guests kind of a background of their intellectual journey, how they not simply how they arrive to their current point as a professor in political science or philosophy department, but what started them, what sparked their interest in political philosophy or the great books? It was at Kenyon College.
I took a class with a professor now, now, unfortunately, passed away Harry Chlor, classical political thought. And we read the Republic and Aristotle, and I think maybe a little Aquinas. And just the depth of his thinking, he was not a particularly good classroom teacher. He'd be, I think he just more or less lectured and took questions.
But just to sort of see someone thinking at the level that he was thinking while he was teaching, inspired me to read, read the Republic seriously and try to think about the questions it raised. And then I took more courses with other great, wonderful professors at Kenyon, including Fred Bauman and Pam Jensen, and particularly a couple of seminars with the great Pam Jensen, one on Lock and one on WU. So these are these one night a week seminars that went on for three hours. And those just really drove home the point that it was possible to sit with sit with the text for a course of a whole semester and just be charmed by it and be charmed by the teaching and being able to learn from my fellow students and just sitting in those seminar rooms that Kenyon really made me think that I might want to do this for the rest of my life.
That's great. And then at Fordham, were you with Mary Nichols? Or? That's right.
Yeah. I was really lucky at Fordham. Mary and David Nichols were both there. They were kind of the leaders of the graduate program as far as the political philosophy was concerned.
But I was also lucky enough to have a few classes with Michael Zuckert. This was sort of between his tenure at Carlton College in Minnesota before he moved to Notre Dame. He did some teaching at Fordham. So I think it was like a golden era of Fordham.
And then I had a bunch of classes with a great Michael Davis who I know Alex taught with and learned a ton from him too. So yeah, I've been really lucky in my professors. Yeah, that's a kind of that was a great program. I've had a few people from there, but people don't often talk about it.
But that's kind of like an all-star. That era. Yeah. It's kind of funny how these graduate schools will have good eras.
And then it's like the kind of fall asleep, these universities. But today we're reading an essay by Walter. Yeah, I want to ask a question about Kenyon versus the professor. Did you so Kenyon is obviously a really good liberal arts college.
Did you have any idea that you were interested in political theory? Was it completely by chance? How did you pick a school like Kenyon? I mean, did you have some big?
Yeah, really completely by chance. I thought I wanted to study to become a doctor. So I was thinking I was entering to do the pre-med program. But I also knew that I liked writing and reading and wanted a broad education kind of supplement the specialization.
And I think a counselor just suggested that Kenyon was a good liberal arts college. I think I applied to Middlebury and Bucknell and a few others. But as far as the political science goes, that was completely accidental. I took a class in American foreign policy.
I think my sophomore year and that just made me think, oh, I like politics. And then that led me to Harry Chlor's ancient class. So it's pretty accidental. Right.
So so yeah, so today we're reading this essay. It's called The Loss of the Creature by Walker Percy. It's only 13 page essays of our essay. If our listeners want to go read it, where can people find this essay black?
It's in a collection of his essays that was published in 1975 called The Message in the Bottle. But it's a very, very elusive title, isn't it? It was a subtitle because I think that helps elucidate it a bit. The subtitle is how queer man is, how queer languages and what one has to do with the other.
Yeah. So yeah, let's get into it. I think we do. No, no, no.
You got it all backwards. Alex, we can't get into it without knowing who Walker Percy is. Plagai, we saw he was a novelist or short story writer. I'd never read.
He's one of these guys, like Southern writers. There's a whole gaggle of them that I keep meaning to look up and read. And I feel like I'm so behind. But he tells just a little bit about who Percy was.
He's like, right? To describe him almost as a novelist or for sure. Yeah, he's the author of six six novels, two of his novels, one, The National Book Award. The first one was called the movie goer was published in 1961.
That one, The National Book Award. So after that, he was very prominent, very famous and much sought after. But he didn't, you know, he was born in 1916. So that was pretty late in his life and he started writing novels, at least for some people and died in 1990.
And as you said, David, he was born in Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, friends with Shelby Foot, who most people know from the civil Ken Burns Civil War. Yes. Yeah. The three volume history, the Civil War, but he was also he was also a novelist.
So so Percy and Shelby Foot had an interest in writing very early. They went to University in North Carolina together. Did Percy do something with the Swani review or? He probably I wouldn't be surprised if he published there.
His his uncle Will, who is a famous writer, William Allen, Santa Percy wrote a very famous autobiography called Lantern's on the Levy. He raised Walker. That's right. He was 14, I think.
So Walker Percy's father shot himself when Walker was 10. And then his mother had a car accident that he thinks was also, which some people think was a suicide and when he was 13. So he was raised by this, this uncle Will, who is a World War I veteran, wrote poetry in Latin and English at a Harvard law degree, you know, just took it upon himself to raise Walker and his brothers, you know, to be cultured, literary, southern, southern gentlemen. Was he also a late Catholic conflict or?
Yeah. He converted to Catholicism, I think in 47, 48, something, something around there. But he studied at UNC, I think he was a chemistry major, then went on to to Columbia to their medical school. And when he was when he was doing his residency, I think at Bellevue Hospital, he contracted tuberculosis and went to a sanatorium up near me, actually on Saranak Lake in the Adirondacks.
And that I think is where he had this kind of reevaluation of his life, knew that he didn't want to be a doctor anymore, started reading Heidegger and Kierkegaard and the Gustin Dostevsky and really just had a complete change in the direction of his his career. And that's when he started in the mid 50s is when he started publishing in, I guess some of them were prominent, but lots of sort of obscure philosophical scientific journals. This essay was published. I couldn't find the exact citation, but it was published sometime in the 50s and one of these obscure journals, I think 55.
And that kind of gave him a taste, I think, for philosophical reflection, thinking that he could write in this way. And that eventually decided on becoming novelist in the early 60s and cranked out novels pretty regularly until until his death in 1990. This interesting is not all novelists can make the cry. I mean, he started with these essays first and then you said started writing novels.
Yeah. Yeah, but it's interesting. Uh, these hybrid creatures don't, they don't always inability to write good fiction, good literature and essays of philosophy or essays with any kind of philosophic profundity. They don't always exist in the same person in an easy way.
But I was impressed with kind of his philosophic acumen in, so what are we reading today? I'm jumping the gun. So we're reading on an essay called The Loss of the Creature and the book in Flagle Appreciate This is called, you don't know how long I've been waiting for that. Yeah, that's an old song that only been waiting, Greg would recognize.
Yeah. On the height of your connection, I was struck how there was a lot of similarity with how to go talk of authenticity, but it didn't feel like it was trying too hard to be part of a tradition or something like that. And so it did feel it had a, I liked that quality that I felt like I was reading a philosophic reflection that was not necessarily, it feels like it works, even though it's not, you know, trying to build off of something or tea. And it does have a vocabulary that shows, I think, a sensitivity to larger.
And the way he tells the story, I mean, that's, no, that's a good point. We haven't even just, we haven't even described what's in, we'll let flag describe what's in general overview of the essay. But as far as the tone, Alex, you're absolutely right. Aside from the, like the philosophic qualities, he has these forays where he talks about, you know, people that visit the Grand Canyon and there's like a human, a human touch, it's almost like you're reading a short story.
It's interesting. Yeah. So what's it about? Yeah, what's the general overview?
Yeah. So it's called loss of the creature. I use it in a couple of my intro classes to get the students thinking deeply about their own education and how hard it is to sort of access, I don't know, normal things in the world, how lots of their, how they see the world, their dispositions toward things in the world is shaped by theory and social science and all of that kind of clouds their judgment and being able to see the world for what it is. And it's not obvious to them that this happens.
And so I use it to kind of prod them to think about their own education. And so what Percy does in the essay is to walk you through a couple of examples. David mentioned the first one, which is the tourist at the Grand Canyon. Second example is the example of a couple who goes to Mexico to try to access something authentic and genuine about the native population in Mexico.
They see a corn dance that some tribe is engaged in. And then the third example is the example of a student, either one who is studying science, a kind of biology class, trying to understand the physiology of a dogfish or someone at, who's in an English class trying to figure out a Shakespeare sonnet. And in what unifies all these cases, according to Percy, is that there's kind of a loss of sovereignty and that people are taught to see the thing before them in terms of some theory. And therefore they miss what is really what is really before them.
And so we can maybe be useful to kind of dig into one or two or three of these examples. I don't know how you guys want to. I just say quickly, I mean, this essay really hit home. It'll hit anybody that's the sick of kind of the bits and bytes that one is inundated with every day by like Madison Avenue, advertisers or just it's like the search of authenticity or everything is packaged as kind of like the authentic experience.
And this essay, there's a huge critique of that. And I think the real power of what Percy is doing is he's trying to teach you how to look afresh at old things or things that one might take for granted. And I think if you really inculcate his message, it will help you also strip away what a lot of advertisers in the modern world are trying to do to one's sensibilities. But even beyond advertising, he's talking about education.
He's talking about just trying to understand a thing as a specimen. Like anytime you approach it in a, even a scientific way, he's talking about technology. I mean, I think it goes even wider. You're right about the average.
I think it goes even wider. It's almost ubiquitous social phenomena. It seems like it's almost necessary to any kind of sociology, right? That you're going to get this kind of problem.
Can we just talk about the first example? I maybe you guys have had this experience. I know I have. I mean, I've been to the Grand Canyon, Greg.
I have actually. And what happened? What happened? That's what I was one of the first humans to see the Grand Canyon.
That's what I was trying to do. There's an old Flintstone. That's what I was saying. There's a one of the first one from Europe.
Anyway, so there's a Flintstone. So we're French Flintstone goes to see the Grand Canyon, but it's like so long. It's just like a little river. No, like they say it's going to be big one day.
So maybe that was Greg. It was a based on a true story. Are you guys finished? Yeah, that took a lot of courage.
You guys with your little jokes. Go ahead. Oh, yeah, two funniest guys on the team. Anyway, what I was going to say is I was very sympathetic to this first story for no reason.
I have been to the Grand Canyon and I was, I suppose I was going to say, it's obviously beautiful. It's breathating, it's stunning. But there are other canyons I visited when I used to live out West that stick more out of my mind because they weren't as curated. Like Walker Percy talks about like I did the, I think it's all the black Canyon, the Gunnison and I think what the Canyon in Utah was that I went, but we went white, white rafting in the green river.
And in both of those cases, it seems more like what I was striving for because there wasn't a tour guide, there wasn't a fence. Yeah, there wasn't a very like walk on this path and look at this. And so in both those cases, it was still very much curated. It was just less visible and less obvious.
And so I think he's right that one of the things we really are longing for is a kind of authentic experience. I went to Cambodia a few years ago and I saw anchor watt, which is this really beautiful, it's the biggest apparently religious building in the world. But there were so many people, it was hard to sort of take it. It was hard to see it for what it was.
And so we tried to get up the guy I was traveling with. We tried to get up really early and go before anybody would be there or, you know, we tried to find out where there weren't people. You were able to circumvent all the crowds by contacting your old friends in the camera Rouge regime, right? And they got you good.
Didn't they give you all the best seats in the house? Listen, Flag and I are both vehemently opposed to all things red. And now you are. I don't think I'm going to say it.
No, but I'm not saying correct. I guess I don't know if anything is further down. I was just thinking this struck me as right. I mean, and it made me sad momentarily.
I thought there's nothing in this world that I will ever be able to see that won't be curated in this way. But that's not true. But I thought in the essay he's you can still capture that feeling of first discovery, even in the woods of one's backyard. Doesn't he say something like that?
Like you can still capture these. Fair enough. One question I had on this is he made it sound like there is, and maybe I'm a mystery, but he made it sound like there is certainly one authentic experience that you can I was wondering, is there a person? Right.
The first person to. Yeah. So he mentions the guy who discovered the Grand Canyon, but did he not look at it through some lens? Perhaps?
How do we know exactly what he went through? You know, I mean, somebody comes across the Grand Canyon and you think, oh, this is great. You know, I'll bring news to this home. I'll get a promotion, you know, to like chief travel or whatever, whatever it works.
But you know, you know, you don't never, I just wonder, is there one authentic experience? Are there many authentic experiences? What does it mean to how do you know also whether an experience is authentic? Or it's got because I assume that one of the problems with tourism is that it feels authentic, but it's not right for some reason.
And it's kind of taken symbolically, maybe flacking jump on here. I mean, he's a guest and he's just like, send their, you know, he's letting his digger. Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing he says, I guess the one way that he suggests to distinguish what I would suggest sort of authentic versus inauthentic is he they'll use the phrase that uses this as page 47.
You want to to see the sovereign discovery of the thing before you, right? But not measure it according to some symbolic complex that you've built up in your head before coming to the thing before you. And so I suppose, Alex, you're right, that it's not only the question of if there's any, if there if you're the first person to see the grain, it's not like there's one authentic discovery and then everyone else is screwed. But I think it's to what extent is the person doing the discovery evaluating things according to some plan or according to some design by the supposed experts in Grand Canyon beauty, right?
Comparing what they see to, you know, what they've been told they should appreciate. Or are they stumbling upon something and trying to see it with their own eyes, you know, and decide for themselves to what to extend its beautiful or whatever. So I guess that would be one way I would think about it. Just a small point.
I don't want to derail our conversation, but I think that sometimes, look, I think this is a piece that anyone could could read and get something out of. I think it sort of speaks to anybody who's listening as far as we're all modern people and we all I think we've all had experiences like this, like seeing something that seems spontaneous, like a strange, a harvest dance or seeing the Grand Canyon or some other natural phenomenon for the first time. So or if you dissected fish in high school or something like this, this seems a very accessible way into some serious questions. I guess that's all I'm trying to add there.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's why it usually works pretty well with students. I mean, they usually Greg talk about their own experiences as frustrated tourists, not seeing what they had hoped they would see when they go to X city, right? Yeah. The other obvious example that he brings up that I think I would be surprised if if is almost not universal is going to see some famous painting in a museum.
I mean, has anyone ever been sort of blown away by a piece of art in a museum? Seems like the museum is sort of designed to crush any instinct towards beauty, at least in my experience, you know, wander through and sometimes you're given a headset that tells you the, you know, the dates of the painter and, you know, those all these people pushing you and you know, you're supposed to think it's awesome and beautiful, but it's sort of not obvious to why. And, you know, so it's that I think is maybe an even more obvious example of what Percy is talking about. I'll tell you a good example of this, at least for me.
Percy mentions the fact that you can access in the case of the Grand Canyon, right? You could one way to overcome the problem would be to kind of follow a tour along, but with the goal of kind of watching the tour watch the grant. Yes. Yeah.
My example of that would be there's a famous, I don't remember the name of it, but there's a famous serat painting in the Art Institute of Chicago. So he's the pointillist painter, right? So I think it's Sunday in the park. I don't remember the name of painting.
But it's in the Chicago. I think it was Saturday in the park. I think it was the Fourth of July. Want to sing that?
Yeah, I do, but I won't. Sorry. Hey, flag. It's in the painting of the Arthur's.
Berris Bueller's Day off. You know this painting in the movie? Of course. Yes, of course.
Yeah. So you see the painting in the movie and then you actually see it because you're looking up and so that's another example of what your sort of your piggybacking on the the movie director's access to the painting and not being distracted by the museum and all this, right? Yeah. I mean, for all I apologize for Craig's conduct.
I mean, you think you have a bit more respect for, I think this is one of Strauss's favorite American philosophers, but you think you'd have a little bit more respect for him, but that's OK. Flag Walker Walker. Walker Percy. You know, I mean, Strauss liked him.
You should like him, right? Is that true? Yeah. I mean, he wrote that book, Persecution and the Art of Writing.
But hey, Flax. So anyway, man, I was thinking about we use. That was the line was he waiting for the long. That was the only episode and that's not to be the worst joke.
Yeah, terrible. I read between the lines, but no, I have the exact I know exactly what you're talking about. I mean, I always call the Louvre, the biggest towards trap in Paris because you walk in there, you want to go all this great art and it is just the wrongs of people. You can't think you guys.
So I was once there and I just went off into a like a small side. It was like 16th century, like Spanish and Portuguese miniatures, just these like tiny paintings and nobody gave a damn about it. So there's nobody in there. It's like this little alcove.
I just went in there and I enjoyed it. It was one of my most pleasant experiences because I was, you know, able to go off and be in track a little bit and actually enjoy something and peace. So I think this is incredibly relatable. I had a similar experience at the, I think it's also at the Art of Institute, like they have those mini houses.
Do you know what I'm talking about? The mini rents or not a mini-earth. When I'm talking about it, it's somebody makes like miniature homes. Maybe it was just a one time exhibit.
But you chug ayahuasca and you just totally, you know, get out of your head. And it's really a unique experience. Or Greg, what your people do is you just drink moonshine. That's right, actually.
Look at the trees. Yeah. At some point I'll plug that my family is actually reviving the family distillery. That's not a joke.
But what I was going to say is a couple things. When I first off, Alex has a home in Paris. So not all of us have time to go back to the Louvre. It's not a home.
It's a piederter. Come on. Oh, excuse me. Yes.
Anyway, I was just going to agree with like I took some students Israel couple years ago and it was a highly curated trip. I mean, every step was perfectly coordinated and orchestrated. And I've been once previously and just the two experiences just don't compare it all. But I want to switch gears just a little bit and say, you know, you said you teach the students and I thought you're going to take this in the direction and maybe this is where you would intended to go that students think that their education is curated in the same way.
I can remember my frustration and most of my college classes until by accident, I happened upon a different one, which we can talk about that just a moment. Most of my college classes were so highly curated. Everything we approached was through a lens or through a theory and nothing was approaching the text directly. Everything was sort of like, well, here's a Marxist understanding of Frankenstein or here's a feminist interpretation of the gospel according to John or everything was.
Here's how astral scene reads the Republic. You know, like that, those jerks. Yeah. Well, I was actually going to contrast him as far as that was my, I mean, I want to jump ahead and I want to step on his toes.
But flags that he accidentally happened upon one of these classes with a Strouse and professor and so did I. And it really was refreshing. I mean, you know, of course these professors have their theories and they have things worked out. But what was remarkably refreshing to me was unlike any other class, we tried to look directly at the book.
So the third example that Percy gives up trying to understand a son and we're trying to dissect a fish. Like every other class I had, well, here's what son is alike. And so here's what the son is about. Whereas the first time I happened to a class with Robert Bartlett, actually, it was, okay, open up to page one, start reading from the top.
There was no introduction, no sort of theory about what was going on. It was just read aloud and it was the best attempt I saw to try and bring me in direct contact with a phenomenon as opposed to through an intermediary. And that's what I found so attractive about it. And that's why I try to teach that way.
I try to imitate that matter of teaching. And it's because I do believe that there is this yearning like the guy that goes to the Grand Canyon or the couple that's in Mexico for a holiday. Anyway. Yeah, I think that's right.
They, I mean, what I ask them usually about novels they've read in high school and how they've approached them. And they usually will explain that how literature is taught is, you might call it like a technical approach. So let's talk about imagery in X novel, right? And they'll, they'll say, okay, what, what do all the water images in X book mean?
And it's a hunting exposition for, you know, water images and, you know, explain how many of them there are, right? And so, you know, that's, that's one or, or, or let's, let's explore how X novel is reflective of its time, right? It's the same thing. So you're losing access to why the sonnet, you know, might be, might be interesting to read for its own sake.
Um, and then I think, I'll go ahead. I just went just before you move because you're getting some or something. Whereas the difference is instead of being told, look for water and tell me what it means, it's different from when you read a book and you realize, huh, water seems to be a theme. That's interesting, right?
You're robbing the student of the accountant. You've made it in county. You've made it formula. Sorry.
I just, it struck me that. Oh, well, I think that sounds interesting. The water, but it's different to find it interesting. It's interesting that to be told it's important, right?
Right. Yeah. And that's, I mean, I also tell students when we read this, this is why, um, unless, unless you're told otherwise, you should always avoid introductions to X book. They might be good.
They might be bad, but once you read the introduction to, you know, some translation of Nietzsche or some book by Rousseau, you're just looking for evidence in the book of what you read in the introduction and you're not thinking about the book. That's why Alex. The exact same thing, by the way. This is why Alex writes, that's horrible introductions to his books so that you, um, you're not put off at all the sense you could figure it out for yourself.
Right. This may give me sense. He's talking about another author introduction. Wait, hold on.
Let me clarify. He's talking about another author writing an introduction to the original book, the parallel would be, this is why you shouldn't read Alex's book and just read the original, read Alex's book. Yeah. Well, when Greg, when Greg gets around to actually writing his first book, then, you know, we can revisit this.
I would didn't waste all my time on the silly podcast. Maybe I could have it done by now. I'm just kidding. Oh, yeah.
You're so prolific before. What do you guys think about the, I mean, I think the, the son at example is easy to relate to at least easy for me to relate to. Um, but what do you guys think about the dogfish? example, you know, so he says if you if you are given a specimen of a dogfish and some biology textbook in high school and you're sort of looking at the dogfish and looking at the textbook, you're not going to have access to it.
But if you had stumbled on the dogfish on the beach and started to kind of pick it apart and thought, Oh, what does this thing do? You're more likely to encounter what's interesting about this dogfish than is that is this kind of what they try to do at St. John's in some of these science classes? Yeah, he said he said what you should do is all of a sudden you go to English class and there's a dogfish on your desk or you go to biology class, which I thought I thought that maybe works once.
This was his like policy. But then eventually I got damn it's fish day and you know, you know, Greg's a little philosophy class. I heard this about him, right? And then it's kind of formula.
But it strikes me that he he lost me there a bit because I thought, no, everything you said means you can't really contrive this at all. Right? In fact, it's a lot he talks about being open or openness and that involves a lot of clearing and sort of getting all of the symbolic sort of, you know, all the apparatus and trying to find a strategy as he puts it right to get around that. But I don't I feel like you can't really I mean, he's right that you know, if you encounter it in the world and you kind of allow the being to show itself to you and discover it rather than being told, this is what you're going to learn today about this.
He's right that that's in a more genuine way. But I'm really I'm really suspicious of the degree to which you can actually contrive something like this. It seems like it's takes a lot of effort, right? And he says himself, he says you have to be hardy, clever and rare, right?
Yeah, you know, who doesn't have these issues or is the man or woman of genius? Remember listening to these lectures by Richard Feynman or they weren't lecture sorry, he was being interviewed, he was describing how he takes in the natural world. It was amazing. Like the adjectives that he used and it's the thought trucking like here's a man who looks at ordinary things and extraordinary ways like he sees things I can't see but just mundane objects.
He gave him all these kinds of like flights of fancy and it was it was amazing and also depressing. So whereas we would have to really work at overcoming our disability of the mundane, people like Feynman, I don't think encounter this problem. Maybe they do. I don't know.
I was reminded of a book called Hibern Yachsan by the medieval Islamic even the file where the main character in the book is a boy who is raised on island by himself somehow miraculously it seems but he begins teaches on the knowledge. Well, he learns it himself. The first knowledge comes from the dough and that's actually about go. He starts dissecting animals and you know on the one hand, okay, yeah, maybe this is impressive and to have the original experience, you know, you don't want to do it in class.
On the other hand, there seems to be something strange about just randomly dissecting animals you encounter. It seems a little like, I don't know, like I would be worried that this one, this guy might turn out so well. Greg, this is exactly what happened to you during your childhood. How could you say that?
It wasn't the island. I was raised in the woods of North George Appalachian Mountains. That's not the same thing at all. Totally different.
Not an island. So is it hopeless then? Are we, I mean, I guess this question is mostly you Alex and she raised the issue but is there no solution educationally for this problem? And I think he meant the, I don't think he meant the throwing the dogfish in English class would work every time but was more, you know, this is the kind of thing that would need to happen to shock the students into being naive about the thing before them.
But, you know, and I was struck by the connection between this essay and the Jacob Klein essay you guys talked about a couple episodes ago where he talks about this kind of educational complex that is developed and there once it becomes routinized, there's not a lot you can do to, I don't know, resuscitate people's naivete to get them to encounter this stuff. And we're at flag and this is something that, you know, there's that old saw, I don't know if it's aerosol or plated, you can't philosophize over the age of like 35 or you can't learn. You guys know what I'm talking about? Do you remember this?
Alex and Greg, I thought they set some age. I thought aerosol makes this joke somewhere, maybe it's not a joke that you can't teach somebody to philosophize over a certain age. I thought he was a great, you were calling our private text messages about Greg on the side. Anyway, when I was going to say flag is over 85 years.
Yeah, we're 200 years old. What I was going to say flag is that it's just, I think that the, I mean, imagine that you're a student, I think the four of us have encountered this and we try and break free. At least I struggle with it. But imagine you're in middle school and then in high school and you're reading these books and they're telling you to trace the color blue through Fitzgerald and then you get the same thing in college and then you go into a root nice to work force and your whole life is like this.
Like it's just like you have an ossified mind that becomes with each passing year more and more difficult to break out of. It's, it's really, it's really, let me note, look, flag, I imagine you do this and I think one of the reasons you, you teach this piece is to try and break students out of that. And this is one of the reasons I teach the way I teach. I think it's one of the reasons Alex and you teach the way you teach, like you, there's, there is hope, but the hope is trying to artificially recreate for students the discovery on their own.
In other words, I don't tell students what a text is about typically. I try to, I try to like, I try to help them to figure it out for themselves. Like I try to give them training wheels and then I should loosen up training wheels, you know, if that's not right metaphor, but like you want to be to try to throw the dogfish on their desk in English class, if that makes sense, right? You don't want to tell them what the book is about.
You don't want to lecture, at least I don't. So, yeah, I mean, there's a certain degree to which you can contrive it. I, you know, you guys all have, you know, sort of set anecdotes you go to, uh, using class. And I typically will pretend that, oh, let's just take a break.
Let me tell a story. Oh, this is irrelevant. And then I'll go off on this tangent ends up being relevant and they feel like at the break from the routine and then they're shown something and then it ties back in and before they know what they're actually like thinking a little bit rather than just sort of jotting down notes or something like that. There's an extent to what you can do, but I do think at bottom on more philosophical level, there is a deeper question, which is, okay, you want to get outside of the sort of, you want to get off of the being track or get outside of this symbolic thing.
How do you know when you've done that, right? He gives lots of examples of people who seem to have done it. He says, no, no, no. Like when people are like, Oh, this is so authentic.
Oh my gosh, this is so authentic. And it's just like you're, you're imposing on your after an authenticity. So you put that stamp on it because you're told that that's what matters. Well, if you're trying to get at the authentic and then even your attempt to grasp the authentic can itself be an authentic, I think it raises a real problem.
I think he's attentive to this. I'm not trying to say, but I do think there's this deeper issue of, well, it's certainly difficult to routinize in a classroom, but even on the individual level, if you go off the beaten track, how do you keep from falling in and saying, wow, this is so great. I'm off the beaten track. I'm doing what I'm supposed to.
This is what Percy told me to do. It just seems like there's a horizon to actually knowing that you've done this or not. Yeah, I mean, I guess part of the battle is one, to the extent that either teacher or student becomes aware that there is even a problem in the first place. So he has this neat quotation on page 57 at the top.
He says to put up bluntly, a student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented. The great difficulty is that he is not aware that there is a difficulty. Surely he thinks in such a fine classroom with such a fine textbook, the sonnet must come across. What's wrong with me?
And that's the thing that I struggle with my students. You can kind of try to get them to appreciate the need to evaluate this thing for themselves and to be confident enough that it can speak to them and they can evaluate the text with their own mind and heart. But the moment it becomes difficult, I think the instinct is, well, why don't I just go read the introduction and that will tell me what I'm supposed to get? And then there's the surrender.
So it's, I don't know, I guess I'm being pessimistic again, but I think it's hard for the student to see that there's anything wrong, especially, and I'll hear I'll take a shot at lots of my colleagues at Skidmore College. All the people use PowerPoint and just show me the slides. If they miss classes, give me the slides and then we're all good. There's so much student learning outcomes.
The problem that Percy is describing has gotten so much worse than when he originally wrote this essay. Yeah, I agree. And just your passage takes a lot of courage to really take down big PowerPoint, Black. It's very great.
Greg. Just a small point on to what you just said about the pessimism. He says a paragraph down, it's the rarest student who knows that the son it must be salvaged from the package. So I mean, there is hope, but it doesn't seem like there's widespread hope for a lot of people, which is why they can tune into the new thinkery weekly and Wednesdays and get their unpackaged wisdom straight from the source.
Yeah, we can cram more wisdom into our episodes if you donate. But setting aside our packages, the most, I think, well, sorry, great Jesus. Come on. Come on, Greg.
That's shameful. It's shameful. But then again, I think one counterpoint that's maybe less pessimistic is, I mean, this does work for a lot of people, right? You do get people who are dogfish experts.
I mean, I never heard of a dogfish at first. I was like, who got a dog and a fish? I thought it was a beer. It's my favorite beer.
I thought if you get a dog fish, you get a seal. Greg, because you fall for all that bull at advertising. That's what you drink dogfish. I don't know why you got to cost me with the fill floor and filth.
I just don't know why you got to do that. Jake, can you blast that out? He's so full of anger. But I do think a lot of this does work.
I mean, society doesn't need to create sort of structures. They need to make create access points. And look, there are times where I clear the ground pretty well. And I feel like I'm leading them up to a point, but I'm trying to ask them questions so that they can see it for themselves.
And it'll be one student who maybe gets it where there's like five misses. And sometimes I wonder, did I do something wrong? But then maybe they do need to say, to quote, Percy, what's wrong with me? Maybe that's the right question.
Hey, when you're teaching this flag, you don't have to answer this because I don't want you to put down any students. But realistically, maybe not this text percentage, just any one of your classes where you're teaching a great work. How many students do you think you awaken per class to class of 20? Do you think you're hitting one student or one student every, you know, other time you teach the class, like the numbers have to be low, because if this were a commonplace conversion, the world would be happier, more interesting place.
So of course it's not. Yeah, it's a low, low number one, one, two, you know, depending. A lot of it actually does depend on if you have a critical mass of students, then it's because they don't, I don't know, it's not in my experience, it takes, it takes a critical mass to get the students to sort of see that there's something going on. Like, you know, they can notice that I'm trying to show them that they should appreciate x or y and force them to allow the text to ask them questions.
But if they can see another student becoming aware of it, then you know, you're doing well. So I think you need at least three. That's interesting. That's a tall order.
I mean, I've taken to just asking them tons of questions and so they're forced to prepare and then maybe they have a bit more to go with. But yeah, I've never been a walker person. I really enjoyed this. I think there's a lot to it.
I mean, it's one of those essays that is definitely provocative. It's got relatable experiences and it's good to think with or against depending on what moment you're looking at it. But he does, I think, fortunately, to think long and hard about about routinized education, right? And Frag, yes, thank you.
Could you recommend to me and to our listeners, if one would like to, since I've never read any walker person, save this essay, where can I begin with this literature? Where do you suggest? I really like the movie goer. It's this first book.
It's not terribly long. I think it's a couple of couple hundred pages. And yeah, I would start I would start there. Lots of people like some of his later books because they're stranger, they're kind of apocalyptic scenarios in them.
He sort of does in some of the later books, kind of what he suggests in this essay, you know, part of what gives you access to being in the truth of things is, you know, seeing seeing them after a disaster. And so there's there's some funny stuff going on and Thanatos Syndrome and Lost in the Ruins. But, but I really like the movie goer. It's great.
Great. No. Cool. So per usual, we are at the part of our show whenever we have a guest where Greg asks his thrilling lightning round questions.
Greg, are you ready to go? No mailbag? We're just going straight to lightning? Oh, yeah.
I guess we have a male bag flag took the liberty of starting his own mailbag. It's the other day's show. I mean, but the questions were all useless. Oh, all right.
Well, that's a nice insult to listeners. Well, what are those like? No, I'm out of their day to write a question. Oh, someone's going to this.
We were dropping the ball. Well, look, we'll just go to lightning round, I guess before we go to that, I just want to say like, I know flag we I consider flag a friend. So thanks for coming on. I hope you come back a couple more times.
Yes, we'll do like a movie too. I think a movie would be kind of fun. Eastern European literature is my preference. Yeah.
And we talk about it. But actually, we like, sorry, Greg, I don't mean to interrupt, but you'll see why this is important flag. You say that every time you're in a pre and I would like to invite you back on the show permanently because Greg, well, you know, we'd like to offer them as a co host. So if you like what you experienced today and want to experience this once a week, you know, you're welcome to join the new thing.
If you just wait a few months, it'll happen anyway by natural necessity. Greg, you've been holding on for well, now you're over 300 years. So I can ask one question. One question flag.
Who is that picture of in your Twitter profile? Bush? Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because I was surprised you came in and you were not nearly as as good around. Yeah, Chris is looking. It's a Chezwav Miwosh, the Polish Nobel Prize winning poet. Okay.
All right. Are you ready for this flag? Lightning round? Right.
I know you know, I know you've listened to some episodes on like some of other esteemed guests. I know you're prepared. So all right. So I'm sure you won't ask me those ones.
Hey, John Blitz said, John Blitz said he listened to a number of them. He did say that. He did say that. All right.
All right. Here we go. Remember, think fast, lightning. Favorite color?
Purple. Purple. Lemon tart or key lime pie? Yline pie.
Gray. Pop tart or milkshake? Milkshake. And that's chicken.
Chicken or pork? Pork. Dogs or cats? Dogs.
Favorite word that starts with a letter R? Meegal. Regal. Not at a regular.
Have you ever visited Delaware? It's lightning. It's lightning. I don't think so.
All right. Have you ever had a mustache? No. What time is it right now?
936. Dang, he did really well. All right. Here, the real life.
How could he mess that up? Are you trying to stop me with the time? Yeah. Yeah.
Flag, we're no longer sending our best. I'm sorry. Well, flag is a known drunk and usually has no I can't stop it. Really stumped us.
Give more professor. You're great. All right. Fine.
I'll ask the real questions. All right. All right. Flag.
What's the F stand for? Frank. Frank. Frank.
Flag Taylor. Who's your favorite philosopher or thinker? Never heard of him. Who?
Tofil. Tofil. Very nice. Favorite work of philosophy.
I feel like I know the answer now. Now I'm going to go spirit of the laws. Very good. All right.
Favorite book, not by a philosopher. Can be a novel? Yeah. Oh, my, Antonio, Willa, Catherine.
That's a great answer. Nick names with a name like flag. You don't really need any. You don't need any of the favorite flag.
Nice States of America. All right. Fair enough. What do you ever like person like his dad or his grandpa or his great.
Yeah. Is there a lot of them, Greg? Yeah. Yeah.
What was your first car flag? A Camaro Z 28. It was red. Oh, that's a year.
Yeah. 1984. You can't wait. So flag, were you just cracked and bruised just like zipping down a whole host of Chicago?
Like was that your vibe growing up? There are there are there have been pages in works of literature written about my first car. Like your your particular car or that that making model? No, that that my particular car.
You know, you all know Dave Eggers? Yes. Yeah. He wrote his memoirs called the heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
Yes. That's how you look at. If you look in that book, there are descriptions about my car and me. Holy shit.
Was he your classmate? Yeah. Where'd you go to high school in the Lake Forest? Okay.
Do you have do you have the book? Let's can we get an excerpt? No, it's a famous book. I don't have it here.
Yeah. Are you still buddies with him? Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, wow. That's what there's a really there's a really funny funny paragraph about the car in the book. Come on. I can just see it's a bunch of these Chicago kids just drinking brews.
So maybe maybe you can help us get him on the podcast. I'd have to read something he's written, but no, Greg, Alex, he's too famous for this podcast. He's really famous. All right.
All right. I got a few more here. What would you be if you had not become a professor? I'm only a journalist.
Really? Yeah. What were you expecting me to say? Are you so fascinated, Greg?
Model? I suppose it's possible. No, journalism. How?
How? Why? Writing? Okay.
And, you know, going places trying to figure things out. Do flag hard hitting question. Do you have any short stories you've written? No.
Actually, I did write short stories in high school. Oh, in high school. Okay. Yeah.