Welcome to the new Thinkery. I'm David Barr with me as always Gregory MacDugel. How are you Greg? Not good Dave.
Oh, dear. Cretal Greg, what's troubling you? I really want to talk about it. Is it the thing the doctors have been giving you the medication for?
No, no, that's cleared up for the most part. Okay. What is it? One of our, listen, I have a certain self understanding and it's been shattered.
Oh, yeah. I know like this is. Know thyself, know thyself like the Delphic Oracle and like, you know, Cretius goes and the Zenithin and he realizes that he didn't know himself. I'm going to tell you right now.
I thought I knew myself, but thanks to Alexa. I don't understand myself. I thought it was funny. I'm not funny.
I amuse you, right? Isn't that why we're on the show? You supply a little less than a quarter of the humor. I think that's decently funny, right?
You're one third, but you give a quarter. Listen, I expected to lose to David. I get it. David's funny.
He's witty. He could easily be in movies. Well, it's because I'm an educated, Greg. That's that's educated.
You're educated. It's a lose to Priya that bald, angry, shriveled soul. How do I lose to him? Well, let's introduce him.
How are you doing now? You know how you lost this kind of bitter, unfunny nonsense that you've been doing. Listen, you get to be my agent. You turn into a shriveled old raisin, okay?
I'm doing well. Thank you, David. How are you? I feel like we never ask you how you're doing.
It's always the same answer. Yeah. Terrible. I'm doing well.
Tomorrow, I guess the new president is inaugurated. So I can't go into Washington. Where you're planning to? I was going to go into the office, but it's just the traffic.
I mean, the security rather is too tight. So other than that, you know, I'm just ready for a new season. Want it to be warm? New season of the new thing.
Oh, no, spring. Well, yeah, spring. The new thingery, we have some hot guests coming up, including a little more energy than you do. That was the most.
I don't know what you want me to say. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
I'm going to go to David as the funniest member of the new thingery. That's what I'm losing to right there, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just telling you, you really know what. I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you what I'm telling you. I'm talking machines in Wisconsin that rigged this election for David. I'm just going to get out there. So Brian, a friend of the show is one of our more honest listeners.
I think our blue check listener. Yeah, our only blue check listener. So the reason I'm low energy Jeb is because I found my wife set aside, you know, those candies and nerds, those little nerds, still my kids. Yeah, yeah, they're excellent.
They're excellent. They're so excellent. I ate all of the nerds, my wife bought for the children. And so it just shot me up.
I was on a real high and it crashed me down. And so I'm a little bit tired, but I want to get one of my sort of my strength back. Today we're talking about one of my favorite authors. Everybody appreciates this person.
Jonathan Swift. I think best known for obviously, Gulliver's travels. Second best, I think most well known work is a modest proposal, which every idiot punded on earth at some point or another uses as the title of an essay or not bad. I think a modest proposal has been so many years, but the there's a famine in Ireland.
Isn't that right, Greg? You're Irish and that wasn't there. It wasn't there. It wasn't there.
No, no, no, but you're people. It's ancient lore. What did your people decide? Decided to start eating babies.
Yeah, yeah. So my wife's Irish too. So you could get your mores are all jacked up, but that's all right. But Swift was he was just known for his wit and his satire and philosophically also profound.
So today's short story that we're discussing titled the battle of the books and I will get summarized it a little bit later. Can I have one thing about Swift that I've always found funny that I mean, maybe people who know Swift will know this. He was a dean of the church. He was an Anglican cleric.
That's right. Which I find sort of I'm very good friends with my preacher. He's a funny man, but I would just say in general, he's very funny and very sort of impish for a man at a cloth. Let me just I guess maybe that like I can't imagine so many preachers going around writing sets, hereical proposals for eating babies just, you know, for one of the characters in Gulliver's travels.
Lemuel Gulliver is the main character. He's the main character and he travels. He travels. You know, he's like earns his living by traveling the high seas and the head of his first boat is master Bates.
Now that's a bar joke, but Swift included it. So can you explain that for listeners at home? It's a B-A-H-R joke, right? Yeah.
Yeah, I can't explain that one. You just have to look it up in your Oxford, but no, so Swift's very funny. Some Oxford professor actually did that. I'm sure like, Flip Note 7.
His Swiss cousin was Dryden, which is kind of interesting. What? No, that. Yeah.
So, but he also is his books like Greg, you were you've written something I think of Gulliver's travels. You explain it just two or three of the kind of deeper themes in that book just to give listeners a sense of Swift to incidentally live between 1667 and 1745 just so you guys can situate what's going on in electoral history when he lived. But Greg, give us a taste of kind of what he dealt with when he wasn't writing about eating babies. Yeah.
Well, you already mentioned the opening onanism joke in Gulliver's travels. Yeah, but it's not all that, you know. No, it's, I listened to a podcast actually with Harvey Mansfield maybe three or four years ago and that led me to sort of have a reading group on Gulliver's travels. It's a wildly entertaining book.
It's quite funny. I think Ellen Bloom says it's an amazing masterpiece. As far as like kids know this book, but it's body. I mean, like adults, I mean, it's very, very risqué.
There's a very dirty jokes. I mean, I asked your piece, worked alongside Master Bates, right? Really, both of these guys finished ahead of me on the humor column. Really, Greg, doesn't know the double entendre of peace.
I believe it's pronounced entendre. But Alexandra, Alexandra, yes. So it's very, there's so many poop jokes, by the way, for what it's worth. Greg, all of your pecadillos, it abounds with poop jokes.
All of your sexual pecadillos are revealed in this book. There's a scene. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's a scene with the urination that I want you to describe.
Leo Shraus, I mean, look, these are body jokes, but even your favorite philosophers make something of them. So I'm sure- I'm waiting for you guys to make something of it right now. I mean, all I've heard is just fecal matter, urination, odenism, and- Urination. Get to the substance.
Why does this stuff matter? Sure, I'll skip the joke then. But the urination stuff is quite funny for listening to him. The main character being a giant, people will know that his first travel is he's a giant and they're all little people.
He puts out a fire in the Queen's palace using what is ready to hand, so to speak, after a long night of drinking. Or it's worth- Doesn't Shraus say that sometimes he likens his political expediency as sometimes nasty business. Is Shraus right on? I didn't know Shraus right on him.
He didn't write on it. He made a joke. Okay. About that one scene.
Okay. What's it about? I mean, Gulliver visits a handful of lands. I suspect that it's- it's- look, it's a kid's story, so it's fantastic, but he visits sort of- the first place he visits I take to be a sort of satirical presentation of modern Europe, especially the aristocracy and its politics.
He then visits his third major visit is to a sort of a lampooning of modern science, and this second and fourth major voyages are trips to lands that evoke images of antiquity. And so I guess- and this is a nice transition perhaps to the book we're doing tonight, The Battle of the Books. The idea is that he visits two lands that seem distinctly modern and two lands that seem distinctly ancient. And the impression one gets, I think if one sort of pays attention to things is that swift thought that modernity was rife with material to be satirized and seemed to prefer the politics and thinking of the ancients.
The last place he visits is the horses and there's a noble. And so some huge themes get raised in the course of the works. So what's the superiority of ancient politics to modern politics? I think there's a critique of modern religion actually in the first voyage in Gulliver travels.
This kind of thing. It's very serious. It's very funny. It's very amusing.
I'm actually teaching it starting in two weeks. Oh, you nasty, Greg. So transitioning to Battle of the Books is short. Gulliver travels is probably 250 pages, something like this.
Battle of the Books is 20. And it's situated, I think, I think it's part of a series of trilogy, right? Yeah, there's a tale of the tub proceeds that which is another work of satire. Are you going to talk about the tale of the tub?
No, no, it's very hard. Yeah, I think that has to do with religion. But anyway, Battle of the Books. So Battle of the Books, I'll summarize it after Greg discusses one of its themes at the outset.
I think that we have to put it in some context. The ancients, you have a big bookshelf at St. James Library, right? And the ancient books are pissed off at the modern books.
And the books kind of personify themselves. So, you know, running into battle, you have Homer in Aristotle and Plato. And they're shooting arrows at Descartes in Bacon, another modern books. In abstract, listeners are familiar with this concept of ancients versus moderns.
Most certainly listeners who read Leo Strauss. What is this, Greg, this? Can I make one little correction of what you said? It's not the ancients that get pissed off.
It's the moderns, right? Oh, I didn't need to say anything. It's just to be clear, because we started it. That's who started it.
I was connected to Pride and the place of Pride in modern thought. I think that's the thing. Yeah, I was going to go. No, you're right.
I didn't need to say, but what is this ancient versus modern coral, Greg, before we launch into the actual? Sure. So, Swift seems to be wading into a literary battle that was being waged in what early 1600s, I guess. And I guess a lot of folks around 1600 or so, they raised this issue of whether or not, you know, who was superior to the ancients and the moderns.
And Sir William Temple, who was a kind of patron, apparently, of Jonathan Swift, wrote an essay called Essay Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, which was a defense of the ancients. There were a number of thinkers, especially French thinkers, who were arguing for the superior or the modern. So, the basic premise is the ancient world is significantly different from the modern world, and the modern world is superior to the ancient world. A number of thinkers, English, but especially French, were saying that the moderns were superior.
And the superiority, the superiority basically grew out of scientific superiority. So, the progress that human beings have made as a result of science greatly surpassed anything the ancients ever were able to achieve. And I'll just say in my own name that I think that that's strictly on the grounds of technology that seems indisputable. The moderns have greatly surpassed the ancients in technology.
So, for example, the printing press, I think they were, I forget right now, but they were a handful of modern inventions that they pointed to. The printing press, the gunpowder, which I think I'll return to here in just a little bit. And so, the idea was, look, ancient learning was inferior to modern learning. So, Swift weighs in on this, and I already mentioned this from the Builders Travels.
I think, and I don't think it's too controversial to say, that Swift weighs in on the side of the ancients. He thinks that modern science, modern philosophy is overstepping, that it distorts its understanding of human beings, that it's overly reliant upon the goodness of technology, that it just sort of assumes that modern technology is good, that it will simply improve the human lot. One funny example, for example, one funny example, for example. Anyway, in Bacon's New Atlantis, pre-Ucken, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's there, it's not there, it's somewhere else.
Bacon insinuates that we can almost conquer death, or that we can greatly extend human mortality through modern science and medicine. In Golers Travels, Swift satirizes a race of people who live forever, and he shows that their life is actually miserable, and it's, and that people who live on this island where these immortal beings view them with great pity, that nobody actually would want to live forever or something like this. So, this was the quarrel in Swift's lifetime. Those listeners who are interested in Leo Strauss, who I hesitate to call myself Strauss, because I don't like labels, but Spare, Alice and I, David, were all greatly influenced by this guy.
He was a 20th century thinker who revived this quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Now, the original quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, I think, was principally over the question of scientific achievement. I don't think that that's what Strauss had in mind principally when he spoke about the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. Alex should feel free to jump in, but I think he was talking more about religion.
For example, in a talk he gave, or she's in an article he wrote called Reason in Revelation, he says, the following quote, a philosophy which believes that it can refute the possibility of revelation and a philosophy which does not believe that. That is the real meaning of the quarrel, the quor, la chorale des ención, et amor, de quorale des ancients and the moderns. So, I think that for Strauss, the main difference between the ancients and the moderns, and this is connected to science, was whether or not one could refute revelation. Why did you say that in French?
Sorry, that was, that was quoting Strauss, Strauss says in French. I apologize to any listener who actually knows French and knows that I can only butcher my thinker. I want to know. Not so much on stress, but on the stuff about the Battle of the Books.
I agree that he's definitely arguing for the superior of the ancients yet. So one thing, you start off by saying I think this is exactly right, and I was hoping you'd make this point that he's waiting in on this issue. But he's not writing some pamphlet or some sort of polemic. He's writing a satire.
Very good point. Which I think means that you're meant to ask who side is he on, right? To give a good example, at one point Aristotle shoots some arrows at bacon, right? Who does he kill, Ollie?
It goes over Bacon's head and it hits Descartes, right? And then he gets killed. Now what's interesting about this is this funny, just kind of little episode, it's just like a tiny paragraph kind of wedged in there. You want to ask a question?
Did, and this is partly spurred by Comet Lawrence Burns makes in another article. I think on Bacon where he says, what actually happened here? And he suggests that Bacon ducked, meaning he goes low. But the other thing you could say is perhaps Aristotle aimed too high.
So a joke and figuring out what's happening, all of a sudden you're engaging in the debate. Another example, at the end you have these fearful kind of, I think they're critics, sort of contemporary critics, and they're trying to kill some ancients. They find Asop and Paraclesis, I forget who it was, but Asop is there, and he's asleep, he and his buddy are asleep, and they're too scared to kill him. They're like, they run with the dreams they get scared off, but they do take their arm.
Suggesting that while the ancients might be superior and the moderns too fearful, the ancients fail to arm themselves and they can be caught sleeping. I think all of this is meant to say that while the ancients might be superior, they might have been caught with their pants down a bit, right? And I think that's- They didn't wear pants. How did they work?
They're boogers. Yeah, all of a while. Yoga's. Yoga's.
You're drinking again. Grandpa's on the sauce. No, but Alex, what you're saying is that- No, Alex, your deeper point is that this book, this isn't some joke. I mean, it's a satire, but it's not some modern joke book written by some SNL burnout, or Mindy Kaling, or some- You know, those idiot humor books.
I don't know why you guys have to- I don't know why you guys have to- So negative. This angry guy. I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. Yes. You just, you know, the shop at the local burns noble, but at that- the- the process- where you purchase the books at the counter. Yeah.
Oh, by sure. I have people to do that for me. So I- but it's a profound. Alex, what you're doing in thinking this through, and I think what your old teacher burns and other people that have written well on battle of the books and pointing out is just how deep in one, you know, in various instances in this text can get.
Yeah, and I think I think the fact that it's put his satire immediately raises the question of where exactly swift lies. obvious that the the ancient source superior once they've been engaged in battle. But when they're not fighting or they're sort of minding their own business in repose, right? There's a way in which the moderns and even the lowest of the moderns, the modern contemporary critic can somehow pull one over on them or rob them of their armor.
And I think that suggests that he's pushing you to take a more moderated less polemical view than these texts have assumed, right? While there is a quarrel of ancient some moderns, it's called the Battle of the Books. And these books include ancient books, modern books, modern translations primarily, and then criticisms and treatises on this question. So that it's it's about both the ancient quarrel, the old quarrel, and the sort of contemporary landscape.
Sorry, go ahead. Just one small point. It also includes medieval books. Am I wrong that it includes the medieval books among the ancients?
That was my impression in any event. I thought that he he mentioned scotus and Aquinas and somebody else as a tree of idiot moderns. I think he uses a it's faulting. Yeah, the rest was a confused multitude.
I just find this in I read my no wrong here, right? In Bellarmine. Excuse me. Yeah, he includes the medieval's among the moderns.
That's right. Yes. But which would mean, by the way, therefore, that he marks the distinction between ancient and modernity, I think with Christianity. So I mean, yeah, sorry.
So I just read my no wrong. Interestingly enough, who's absent? The Hebrews aren't there on the side of the ancients. These are Western books.
Oh my God. And once we always lose these poles, the Hebrews aren't there. There are these are only Western books taking part in the battle, right? Like Alfa Robbie's not lining up.
And so, yeah, that's interesting. Let's talk about how kicks off, right? The, you know, there's a note from the bookseller, there's a preface from the author, Ha Ha, these are all kinds of like, in quotations setting the scene. But really, the antagonism kicks off the among like the low line foothills of Mount Parnassus, right?
And the ancients are on a hill and the moderns have a hill. The hill of the ancients is slightly more elevated than the hill of the moderns. And the moderners present this and they say it like obviously it's their view and they don't like it. So they go up to the ancients and they say, hey, lower your hill for bringing to raise ours or something like this.
And that's where the beef starts. I don't think it's slightly because at one point, he says, hey, it's okay if our hill is so high, you can enjoy the shade implying that it's massively higher. So it's really dwarfed by the So you guys think that this is what's think that many ancients really are pitched at a higher plane than right? I mean, the moderns are low, but solid, right?
Yeah, I mean, maybe they're both solid, but they're just lower. And they've got a chip on their shoulder. You know, it's also interesting. This is taking place the environs.
This is that Mount Parnassus is something you would learn about through ancient texts, right? It says in bigger prom, Mount Parnassus doesn't mean what was Mount Parnassus who lived there, Greg? You're a fucking idiot. Anyway, then he was there because Greg's drinking and he's eating cheese.
And what's really weird about it is he's going to consume the cheese and then he's going to do something indecent with it. And this is a family show. So anyway, let's get back to the text, Greg. Prior to prior to we get to the hills though, he gives a kind of one paragraph in the actual thing, one paragraph on the origins of war.
He says, the most ancient and natural grounds of quarrels are lust and avarice, which I assume were to be embodied by the moderns. And he says pride, which though we may allow it to be brethren or collateral branches of pride are certainly the issues of want. So there's a kind of neediness or wantfulness that leads to pride and therefore quarrels of lust and avarice. And that seems to be what the moderns tend to body is these low passions, right?
And they're therefore angry at the agents who have such a high mountain, right? And they want them either to be on their level or to put them up high and they take the lower ground. Implying that there is this kind of greed and this concern with pride as a result that is characteristic of a moderns and that initiates the quarrel. And if it were up to the agents, it never would have started in the first place.
I think that's the suggestion there, which suggests I think that the high ground of the ancients, which maybe transcends human pride, is therefore somewhat indifferent to the or unaware of the lowest in human beings. Yeah. And so what happens at the beginning that blood feud begins at Mount Parnassus and then what the books remember it. And so care is taken in every library around the land, not too couple, ancient and modern texts together because they fight, right?
And then it just so happens that at the guardian of the regal library of the library at St. James, quote, a person of great valor, but chiefly renowned for his humanity had been a fierce champion for the moderns. And in an engagement upon Parnassus had vowed that the zone hands to knock down two of the ancient chiefs who guarded a small pass on the superior rock, etc, etc, etc. He makes the mistake of, I think, pairing an ancient and modern together.
And then this is where the battle kind of commands his at St. James. But he fails initially because he was obstructed by his own unhappy way and tendency towards his center, implying that he's obesity. Yeah, but what you make of that, I think, I think, I'm sure Greg is saying the same thing, but just a sort of modern indulgence, right, and concerned with bodily pleasure, right?
Yeah. So Swit has so many of these descriptions where he uses physical attributes to describe a modern philosophy or ancient philosophy. And a scene that comes next, there's a digression in the Battle of the Books. So a fight starts, and then there's kind of an intermission where he tells the story about a bumblebee and a spider.
And both of those are kind of standings, the bumblebee for the ancient and the spider for the moderns. Did you want to talk about that Alex? Yeah, we can. I mean, I think the, it's funny because it turns out after you hear this that they've all been listening wrapped with attention to ancient and modern books.
Am I right? I remember that correctly. And this, this leads to, then I think right after this, or shortly after this, the actual war really breaks out. There's a, there's a comment on this passage in Seth Benardetti's essay, Strauss on Plato, where he's talking about different forms of esotericism.
And he says that there's two kinds of esotericism, ancient and modern, but which he means two ways or two reasons for hiding your meaning or making it difficult to discern, much as we've had to sort of unravel what's going on in Swift, why you might have to do the same with philosophers. And he says, Swift represented one by the b, which out of the sweet produces the sweet, and the other by the spider, which out of the foulest things produces the most beautiful web. Right. And so what he's applying there, and so the spider here lives in the library, in the dark, right, in a shade, much like the modern books do.
He eats corpses, right, and he turns it into basically feces of a kind, right, and spins a beautiful web, which is very mathematical in its construction, right, I think this is a wonderfully chosen example. He is also the spiders also described as a fat, he's swollen up to the first magnitude by the destruction of infinite numbers of flies, who's spoilsly scattered before the gates of his palace. So he's fat, he's surrounded by corpses, and he lives in this dingy place, and he's nasty. The bee, however, lives out in nature, right, and he wanders in only out of a kind of curiosity, right, and the bee can take Poland, Poland, right, and turn it into honey and wax, two very useful things.
I'm sorry, Poland, for listeners at home, I believe Alex Perieu means pollen. Jesus, Greg, do you want to weigh in on this? No, no, go ahead, go ahead. Okay.
Sorry, this is a good part. This is a good problem, right? Yeah, so I mean, I think what better is referring to is the kind of esotericism is, you know, obviously, pollen is really, is, is, is, is fine of stuff, but it's kind of useless, and he, but they make something quite tasty and useful, honey and wax out of it. The, the the moderns can make something mathematically well constructed, right, and it can make something that's, that's in a way a beautiful web, but it's produced of something felt, right, they can make their ideas attractive, right, refers to things like progress, right, and mathematical certainty, but it's only by virtue of building off of, you could say, mere matter or treating everything like corpses, right, for consumption or something like that.
And I think that's ultimately, I think it really profound insight that's, that's coming out of this opening bit where you see two bugs, two natural creatures, one has restrained itself to a false world of needfulness because the library does not naturally produce food and has to hunt therefore, but the other one lives in nature and enjoys the beauty of nature and lives there quite happily, though maybe not as impressive as regards to the technological feat that he achieves. But you can see there's jokes about feces here, about dead bodies and stuff like that. But both, both bugs are interesting, both bugs are necessary for a thriving ecosystem, right, like you can't, you don't want to subtract bees or spiders out of the habitat, things are thrown out of whack. And yeah, yeah, going, I was just having this half big thought anyway.
No, I like that idea. I was just wondering if so, if Alex's suggestion, I guess based on better daddy's suggestion that the spider in the bee, among other things, also represent a mode of esotericism or why one would write in a certain way that one does, I'll ask my question, then I'll read a passage to give you some times reflect on it. This isn't, we didn't do this in the run show, but how does Swift write? Let me rephrase that question.
Is Swift's satirical mode his distinctive mode of esotericism? And here's what I have in mind, I'll just, I'll let you guys weigh in, I'm just going to read a couple of things. So he speaks, this is about halfway through paragraph 19 or so, about MoMA's mama's the god of for the personification of satire. And then he then mama's gives a speech or mama's gives a speech to come a paragraph later, he says the following.
Oh, the smallest pole in Poland. This is what I do think is connects your esotericism business. And I'm sorry that I didn't have this in Russia, but what you just said made me make this connection. So here's here's this personification of satire.
To his eye, oh, excuse me, it's a she, excuse me, said she who give wisdom to infants and idiots. By politicians and school boys judges of philosophy, by me, so fisters debate and conclude upon the depths of knowledge and coffeehouse with since think by me can correct on an author's style and display his magnetist errors without understanding a syllable of his matter or his language. By me, straightlings spend their judgments as they do their estate before it comes into their hands, desire who have deposed wit and knowledge from their empire over poetry and advanced myself in their stead, and show a few upstart ancient stare to oppose me, but come my age of parents and you, my children dear and thou my beauty as sister, let us ascend my chariot and has to assist our devout moderns who are now sacrificing to us a hecaton as I perceive by that grateful smell, which from thence reaches my nostrils. So you're also you're also smiling me right.
I just does this shed any insight into what he's doing? Does satire a distinctly modern mode of doing this? Is he sort of, I don't know? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
Sorry, I was thinking about this. He mentioned satire here. I just looked it up, MoMA says the goddess of satire. I mean, that's an interesting question.
It's not mentioned here, though. One thing I would say is that the polemical versions of this book, keeping in mind that this is an example of these kinds of treatises, but it's a personified satirical kind of story implies that I think the polemical version of this that you see is is pursued by these critics of the ancient books. And then there's against the critics, you often see the translators, right, the contemporary translators, who you could compare to the agents who don't guard themselves. They obviously think the books are worth preserving and maybe continuing, right, or at least making them available to modern audiences.
They haven't been simply replaced the way that the moderns want to replace them. So that maybe a satirical treatment of the question is a kind of hybrid approach, right? If you're right about this moment, but it's very good. It's not indifferent to the question, the way that these translators and people like Asop are portrayed in this.
Aristotle, actually, though, seems to be closer to swiftness. But it's somehow willing to get into the fight, but with the kind of joy or lightness to it that's more characteristically ancient. I'm just thinking off. That's very good.
Maybe it's the way that an ancient minded person would proceed in majority or something like this. Would you guys make of the fact that while this battle is raging, there's still people above the phrase, so to speak. And that's the gods and not modern God, not like Jesus Christ looks down, or is raster if we're going with Alex's belief system. But the muses are there, I think, and Jupiter is also there.
And they have their favorites among the books, and they're assisting just like in Homer. Yeah, I was going to say, I have no idea, but the connection to me between the battle, the whole battle seems so merit to me. So the gods are watching, the battle is fought with spheres, right? And they're throwing javelins.
I mean, it's just, I mean, the terms of the debate seem decisively weighted in favor of the ancient, right? I mean, like, yeah, if this were truly a battle, I mean, look, you got a modern army and an ancient army, the monitors are going to win, right? It's very simple. It's funny.
And they're fewer. So here's the, this is all the people on the ancient side. The army of the ancient is unquoted. The army of the ancient was much fewer in number.
Homer led the horse and pinder the light horse. Euclid was chief engineer. The Plato and Aristotle commanded the bowman Herodotus and Livy the foot, the Socrates, the trigunes, the allies led by Vosius and temple brought up the rear. That's it.
That's it. But if you go, if you go, the leader is right. That's just the, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure. Yeah. But you're right. It's still, it's still small.
But the leaders of the moderns triple or quadruple that I mean, you have Harvey who are St. John's listeners won't recognize this, the discover of how the blood circulates on the body. Everybody shows up. Virgil, interestingly enough, is also counted among the moderns.
I count 10, ancients and 23 moderns for what's worth. So yeah, over twice as many moderns listed. But they still fail because the, and there's, they're mentioned in as more numerous, right? But they still fail because it seems like they're just more fearful, right?
They lack a real courage to them. You know, it's weird. Machiavelli, Machiavelli is not in the moderns, but Gucci or Dean is there. There's some notable exceptions that I can't, I don't get.
Yeah. Sorry, Greg. Alex, on the Homeric stuff, just to give a sense to people who haven't read it, he says, the goddess diffidence came on sea and cast a mist before his eyes. That's a very Homeric phrase.
A little later, his shield dropped from his hands, threicy fled and threicy could not escape. That happens quite a bit within Homer, Helicon, which is a mountain refer to the beginning of Hesiod's Theogeny is mentioned. As you go further, you start to get a lot of Homeric similes or Homeric sounding similes. So for example, it says, as a young lion in the Libyan plains or a rabie desert sent by his age sire to hunt for prey or health or exercise, he scours along wishing to meet some tiger, etc, etc, so wanton fled, so boil pursued.
Again, this as extended image and then so, right in this way. I mean, in this one page alone, I think there are three Homeric. And then toward the end, the 24th paragraph, you already mentioned when Aristotle kills Descartes. I mean, were we just talking about one of your favorite death scenes in the Iliad where the guy gets the javelin in the eye in the head?
I mean, this is what happened to the bridge of the nose. I guess it catches the bottom of the eyes so they spin and spin real quick and hit the ground before his knees do. So it's just like a lunatic. It goes in and off and it goes into the ground.
I mean, this is what Aristotle does as Descartes, right? I mean, he went right in his right eye. So this is I mean, so yeah, even the death of the modern this mentioned, it sounds very very Homeric to me. And he mentioned Homer in that regard for us.
Yeah, but spoiler alert, the manuscript we're reading. So this is taking many levels is damaged. We don't know what comes to the battle. We don't.
Why do you also shouldn't trust the manuscript? Because it's written by a mother says our author. Right. Yeah, it's telling us they, you know, we hear that this person gets wounded, we get little pieces and says, you know, here a small piece is missing here, a huge piece is missing from the manuscript.
But why do you think it's weird? Because it's obviously a modern book or a contemporary book. So I was trying to figure out why is it damaged? And I thought it must have been attacked.
Right? Oh, that's a really good insight. That is good. The only reason or it's eaten by something, but in any case, it's either turned into food or it's attacked physically in the second battle of the books or by getting survives.
Yeah, it survives in part. Yeah, because the book is a kind of kind of chronicle, it would be of a type taking place in the battle. And then if we want to connect that to the question of the outcome of the battle, which is the chief thing we want to know, but are denied by Virginians fragmentary, who wins? I think the suggestion that he's written something that's obviously sympathetic to the ancients, and yet might have been attacked and therefore left fragmentary, that ultimately it's a precarious place for the ancients going forward.
It's never going to be a decisive victory. And perhaps it's the moderns who want the decisive victory and the ancients who rather want to defend themselves and preserve the variety or something like that or the possibilities. And this might be a fundamental weakness, even if his own work that opens it to this. There's one thing that I meant to touch on earlier, I'd like to come back to it's that so we've been harping on this.
And so the ancient modern distinction seems to be of primary importance for Swift. And it was for Strauss, it was for others. But what is obscured in some other discussions of the distinction between ancient and modern, but what becomes clear here in Swift is that the ancient modern distinction is more fundamental for Swift than the distinction between poetry and philosophy. So Homer and Plato are on the same side fighting the moderns.
So whatever the differences that exists between Homer as a sort of quasi religious figure and Plato as a philosopher, whatever differences exist between them, they have more in common as ancients than differences as poet and philosopher. I think that's really important for his work. Yeah, if you want to, I was thinking about this with the Republic, if you want to connect it to something like the moderns are more imperial, in a sense. And you look at something like the Republic where it's pretty clear that the imperialism of the Athenians is undermining the old civic order or something like that.
It seems like Plato and Homer both are in favor of that, trying to gird that, whereas this tendency towards empire and the commercialization, right, reducing all sort of human relations to a kind of transactional acquisitiveness, like the moderns do, that really lumps the two of them. Homer and Plato together. Does that make sense? It does.
I also wondered if Swift didn't view his own project as a sort of poetic presentation of philosophic principles, which would mean that the mode of presentation is less important than the content that was being presented so that Homer, while he may have been a poet, this is just a position, by the way, that Homer, while a poet still had a teaching of philosophic teaching that was just presented in a poetic mode. And so the mode is not as important as the content it would seem. If that makes sense, so I mean, Swift is a poet. I mean, if we're going with the poetry philosophy distinction, like he wrote satire, as he wrote novels or whatever you want to call it, Coler's travels, right, he wrote a modest proposal.
He didn't write philosophical treatises. By the way, the philosophical treatise is a modern, that's very say, right, that's a distinctly modern phenomenon. Well, it's Aristotle, right? You think so?
I mean, it's presented self in a kind of treatise form. Yeah, it's not a very same variety. Right. But this, I mean, this raises the all important question that I got to mind right, right, which is if you could stab one book, what would it be?
How about you, David? Well, let's have Greg go first because he's not that funny and then you David, I'll go last. Oh, and you're David, I have to think about it. Greg.
I mean, I think about it too. What book do I not like? Just at any top periods in time? If you were, if you were, you know, if Xenophon's short of Socratic writings became alive, right, and you, you know, were in that book, what book do you got to stab?
Listen, Alex, we're asking Greg, would book his staff not make love to? No, he is that book. I am. I'm writing the parkas on the cavalry commander.
I'm saying, you know, I've never been super impressed with Freud when I read him. Yeah, Freud. That's not bad. David?
I mean, yeah, he's so stabable, the grads. Yeah, exactly. You know, you're all, you're all, oh, you're all fairly, I say, he's not a big guy. Yeah, yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to go after.
Oh, okay. I have your content. Caught. How about you, David?
Good. All of his books, just Hume. I'd like to impale an imperative. Yeah, for what he did to Rousseau.
He tried to eat him, right? Yeah. Yeah. What about you?
Oh, mine comps. I mean, easily. I mean, you guys apparently want to keep it. Oh, my gosh, you were selling it.
You're going to get rid of the content, Hume, and meanwhile, Hitler's still there. But we're talking about great books. I just talked about books. I asked about books.
Oh, I thought you meant just philosophical. No, if we're just talking about books, I mean, a lot of Thomas Friedman Earth is flat stuff should get done to see. Yeah, and a leaky dinghy. Man, that's not fair.
I don't know. Something like Ben Barber. I like Ben Barber. So I really like this.
I really like this. One of the reasons I really like this is that it's one of those books where every paragraph is full of 50,000 details. You have no idea what it is, but every time you do figure out, it's well worth it. And there's so many little details of the battle of how people are killed.
And you can make sense of a couple of them. I mean, you know, I tried to make sense of the theft of the armor at the end. There's also a gold, an exchange of armor, just like in Homer. That's another Homer detail.
But there's that part at the end. There's the arrow thing with aerosol and bacon. And if that happens on Friday, why is that? Why is that detail important?
Right? Yeah, there's so many. And then all the minor figures, the critics and the translators, and it does seem like it's worthwhile. Now, what are you going to do?
Right? A dissertation on the section story. But but still, it is one of those things where you just start, you just start to the way and I know Greg from reading, Govers travels, you have the same experience that when you start pushing these apparently insignificant details, it's just infinitely rewarding. That's really impressive.
How we can pack so much meaning into such a short story. So much of Swift is unknown, too, which is amazing for such a household name. I mean, insofar as everybody's heard of Govers traveled, maybe they aren't familiar with the name Swift, but volumes, but just try it. Look on Amazon and see what you can buy from a reputable academic press on Swift.
And it's like two or three books, period, which is a shame. I was trying to write on Govers travels and I sent a note to Paul Cantor and I said, you know, help me find some good secondary literature on this because I'm trying to get this piece out. And he said, I sent him the three or four things I found. He's like, yeah, that's it.
That's all there is. Yeah. What do you think that is? I mean, he didn't have a massive effect, I guess, on no, no, I mean, how many of our readers are listeners do we want to offend?
I suspect it's because Swift is taught in an academic discipline that doesn't take seriously his motivating. Oh, for sure. Is he taught? And it's hard for that's even better.
You know, I'm a political science professor, your philosophy professor and nobody takes seriously. What was that noise? I don't know. Our capacity to do this.
Well, I guess that's it. Since David's Greg's house is falling down. We should we should mention a couple of I asked people on Twitter what book they want to punch in the face. But here, Bruce A.
Hunt Jr. says Spinoza's ethics. Really? Nemo, Mickey, Noman, writes Kurt Vonnegut's time quick or F Scott Fitzgerald's great Gatsby or JD Salinger catcher in the rye.
All are amazingly ****. Honorable, honorable mention anything by Steinbeck or Hemiway. Why? So much ****.
Well, language. Yeah, I know. Jakey, you know, he's an email me. He knows.
He knows how to be a co host. So catcher in the rye. I'll just write that when I was like 30. And it's it must be maybe it's a good book.
If you're a 16 year old angsty teenager who wears black, but when I was 30, I was like, Jesus, kid, you got you got it made. Like what do you like? You're like Alex pre you went to Exeter, like your your family is loaded. You're from the Upper East Side.
You descend from Persian royalty. Yeah, just chill out dude. Get a job. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, doesn't he doesn't he have a fling with that teacher who's house he stays on?
Also like you, Alex. That's true. There's another one. Christopher Hoffman.
I am bada banga. The Hoffman. Yeah. Don't hassle the Hoffman.
He goes, I once was reading a book that argued for the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. It was so unreasonably stupid that I tore it in half and threw it away. Only Hoffman would be noticed. He didn't say he did that to my comp.
So and for the record, my middle little bears, the scuff marks on when I threw it against the wall as a frustrated undergrad. That's a Greek. What's a middle little for the folks at home, Alex? That's a Greek lexicon.
And then somebody else wrote this is for Kian Dionysus. Dionysus. I once dunked 100 years of solitude into the tub to teach Gabrielle Garcia Marquez a lesson in manners. I like that.
Yeah. No, no, I mean, it's not that good. I agree. No, no, it's it was fine.
You have to drown it a little bit. And then we have one more question that had nothing to do with that. Why don't little putions have clocks by a grip of Publius? Listen, I don't I with all due respect to anonymous people.
I don't know what to say. I think David's got a thing. I think David's got a thing. Yeah, I mean, I already called the person out on Twitter.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. See, that question was posed by Bloom to Jacob Klein during the lecture at St. John's. It's a person.
Listen, if Bloom can answer, what do you love these three hacks? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, if you know the answer, throw it out there on Twitter. I would like to know.
It hadn't occurred. Well, here's the funny thing is you then responded from the New Thinker account. Yeah, yeah, that famous question was posed by Klein to Alan Bloom, a lecture at St. John's on Gulliver, care to share what he answered.
And he goes, Alan Bloom could answer in Klein refused to give a clue. It is an interesting question though, because Lulep had a supposed to parody modern politics. But their surprise when Gulliver shows them his watch, La Puda is the parody of modern philosophy and they are technically proficient. Lulep inspects more the social aspects of the society.
Luleputions act like autistic clueless nerds. That's the listeners Greg since a few months. It was probably Greg. It's not me.
That's what he what he teaching next week. Alex, who just who just started for me today? This week, while I'm doing a little air song, a little Jacob Klein person, are you in person? Not yet.
Mid-February. We're supposed to go back and then next week, we do some more air song on my junior seminar, but then we start a 13 week track through Plato's Republique. Very nice. And during that 13 weeks, your daughter will have been born.
Yes, probably in the next three weeks. Is that why you're drinking? Yeah, I need a beer. I gotta get them in before it's too late.
But they'll spoil the breast milk. Are you not a lot of drinking of kids? I'm making a joke that I'm breastfeeding my child. Come on, Greg.
Geez. That's disgusting. Okay, well, this is a fun episode. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Yeah. Thanks also to Jake, the water cannon, Gannon, for producing the show. He's gonna have to zap out some of your Phil Florin filth in this episode. I heard some curse words.
Phil Florin filth. Okay, guys, I'll talk to you soon. These guys. Bye.
Later.