Readers are Leaders



Photo: Me with a handwritten manuscript
transcribed by clergymen in the Middle Ages

 "What are you reading?"  The brilliant Berlin philologist Wilamowitz-Moellendorff would ask this of his students upon first introductions and other visits. According to Gilbert Highet, the lesson to be learned from the question is that “a scholar’s duty is to keep reading, reading, reading.”

Literate populations didn’t reach the majority until the 1870s. This was very surprising to me. I expected it to be much sooner than that. I would have thought literacy began to reach the majority of populations shortly after the invention of paper was brought to and reproduced in Europe after the 15^th century. Second, I would have expected it to be during the Renaissance when literature and the arts were rising from potent seeds in Italy and being sown across Europe. Lastly, I would expect literacy and education to be common by the time of the Enlightenment of the 18^th century.

Having given it more thought, let us look at what we already know. During the Imperial Age of Rome (27BC-476AD), only elite nobles were educated. After Rome fell and we entered the Dark Ages, saeculum obscurum, (5^th century to 15^th century) education became a privilege of the clergy. The Church essentially held a monopoly on education throughout the Middle Ages until the Renaissance of the late 15^th – 17^th centuries and was finally overcome by the Enlightenment in the 18^th century.

During the Age of Enlightenment, there was a public shift from religion to reason. Religion was considered to be merely superstition a way for the church to manipulate and abuse both people and government. The atrocities carried out in the name of God and the church would no longer be tolerated by the people. During this time, the western world was blessed with individual thinkers such as philosophers JJ Rousseau and John Locke, physicist Isaac Newton, statesmen Benjamin Franklin and Montesquieu, and other great minds of the time. This grudge against religion also led to the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence.



Photo: Me with a handwritten letter
from the Pope in 1250s AD

 
Did the Enlightenment break the Church as water splits the rock in winter? The church had already fallen far from its peak of power during the Middle Ages. Long before Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church, the Great Schism had struck a mighty blow splitting the papacy between East and West. As time progressed, cracks in both doctrine and parishioners grew like fissures rent open from the colossal pressure of tectonic plates. Furthermore, the clergy was crippled by the Black Death. The Plague killed 1 out of 2 people in most major European cities. However, it killed 4 out of 5 people in the clergy. How is it the plague seemed to seek out to devastate the church? Some people thought it was God’s vengeance seeking those responsible for the Holy Wars. In fact, it was probably because priests were present for last rites to the dying and ill. They also were in close proximity to perform funeral ceremonies for the recently deceased. These activities most likely increased their chance of catching the Plague. It took the church and the rest of Europe around 150 years to regain healthy populations. During this time, the church had ongoing quarrels with several medieval kings of the European provinces.

The church, weakened by various means, finally lost its position of nearly unlimited power over the people. In the Age of Enlightenment, the people fought back hard. They took back education from the church and put it in the hands of the State. Within one hundred years, it became a right to the layman and his progeny. It has remained as such in all developed civilizations since. Blessed are the ones who lay no restriction on education. Blessed are those who share from their hearts with no requirement of class, creed, or race, and seek students everywhere their feet fall. Blessed at the teachers.

Remember, the world was not always this way.

Please be thankful that you can read this.

Now go share a book with someone.

Readers are Leaders!

On the Nature of Rebellion

As most know, I’ve been teaching abroad in different countries this year and last. Every once in awhile, I have a student that shows outright rebellion towards the teacher as an authority figure. I teach middle school age students, so hormones and identity crises are normal. However, I keep thinking about the nature of rebellion. My mind won’t just write it off to the simple explanation of puberty.

So what is this natural desire towards rebellion? Is it a nascent potential to corrupt/destroy in order to make room for other forms of creation? Is it merely to instigate change in the world around you or a superficial affect to make you feel that you are making a difference? Is it a form of Durkheim’s concept of anomie, or maybe Marx’s Entfremdung (alienation)? Would the papacy chalk it up as just another result of original sin or a chthonic voice on your shoulder whispering dark messages in your ear?

I feel my own bouts of rebellion when people become unnecessarily bossy or use demanding imperatives too often. The feeling sparks a heat of rebellion in chest. It makes me want to do the opposite action. Where does this come from, I imagine. Have I been trained to rebel against authority? As an American mind, I believe this desire was molded by a society that values and encourages rebellion. When we see authority stacked too high, we must knock it down for fear of our own liberties. This is, in most daily cases, quite ridiculous and grows from a seed of distrust. But we are a nation of rebels, united under the rebellion from Great Britain, monarchy, tyranny, and the church. We say eff your tea as we dress as Indians to avoid the blame and consequences of our party actions when we toss it into the harbor.

But this is not to be another rant on our American past. It is a question of our ever-present. Why do we rebel? Alone, the question is perhaps too broad. It would not do the question justice to answer it simply as a child answers when asked why…. “Because.”

Let us study it as Plato did in the Republic when considering what is justice and how do we create the just city-state. Rather than examine the city in the larger macro-scale, he looked instead to the man as micro-scale. He reasoned that what leads to the development of the just man, must surely also lead to the just society. So let us look not at rebellion on a global or national scale, let’s see it from the perspective of a man or family. One classic case of rebellion which we witness generation after generation is child-contra-parent. Throughout history, sons have rebelled against their fathers (and daughters against mothers). Not just on ideologies after spending time in the world outside the parent’s home as in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, but as simple as taking out the trash, cleaning your room, et al. Take Henry IV of England as portrayed by Shakespeare. His son, Prince Hal (Henry V) was a dreaded little brat during his youth and well into young-adulthood. Although many times he recants his behavior in a Zack Morris-esque aside to the audience saying that he knows he is hanging with a disreputable crowd, but he plans to redeem himself publicly at a later time. However, his actions prove otherwise as he continues to share company among Falstaff and his dregs of the alleys and taverns. Prince Hal repeatedly rebels against his father’s royal court by refusing to attend public functions. His untoward reputation grows to the disdain of his father. His private asides to the audience remind me of St. Augustine’s famed prayer in his Confessions (Book VIII, chapter vii), “da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo” (Latin Trans: make me chaste and celibate, but not yet). Augustine too wanted to be good, he wanted to respect his father (God) and follow his rules, but not just yet.

I suppose that teachers have a similar relationship with students who become true pupils or apprentices rather than just a seat-filler for the scholastic year. I’ve had a couple great teachers turned mentors who were like a father to me. In days of yore, you studied with your tutor each day and they often lived within the same estate. Let us take a side note from the rebellion of parent and child to that between teacher and student. There are several more good case studies I could mention on good teachers and bad students. I suppose that is what brought my mind to the question to begin with.

Take the case of Seneca and Nero for example. Seneca was a brilliant philosopher of the stoic school of thought during the twilight of Rome’s Imperial Age. He was a tutor to Nero as a young man, and later became an advisor to him during his reign as emperor. Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian line of emperors. We learn from both Seneca’s own writings and the historian Tacitus that Nero was a bright student and well adjusted at a young age. However once he gained power, he began to push away those people who influenced him towards virtue. He grew in vice as his positive influences disappeared. Plutarch describes him as a tyrant during his rule. Nero later ordered the death of his dear teacher and advisor Seneca. Seneca took it like a champion stoic. If you haven’t seen it, swing by the Musée du Petit-Palais in Paris to see Jacques-Louis David’s oil painting The Death of Seneca. It is strong evidence for the rebellion of a student against his former teacher.

Antiquity likewise provides the case of Socrates and Alcibiades. We discover in the readings of Plutarch’s Lives and Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War that Alcibiades loved his teacher and yet grew up to become the ruin of Athens. Plato similarly wrote Alcibiades into many of his Socratic dialogues. Alcibiades is shown as a loyal follower of Socrates and his philosophic teachings; yet as an adult, he changes allegiances from Athens to its rival Sparta during the Peloponnesian Wars. Furthermore, he leads a conspiracy to impede peace talks between the two cities and helps to instigate the Athenian Coup of 411 BC which led to the rule of the Four Hundred Oligarchy and later to the rule of the Thirty Tyrants.  Here, a student who shows devotion for his teacher nevertheless tears down all that the teacher holds dear by dismantling both Athenian city government and the virtuous democracy it harbored. Why does this student destroy that which is so valued by his teacher? If this is the result of Socrates’ teaching, it’s no wonder the ruling class ordered his execution by charge of corrupting the youth. Given that the youth he taught grew up to sew tyranny into the Athenian city-state, I’d say warm hemlock tea was getting off light. But alas, this case does not show fault for the teacher. It is the student that chose to rebel. There seems to be no justification in it.

Sure, sometimes rebellion is justified. We Americans certainly don’t feel bad about gaining our independence through rebellion. Looking again at the familial cases, in the Royal house of Thebes, Oedipus Rex’s famous rebellion via patricide was truly accidental. In the house of Atreus, Elektra’s matricide was planned, but justified according to familial loyalties and her pious duty. These names lead us to the field of psychology. Freud, the renowned psychoanalyst, uses the historical name of Oedipus and his contemporary Carl Jung uses Elektra in their psychological writings. Each theory talks of rebellion against the parent to fulfill a natural desire of psychosexual development.

During college, one of my aforementioned teachers turned mentors recommended a writer to me by the name of Gilbert Highet. I found him to be one of the most brilliant classicists of the 20^th century. I happily devoured his book Man’s Unconquerable Mind and recently read his book The Art of Teaching. In the latter, Highet makes an exceptional argument which hints at a solution of our problem. In his book, he discusses our case studies and makes the observation that rebellion may spring from the desire for self-creation. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Prince Hal does not rebel for rebellion’s sake, he rebels because he wants to be his own man. He fears that if he does what is expected of him, he will become merely a copy of his father. He desires to be himself, so he rebels against all those who would seek to make him a cookie-cutter replica of his father. He avoids royal court functions in order to seek his own authenticity. Perhaps that’s just it, a desire to be authentic. We destroy the foundation of others so that we may create our own and feel unique and responsible for our efforts. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote extensively on the matter of authenticity. In his magnanimous tome Sein und Zeit, he describes his concept of dasein. At this point in my life, this seems to be the greatest explanation of our desire toward rebellion. Rebellion seems to be a natural effect of dasein’s endeavor toward authenticity during our developmental years when we are building our individual public and private identities.

There comes a time when we must push away from our supports.

We must set out to create ourselves.

This my friends, is why we rebel.