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Other than Sex BC, is a "classical education" relevant in the modern world?

  
  

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Cat Chant
12:09 / 21.08.02
I suspected that Bill P - though I hesitate to speak for him - meant that the idea that there is a linear "history" running from fifth-century Athens thru Republican/early imperial Rome to the Renaissance to the British Empire to us has been a major legitimating discourse in the invention of particular kinds of racism, and hence that statements like "Arabs invented mathematics", are useful tactically since they break out of the tautologous & hermetically-sealed conception of "humanity" as defined by a Eurocentric concept of "the history of human civilization" and legitimated by a definition/study of "the classics".

Sorry about the one-liners earlier. I should just stay out of this one, really, since I can't say anything helpful.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:29 / 21.08.02
Deva, I have rarely known you to say anything *unhelpful*.

But if that's what Bill means, then absolutely - although it could be said that a lot of this "Arabian" knowledge was Greek and Latin, kept alive in the East through the West's dark ages - bear in mind how long the Byzantine empire was kicking around in one form or another.

But I think "Arabs invented algebra" although absolutely valid as a way of challenging the received ideas about "Western" society, is by no means going far enough.

As I mentioned above, a) the study of that legitimating discourse is, I think, part of the question (Athenians don't sleep with boys, the Beatles didn't take drugs, there was no homosexuality at Eton, and so on)and b) absolutely it's a fallacy, but I'm not sure that arguing that other civilisations not on this axis were also getting on and making and doing things is the only prong of the argument; to discuss whether the antecedents of Greece came out of Africa is, I would suggest, less useful to a reexamining of global civilisation than a discussion of the cultures that have developed over the past very long time indeed within Africa, which is a horribly undersupported discipline and in a perfect world would be a part of Classics (or Classics would be a part of it, if you see what I mean).

Perhaps more useful would be the knowledge (that is gained through any study of the Classics worth its salt) that these civilisations were alien in all sorts of ways, with considerations of how those alien qualities have been and are elided by those with a political interest in making their own civilisations conceptually map.

F'r instance, I can see it would be mud in the eye of the Nazi neo-classicists to say "ah-hah! The people whose architecture you idolise were a decadent culture by your twisted reckoning, because we can now show (or at least theorise) that they were partly of African descent." But would it not also be bootful to point out that, as soon as you take a wider view, the culture is "decadent" (and deeply odd and un-German) in a bout a million different ways, relating not to who interbred with whom 1200 years before the temples were built, but what the people who built those temples did and thought.

Totally take the hit on "B.C". mind - it's a handy signifier, and I fall into it. Lazy Tann.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
12:40 / 21.08.02
My Near East history absolutely sucks. It's a failing, and a very obvious indictment of the Western educational model...

Which begs the question, what should be the model of Western Education, which I think was the secret theme behind this very entertaining and educational thread all along. The important question isn't "should some people study the classics?" because it's pretty uncontroversial that yes, some people should, just like some people should study dying Native American Languages, the archaeology of Easter Island, and Poetics of Heavy Metal. So, yes, of course there is "justification" for the study of the classics in the 21st century, as much as there's justification for the study of anything else (the Posters Position).

The controversial question, and the one hard to advance in the affirmative without seeming like Harold Bloom, is "should the Classics (under erasure, natch) have a prime spot in the "kitbag" (to borrow LMP,B's phrase, though I prefer toolbox, but that just may be my phallocentrism pricking up) of critical skills (or "Things to Think With") provided by a Liberal Education (for all intents and purposes, we're talking about the West here. Anyone educated in a different tradition? That experience would surely add to this thread)?

To me, it makes little sense to avoid the classics all together. Would you seek an understanding of Indian without reading the Upanishads (not that I have, really, aside from bits and pieces)? In order to understand the West (under erasure, tee hee) as it is now, which I think is essential, doesn't it behoove one to know how it became The West (tm)?

Not have much firsthand knowledge of how the Classics are taught in University, I propose the "MetaClassic Model" - that is, the study of the study of the Classics, a look into how a continuous yet protean investigation of these ancient thinkers shaped the concept of the West.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:26 / 21.08.02
With every new academic outlook there becomes a new way to regard what has already been studied, people's views are never going to remain fixed on one thing and thus their perception will change, you've already said it yourself - the classics are now classed as pre-modern. Postmodernism has reevaluated the way that we review ancient work as it has done so for work from the renaissance. It has done so in a way similar to the enlightenment and modernism before it. I would never say that something is not worth studying but I would say that the approach towards studying some things is worth adapting -not necessarily at the level you likely study it at- at an intoductory level. Having said that I still would not want to have any part in it, I'd still dislike it, that period of history is not for me.
 
 
Bill Posters
14:05 / 21.08.02
Deva that's exactly what I meant but obviously expressed badly, so no, you're not being unhelpful, far from it and I don't think anyone wants you to stay away. I do agree with Haus's reservation that it's not the only or optimum way to think/argue... I think it could be seen as a form of 'strategic essentialism', and as you say, a powerful tactic therefore in certain instances. But yes Haus, point taken that the 'oh look, there's an historical personage who happens to be 'brown'/'black'/'yellow'/'red' who had a firm grasp of instrumental rationality so that's knocked Whitey off hir (his?) high horse' could well become highly oppressive to those 'brown'/'black'/'yellow'/'red' persons from cultures (or 'cultures') who appear not had such a strong grasp of the ratiocinative, and thus thoroughly counterproductive.

Now Haus, on real history, I know that's its more fashionable in history to ask 'why is history constructed thus?' than to worry about 'how was it when it actually happened?' (to sort of misquote Ranke... was it Ranke? My memory fails me. It might have been Momsen. Dunno.) I do however think there's a time, albeit a limited one, for good old fashioned realism, almost an historical logical positivism as it were. I know that "The Gulf War Never Happened", obviously, but do I remain a lone modernist voice in a postmodernist wilderness in my claim that the holocaust did happen, and moreover that it wasn't very nice? Surely not? I appreciate that there are those who might beg to differ but surely what we have there is an

*brace yaself*

historical fact. There, said it! Sorry for any offense caused to members of Agnostics Anonymous. I can still maintain that concepts like 'Jew', 'homosexual', 'mentally infirm' or whatever their Germhun equivalents are can and may at times have to be used under erasure. But I for one am not prepared to relinquish such terms. So there.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:19 / 21.08.02
But in this case there *is* no real history. There are no records, at least none that I can think of, that can offer any conclusive proof a) that Aryans swept north at a particular time through Greece from the north, or b) that Afro-semites swept through Greece from the south, or indeed c) that what look like some evidence of invasions and population shift is in fact, as is at times suspected, a shift in internal power structures, or indeed d) that Homer was blind, while we're here. This is, as I say, the bit that (prepostmodern) people seem to have trouble with. This isn't "real" history. It's not even "fake" history. It's the construction of a credible history, which can take its place alongside the other credible histories. It's storytelling with an end in mind.

Is the war of the Lelantine Plain a historical fact?

And this is but one reason why I am slightly biting back a suspicion that your "disappointed but unsurprised" implication is that to suggest that saying that the Bernal thesis is in effect unprovable was in some way an attempt to "save" Greece for the white races. Greece was never white (or indeed, Greece) in the first place. It was *Greek*.
 
 
Bill Posters
14:43 / 21.08.02
No, I never meant to imply you were trying to save Greece in order to boost the reputation of 'the white race'. I just thought that archeologists jolly well ought to be able to answer such questions with their trusty DNA-based analyses. But mayhap I expect too much of this life. Small wonder then that as a discipline, archeology is in ruins.

*ba-boom tish*
 
 
Cat Chant
12:35 / 19.09.02
...a series of shifting interpretative resources, structures and processes by which the world can be viewed and reviewed - a thing to think with. - Haus

We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire - T. S. Eliot

Roman history, properly comprehended in its broad outlines, is and remains the best teacher not only for today, but indeed for all times. - Adolf Hitler

The Empire never ended - Philip K. Dick

So... fucking burn the Classics. Just burn the lot. So we wouldn't be able to understand a lot of contemporary culture? Maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe even the interminable bloody endurance of our understanding of classical references reinforces the Romanization of history, so that the Roman Empire becomes a sort of Microsoft - an oppressive technology, presenting itself as a transparent means of understanding our world, but at the cost of collusion in oppression.

Maybe there's something to be said for a willed full boycott of the whole structure of the Athenian-Roman Empire and the traces it has left/paths it has laid down in later world history. Maybe what we should be doing is rendering radically illegible, for all time, all cultural formations which rely on this Eurocentric discourse network which subordinates space, time, & history to a fundamentally racialized and fascistic (quite literally - in fact more literally than C20 appropriations of the term "fascist") conception of the human.

[PS and FYI, I'm doing a PhD on Vergil & Lucan]
 
 
Persephone
17:30 / 19.09.02
Wow. How serious are you about this? I don't mean pragmatically serious, but ideally serious. I'm not even a classicist, and I honestly think that I would have nothing left after such a revolution. Do you think there would be anything left?
 
 
Bill Posters
17:32 / 19.09.02
There'd be no Haus left.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
18:39 / 19.09.02
That's a fascinating proposal, Deva. And one which seems to suggest
that you might think that without the Classical sensibility, if i may call it that, Western culture would have evolved in different ways... Or am I putting words in your mouth? In what ways, is I guess, what I'm asking.

As, I guess, Persephone, I'm also then saying that there might not be much left of what we have now, but there'd be something else instead, as in cultures that have had little or no contact with or relationship to the Classical cultures.

I do think there might well be something in Deva's suggestion (again, hoping I've got this right) that thought structures can limit our understanding and development, and that the balance between how much they help and hinder is in constant flux. I've been thinking about Deva's characterisation of Romanization as being like a gradually homogenizing technology. I'm reminded of the advances in text-messaging and ready-made profiles/messages and picture messages which purport to 'make communication quicker and easier than ever before' but instead reduce users to a set of ready-made emotions/communications. eg the 'i love you' picture messages are all currently hetero, single race couples'. So the technology in fact makes it alot easier to say fewer things, whose boundaries, inclusions and exclusions are already specified.
 
 
Cat Chant
11:16 / 20.09.02
BiP - I love that picture-messaging analogy, can I borrow it?

Scattered thoughts & amplifications follow.

I guess the thing is that, contra Haus's assertion (mostly in argument with janina) that 'the Classics' are a thing which should not be confused with the establishment within which they are studied, I would be somewhere closer to thinking in terms of Derrida's lovely new word, 'globalatinisation': a communications technology which universalizes the particular (Latin) by designating it a transparent and innocuous medium of communication. Classics (or 'Rome' as I usually call this thing) names not only a body of thought/texts but also the structure of inheritance by which we become members of a European culture which is equated with the Roman Empire - Shelly, for example, credited the Roman Empire with being an efficient system for the delivery of Greek thought and it was also understood by some Catholic historians as the necessary 'globalisation' process which made it possible for Christianity to spread through the channels it had already cut.

The question is, then, how complicit does it make us in the history of Classics as homogenizing technology of history/geography/globalisation to avail ourselves of it as a technology of understanding/communication? Haus calls Classics a "toolkit" - Audre Lorde reminds us that the master's tools will never demolish the master's house .

I should make it clear that I don't mean this "burning" procedure as a Pol Pot/Year Zero procedure (though that might be the only way, however, in which such a boycott/burning is possible) - more like an anecdote MC was telling ages ago about responding to the repeated telling of a racist joke with a cold stare and the refrain: "I don't get it. I. Don't. Get. It" - thus putting the joke-teller in the position where he had to either let it go or explain, explicitly, "It's funny cos black people are stoopid!" A way of forcing the underlying racial/sexual/cultural/linguistic structures which make Classics intelligible out into the open, so we can destroy them.

Or to take it in another direction, as BiP says, the fundamental question becomes one of alternatives to Classics - a historical/geographical LINUX, a technology which allows us to communicate without complicity in Rome. In this case I'm thinking more about the sorts of thinking underlying lesbian (and possibly other forms of) separatism as a strategy: a sustained and total withdrawal of energy from men - all the way down to a refusal by women to smile at men who expect their dealings with women to be a little treat, a little smiley bonus of pleasantness throughout the day: to withdraw that feminine niceness which is why women get hired as receptionists... I'm explaining it badly but I'm in the office & my books are at home. The point of this kind of thinking, though, is that it's based on the idea that if you withdraw all your implicit, invisible, tiny little ways of supporting a rotten system and put your energy instead into building radically alternative systems, which do not share conceptual or material resources with "the master's house", the rotten system will die. It's a politics of ignoring as active withdrawal from a set-up which is geared against you from the get-go.

Clearly, though, it's, strictly speaking, not only pragmatically but also philosophically (? can't think of the right word) impossible to "burn the Classics" as I've advocated - given that, is it even worth advocating?
 
 
Persephone
12:10 / 20.09.02
To answer your last question, I think that my answer would be that it's an extremely powerful imaginary exercise. And I never mean "imaginary" to be derogative... to me, the imaginary is a sort of lab where you can do things that probably you could never do in the world; it's the place where you can access the impossible.

I have to think about this some more. But this is similar to something that came up in my head in Plums's class threads, but I could never get it schematic enough... will probably fail again... but it has to do with how the conventional wisdom is that America is a lovely melting pot and overlooks --there has been a major book about this, it's not like I thought of this myself-- the very fact of our official English language, our "transparent and innocuous medium of communication." Anyway I've been beating on this drum (in my head) ever since, that America is an Anglo outcome and make no mistake. But if America is an outcome of England and England is an outcome of Rome...

Should take it as a sign that I just typed and backspaced over five sentences...

I did spend a little time editing out items inherited from the classics in my life, and I was pretty much left with a short list of foodstuffs.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:12 / 24.09.02
Deva: go ahead, have to admit i was rather pleased with it myself.

Persephone's raised something that occurred to me the other day... Have any of the UK people been watching a C4 season called AD1, starting with a programme called The Model Empire?

Didn't see it, but the trailers were hyping the season not only on the grounds of the relevancy of the models, but on the reverse process, that the dominance of these models provides contemporary/modern empires with a set of rules/insprations.... Not sure if this is clear, but made me wonder about the extent to which the 'obsession' gives rise to societies in its mould, provides a justification/ a line to trace for empire-building practices today... Is it possible to disentangle this process from the 'actual' significance of these cultures...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:36 / 24.09.02
Oh, and it's interesting that you bring in Lourde here, as example of the lesbian separatist strategy got me to thinking about immigrant strategies, ways that immigrants have tried to inhabit a geographical space without compromising their cultural space/identity. Again, at the most rigorous/'fanatical' edges, it can be and is done. Have been watching East is East, which delinetes the difficulties in mixing the 'master' and 'servant' ideologies...
 
 
Bill Posters
13:41 / 07.10.02
I can never remember what 'Shoah' means but I've been warned off the word 'holocaust' by various people...

Deva, on the Culture after auschwitz and me me me thread in the Conversation.

And this is a prime example of a politically-aware attempt to not 'classicise' other people's cultures. Sho'ah I believe simply means catastrophe, but the use of the Hebrew is to emphasise that is it different from many other things which could be seen as catastrophic and (relatedly) that it was a uniquely Jewish event. Although I would disagree strongly with both those claims (as would Jewish friends of mine), I can understand why many Jewish people prefer not to use a word which means a totally (not partially) burnt sacrifical offering in Ancient Greek because, well, it's neither a Hebrew word nor does it really carry a very appropriate meaning.
 
 
Cat Chant
09:19 / 08.10.02
if America is an outcome of England and England is an outcome of Rome...

Could you say a little more about what you mean by 'outcome', Persephone? This thing about English is interesting as well - isn't it a little more obviously politically contested, though, in terms of the history of the Spanish language(s) in the US? Though I have to admit I have not the slightest idea about non-English language communities in Britain.

I am supposed to be watching AD1 but the thought of it fills me with weariness and misery and so it languishes on tape on my shelves.

Is it possible to disentangle this process from the 'actual' significance of these cultures...

I am slightly obsessed with Daddy Jack's Archive Fever these days. If you think of Rome as globalatinisation, as the archive of 'world' history (where the 'world' is understood in a totally Eurocentric manner, obviously), it all becomes either clearer or murkier... JD says

The archive is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case... No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.

So if you think of Rome as archive - no, you can't distinguish the archive as technology from its content as information.

Oh, and this is Walter Benjamin, who's also informing the way I'm thinking about history and classics at the moment:

From what are phenomena rescued? Not just or not so much from the ill-repute and contempt into which they've fallen, but from the catastrophic way in which they are often portrayed by a certain form of transmission, by their 'value as heritage' - They are rescued by the demosntration of the fissure in them. There is a form of transmission that is catastrophe.

and

The concept of progress should be based on the idea of catastrophe. That things 'just keep on going' is the catastrophe. It isn't that which always lies ahead, but that which always is given.

The idea that there is something in the very structure of transmission and archiving that is corrupt - very much like the picture-messaging thing I guess. Though can we just take over the tech & create little as many pictures as there are 'niche markets'? Would that help?

Sorry for scattered, late, & heavily-citing reply.
 
 
Pepsi Max
10:03 / 08.10.02
Deva - yeah, baby, yeah!

Reburn the Library of Alexandria.....?

Hmmmm, why not drown the bugger instead? We have many "Classical" traditions. Already mentioned are the copious Sanskrit documents from India (the Vedas, the Upanishads, etc). We also have the immense corpus of Islamic literature in Arabic and Persian. Not to mention the mighty output of the Chinese (the Analects, I-Ching, The Art of War). And we're only just scratching the surface here.

Or this is simply substituting more candidates for a 'master discourse'?

And if you institute this purge, how does it actually operate. Do we simply abandon the study of ancient greek and latin? what about ancient history? spell it out.

'globalatinisation' - can we have a link or an explanation of what exactly this is please.
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
09:22 / 15.10.02
Hmmmm, why not drown the bugger instead?

I agree with this Idea. Include so many other classics that The Classics are no longer the history and the culture but a history and a culture.

Disparate signals from distinct symbol systems. I've read the Illiad AND the Epic of Gilgamesh AND Beowulf. I've read The Prince AND The Art of War AND The Book of Five Rings. I've read parts of the Bible AND parts of the Koran AND the Dammapadda(sp) AND the Tao Te Ching AND the Bhagavad Gita. A note: I've read them all in translation into english as I have no other language... yet.

My position is that what was of value in "Classical Education" was the treatment of Philosophy as something that is important and the training in an other language. It would do better perhaps with a training in more modern philosophy. The language training should also be in something significantly different than the historical roots of "Eurocentric" culture. Chinese or Japanese for the difference of the way of thinking that they can frame. Japanese is particularily interesting in this way as native speakers have been shown to use the other side of their brain for language than do english speakers.

However this is not to say that "Classical Education" is not of value for some people to be versed in. If we abandon it completly it would become the disparate signals we need.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:29 / 15.10.02
I'd suggest that believing that there is an "ideological continuity" that means, say, Ancient Greek is a less "alien" mindset that Chinese is falling into exactly the same trap that sees a continuity of acculturation between Classical Athens and 19th-Century England. Old world thinking, basically.

(On a side note, I would be fascinated to know where Japanese speakers are "shown" to use the other side of their brains...)
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
23:12 / 15.10.02
(On a side note, I would be fascinated to know where Japanese speakers are "shown" to use the other side of their brains...)

I am not too familliar with the research but some group of scientists did brain scans (maybe eeg) and found that people who's mother language was Japanese processed it on their right side. They also found that traditional japanese music, i seem to remember, was also right brain whereas when they listened to western music it was left brain. I read it in a Scientific American which I don't have handy. I'll see if I can dig that up for you.

Ancient Greek is a less "alien" mindset that Chinese is falling into exactly the same trap that sees a continuity of acculturation between Classical Athens and 19th-Century England.

There are a number of people who point out that a number of assumptions that were expressed as theorems by the likes of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are embedded in our language (English). Alfred Korzybski for one. Robert Anton Wilson goes on at length about that.

Plus Etymologically, A large number of words in english have their roots in Latin and Ancient Greek. This is particularily true of words of the educated and traditionally upperclass such as doctors and lawyers. A much smaller base of words has been inherrited from the chinese.

So no, I don't see any problem with the position that chinese is more "alien" than Latin or Ancient Greek.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
00:43 / 16.10.02
Aargh. The "upper class" lingo did not evolve. It was created. It is artificial, an alien construct upon the language itself. Languages aren't smooth and shiny, whether "alien" or "familiar".
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
01:12 / 16.10.02
Aargh. The "upper class" lingo did not evolve. It was created. It is artificial, an alien construct upon the language itself. Languages aren't smooth and shiny, whether "alien" or "familiar".

Hmm.. the "upper class" was to much of a cheap shot?

Alien, perhaps but less alien than chinese. I disagree with you about the alien-ness of the "upper class" lingo. English as a language had the infection of the alien classics meme early enough for it to evolve as part of "the language". It was brought into the primarily Germanic structured Anglo-Saxon with the arrival of the conquering Normans who brought with them Latinate-french. They set up the french language as the language of the court or of the "upper class". This brought a lot of french and therefor latin derived vocabulary into the mix of what is now known as english. It should not be suprising that the bulk of this vocabulary was used in the spheres domminated by the "upper class".
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:04 / 16.10.02
So, hang on....you're saying that Latin colonised English by making us speak...Mediaeval French. Like doctors do. Because only members of the upper class describe themselves as eating "pork" rather than "pig".

Forgive me; I thought your position was ill-informed. Now I realise that it is simply absurd.

So, let's pretend that you had the ill-informed position instead, which covers the insertion into the language of many Greek and Latin-based coinings, accellerating to the Age of Reason and showing no sign of stopping. Which *is* interesting, because it's the creation of a technological language within the language, which takes its linguistic components from a formalised understanding of something essentially outwith that language, in order to express concepts alien *to* that language.

That is an infection, in the manner of the alien fungus covering the Liberator - bonded to but alienated from English, with all sorts of peculiar "classicised" cross-currents running towards and away from the apparently desired valence - inviting the lion within your gates, and then hitting it really hard in the nose.
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
10:18 / 16.10.02
So, hang on....you're saying that Latin colonised English by making us speak...Mediaeval French. Like doctors do. Because only members of the upper class describe themselves as eating "pork" rather than "pig".

No, you are seriously misconstruing my argument here. I seem to remember this as being described as "attacking a straw man". I said, in defense of my statement that Chinese would be useful because it is different from our normal language structure, that as latinate french entered the english language starting after the Norman Invasion in 1066 english has had time to evolve in a way that includes the incorporation of the latin and french "tools for thinking". Clearly if English has incorporated Latin elements during its evolution and Chinese has been incorporated much more recently, and much less pervasively, than Chinese is more "alien" to English then Latin is.

And really, it is my understanding that most people in all classes refer to the food as "pork" not "pig". A heavier percentage of latinate vocabulary and "tools for thinking" are used by those in traditionally "upper class" roles, I never said the "upper class" were the only ones to use language derived from Latin and French. Although personally, I tend to refer to the meal as "katsu", more of a result of Japanese eating than Japanese speaking. Sadly. ;^>

I think it is clear that for this debate "upper class" is a loaded term. Though thankfully, not as loaded as it might be in a Marxist debate.

I think Haus that some of your confusion with my post seems to revolve around mistaking what I considered to be an "interesting side note" for a primary part of my argument. Perhaps though, it warrants an argument of its own:
Historically Latin usage has been connected with the "upper class".
It started with the usage of latinate french by the "upper class".
It has continued as part of the roles reserved for the "upper class".
Therefore
the preservation of Latin education might relate to the "upper class".

I have a favorite latin phrase, CUI BONO.

Forgive me; I thought your position was ill-informed. Now I realise that it is simply absurd.

I think I'll ignore the condescending tone you have taken and look at the structure of what you said. You have implied, either my position is ill-informed or it is absurd. This statement is an example of assumptions that are formulated in the classics, in this case Aristolean logic and the Socratic method, that are embedded in the structuring of our language. This is also an example of another classical pursuit, rhetoric. See Lord Alfred Korzybski and his General Semantics for an example of an attempt to excise these assumptions and classical structures from the english language.

Haus, I think I have defended against absurdity, can you explain to me what causes you think I must be "ill-informed". I would like to defend myself against this, presently unsubstantiated, accustation or if it is in fact true to attempt to rectify it. Or is it the assumption that anyone who is not classically educated is ill-informed about classical education?

That is an infection, in the manner of the alien fungus covering the Liberator - bonded to but alienated from English,

Sadly we can't attribute much of the credit for this idea to me as it arose as more of an artifact of my word choice than as a consciously created position. On the other hand this turn of mind does seem to be implied with in my post. I think in the future, I am going to try harder to separate my explicit argument from implied content. I definitely agree that this is an interesting direction to take.

Warmest regards,
Fenris23
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
10:34 / 16.10.02
Fenris - 'upper class' is a loaded term anyway, but in terms of your argument it is actually really unhelpful. First up, the use of French at court and for legal purposes doesn't equate to the Plantagenet nobility being au fait with the Latin language. Historically, the use of Latin has been associated with the clergy, regular and secular, with the law and with medicine - the professions. This is not the same thing as the aristocracy/gentry/nobility/upper and middle class (depending on which period you mean, of course); though it is certainly true that, especially during the nineteenth century, the idea of a classical liberal education was espoused by those institutions which we associate with the upper and middle classes (public schools and universities). I would say that this association probably began during the eighteenth century, when learning (but not pedantry) became associated with the idea of politeness, a very inclusive social discourse; but at no point has Latin been associated exclusively with the aristocracy/gentry (and if that's not what you meant by upper class, what did you mean?).
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
10:38 / 16.10.02
And besides, knowing Latin does not necessarily enable anyone to understand the ancient world or mind...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:59 / 16.10.02
Listen to the historian. She has knowledge.

Meanwhile....you misunderstand me, fenris. I assumed that your position referred to the period of Latin and Greek-based neologism (beginning seriosuly in the age of reason tum te tum te tum), in which case it would have been ill-informed. It subsequently became clear that you were in fact advancing the opinion that, because Mediaeval French had morphologies originating in Latin roots, that it was a vehicle for Classical ideologies (you used the term "classics meme", which would refer to culture rather than simply language), which was simply absurd. One might as well accuse William the Conqueror of being a stooge for Etruscan ideas.

I trust this has cleared up your misapprehension.

If your only argument is that Chinese has fewer morphological elements in common with English as a language than Latin, then I will happily agree, pausing only to draw your attention to the question of *why* that may be (see also the coining of neologism that tum te tum te tum), and that that has no necessary connection with a continuity of culture - one does not feel somehow more "in touch" with Ancient Greece because your word for "the arrangement of the stars" is composed of Latinised particles of Ancient Greece, or because 900 years ago your country was invaded by people whose language was in some ways connected to the state language of the Roman Empire that had previously occupied it. By that logic you should be going back to Aulus Plautius' invasion of Britain in 43 A.D. At least reasonable sources confirm that he did speak Latin, not "latinate French". Which - newsflash - is not Latin, any more than German is Norwegian.

On other notes, unless you can come up with something to substantiate this hemisphere theory, I'm afraid it just sounds like orientalism.

(If I were feeling snarky, I might add that the use of antithesis is a linguistic feature of Ancient Greek, not a specialised characteristic of certain Greek writers, a point which would be coherent in any case only if you could prove to me that no other culture has ever come up with the idea of something being one thing or another, these two states being incompatible.

But I'm not.

So I won't)
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
11:04 / 16.10.02
I have a feeling that the term upper class is far more loaded in the UK than it is in other locales such as Canada.

I feel there has been a definite slide effect as to who in each time period has been called upper class. It seems to me that at one time jobs such as Barrister or Doctor were restricted to gentry. In the 1080s it might have been the aristocracy, in the 1800s it is more those people who were permitted into further educational institutions. There is still a certain amount of wealth and privilege required for one to be able to attend post-secondary education rather than enter into the work force these days is there not? I would also suppose it would require even more privilege and wealth to be educated as a doctor or a lawyer. Is my belief unfounded?

However, as I have said, I find the discussion of privilege and the role of classical education to be a secondary debate when compared to the discussion of the usefulness of such education.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:07 / 16.10.02
"When I use a word", said Humpty Dumpty, "it means exactly what I want it to mean."

Glad that we arrived here sooner rather than later.
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
11:14 / 16.10.02
(If I were feeling snarky, I might add that, while an absence of Classical education is no bar to being considered intelligent or correct, if you are trying to impress people with the big veiny cock of your wide reading you may want to learn to spell Iliad)

You are not being snarky?!! Shit I don't ever want to see you snarky. Forgive me my typos as I forgive those who typo against me. Besides I read it a while ago and having reviewed the Iliad thread I think I may have to reread it.
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
11:42 / 16.10.02
you edited your post to include more spelling errors on my part?

The interesting thing about the exclusive-or language structure, which you attribute to greek language, is not only that it denies that the two are compatable but that it implies that there is no third option. Both features of the structure can be misleading. Hmm... this was also added after the edit.

Showing my scope of reading was not an attempt to impress any one, as at the time I had little ego bound up in the thread, it was merely an attempt to give what I thought was an example of Pepsi Max's "Drowning the bugger" an Idea I still think has some merit.

And thanks haus a weak argument is always better than an absurd one.

I still think there is some merit in an argument that "continuity of culture" is, or can be, largely maintained by the "continuity of language structures". As language acts as a constraining grid that determines what kind of discourse is or is not easy to hold in a given culture.

And since when is attempting to explain oneself better, "When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean." You are right though that does seem to always come up eventually.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:22 / 16.10.02
The edit was before your response. Although the fact that you have misread my comment as presenting the structural antithesis as *denying* incompatibility rather than *asserting* it suggests that you may not be paying as close attention to what others are writing as is generally considered polite in the Head Shop.

The Humpty Dumpty point is, fen, that as your response to KCC demonstrated, and your increasingly brief responses to mine are tending to, you are so reluctant to admit to being wrong in any particular, logical or simply factual, that, rather than do so, you are demanding carte blanche to redefine, according to your whim, among other things the Upper Class (variously and severally the upper class, middle class, clerical class, aristocracy, monks, various imaginary social orders revolving around the gentry), Latin (French), Latin cultural memes (Latin language structures)...and so on and so forth, until one is left with a soggy mess of word salad in which all meaning has been pulped out by an individual's sheer force of will never to recant or reconsider, even if the cost is meaning itself.

There is little, if any, profit in this process. Possibly less so, in fact, than in a Classical Education.

So, onwards.

Back to the *usefulness* of the Clasical Education. I think something we were moving into here was the question of why "Classics" is identified as being the study almost exclusively of Ancient Greek and Latin. If this is true (and I think it pretty much is, yes? Other civilisations are studied as "Egyptology" or "Pre-Columbian studies", and so on), then why is it true? And what should be done about it, if it is undesirable.

Personally, I suspect we are failing to distinguish two separate threads, one of which is currently much-neglected; the study of the Classics, that is ancient history, civilisation and works of literature and art, and the study of the Classics, the examination of why some cultures have studied these things, in what way and to what ends.

I think that broadening the idea of "Classics" to include every ancient culture might risk the developing study of the latter, but might also create a degree of critical distance that might be very healthy for it.

Hmmm.
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
13:00 / 16.10.02
Although the fact that you have misread my comment as presenting the structural antithesis as *denying* incompatibility rather than *asserting* it

Actually I think that was a typo, adding the in prefix by mistake, which indicates that I am far too tired to continue discussion at the level that headshop seems to require. You are right that my word usage is getting soupy but I suspect that the point it got confused was my use of the word meme.

I'll get back to you later its 6:55 am for me and I have been enjoying this conversation all night. Thanks Kit-Cat Club for your response and reminding me about the roman invasion of Britain. Funny what you forget in the middle of the night

good night!

ps. haus did you edit your post again? was this line in the original version?
 
 
grant
15:34 / 16.10.02
Just to address the tangent, there is some scholarship on different languages being processed on different sides of the brain:
Rogers read a story to a group of bilingual children while recording their brain-wave patterns. She first read the story in English while observing that the children’s brains were active in the left hemisphere and then read the story in Navaho and observed their brain activity in the right hemisphere. This according to Rogers gave evidence to the fact that English as a noun-centered language was processed in the left side of the brain and the Navaho as a verb-centered language was processed in the right side of the brain. This gave evidence to the fact that although the same story was told to the same children they processed the story differently according to which language it was told in (Gill, 1997:140). Gill, Jerry. 1997. If a chimpanzee could talk and other reflections on language acquisition. University of Arizona Press.

There's a less referenced mention of Japanese specifically here:
The left hemisphere, the one looking out of the right eye and working the right side of the body, has (in most Europeans, anyway) the speech center. The left hemisphere does not speak, but is actively involved in music, poetry and other forms of communication. This relationship does not hold true for other language types. Japanese language, researchers believe, is linked with the right hemisphere. Perhaps because it is more tonal, poetic, less digital than European language. Bilingual Japanese process English and Japanese in opposite hemispheres.


And, just to make it a full-on racially sensitivity yukfest, here's a .pdf of a University of Washington/Tokyo Denki University study on the way "r" and "l" get processed in Japanese brains.
Among the conclusions: • The American subject’s MMFs to /r-l/ contrast in the left hemisphere were much larger than the Japanese subjects (outlier of 99% confidence interval). %Ha ha! Velly solly!%

And according to a related New Scientist article, ...A six-month old Japanese baby can clearly hear the difference between the words "right" and "light", but when it comes to a Japanese tourist asking directions in New York or London, the potential for confusion is endless. The distinction between the "r" and "1" sounds is not made in Japanese, and by adulthood it appears to have been wiped from the Japanese brain. In fact, says Marie Cheour of the University of Helsinki's Cognitive Brain Research Unit, the distinction is erased before a child even learns to speak.

The article also goes on to say:
Having two separate maps is important if two languages are to be spoken and understood well, but this doesn't mean that they have to be separated in space. In fact, the opposite may even be true. Although brain imaging hasn't yet allowed us to pick out the phonetic maps specifically, two years ago Joy Hirsch of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the speech region known as Broca's area. They showed that in bilingual people who learnt both languages early in life, the two are represented in overlapping regions of the left frontal lobe.
In other words, most bilinguals use the same hemisphere of the brain to process both languages - but for whatever reason, Navajo and Japanese speakers don't.
 
  

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