You could say the problem is that we don’t mind our own business.
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Did politicians of the past believe the things they said? Or were they just sayin’ some shit to rile up the crowd like politicians today?
Were Lincoln and Paine using flowery language to get warm bodies to fill uniforms and build railroads?
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What’s a better freedom than the freedom to get money?
That’s what I’ve been saying.
Paine was a true believer in what he said, and that’s why he was marginalized. Lincoln was an admirer of Paine. The thing about Paine is that he wasn’t a true revolutionary, and neither were the Founders, he and they were more like rebels. I’m using Camus’ definition of these terms. A revolutionary wants the current system completely eradicated to the point that it is erased from history; it’s a total reset. This is what the French Revolution attempted. Paine supported the French Revolution but did not support the aftermath, which we know as the Reign of Terror. He did not believe the king should have been executed as he was against capital punishment for moral reasons and instead exiled to America (keep in mind France aided the American Revolution under Louis XVI so there was some sympathy and gratitude there).
Anyway, the Founders didn’t want to create some new moral code or stray from the basic human values they grew up with. They didn’t want to abandon things like the Protestant work ethic. They didn’t want to abandon belief in a higher power and create a nation based on atheism. Where they differed from Paine was that he wanted things to go further. The Founders wanted some people to have the right to vote, Paine believe in universal suffrage. They talked about all men being created equal, Paine was for the abolition of slavery. They talked about separation of church and state while he wrote the Age of Reason which attacked all organized religions and said the Bible reads like something written by the Devil rather than God.
So the Founders were really not that revolutionary, certainly not as revolutionary as the myth of the proposition nation would suggest. Paine was closer to that as he believed the Founders should have gone further. But even Paine was not a total revolutionary. The Founders, including Paine, had a common ancestry (Paine was born in England). They had a common upbringing that influenced how they thought. The idea that they believed America was some metaphysical idea that came out of nothing would be wrong. They were English, or British, and did not see themselves as some new race of humans. They originally wanted fair representation, not a divorce. They wanted the same rights that an Englishman in England had. The proposition nation looks at “all men are created equal” as the belief or idea which the US was founded on. This isn’t true. They most certainly did not believe that every human on Earth was equal. The Declaration of Independence was not some universal message; it was intended for a specific audience and referred to a specific people. They believed all Englishmen were equal but since they were declaring themselves no longer British subjects, they couldn’t say that.
In fact, the Declaration is not a founding document anyway, that would be the Constitution. America was created with the idea that it would be a republic with laws that were to be codified by men we could describe as Anglo-Saxons. It wasn’t some singular idea and it wasn’t a revolutionary one either. The concept of citizenship goes back to Ancient Greece.
The real misunderstanding is people confusing liberty and freedom as general concepts when what the Founders wanted was independence from Britain. They didn’t want liberty and freedom as such, but the liberty and freedom to rule themselves. It’s not like Jefferson or Washington were slaves prior to the Revolution.
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At the risk of sounding like I’m kissing your ass, how do you know all this? I don’t always agree with your opinions, but you are one of the few posters on here who I’ve always thought seems genuinely extremely knowledgeable about history, even if you’re the OG troll.
I have professors who amaze me with their knowledge of history and their depth of understanding when reading things. I can read something that’s assigned for class, think I understand it, then when I hear them break it down I realize I only understood 10% of it.
I’m assuming the way to get to this point is to just always be reading and learning, and have enough intelligence to figure things out.
As a future teacher, I should be able to explain things deeply and clearly. There’s some areas I feel competent in, and others that I know I need to become more familiar with. Do you just read a lot? Do you have a good memory?
I have read a lot. Relative to the average person, even average college educated person, I’ve read a lot. My grandfather was an English professor so there were always books lying around as he had thousands. He had so many books, he opened a used bookstore and in the end had well over 100,000 books. I would go with him to garage and church sales looking for books. So some of these books spilled over to my house as my mother brought a large number with her. When I was five I remember pulling Ulysses off the shelf thinking it was Greek mythology when it was Joyce’s novel. I was like what the hell is this? But I always liked reading and I would read whatever you put in front of me. I think the important thing was that I stopped reading children’s books early. It’s why I really have a problem with high schools assigning things like Harry Potter or Hunger Games. I liked history the most as a kid, especially biographies. I read a biography of Napoleon in fifth grade, for example.
Maybe because my grandfather was a professor and he wouldn’t talk to me like a child, and he watched the news (which is what people did back then) and shows like Firing Line, I developed an admiration for people who could talk about things intelligently. When someone would talk about a specific subject and reference history, literature, philosophy, etc., it was the most impressive thing to me. It’s one of the reasons why I stopped reading kids’ books. They just seemed silly and almost insulting. I remember watching a panel discussion with Ted Koppel. A panelist made reference to a figure from Greek mythology. Koppel then briefly explained the myth to the audience in a way that wasn’t condescending. I was thinking this is how people who are on a different level intellectually speak. A Japanese panelist was asked about Africa, they were talking about global economics, and he started by saying he wasn’t an expert on Africa (the Japanese are known for being humble) but then started giving reasons for it being behind economically and what it needed to do to catch up to the rest of the world. Koppel said to him, I thought you weren’t an expert. The thing is, he wasn’t. He was just very smart and was able to use what he already knew about history and economics, which was a lot, and apply it to a region that he knew little, but just enough, about.
So other than listening to smart people, you can also read books by them. For literature, you have people like Harold Bloom for example. The real secret, to me at least, is writing. Which is why I said reading people who write about things is important. It’s harder to analyze and talk about something than it is to write about it. That professor who breaks things down probably wrote about it and part of writing about a given subject or topic is reading what others have written. But that’s the easy part as you have a guide. Eventually, you want to be able to be as original as possible with your ideas and analyses. With some subjects it will be hard, even impossible, as people have written about them for centuries. I mean, don’t read Homer expecting to find something no one else has found.
You have to read as much as you can and read a variety of books and subjects. The problem with say an English major is that he will read primarily British and American literature. This will limit his understanding. If he reads history, philosophy and the literature of other nations, he will be able to understand more fully what he’s reading and put it in its proper context as art, philosophy, literature, even science, and obviously history itself, don’t recognize borders. Cervantes was influenced by Ariosto, for example. Why do I know this when a typical English major might not know Cervantes and he is even less likely to know Ariosto? I read both because I studied both Italian and Spanish literature. Rather than take the approach of looking at Western literature’s individual components, English, Italian, French, German, etc., I look at it as one body of work that traces its roots to Ancient Greece. What I’m saying is, and I don’t know what you’ll be teaching, if you were to teach Shakespeare, if you know what Shakespeare knew, that is, the philosophical movements at the time, what was going on outside of England, the works he read and that influenced him (which would not have been solely English, far from it), then you can explain him better.
This is why someone who you would think is educated and intelligent comes off as anything but. The 1619 Project is an example of that. Hannah Jones, or whatever her name is, believes that America claims to have been founded on the principle of all men being created equal but it was lie. So she believes in the myth of the proposition nation but that it was a failure of sorts at the beginning. She comes to this conclusion based on not having read much. She has limited knowledge and whenever she talks about American history, she sounds like a college freshman. She believes that the War for Independence was fought because the colonists wanted to protect slavery as the British were supposedly going to outlaw it in the colonies. Thomas Paine was an important figure in the Revolution and he was an abolitionist. We’re supposed to believe he championed the Revolution knowing it was about preserving slavery? She is either a liar (and she objectively is) or has no idea who Paine is. I choose both options. But she studied journalism and probably didn’t learn much outside of it. She knows nothing about history because she chose to not learn anything about it. There are people who are experts in a particular field but can talk about other things and make connections between them, she is not one of them. So yes, a wide breadth of knowledge is valuable for a teacher, although most teachers and even many professors don’t have that anymore. In order for an English teacher to properly teach Hemingway, he needs to understand existentialism. I wonder how many HS English teachers could give a rudimentary lesson on it. How many could name more than one existential philosopher? But, Hemingway isn’t taught in many schools anyway so it doesn’t matter. You have English teachers who prefer to have kids read Hunger Games, or something by Toni Morrison, because they themselves prefer it.
If I were to give just one piece of advice: start from the beginning. If it’s philosophy, start with the Greeks (if we are sticking to the West). History? Sumer. Literature? Again, the Greeks, which means Homer. Science can be tricky as you have actual science and the history of science. You can know the laws that Newton discovered without knowing anything about Newton but it’s still valuable to learn about him. It’s the same with math. But all of this stuff is connected as science, math, philosophy, art, are all happening simultaneously and sometimes by the same people. The whole polymath idea. Getting back to Paine briefly, he invented a smokeless candle.
The problem you will encounter is that the people you teach may not be as interested in what you’re teaching as you were in learning it. Maybe I’m being cynical, but education was not for everyone and is not for everyone. Most people should learn skills instead of receiving a humanities or liberal arts based education. Almost everyone I work with has a college degree, it’s a requirement for most positions. Some even have advanced degrees. None of them could tell you who Kant was, one of Newton’s Laws, who Ophelia was, who Octavius became, who Enkidu was, the Pythagorean Theorem, what Copernicus did, what happened in 476, 1066, 1453, 1492 (other than Columbus), etc. You would think they would have learned some of what I listed in college, and even high school. Now, someone who majored in a hard science or math might be able to name two or three things, but not much more. The points being most people, even supposedly educated ones, don’t really care to know things and most people don’t need to know them regardless. There are some posters here who might surprise you with how much they know and they would probably tell you it was by choosing to make the effort to learn. This might seem from the outside as a gathering for meatheads but there are some very smart posters here.
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Zeducated
I fall in this category, but would add the caveat I remember learning these things but have since forgotten. Gists and absorbed perception have stayed with me but I couldn’t write an essay.
I’ve forgotten most of the textbook content and would likely do poorly on an exam in the bachelor of science business courses I achieved my degree in.
Knowledge has to be useful for me to retain a working handle on it.
Just making comments & observations. Your academia is obviously impressive and I understand the general value of building on historical knowledge and lessons learned, but for me the “go-forward” motion requires fluidity to learn and unlearn in pursuit of future goals or outcomes.
Never forget where you came from, but don’t let it be an anchor either. Objectively and subjectively.
I suppose this is potentially due to a lack of tribalism in my psyche though.
Which is why you could interpret what I said to mean if you don’t know something or remember something you’ve been taught, you probably didn’t need to learn it in the first place. It doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice to know it or that it is useless, but you can function without it. And, you could also add that perhaps the time learning something you didn’t need to know would have been better spent learning more about the things you do need.
I wouldn’t call it impressive. It’s like the person who doesn’t work out or works out half assedly that is impressed by someone who is strong and jacked. Sure, the person may even look good to someone who is also strong and jacked but, it is simply a case of priorities and investment of time and effort. You prioritized certain things in your life and have gotten where you are; that is, in its own way, impressive. Take someone who knows multiple languages; it’s impressive maybe, but again, they just decided to invest their time in learning those other languages whereas someone else didn’t. I tutored college students in Spanish. One student asked if I had any shortcuts to learning it. I responded that I could show him how to use his time more efficiently when studying but he still needed to put the time in. He wasn’t interested in doing anymore than was necessary to pass the class when told his success would be proportionate to the time and effort he put in. One student ticked me off a little when he complained about having to study (you’re in college dummy, what did you expect?). I mentioned how there were people his age getting their legs blown off in Afghanistan so maybe studying isn’t the worst thing in the world. He just shrugged his shoulders. I’m sure there are other posters here who enjoy reading and learning about a variety of subjects and they’ll say it’s not some great feat; it’s just using their time doing something they enjoy. Getting back to lifting as an example; everyone wants to look fit and muscular, to varying degrees, but most of them won’t do what it takes because it really isn’t as important to them as it is for those who do it. And it’s why those of us who do invest that time can have issues with those who say they want to do it, but ultimately find a million reasons to not do it. I’m sure we’ve all wasted our time giving advice to people who seemed enthusiastic but in the end, didn’t get off their asses and put in the effort.
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My in-laws named their daughter Ophelia. They use “Opie” as her nickname.
Jesus!
I think this sentiment is true in an objective, useful scenario for sure. It’s why branching off from literature, sociology/psychology et cetera in to a narrow scope of study towards a specific goal made sense. Then purging unnecessary information even from that line of study in a practical sense and learning new things I needed as I moved through my career.
I think it is useful to learn from classical literature and other resources even as passover information of sorts. I think we internalize or at least store morals, lessons and viewpoints that we can then draw on and utilize situationally later, even if we don’t remember the specific order of encounters with Sirens and the Cyclops. At the least I’m sure it instills a certain brain elasticity that lasts.
I also think this is why it’s important to take in a well rounded view of things. Our thoughts create the tracks we live in, and the more we know the more broadly we can apply knowledge to personal ideals.
Its also possible he made all that stuff up.
The United States Didn’t start July 4th, 1776? The Bill of Rights isn’t attached to the Constitution? The Father of the Revolution was marginalized?
I’m gonna need some citations.
13 States declared their independence from Great Britain. 13 “Free and Independent States” with “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”
I don’t think he said that, but that was a prohibition on federal meddling in State issues.
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You could argue it didn’t. What’s the defining document of the US? The Declaration or the Constitution? The very word constitution implies it’s the foundation of what our nation is built upon.
Yes, but it doesn’t state all men are created equal. It’s a document that puts limits on the government. If anything, limiting government is more of a foundational idea than freedom.
He was sentenced to be executed in France, and Washington did not intervene. Monroe ended up getting him released. In the end, something like six people attended his funeral.
I don’t know if you’re joking, but this should be common knowledge.
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Now Pres Monroe isn’t a founding father! Come on dude!
@zecarlo Have you ever read The Giver?
Of course not. It’s disgraceful that it gets assigned in some schools.
Sorry, haven’t been on a ton the past few days.
I don’t have a ton to say in response, as I was just looking to hear your thoughts, but I appreciate the answer, and thank you for the time you took in answering it. It’s given me some things to think about.
Another systemic push back.
FTR I view these rollbacks as positive. Don’t care if a weird adult wants to do weird things but glad to see child exploitation under a spotlight.
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