On my Substack, “Philosophy of Human Flourishing,” I posted some thoughts on Valerie Tiberius’ great little book What Do You Want Out of Life? A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters, for those interested: “Good books for a good life: Valerie Tiberius’ ‘What Do You Want Out of Life?'”
Brief comments on Tamler Sommers’ “Why Honor Matters”
As a long time listener of the podcast Very Bad Wizards, I purchased Tamler Sommers’ book Why Honor Matters with a positive disposition toward the author but a negative one toward the focus of the book: honor and honor cultures. My moral/ethical leanings are shaped by a “dignity framework,” whether that be because of my upbringing as a Christian and the explorations in Christian theology that have indoctrinated me, or (and?) because of my attempt to develop a rational basis for my moral and ethical beliefs that don’t appeal to divine revelation (often a secular derivative of Christian morality, if I’m honest). Right or wrong, Christian morality is presented as emerging from the example of a man, Jesus, who appealed to dignity (by way of the imago dei) in the honor/shame culture of the Roman Empire, with obvious favoritism toward the former. Jesus suffered because of an honor culture (i.e. his Passion) but the Kingdom of God that he preached imagined the world as a dignity utopia. This paradigm makes honor cultures look archaic and unevolved.
Sommers’ book doesn’t abandon the value of dignity-based morality but instead sheds light on the strengths of honor-based morality that we have lost in societies that have abandoned an honor-shame structure. He doesn’t ignore that weaknesses of honor culture—for example, honor killings, cyclical revenge, and such. He builds a steel man for the values of honor culture that I found at time convincing and at other times at least worth pondering further. And this book knocked me off my high horse by putting a spotlight on where dignity culture has failed (e.g. the American justice system and our world’s largest prison population).
I was attracted to the book for a negative reason: I’ve begun to think, contrary to some, that we’re not a society that needs less shame but one that may need more of it. I don’t mean old school, religious, Puritan-style shame. But I do think that social media has revealed a side of us in “Western” culture that’s gotten very ugly. It’s individualism taken to its most absurd extreme. We do what we want and we don’t care who it impacts, as long as we enjoy it. I think there should be some shame in that. The flip side of this is that there needs to be more people who want to live honorable lives: who care about their name, their reputation, and that of those closest to them. (For example, I want the name “LePort” to mean something that it definitely hasn’t mean in previous generations, and I want it to be a good name that my son can proudly own.) If you’re generally interested in a philosopher making a defense of the strengths of honor-based morality, or if you’ve had a concern similar to my own, then I highly recommend this book. It’s well-written and its case is argued as about as good as anyone can argue for honor-based morality in our current context.
Social media is terrible, so join a book club
This week, I was thinking about social media. I hate social media. Also, I spent more time that I should on it. I’ll check Facebook, then Threads, then Instagram, then Bluesky. (X is a hellhole that I left long ago, and I’m too old—at least I see myself as too old—to care about TikTok.) I’ll post. I’ll get some interaction on Instagram, especially if I post pictures of my kid, but hardly any interaction otherwise. It’s kind of depressing. It’s like talking to yourself in a cafe.
So, if I understand the past couple of decades, we outsourced clubs, churches, etc., to tech companies who spend all their effort trying to keep us doomscrolling so they can throw ads at us. I think this t-shirt that I saw in a store several months ago is correct in its messaging:
As I pondered the sad trade that we have made, I thought to myself, “I should join a book club.” I kid you not, this week a good friend of mine sent me a text asking if I’d like to create a book club with him. I think there will be three of us. It’ll have to be over Zoom because the other two live in Canada. But I’m excited. And I think this is our solution to the world social media has broken: book clubs, or at least some kind of club. Shared hobbies. Shared interests in general that bring us together. Zoom isn’t ideal but at least I’ll be interacting with a friend, and we’ll have a project that brings us together once a week for a half hour or so. This is the type of thing that will help us break free from Zuckerberg’s algorithms. And we need to become free.
A box of books, roomier shelves, and past selves
Yesterday, I filled a box halfway with books that I’ll be taking to Half Price Books this morning. Now, I’m a fan of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “antilibrary” where the unread books on our shelves remind us of all the knowledge that we don’t have and won’t acquire in this lifetime. If I could, I’d fill my house with books, read and unread. It would look like a library. It would elate and humble me. But I’m not the only person in my household who makes decisions about home decor, so there are limits to where books can be stored. This means that I needed to clear some space for the many new books that I’ve bought that have been stacking up on my desk—mostly philosophy books in preparation for a new class that I’m teaching next school year. Hence, the half-filled box that I’ll be taking to Half Price Books.
I chose mostly biblical studies and theology books. I didn’t touch my philosophy section. I didn’t touch my religious studies or American religion sections. I decided that only so many books on the Bible were needed, so that’s what I’m selling today. This decision reflects a change in my interest and even personhood over the past few years. I’ve struggled to teach students about the Bible in a way that confounds me. When I’ve taught courses on comparative religion, American religion, or even local religion (ala my summer offering “Religion in San Antonio”), it’s been easy to retain student interest and investment. And honestly, when I teach the Hebrew Bible, other than a lot of whining about “all the reading” (you signed up for a course on the Bible, kids!), it goes well. But every spring, the combination of the year drawing nearer and nearer to the end, along with self-understood “familiarity” (which is hardly any familiarity at all) that breeds contempt, and the fear of using critical thinking skills to evaluate something so sacrosanct as the Christian New Testament, I find myself struggling constantly with resistance to learning. Most of my educational training has been around the Bible, especially the New Testament. I’ve written ThM and doctoral theses on its content. I’ve presented papers at conferences about it. But nearly a decade of teaching it to adolescents has sucked the joy out of it. I enjoy teaching high school…just not the New Testament. And this has led me to lose interest in the very content matter that was at the heart of an undergraduate, two graduate, and one doctoral degree.
Is there another context where I could find myself enjoying the teaching and discussion of the Gospels or the Epistles of Paul again? Sure. I imagine an adult education class at a church, if I had the time or will power. But my experience in my context has so zapped me of interest in that material that I lobbied to reduce our two semesters of biblical studies to a single semester offering titled “Introduction to the Bible” which seems far more manageable for my students and me. I mean, to be fair, if students are going to learn about religion in high school—a privilege that many high school students don’t have or have only in contexts of indoctrination—I find it strange that they would spend all their time on the holy book(s) of Judaism and Christianity without even learning about Judaism and Christianity let alone all of the other religious traditions that are out there. Most of them aren’t going to seminary someday. If they stay Christian, as many of them are, they’ll hear the Bible through the comforting filter of sermons, which seems to be their preferred method of engagement anyway. (Sorry if this sounds bitter!)
This has led me to rethink other aspects of my personality and how I’m using my time. For example, do I want to remain a member of the Society of Biblical Literature? My son’s birthday will be every November, just a few days before Thanksgiving Break when the Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion meet. Do I want to spend my time at those conferences anymore? I’m not sure. I don’t want to hear papers on some micro-exegetical evaluation of a portion of the Gospel of Mark, that’s for sure. So, is membership and conference attendance a waste of precious time and money? It’s beginning to seem like it.
I’ve been through these transitions before. So far, they’ve always turned out well but they’ve left me with a pedigree that doesn’t match who I’ve become. Let me explain. In high school, no one considered me college material. At best, I would go to the local community college for some skills but I think that most presumed that I would enter the workforce when I graduated. The summer before my junior year, I became curious about the Pentecostal tradition that my mother was raising me in, and by default, I became curious about how to read the Bible “the right way”. The positive side to this is that I turned around as a student and graduated from high school, which was in doubt at times, and then went to a denominationally affiliated college because I thought I was going to become a minister in those Pentecostal circles. By my junior year, I knew this wasn’t going to be the case. I didn’t believe any of their core teachings anymore, so I bid my time until I graduated, looking for a new place to belong.
The negative side of this is that my undergraduate degree is from a truly terrible school. I will never step foot on that campus again. But my options weren’t Stanford or Cal Berkeley as I neared graduation. My options were workforce/community college or this denominational school and the denomination school did give me the skills needed to get into graduate school. So, I went to Western Seminary, which is loosely affiliated with Baptist churches but mostly brands itself as conservative, “big tent” Evangelical (compared with say the more “liberal” “big tent” of a Fuller Theological Seminary). I earned a MA and then a ThM (Master of Theology) from there. As I began my studies for my PhD, through the University of Bristol but facilitated by the Anglican school Trinity College Bristol, I began to experience a from of deja vu. Just as I had known that I wasn’t going to be able to stay in the Pentecostal circles that had raised and educated me, because I could no longer identify with them, so my time in Evangelicalism was drawing to an end.
The end of my doctoral studies were traumatic. As I neared the completion of my thesis (what they call a dissertation in the UK), a series of things went wrong and I began the job that I’m still working today, which was great because I had a teaching job, but made it extremely difficult to finish off my thesis. For this reason, my viva was a bloodbath. I had to spend the next several months making corrections to my thesis in order to graduate and in order to not fail my doctoral program. I pulled it off but something had changed forever. As much as I’ve tried over the years to regain some sense of myself as a biblical scholar, the confidence was gone. I hated my thesis, so I never could find the will to edit it further to try for publication. It sits as a PDF on my computer and as a lost book somewhere in the library of the University of Bristol. (By the way, the external evaluator who bludgeoned me to death during my viva: his books, which I’ve kept on my shelves all these years, are in the box that I’m taking to sell this morning!)
All of this has me thinking about one of my favorite concepts from Buddhism: anatman/anatta. It’s a complicated theory, but as Daniel Weltman summarizes it: “there is no persisting self—nothing about us that remains the same at all times.” (I recommend his explainer, “The Buddhist Theory of No-Self”, for those who want to know more.) While I don’t know that I’m on board fully with the idea of no-self or no consistent self, it makes a lot of sense experientially. Is the Brian LePort that thought he was going to be a Pentecostal minister the same as the Brian LePort who thought he was going to be an Evangelical biblical scholar who became a high school religious studies teacher in an Episcopal school? Yes but also in many ways, absolutely not. Those versions of me were necessary for the current version of me to exist, for sure. If I wasn’t under the delusion at age 18 that I was going to be a Pentecostal preacher, I wouldn’t have the job that I enjoy now at age 42. But also, the decision of the 18 year old to go to a school that trains ministers in a highly sectarian denomination forever limited to future options of the person that I’ve become and am becoming. It’s still on my CV and I’m sure that along with schooling from conservative Evangelicals, it’s caused people to write me off as a candidate for many jobs. I got extremely lucky that when I applied for my current job a decade ago, that chaplain who was heading the search has himself spent time in Pentecostal and Evangelical circles, so he was curious about me. I fear that a born-and-bred Episcopalian who’ve never given me a chance!
On the other hand, there seems to be hardly anything left of that kid that thought he was going to be a Pentecostal minister. If I could warp time and meet him, we’d likely agree that there’s no connection between the two of us. We’d have a hard time imagining that we’re the same person in any meaningful sense.
I’ve written mostly about the changes that came from transitions in and out of religious traditions and academic settings but there’s no doubt that other major events forever altered me into someone new, ranging from my marriage at age 27, to moving away from California and eventually living in Texas, to the birth of my son last November, to a major health scare that I experienced just this January. These types of events feel like when the butterfly comes out of the cocoon. There’s continuation but the discontinuation is what’s radical.
Am I a philosopher now? No. I’m self-trained. I’ll always have a more developed skill set for biblical studies than for philosophy but the biblical studies books are going to the store to make room for more philosophy because who I want to be now is someone who thinks philosophically. I’m not as invested in the project of creating human knowledge around/about the Bible as I used to be. It’s a noble endeavor, as all humanities work is, but it’s not my endeavor anymore. And while I’ll continue to teach a class on the Bible for the foreseeable future, it’s not my area of interest anymore, so I hope my philosophy class is a success! Who knows who I’ll be or how I’ll feel in a year from now. I’m sure there will be far more continuation than discontinuation. I’m a relatively stable and static person. But sometimes you need to make room for a new version of yourself by getting rid of that which is old. So, if anyone is looking for a good deal on some biblical studies books, go to Half Priced Books over off Bandera Road here in San Antonio. You’ll find some of my stuff there.
Epictetus’ Stoicism (2)
See the first post here: “Epictetus’ Stoicism (1)”
Epictetus has a way of assessing what is valuable about our lives as humans that I find refreshing. In our society (I speak as an American), most people determine your greatness based on wealth and power. (Interestingly, many Americans also think of our society as a “Christian” one…but that’s another discussion altogether.) Rarely do we admire people for their virtues. Maybe we admire wealthy and powerful people who seem to have retain some virtue but our admiration of their virtue is secondary. We’re surprised that they have money, power, and character. But for Epictetus, as I wrote in the last post, there’s nothing about being wealthy that makes someone inherently great. If someone is wealthy, that’s just it: they have a lot of wealth. It tells us little about them as a human. The same is true of power.
Epictetus and Wealth
Now Epictetus doesn’t seem to be one who would say that we should “eat the rich”. He wasn’t anti-wealth. Nor is he anti-power. It’s just that he didn’t see these things as the be-all, end-all of human value like we are taught in capitalist societies. Epictetus saw wealth and power as things that someone might have, mostly by means that are beyond their control (e.g. born into a certain family; right place, right time opportunities). He didn’t deny that people who want wealth must pursue it, so there’s definitely some minimal contribution of human agency. But it is very minimal. Every wealthy and powerful person arrives where they do not because of the power of their will but because many things beyond their control went their way.
Here is what Epictetus appears to think of the decision to pursue wealth and power with our limited agency: it’s just an exchange. We’re making the decision to trade certain things for others. The trades aren’t necessarily “good” or “bad” but merely preferential. Let me share some excerpts that will explain what I mean (and remember, I’m using Long’s translation).
Judgments, Motivations, Desires, and Aversions
First, Epictetus warns us “if you desire any of the things that are not up to us, you are bound to be unfortunate” (Section 2; Long, p. 9). Epictetus has stated already that the things that are up to us are judgments, motivations, desires, and aversions. In other words, our perspective on the world is our own; how we exist in the world is mostly outside of our control. Wealth and power aren’t judgments, motivations, desires, and aversions but we can judge that we want wealth and power, be motivated to attain it, desire it, and be averse to experiences like poverty and powerlessness. But the only real choice that we’re making that’s in our control is the choice to value what we value. We could choose to value other things, like peace, tranquility, happiness, etc., which are more easily accessible as states of mind.
What We Value
Second, we must take responsibility for what we decide to value, knowing it could let us down if we fail to earn the wealth and power of which we dream. Epictetus says (Section 5; pp. 11, 13), “It is not things themselves that trouble people, but their opinion about things.” And “whenever we are frustrated, or troubled, or pained, let us never hold anyone responsible except for ourselves, meaning our own opinions.” With regard to what I’m saying here, if we pursue wealth and power and we fail, we have no one to blame for the fact that we invested so much of our emotion into those externals.
Entitled to Nothing
Third, we should see nothing of this sort as owed to us. We are not entitled to wealth or power, no matter who we are. Epictetus reminds us (Section 11, p. 19), “Never say about anything, “I have lost it’; but say, ‘I have returned it’.” If we have wealth and power at one moment, and then we lose it at the next, it was never “ours”. We had it on loan. (More intensely, Epictetus says this about the death of a loved one like a spouse or a child, for even with regard to people that precious to us, he stands by his assertion that we must remember that we can’t control whether they are with us or not. This has been a harder teaching for me to accept but I’m still processing why I’m open to Epictetus’ posture toward wealth and power while much more resistant to his posture toward lost loved ones. That being said, in his era, life-spans were shorter and one was more accustom to experiencing the death of a spouse or a child than we are, so it was something with which a first century CE Roman had to learn to cope.)
Distrust Yourself
Fourth, as I’ve discussed in another post (see “‘If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself'”), even if we pursue wealth and power, we should never allow ourselves to buy into our own hype. Epictetus writes in Section 13 (p. 21), “Even if some people think you are somebody, distrust yourself.” Oh that many of the world’s most wealthy, influential, and powerful people had an ounce of this self-awareness. Maybe to be a major player on the world stage like a Putin, or a Jinping, or a Trump, you have to have a level of narcissism that drives you to bulldoze forward no matter what but I don’t know that our world is better with such men in power. What if such men paused to have a moment of doubt as to whether they should be where they are, acting toward others as they do. Imagine.
Appearances Can Be Deceptive
Fifth, Epictetus reminds us that people who have wealth and power may not be as satisfied as they appear. He writes in Section 19 (p. 29):
“When you see someone honored ahead of you or holding great power or being highly esteemed in another way, be careful never to be carried away by the impression and judge the person to be happy. For if the essence of goodness consists in things that are up to us, there is room for neither envy nor jealousy, and you yourself will not want to be a praetor or a senator of a consul, but to be free. The only way to achieve this is by despising the things that are not up to us.”
A modern example that stands out to me is Elon Musk. The man spends hours on “X/Twitter”. There are days he tweets over a hundred times. He’s reported to have a burner account to fight online with his enemies. His cult of personality leads some to worship him thinking that “he’s playing chess while everyone else is player checkers” but what’s his goal. He’s the wealthiest man in the world and clearly, that doesn’t satisfy. He has to ear of powerful politicians, but that doesn’t satisfy. I’m skeptical that he’s a man who can be satisfied and by this I mean that he’s a man who could embrace happiness, peace, and tranquility. He needs drama. He needs a fight. Clearly, he needs to be constantly distracted. The billions aren’t enough. Epictetus would remind us that we should be very careful when we become jealous of such people. Do we want their lives, really? If your happy, at all, then you may want a piece of his financial security but I guarantee that if a genie offered you the chance to swap places with him, you’d turn down the offer.
Satisfaction Starts Inside
Sixth, this is because Epictetus believes that if you aren’t satisfied with yourself, there’s nothing wealth and power can provide you. In Section 23 (p. 33), he writes, “If you ever find yourself looking for outside approval in order to curry favor, you can be sure that you have lost your way.” And in Section 24, he says that we should not worry about living a life “without honor” in fear that we’ll be “a nobody everywhere”. Instead, we should embrace the reality that we “need to be somebody only in the things that are up to you, and in them you can be a top person” (p. 35). Personally, this means trying to be a good husband, father, and teacher. I don’t need to be somebody to many; I need to be much to a few.
Pursue Wealth, If You Can Preserve Honor, Integrity, and Moral Principles
Seventh, Epictetus addressed whether we should seek wealth (and we can add power) so that we can support others, like our friends. His response (in Section 24; pp. 35, 37)?
“If I can get it and preserve my honor and integrity and moral principles, show me the way, and I will get it. But if you are asking me to lose the good things that are mine just for your to acquire things that are not good, you can see how unfair you are and how ungenerous. Would you rather have money or a trustworthy and honorable friend?”
Similarly, Epictetus sees this commitment to honor, integrity, and moral principles as a patriotic act that benefits one’s nation: “And if you were to supply your country with another trustworthy and honorable citizen, would you not being doing it a benefit?” If we sacrifice our values, Epictetus warns (p. 39), “…if you lose this character in wanting to benefit your country, and you end up dishonorable and untrustworthy, what benefit would you be?”
Weigh the Costs
Finally, back to the most important point: all pursuits are exchanges. Epictetus advises (Section 29; p. 45):
“In every undertaking, examine its antecedents and their consequences, and only then proceed to the act itself. If you don’t do that, you will start enthusiastically, because you have not thought about any of the next stages; then, when difficulties appear, you will give up and be put to shame.”
He uses the example of somehow who wants to glory of being an Olympian. He doesn’t tell them that they can’t pursue this goal, but that they must count the cost of the exchange (p. 45):
“You must train, keep a strict diet, stay off pastries, submit to a regular regimen each day, summer or winter, drink no cold water and no wine except at appropriate times; in other words, you have to surrender yourself to the trainer just as you would the doctor. Then in the actual contest you have to dig in alongside the other contestants, and perhaps dislocate your hand or twist your ankle, swallow a lot sand, get flogged, and with all of this lose the fight”
Even if one is to commit to be a philosopher in the Stoic way, they must be prepared to lose some things in order to gain others; they must be prepared for certain hardships the lead to certain rewards. Life is about making decisions; it’s about exchanging this for that. “Think about all this then see whether you want to exchange it for calm, freedom, and tranquility” (p. 49).
In my next post, I’ll share some of Epictetus’ words about reputation and worrying about how others view us.
Epictetus’ Stoicism (1)
Last week I read A.A. Long’s translation of Epictetus’ Encheiridion and excerpts from his Discourses, titled How to be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life. I know Stoicism is en vogue right now but there’s much of the philosophy that I find attractive, whether trendy or not. A while ago, I read a bunch of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. The principles were agreeable to me. Likewise with Epictetus’ philosophy.
Epictetus (55-135 CE) was a Roman philosopher who had been a slave. His context is important because it’s different from those of us who have some way to participate in a democracy (though maybe not so different from people living in more authoritarian countries around the world, which could include the United States some day). As Long notes about Epictetus (p. xv), “The Roman world of his lifetime was an absolute autocracy, headed by the emperor or Caesar.” Epictetus didn’t have much hope for changing his world through campaigning, voting, or activism. As hard as it is to bring change about in our world, it was even harder in his. For this reason, the next best move was to turn inward to find freedom. According to Long (p. x), Stoics like Epictetus understood freedom to be “neither legal status nor opportunity to move around at liberty. It is a mental orientation of persons who are impervious to frustration or disappointment because their wants and decisions depend on themselves and involve nothing that they cannot deliver to themselves.” While many of us may have a more expansive experience of freedom (we can campaign, vote, participate in activism, start a business, etc.), the truth of the matter is that as individuals most of us are quite limited in our impact and our influence on the world, so the “inward turn” remains valuable because this is where our “locus of control” lies.
For Epictetus, there are aspects of our world that are “up to us” like our motivations, desires, and aversions: “in short, everything that is our own doing” (p. 3). Most things are “not up to us” like our “body and property, our reputation, and our official positions—in short, everything that is not our doing.” This can be a liberating insight, even now. We can’t control the body that we were born into, or the wealth with which we started, or how people think of us, or whether we get the job we want. Biology, and societies, and economies, and other systems control much of who we are and what we have. Even those who become billionaires need things to break a certain way and they need to do business in a certain system that is rewarding certain innovations at the right time. Jeff Bezos, for example, doesn’t happen in just any context, so the idea that he’s self-made ignores pretty much everything about reality. This is a freeing insight. Those of us raised with the myth of “the American Dream” were told that anybody can become anything if they work hard enough for long enough. It’s a cute myth but merely a myth. Like all myths, it inspires certain people who “make it” but they’re the exception that proves the rule: the American Dream is a lottery. There are plenty of people who worked hard enough for long enough for very little reward.
I’m going to write a handful of posts sharing nuggets of wisdom from the Encheiridion. For this post, let me end with this one, since I’ve been talking about being a “have” or a “have not”. In Section 44 (p. 79 in Long), Epictetus shares two “inferences” that are “invalid”:
- “I am richer than you, therefore I am better than you.”
- “I am more eloquent that you, therefore I am better than you.”
Epictetus reminds us that as humans, we are “neither property nor diction”. We have property/wealth. We have rhetorical skill. But those things aren’t what we are. Instead, if someone is richer than others, rather than seeing themselves as better because of this accident (I used this in both the philosophical and colloquial sense of the word), they should accept what it means: to be wealthier than someone else doesn’t mean that I am better than them; it means that my wealth is greater. That’s it. I have more wealth than they do and for most of us, someone has more wealth than we do.
We judge ourselves by accidents of reality. We determine our worth by things that we don’t determine, no matter how much we’d like to believe that our hard work and ingenuity is the sole cause of our wealth, success, health, etc. This isn’t to say that we don’t contribute anything. I mean, Bezos did have a great idea at the perfect time…but he easily could’ve made a mistake here or a mistake there and there’s no Amazon as we know it. Nothing about the lives of people that we deem “successful” is inherit and inevitable; the same is true of those who are deemed failures or even just middle of the road.
“I, too, seek an unreadable book”
The philosopher Robert Nozick begins his book Philosophical Explanations with this wonderful line (p. 1): “I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to a stop.” There’s something about this statement that resonates with me as I think on the books that I’ve read. Now, if I happen to finish a book by reading it straight through for a day, or a few days, or a week, while this is rare, I don’t think it says anything negative about the book. In fact, often I would consider this to be a sign that it was a good book. If I begin a book and it finds its way to my bookshelf, it would seem to follow that it was a bad book. But is this the case? Are good books easy to finish and bad ones difficult?
I don’t know why I’ve never thought about this before but when I stop and reflect, I think some of the best books I’ve read are those that I had to stop, though not permanently. I had to stop for a time. On my shelves sit books like John Rawls A Theory of Justice or Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics. These books are partially read but I stopped with the intent of reengaging later. Why? Because I had to stop. I had to reflect. I had to read other authors on similar topics to help me move forward. I needed to consult the history of some idea or the history of some debate in order to have a great context for what I was reading. I was forced into a hermeneutical spiral of sorts.
I learned from Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book that it’s my responsibility to find out whether a book is worth my time and attention. Not all books need to be finished. I think this is why I sometimes look at unfinished books in a negative light. But the “unreadable” book that makes you stop, walk away, and think, may be more valuable in the long haul than the book through which you can breeze quickly! This reframes many of the books on my shelves that are waiting for the day that I reunite with them. They’re good books; they’re just not books for which I was ready when we first met.
Would Plato approve of children reading the story of “Noah’s Ark”?
I’ve been rereading through Plato’s The Republic recently. In Book II, as he has his characters Adeimantus and Socrates imagine the ideal society, they begin discussing what kind of books they would want the youth of their society to read as part of their education. They agree that education should focus on “mind and character”. And that this education should “include stories” of “two kinds, true stories and fiction” (Lee’s translation, p. 68).
But then Socrates asks:
“Shall we therefore readily allow our children to listen to any stories made up by anyone, and to form opinions that are for the most part the opposite of those we think they should have when they grow up.”
Adeimantus replies, “We certainly shall not.” Socrates goes on to say that the ideal society would have to supervise what books are read (p. 69). Now, at a time where our country is debating the banning of books in libraries and schools, this may sound a little fascist. I don’t know if Plato should be read as saying he wants this to happen, or just that this is what it would take to create an ideal society even if he’s not committed to the actions that Socrates floats. Either way, Socrates says, “The greater part of the stories current today we shall have to reject.”
For Socrates, this includes Hesiod (e.g. the Theogony) and Homer (The Iliad; The Odyssey). Adeimantus asks, “What sort of stories do you mean and what fault do you find in them?” To which Socrates responds, “The worst fault possible…especially if the fiction is an ugly one.” He explains this as “Misrepresenting the nature of gods and heroes…” (p. 69).
The Gods Aren’t Good
Anyone who is familiar with Greek mythology knows that the gods aren’t moral exemplars. They’re powerful but often they’re not nice, or honest, etc. Of these stories, Socrates says, they are “not fit as it is to be lightly repeated to the young and foolish” even if these stories were true! He believes only a small select group should be trusted with these stories and their memorization. But this would never include youth.
Socrates says, “Nor shall any young audience be told that anyone who commits horrible crimes, or punished his father unmercifully, is doing nothing out of the ordinary but merely what the first and greatest of gods have done before.” Additionally, “Nor can we permit stories of wars and plots and battles among the gods; they are quite untrue.” For Socrates, young, impressionable minds can’t discern how to interpret these texts. The gods are important. This is how they live. Shouldn’t they be mimicked?
Teaching Children Healthy Theology
A few years ago, I had a friend who said they were generally comfortable with the church they were attending because they knew that their kids were being taught things like “God is love” and “God loves everyone”. Like Socrates, this friend didn’t think his children should learn stories from the Bible where the theology is suspect; where God is violent or behaves in such a way that if humans mimicked the Bible’s God, we’d have problems! Socrates ays, “…we should therefore surely regard it as of the utmost importance that the first stories they hear shall aim at encouraging the highest excellence of character”. In other words, choose good and uplifting theology if you’re going to teach any theology at all (p. 70).
Later, Socrates argues that good theology takes precedent over stories about the divine (p. 71). He says, “God must surely always be represented as he really is…in reality of course god is good, and he must be so described.” Socrates’ god is the source of good and not evil: “…while god must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some factors other than god as a cause of evil.”
What about Noah’s Ark?
A few years ago, I wondered aloud how old a child or adolescent must be to read, say, the story of “Noah’s Ark” with maturity. As I read Plato, this thought crossed my mind again. I agree with my friend, and Socrates, that if you’re going to participate in god-talk with children then your theology better be about love and goodness and all that nurtures, uplifts, and provided security to a child. Some of the trash theology that I heard when I was young—like the idea that the “Rapture” could happen leaving me on earth during the “Great Tribulation” to suffer divine wrath—shouldn’t be taught period but especially to young children. That can be traumatizing! And I know from experience that it harms adolescents as well.
In spite of these concerns, many parents read books like this:
The animals are so happy. Noah is so happy. Yet humanicide occurred and most of the animals are dead underneath those waters. I see no reason to sanitize this story just to share it with children. We can wait until they’re older. As Socrates said about the stories of Hesiod and Homer: even if they’re true, indelible minds shouldn’t encounter them during formative years.
How Old is Old Enough?
Four years ago, I asked these questions in the aforementioned post:
“So, when should children read the story of Noah and the Ark? When are they mature enough? Is it ok to introduce it to them as a happy story about God saving animals when they’re young and then return to it later to discuss some of the more complex, even disturbing aspects of the story later?”
When I consider the kind of media my students consume through YouTube and TikTok, I presume their readiness to read and critically engage stories like this one. But I’m not sure the middle schoolers at my school should be learning about stories like these. Maybe they’re ready. Maybe they’re mature enough. But we must remember that many people who read religious texts presume that the presentation of god in those texts is prescriptive to our theology in some way. If this is so, then maybe they should wait until high school to read Hesiod, Homer, and “Moses”. Until then, we should emphasize positive theology.
Reading without comprehending
I’ve been reading Scott Soames’ The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age. As I near the end of chapter 6, I can say that it’s a great book so far and I imagine it will be through to the end. Its main thesis is that in spite of comments to the contrary (e.g. Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and parents of most philosophy majors), philosophy can be credited with shaping the world we have for the better and with continuing to do so. Soames shows his readers how philosophers have helped birth many other disciplines, including the sciences as we know them, but how it also continues to speak to our politics, our concepts of language, rational choice, mind-body relations, and much more.
There are two chapters that I’m confident are good ones but also that I found humbling: Chapter 5, “Modern Logic and Foundations of Mathematics” and Chapter 6, “Logic, Computation, and the Birth of the Digital Age”. Admittedly, much of chapter 6 left me lost, not because of anything Soames did wrong in writing it, but because I struggle with these concepts. I’ve struggled with mathematics since high school. As soon as they introduced “x” and “y” in the equations, my brain became allergic. There’s a reason why my primary philosophy/theological/historical interests have to do with things more social-science-y!
Gottlob Frege receives a lot of attention in both chapters; Kurt Gödel receives a lot of attention in chapter 6. These men seem brilliant. I understand the gist: their work in logic, and the logic of mathematics, laid the foundations for computability. The modern digital world owes them a ton. But the details escape me as Soames mentions this formula and that formula. My poor “it took me two attempts to pass Algebra I” brain tries to comprehend what I’m reading but I must admit, I’m lost most of the time.
This humbling experience has a dual silver lining though: (1) it reminds me to be patient with my students who try and fail to understand the material in which I have expertise; (2) it functions sort of like Umberto Eco’s “Antilibrary” reminding me that there’s still so much about our world that I have to discover and better understand. Let me say a little about each point.
Regarding (1), I’ve been reading the Bible since I was young. I’ve been around religion for the same amount of time. My undergraduate, two graduate, and doctoral degrees all focused on religion and theology. I’ve been teaching on these subjects for over a decade, including eight full years in a high school setting. (I began my ninth year this week). It’s the water I swim in daily. And it’s easy to see a student flailing and think, “Why is this concept so hard to understand? It’s simple, really!” But is it simple, really, or is it really simple for me? I have students in my class who can go to another classroom and take a physics or calculus exam who would do way better than me if I were put in the same situation. It’s not that they’re not smart enough; it’s that they lack familiarity. I need to be patient and provide them with the tools to make my discipline more familiar to them.
Regarding (2), I won’t say much because Maria Popova at The Marginalia has an excellent post on this topic that’s worth your time: “Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones”. But in short, the intellectual Umberto Eco argues that it’s actually good to have a library with books you haven’t read/won’t read. Those books sit there reminding you, “you don’t know everything; you have so much—so much!— to learn”. The aforementioned chapters are having a similar effect on me.
As I flip ahead to Chapter 7, “The Science of Language,” in Soames book, I feel like I’m on more secure ground already. I’ve thought about some of this. I can follow the argument. There are less formulae! But I’m glad I struggled through chapter 6 and that I’m doing my best to walk in complete darkness through the end of chapter 7. Maybe someday I’ll be able to understand this stuff but it’s the discipline of trying to learn, reading even when I need help comprehending, that eventually strengthens the mind to understand. But not to understand everything, and that’s ok.
A reflective note on Stephen Mumford’s “A Philosopher Looks at Sport”
As I’ve been asking myself (1) how I, as a father, want to teach my child about thoughtfulness and (2) how I, as a teacher, want to educate my students, I’ve been coming around to the idea that one way to engage younger mind with subjects that we think they should study is to package that subject in an accessible manner. By this, I mean teach them (A) a subject with which they’re less familiar through (B) a subject with which they have greater, and maybe more natural, familiarity. As I mentioned in a recent post (see “Sports and non-dualistic education”), as I reflect upon the adolescent version of myself—who was a mediocre student, at best—I recognize that one of the best ways to have engaged me would have been by connecting what we were learning to sports. I was obsessed with sports but not Algebra, or U.S. history. Yet it was sports that led me to be learn about Jesse Owens embarrassing Hitler, or where Baltimore is on a map, or how to calculate a batting average. For this reason, as I think about the need to teach my students the skills that will help them evaluate the wave upon wave of information that comes their way—how to be critical, skeptical even, before embracing something just because Google found it or because someone said it on TikTok—a conclusion that I’m tentatively reaching is that, for example, if I were to teach a philosophy class at my school in the future, a philosophy of sport would be the way to go. It would start with (B) sport, which matters to a majority of high schoolers, and then guide them to (A) the skills that philosophy can provide them.
As I’ve been reading on the philosophy of sport, one book that I finished recently is Stephen Mumford‘s A Philosopher Looks at Sport. It’s a small book (at 5 x 0.5 x 7.5 inches) and a short one (at about 133 pp. of content) but it’s very good. It built around six topics: physicality, competition, definition (of sport), spectacle, ethics, and inclusion. One of this main points is that we find joy in developing an ability and in displaying that ability. Sport is a venue for that development/display but it adds competition. Competition can be a negative thing but Mumford sees athletic competition as a sort of bubble where we can put forth a certain level of effort without the negative effects because ultimately, the goals are themselves “unimportant”. For example, if I were wrestling for a high school state title, it would matter to me, it would be important, but not in the same way as if I were wrestling a potential mugger or a wild animal that I encountered on a walk. The latter has my very life and well-being at stake in a way that sport doesn’t…or shouldn’t.
Once Mumford provides a working definition of sport, he addresses why we enjoy the spectacle of it all (which is very relevant right now as the Summer Olympics are in full swing) and he asks questions about the ethics of sport. Both of these topics are fascinating. I’ve long wondered to myself why I can spend a Sunday watching three or four NFL games and enjoy it. And the ethics section had me thinking about why we allow for certain things in sport (e.g. boxers pummeling each other) that we wouldn’t allow in general (boxing on the street is assault). Mumford addresses whether there is an “internalist” ethic that differs from the outside world or if the line between sport/not-sport is more porous.
Finally, his section on inclusion felt very relevant because as I was reading it, the ugly debate over Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif’s eligibility was reminding me that the Internet really does bring out some of our worst characteristics. We need to calmly and thoughtfully ponder the relationship between sport and gender and transgender athletes in a world that wants us to be reactionary and vitriolic. And with the Paralympics beginning, we should be cognizant of our thoughts around ability/disability and sport. Mumford addresses topics like these and this reinforces my first point. Sport may not be as high stakes as some things (e.g. the wars in Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine) but sport is a place where many high-stakes debates are magnified, including things like gender, ability, bodily objectification, fairness in pay, etc. These topics may be intimidating in themselves but studying them through the lens of sports can provide students with an otherwise unattainable accessibility and books like this one go a long way toward helping us in this endeavor.
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