“surely”, said I, “I thus must need
“To search better, search night and day
“In all tongues, that I might say
“‘I found the book I wished to read’”
—E Antony Gray
There is much contempt among the rightly-disaffected competent at the enforced incompetence and mediocrity pushed and sold at all levels of the establishment. We are all familiar with the education industrial complex. And there is a corresponding temptation to implicitly accept the propaganda of our omnibus administrators, to reject education as we experience it.
This is a temptation that should be resisted; the motivated slacker, the dumbed-down rebel, only punishes himself while facilitating the decline. My own experience, which is hardly exceptional, is one of fully buying into the conflation of true exploration and mastery with the deadening work of the Peculiar Apparatus. I rightly hated that machine. But my unfocused hatred enforced their lie and aided their project.
Only after high-school did I make my way into libraries and used book stores. My first discovery was George Berkley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous; what a mind-blower! With further exploration I learned that, as in Borges’ Library of Babel, all books are connected. And I slowly began to disentangle the accidental from the essential.
While the anti-academic strain in parts of the Outer Right is understandable, especially among the young, we should not allow it to be confused with anti-intellectualism. Academia is occupied territory, for now, but the land is fertile. We should pillage their libraries. They are our books, and we must become worthy of them.
***
Our educational system is a reflection of the mercantile values and ideals of the ruling class—unconstrained exchangeability. They cannot absorb the fundamentally different, the transcendent or the other. Small-minded and incapable of the labor required for suspending judgement, they cannot think another’s thoughts, cannot run different software simultaneously on their own systems. The technocrat’s incapacity is reflected, partially, in the cheap universalism of the monoglot who refuses to acknowledge the value of any epoch, civilization, or philosophy different from his own.
The Moldbuggian remedy for this cultural malaise is “read old books”—an efficient way of dislodging oneself from the progressive hegemon whose future is fixed, and whose past is always in flux. The point of the exercise is not to make you a clone of Carlyle, but to awaken you to see beyond the ever-flattening horizon. Fundamentally, this is an aesthetic venture, a creative capacity in potentia awaiting activation.
The thrill of holding an old book or an even older manuscript is not of the intellect. It is an aesthetic provocation that invites you to subsume all your current thinking under a higher sign—intellectus and aisthetikos, the double, Castor and Pollux, or their Indian cousins, the twin Ashvins, who serve as messengers to the gods. As one grows so does the other, as one sacrifices, so the other increases.
When we look at the educational process at earlier phases of our civilization and at other similarly developed civilizations, we note that there are significant divergences from our own.
Take the Medieval European Trivium: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. The first two are what one might call “sites of inequality-production,” if one were an education-worker. The last is actually still taught, if only in highly commercialized form, brought to a frictionless hum by such tribalist luminaries as Edward Bernays.
Its utility, therefore, might be worth further examination.
In Europe during The Time Before the Current Year, where serious students were expected to compose poetry in Latin, a language they learned from their fathers rather than their mothers, rhetoric was an earned art[1]—a skill acquired, mastered and propagated until the last hundred years or so, when doctoral theses were still written in Latin, which is a far cry from the banal dregs emitted at large volumes under the patronage of our technocrats. They knew a little something about preventing entryism. Even the scholars and bureaucrats among the wily Saracens were expected to be capable of composing poetry and prose.
Poetry should not be seen as mere decoration—it is fundamental to the project of creating, maintaining, and passing along civilization. The Greeks, Arabs, and Europeans all saw poetry as memetic technology. Here is al-Biruni, an 11th Century Persian writing in Arabic, quoting Galen on the power of poetry as a knowledge delivery system:
Therefore it is quite right that the books of Damocrates on the medicines should be preferred to others, and that they should gain fame and praise, since they are written in a Greek metre. If all books were written in this way it would be the best.[2]
Part of the virtue here is technical, mitigating textual corruption during transmission, since poetic text is significantly more constrained. But it is also a means of focus and analysis. It facilitates self-reflection regarding language and the tradition to which it belongs. It must be chewed, mulled, and stewed. Poetry is memetic technology, though it might seem past its prime today in its competitively hypertrophic state.
Of course, poetry is not the only means available to achieve our generational aspirations. A play, for example, is aesthetic technology. The ability to watch a play is a cognitively advanced functionality and allows for higher-order engagement with the world, especially the human one. Other primates can know what others know, but only humans have the recursively embedded modeling capacity required to watch a play (I know that A knows that B knows that C doesn’t know that A knows X).
A man watches many plays, perhaps talks to actors and playwrights, directors, watches more plays, writes a play himself. He transcends the first order experience, making him less subject to unreflective manipulation. Eventually, he becomes a critic with knowledge about how effects are achieved, the ideology of the producer, the economic pressures of the theater. His experience of the play is no longer that of the first order consumer who goes along for the ride taking everything for granted. His is not only a richer aesthetic experience, but also a far more grounded connoisseurship, framed within a more comprehensive theory of the play than that of his naive counterpart. His model of the play is raised to a higher level which nonetheless contains all lower levels. The naive spectator and the expert watch the same play, but the expert sees it kaleidoscopically.
The ability to see above the fray, and beyond the immediate—to model another man’s mind and embed that model in a higher order representation—is firstly an aesthetic and secondarily an intellectual development. Pace the pathological individualism of our own culture, we are fundamentally imitators. We learn from imitating others—their bodies and their minds and their higher-order modeling. We need high culture because aesthetic development awakens intellectual development.
***
One of the primary features of the modern egalitarian tyranny is the enforced divorce of a man from his family, people, history, and God. Of the many subsidiary means employed to this end, the most effective is instilling ignorance of the meaning of education. Maintaining ignorance of languages is key.
This is why, along with the importance of reading, it should be recognized that there is an aspect of becoming worthy that, like many difficult things, is often neglected. If you really want to read really old books, you need to learn other languages. Even a contemporary synchronic exploration of language will give you a peek behind the curtain.
Take something as literally and figuratively quotidian as a newspaper. In an establishment publication, an article will likely come from the AP and will be published in English, French, German, Arabic, Chinese. Take a random article, and read it in a few of these languages. Even with an unprecedentedly homogeneous international ruling class, there will be differences, and triangulating these differences can help you see the limits of your own system.
Reading Deutsche Welle or the Annals of Confucius both serve the same fundamental purpose, though the latter is to be preferred—taking you out of a single point of reference, and subsuming all your knowledge under a higher perspective, making the former more amenable to digestion.
While I came to language-learning relatively late in life, more than anything, it has opened my eyes to the limitations of our current ideological system. The insidiousness to which I referred earlier is not so much in the complete absence or abandonment of language learning, but rather the maintenance of its pretense.
The child who does the thing called “studying Spanish” in the curiosity-killing manner currently on offer will exit the institution’s digestive tract incapable of doing anything useful with Spanish, totally ignorant (and bewildered) as to how one might even go about learning Spanish, utterly contemptuous, and hating the whole thing.
The purpose, indeed, is to cut the root, salt the soil, and blot out the sun for good measure, then feed you a microwaved soy-patty to be gummed under a fluorescent lamp.
***
Thinking someone else’s thoughts, meditating on the language used to express them, and entering another character’s world while maintaining a distinct self, are aesthetic capacities with intellectual repercussions. The ability to remove oneself from the immediate intellectual environment and see a larger realm is a skill that must be honed through the study and practice of art and language, both foreign and domestic. The failure to develop such a capacity makes us small and petty.
We can do better than our ruling class, which is much more parochial and monocultural than they would like to let on. The elites of Mumbai, London, and New York actually are as interchangeable as they would like the rest of us to be. Their lack of multi-perspectival dynamism when confronted by a truly foreign system of thinking, one that questions “our values,” leaves them panicked.
However, they still control our propaganda system, and propaganda is effective. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be so much fuss about who gets to make it and distribute it. But rather than rejecting this false consciousness rashly and directly, and at enormous cost to ourselves, we need to lower it by raising ourselves—make it a character in a dialogue, a Thrasymachus who speaks, whom we observe as one among many, and who earns his place as a mercenary among the magnanimous, without rancor or bitterness.
Learning French is a good place to start.
[1] Gasparov, M. L. A History of European Versification. (Ch. 6)
[2] Bīrūnī, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad, (trans.) Eduard Sachau. Alberuni’s India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India About A.D. 1030. (vol. 1, p. 127)