Teacher in America View 20110821

View 688 Sunday, August 21, 2011

· Libya Falls?

· Teacher in America; Barzun on culture

The shores of Tripoli

It would appear that Qaddaffi is finished. Rebels have advanced to the outskirts of Tripoli, and there are risings among those in Tripoli itself. Khaddafi has up to now been able to hire Berbers and Tuarag and Bedoins and other tribal mercenary units to defend his rule in Tripolitania, but apparently that has not been enough.

It is significant to note that there seems to be actual coordination between the mostly Cyrenaican rebels of East Libya and the dissidents in Tripoli itself. We have no way of knowing how many actual Kaddafi loyalists there might be; certainly there are some, perhaps even a majority in Tripoli, but it is likely to be brittle support. After all, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, last Communist ruler of Rumania and his wife, were safe enough until the elite security guards decided to join the uprising, after which they were hastily “tried,” “convicted,” and shot by an eager firing squad despite his contention that he was the legal President of Rumania…

It is not clear where Qadafi is; he may not even be in Libya. There are reports that one of his sons has been arrested by the rebels. Another radio report says that Tripoli has fallen and Kadaffi has surrendered. Apparently it is only a matter of time until his mercenaries quit on the grounds that they will no longer be paid…

It is likely that Obama will claim credit when Kaddaffi falls. The real authors of the fall of Tripoli are probably British and French special forces who managed to turn a group of insurgents accustomed to firing all their ammunition into the air into an effective fighting force capable of sustained operations. There is also some likelihood of Delta Force and CIA involvement. It is clear that the NATO air and sea bombardments saved the rebellion to allow it to fight another day, and once that was assured allowed a rebel advance preventing the very likely outcome of stalemate and de facto partition of Libya into the Ottoman provinces from which it was formed by Italy after World War I. The story of the Libyan revolt will occupy historians for years. Who gets credit for what comes next is as unclear as to who will be the actual winner when the smoke clears.

It’s certain that it happened on President Obama’s watch, US participation was important if not decisive, and the entire cost of the operation was a lot less than if we had made a commitment to go in or become formally involved. It’s not over yet, but it looks now to be headed for a better outcome than we got in Iraq. Of course what I advocated in Iraq was the construction of monuments. Actually, it was more complicated than that: I do note, though, that I contemplated adding Tripoli to the places where we might build monuments – and that doing that would have been a very great deal cheaper than what we did.

Barzun, Teacher in America, and the language of rule

I was looking for a passage I dimly recall reading in about 1950 when I was still in Christian Brothers College high school in Memphis, and came across the incomparably valuable Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun. Barzun, born in 1907 in France, now lives in San Antonio, Texas. He is a national treasure, and has written at least two books I would put on the list of works that every educated person ought to read at some point in his life. Teacher in America is one of them. I grew up in a middle class family, and so far as I know no one in my ancestry was ever a college graduate, much less an intellectual. My father was a salesman who became a radio broadcasting executive. It was always intended that I should go to college, but the general expectation and encouragement was that I would pursue a medical career. Teacher in America didn’t really change that expectation – a partial color blindness coupled with the necessity to get an honor grade by identifying slides in Vertebrate Embryology did that – but it did give me to understand that there was such a thing as an intellectual, and there were intellectual careers other than Medicine or Law. The fact that I remember the book sixty years after reading it should be sufficient. In the course of looking for an on-line version of the book – there isn’t one so far as I can tell, and almost certainly no edition authorized by Professor Barzun – I found a Time Magazine review published the year the book came out. If you have any doubt that a book published in 1945 can still be relevant I refer you to that review.

The passage I was looking for is intended to be in my preface to the Kindle edition of The California Sixth Year Literature Reader, a public domain book that my advisors and a few readers have assisted in generating a Kindle edition with attractive format. Making it attractive turns out to have taken longer than I expected, but it shouldn’t be too long now.

The passage I was looking for from Teacher in America was

“Not a few of the students who apply to me for admission to the present form of Erskine’s [Great Books] reading course give me as a reason that they want “the background” and will have no other chance to “get it”, because they are about to study medicine or engineering. Their idea is we “give it” and they “get it.” But what is it that changes hands in this way? Background is the wrong word altogether. What is acquired is a common set of symbols, almost a separate language. I open today’s paper and I see over a story of naval action: ‘David-Goliath Fight by Foe at Sea Fails.” Immediately, I infer that some small enemy flotilla fought a larger force of ours. The image was instantaneous, and would have suggested more—namely the foe’s victory—had not the writer added that it failed.

“A common body of stories, phrases, and beliefs accompanies every high civilization that we know of. The Christian stories of apostles and saints nurtured medieval Europe, and after the breakup of Christendom the Protestant Bible served the same ends for English-speaking peoples. Bunyan and Lincoln show what power was stored in that collection of literary and historical works known as the Scripture, when it was really a common possession. We have lost something in neglecting it, just as we lost something in rejecting the ancient classics. We lost immediacy of understanding, a common sympathy with truth and fact. Perhaps nothing could better illustrate the subtlety and strength of the bond we lost than the story Hazlitt tells of his addressing a fashionable audience about Dr. Johnson. He was speaking of Johnson’s great heart and charity to the unfortunate; and he recounted how, finding a drunken prostitute lying in Fleet Street late at night, Johnson carried her on his broad back to the address she managed to give him. The audience, unable to face the image of a famous lexicographer doing such a thing, broke out into titters and expostulations. Whereupon Hazlitt simply said: ‘I remind you, ladies and gentlemen, of the parable of the Good Samaritan.’

“It is clear that no account of explaining, arguing, or demonstrating would have produced the abashed silence which that allusion commanded. It was direct communication; the note that Hazlitt struck sounded in every mind in the same way and it instantly crystallized and put into order every irrelevant emotion. That, if I may so put it, is what ‘background’ does for you. Even today, without Bible or classics, everyone possesses some kind of tradition which he uses without knowing it. The man who should look blank at mention of George Washington and the cherry tree, or who had never heard of Babe Ruth, or who thought that Shakespeare was an admiral, would get along badly even in very lowbrow circles. He might be excused as a foreigner but he would be expected to catch on as soon as he could. This does not mean that culture is for keeping up with the Joneses; it is talking to your fellow man—talking more quickly and fully than is possible through plodding description.

“In college and after, it so happens that the fund of ideas which it is needful to possess originated in great minds—those who devised our laws, invented our science, taught us how to think, showed us how to behave. They spoke in highly individual voices, yet rely on the force of a common group of symbols and myths—the culture of the West.”<snip>

I have remembered the essence of that passage from the moment I first read it on a bus on East Parkway Avenue in Memphis more than sixty years ago. It remains true even if, in the past few decades, the cultural life of America has begun to come apart. It remains important that those who would be the ruling class be able to communicate; else those who can communicate become even more the ruling class. But that is another story. Barzun continues in that vein for several more pages; after reading them I was determined to become part of those initiates who understood the language of rule.

I took the trouble to type it out because I intend to include it in a preface to the California Reader when I get that formatted for Kindle. My intention is to put that out as a public domain work, not copy protected, with a preface and some commentaries for $0.99. The notion is that the small fee won’t prevent who intends to read it or expose it to younger readers from getting it, and it will trigger the efficient Amazon association machine which will make many aware of its existence.

In digging around for other stuff I found this review of Escape From Hell that may be interesting.

I have just re-read what I wrote about what we should do in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, and in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, and I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. It seems that back then – prior to my 50,000 RAD brain cancer treatments – I had the energy to put together a composite of some Views and Mail on the subject of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. It’s worth your reading if you find the subject interesting.