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Being “between courses” has afforded me the opportunity to dip back into Recorded Books’ Modern Scholar series of lectures on audio CD. I started listening to these a couple years ago, finding the entries by Thomas Madden to be especially worthwhile listening. Aside from Madden’s, I have to admit that I’ve found the rest of the series hit or miss, but I wanted to give a shout-out to Professor Fred E. Baumann for his entry, Visions of Utopia: Philosophy and the Perfect Society.

This might come across as a backhanded compliment, but I was impressed by the seriousness with which Baumann treated religion in this set of lectures. Not that the lectures focused on religion – religion played a small role – but he understands the importance of religion in the fabric of both intellectual and common history, and did not just simply dismiss it as irrelevant, or regard it derisively, as most modern intellectuals seem to. Not only was that refreshing, but it added a layer of realism and intellectual heft to the discussion that seems sorely lacking so often.

The lectures cover Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Rousseau’s Social Contract, the Jacobin implementation of Rousseau’s thought, Marx’s programmatic update of Rousseau, and Skinner’s Walden Two, concluding with some reflections on the continuing relevance of utopian thought, particularly in the bizarre but socially intoxicating supra-eugenicism of the movement at the edge of “progressivism” that calls itself transhumanism.

Baumann is not a strictly conventional thinker on these matters, and I take issue with some of his opinions – especially in the way he reads Rousseau, which seems to me to unjustifiably take him off the hook for the monster he created – but I highly recommend this set of lectures as a thoughtful and engaging exposition on what only a fool would still consider a fringe aspect of political science.

I’ve listened to a couple more volumes in the Modern Scholar series over the past month. The first was A History of Ancient Rome, by Utah State University professor Frances Titchener. This set of lectures was not among the best of those I’ve listened to in this series, though I’ve also heard worse. Covering 1,500 or so years of complex history in 14 half-hour lectures is not an easy task, and she certainly deserves some freedom to present it as she sees fit, but I found the presentation overly idiosyncratic, nonetheless. Professor Titchener displayed an annoying habit of talking down to her students by means of occasional glib and sassy interludes that could perhaps best be described as reducing events to comic book dialog. Perhaps it makes her seem hip and approachable to younger students, but I doubt most of the audience for this Recorded Books venture has a lot of interest in such intellectual shortcuts. Of course, I could be wrong.

Despite being quite interested in the subject matter, and in need of this kind of survey to help me piece together my limited knowledge of it, I was pretty tired of Professor Titchenor by the time the final lecture came along, the one covering the period from Constantine until the fall of Rome in 476. Then she dropped some doozies.

Taking her cue, as she acknowledges, from Gibbon, the last lecture is dedicated essentially to explaining the various ways that Christianity was responsible for the destruction of the Roman Empire. Some of this is familiar ground to anyone aware of Gibbon’s thinking on the subject, but this was the first time I’ve ever heard anyone suggest that, unlike in the Western Empire, where the pope and the emperor would create vulnerability to the marauding barbarians by the slowing down of the apparatus of state decision-making on account of their quarreling over the best approach to solve problems(!), strength was maintained in the East, at least in part, because decisions were made “rapidly, firmly, and finally,” since “the Patriarch of Constantinople was also the Roman Emperor.” I’m not making this up – I went back and double-checked the recording to make sure I had heard correctly. She claims that the offices of Patriarch and Emperor were filled by one and the same man.

I might have been inclined to give her a mulligan for the factual faux pas, even if it does display an ignorance of the relationship between the Church and the empire that is remarkable for an historian of the period, but I then had to suffer through a series of tired, Gibbon-esque arguments that tried to show how Christianity’s rejection of statist idolatry amounted to a mass renunciation of civic responsibility, which served as an open invitation for barbarian invasion. It’s hard to understand how anybody can take this theory seriously, given how poorly it understands historical Christianity, and how it completely fails to account for either how the equally-Christian eastern half of the empire survived as an empire – and at times thrived – for another millennium, or how the Arian Christianity of the invading barbarians did nothing to dull their own martial fortitude.

Titchener ended the lectures with an academic fantasia on how the Roman state had fathered Christianity, and how this patriarchal culture had ultimately been destroyed by its son. References to the son’s desire to usurp the affections of the mother were blessedly absent, but that’s about the only good thing I can say about the way this lecture set ended.

On the other hand we have Religions of the East: Paths to Enlightenment, from Boston University’s Stephen Prothero. I don’t think it was the most insightful presentation of the various surveyed belief systems in and of themselves, but Prothero does a nice job of showing the historic movement of Eastern religious thought, beginning in the Vedic period. The strength of his approach is in the clear demonstration of the continuity and relatedness of the various religious strands. The parallels with the Western world’s movement toward Romanticism and democracy are striking, though Prothero doesn’t try to draw it out, except for a couple brief references made to protestantizing tendencies. Of the groups discussed, only the Sikhs are presented in a way that doesn’t really seem to contextualize them historically very well. I do think he could have skipped the final lecture, on Buddhism in pop culture, as it is rather brief and thin, and doesn’t add much to the survey. This one is worth the time to listen to, though, if you’re looking for some general clarification on the various belief systems of the Orient.

I wanted to write a follow-up tonight to my last post, refuting the silly (if a bit scary) notion of celebrity gossip as a legitimate form of moral discourse, but I strained my neck last night, and have been unable to spend enough time in front of the computer. I’ll have to come back for that. Instead, I’ve been trying to get through a Mortimer J Adler book I started in late February but wasn’t able to do much with in March.

I’m not prepared to get into too much detail about it yet, as I’ve only just begun part four of the book, but it is really a fascinating read. Adler, whom I consider one of the great American minds, was always concerned with promoting liberal education, and that is the simple purpose of A Guidebook to Learning. He begins by poking some fun at what he calls alphabetiasis – the modern tendency to order our knowledge alphabetically – which makes for easy lookup for reference purposes, but provides a learner no context for understanding the relationships between ideas or bodies of knowledge, let alone any (gasp!) hierarchy of value that might exist among them.

He wrote this book more than twenty years ago – before the ubiquity of personal computing – and I wonder where he would have gone with digital media’s potential for multiple layering of content relationship paths, coupled with it’s almost inherent difficulty in imposing such order.

Anyway, he spends probably half the book surveying ways in which the cataloging of knowledge has changed from the topically-ordered and hierarchically-structured understanding of the ancients, through the scientific revolution, to the egalitarian but uninstructive contemporary models. He sees in modernity, as many people do, a great leap in information, and even knowledge, but he observes that nobody is ever heard calling our age an age of increase in understanding – let alone wisdom. He also rightly notes that there is a hierarchy of importance in these various goods of the mind, moving upwards from information to knowledge to understanding, and finally, to wisdom. Adler would have us consider that perhaps the “information age” has created a kind of mental imbalance in our cultural measure of learning that over-emphasizes the trivial at the expense of what is of real value.

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One neat idea he identifies in the book is a distinction made in medieval thought between the use of the mind in the first intention and the second intention, where the first intention refers to the knowledge and understanding of reality, and the second intention refers to knowledge and understanding of the branches of knowledge by which reality is known. In modern, techno-parlance, we could almost say that second intention knowledge is meta knowledge through which we are able to comprehend the knowledge of particulars in first intention thought. In other words, the knowledge of mathematics and mathematic principles provides the framework through which we understand the reality of time in an intelligible way. Inversely, first intention knowledge would continually flesh out second intention knowledge.

I think this model does a pretty good job of explaining the nature of creativity or ingenuity, where the human mind is capable of taking knowledge learned from experience in one particular situation, and applying it to other situations where it can be employed. This extrapolation is admittedly a long way from Adler’s attempt to explain the challenges of categorizing all the fields of human knowledge, but I think it’s interesting to consider how creativity might be dependent on the robust health of, not only generalized knowledge, but generalized knowledge about knowledge. Even if this weren’t an era of hyper-specialization in which the arts have largely been reduced to a banal pop kitsch, I think Adler would agree with me.

In the spirit of always trying to look on the bright side of things… One of the advantages to spending two hours or so each weekday commuting to and from work is the opportunity it affords me to listen to audio books. I was in the local public library over the weekend, and noticed that they had a new title from Thomas F. Madden in Recorded Books’ Modern Scholar series. Unsurprisingly, the series overall is a bit of a mixed bag, but, having listened to all of Madden’s volumes so far, I can vouch for the quality of all of them.

These are not actually recorded books, but sets of about seven hours worth of lectures on various subjects – in Madden’s case on the history of Christianity, broadly speaking. Madden’s work is by no means overwhelming – these are survey-level mini-courses, and an overlap in subject matter among his volumes leads to some redundancy, but he does a nice job of walking through the material briskly while still demonstrating the complexities of the historical situations. I was particularly impressed with his agility in avoiding fashionable, oversimple cliches in his surveys of the Crusades and the Inquisitions – each of which he managed to cover fairly comprehensively in what would amount to about three weeks worth of classroom lectures in a traditional undergraduate environment.

I’ve been able to fill some gaps in my knowledge of European history while listening to these CDs, and it struck me a while back just how fundamental this knowledge is to understanding the world we’ve inherited from the ancients, the medievals, and the early moderns. And yet, where is this knowledge to be found in our culture? I know so many people who have absolutely no clue about any of this – including many with college educations. What little previous knowledge I had of this history was almost entirely gained through personal reading over the years. As a product of the public schools, I had almost no exposure to this – beyond, perhaps, memorizing the details of major military skirmishes, and of changing political fault lines. I certainly was offered no clue as to how the set of ideas we call the modern world (if we can still call it that) was forged in the interplay of the ideas of our cultural ancestors.

Maybe teenagers are too young to grasp human history as the story of ideas, but if that is true, then our system of education teaches history to the wrong people. Actually, I think that is true, and it suggests a gaping question regarding how we might rectify the problem of a rampant ignorance of the meanings of ideas. And when the Daily News Product is feeding us political ‘debate’ that tries desperately to find the right marketing mix of ‘change’ branded slogans and ‘experience’ branded slogans – all in an attempt to manipulate the election of the leader of the free world – we’d be hard pressed to show that ideas are not in crisis in our culture. Ideas are packaged for consumption – as trivia.

“For $10,000 and a weekend in Barbados with an upscale hooker: Who was the father of Charlemagne?”

This series is a good place to at least start rectifying the problem – Madden’s volumes are, at any rate.