Modesty Matters

Some thoughts on modesty, here.

Foodies, Nutritionists, and the Transcendent Table

This piece was subsequently published over at The Curator.

In Defense of Honor

About this time last year, I presented this essay at the 2010 Senior Colloquium at Wake Forest University, which was held at the Graylyn Conference Center. I delivered an earlier version to an incoming freshman class at the 2008 Honor Assembly, the text of which was published in The Old Guard newspaper. In the intervening years I studied honor as it relates to political theory and eventually wrote a thesis on it entitled, A Consideration of Honor: To Lockeland and Back. 


In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Falstaff, summoned to acts of courage on the battlefield, justifies his cowardice with a comic discourse on "Honor":

What need I be so forward with Him that calls not on me? Well, ‘tis no matter. Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg?  No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”? What is that “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning.

When asked to count the cost, Falstaff finds that he does not have much use for honor.  He along with thousands of others are about to risk their lives for the sake of honor, and the rewards are not readily apparent.  Shakespeare was careful to couch this assault on a pillar of his society in the voice of a fool, but I think the question is worth considering.  Every student is forced to reckon the cost of honor.  At some point, he will be asked to choose between the honorable course and a shortcut.  When faced with the impossible, he will have to decide whether honor is worth the prick of failure.

Honor is not quite the pillar of society that it was in Henry’s or even Shakespeare’s time.  Thus, Falstaff is a bit of a prophet for the modern day.  He believes the physical world is all there is and that self-interest is the motivation for all human action.  In this world, the rewards of shortcuts must be weighed against the costs of society’s disapproval. The most serious decisions should be decided by shrewd calculations of costs and benefits. It is as Machiavelli said, seeming is better than being.  I think it is safe to say that many of us are tempted to think this way.  Downloaders settle out of court.  Students are suspended.  Executives go to jail.  Most, however, walk away unscathed, and on Falstaff’s view, we should not blame them for it. They correctly calculated it to be in their interest.

When we see man as simply matter in motion, we begin to undermine those attributes that give humans their humanity.  We attempt to quantify the value of human life and end up wondering if it has any value at all.  We try to describe freedom in scientific terms and enslave ourselves to biology and physical circumstance.  By limiting ourselves to the material world, we blur the line between what is and what ought to be.  Honor though, as any child will tell you, is a question of oughts.  The knight ought to risk his life for the princess. Lancelot ought to be faithful to his king.  So how are we to recover our sense of ought?

Thanks to durability of human nature, our moral imagination is far from lost.  We see mass genocide and cannot help but declare it an atrocity.  We find forced child prostitution, and our hearts break.  We hear stories of soldiers diving on grenades to save their comrades and hope we would do the same.  In each of these cases, we find ourselves acting on principles that reach beyond the world described by modern natural science.  Suppose we fail to act in one of these situations, or worse, take the wrong action.  Well, then we feel shame, for shame is what teaches us when we’ve been dishonorable.  Professor Harvey Mansfield shed some light on this unique human capacity in his Jefferson Lecture.  You see; despite what science tells us about our similarities with chimpanzees, only humans have a capacity for shame, and it seems that shame is not always in our interest.  Sometimes it means failing a class.  Sometimes it means losing one’s life.  Yet something within us pricks us on.  The Ancients called it thumos.  When a soldier charges into battle against overwhelming odds, it is thumos that makes him “insist on his own importance” and drives him on, despite his instinct for self-preservation (Mansfield).  Thumos forces him to think past his own good and act for what the ancients called the good.  I think the war imagery is right, for honor is only won through conflict.  Honor is gained when a soldier risks his life on the battlefield.  Honor is gained when a student faces the impossible exam with integrity.  It involves taking risks that defy simple calculation.  What the honorable student and soldier teach us is that honor is part of what it means to be human.

In its original conception, the aim of the liberal arts education was to educate in what it means to be human, since this was thought to free humans from bodily appetites and cultivate the life of the mind.  As W.E.B. Du Bois put it, the goal of the true college is “not earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”  Thus, liberal education as it was originally conceived was at least in part an education in how to live.  To some extent this aim has been lost in the present day.  The Liberal Arts College has given way to the Research University and the Research University to what Clark Kerr calls the “Multiversity.”  Core curriculums are on the wane as professors demand specialization, society demands “useful” knowledge, and undergraduates demand choice. 

Even so, elements of liberal education live on at Wake Forest.  A student may still read Shakespeare and be compelled by King Henry’s honorable break from Falstaff’s shameless world.  He may take a philosophy course and find Machiavelli’s claim a weak challenge to Cicero’s argument that being rather than seeming leads to the fulfilled life.  He may read the Bible and find that treasures in heaven are far better than treasures on earth.  As an institution, Wake Forest still aims to be “pro humanitate.”  Though its place in the curriculum is uncertain, Wake Forest continues to encourage students to think beyond their own good and toward the common good.  The Honor Code echoes this goal.  It helps us recover our sense of ought by reminding us of what it means to be dishonorable. 

As I retire from the Honor and Ethics Council, my thoughts turn to continuing the tradition of honor at Wake Forest.  My hopes for Wake Forest are threefold.  First, I hope that she will return to liberal education as it was originally understood, so that students might again be encouraged to take seriously the best that has been thought and said regarding the good for human life.  Second, I hope that she will remain “pro humanitate” and do so by stitching her motto into the very fabric of her curriculum.  Third, I hope that she will remain committed to honor, not out of a desire for success, but out of a recognition that humans ought to live honorably.  George Bernard Shaw once said that “the most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.”  The bright students of Wake Forest have far more to lose than the drunken Falstaff.  But with a truly liberal education that incorporates a concern for humanity and a commitment to honor, they may find that chivalry is not dead and that honor is weightier than ever.  

The Problem of Maturity

There’s a tendency, particularly in op-ed writing, to drop phrases like “for the first time in human history” or to make grandiose claims about some allegedly “momentous sociological development.” But I won’t complain, because they do get my attention, and they certainly make for nice Time Magazine covers. Nowhere are these phrases more prevalent than in the steady stream of literature on the so-called 20-somethings, pre-adults, hipsters (whatever those might be), or some other term that hasn’t been coined yet. With minor nuances they are all basically saying the same thing. Our generation, for good or ill (mostly ill), is refusing to grow up. These pieces are redundant and border on stating the obvious. But more importantly, they fail insofar as they are so caught up in the thrill of having discovered that theirs is an unprecedented moment in human history that they miss what is right in front of their faces, that is, the timelessness of it all.

And so they look around in bewilderment, asking questions like, “where did all the good men go?” That’s the title of Kay Hymowitz’s rather belated contribution to this already overwrought sociological fad. And since hers is aimed directly at my own sex, my gut reaction was to mount a manly defense. Hymowitz, for her part, couples the popular “the kids won’t grow up” thesis with the statistics indicating that women are edging ahead of men in education and professional performance. Her first piece of hard, empirical evidence is a female comedian, Julie Klausner, who is “sick of hooking up with guys.” But don’t presume that she is ready to move on to something mature, like marriage, and simply lacks modesty, that antiquated virtue that would save her from serial hookups. No, her problem is that these Star Wars-watching, PlayStation-playing, and Las Vegas-frequenting guys, who she essentially babysits, won’t grow into more sophisticated and selfless hookup partners. I can only hope the irony of this situation isn’t lost on her.

But irony becomes tragedy in Caitlin Flanagan’s recent article in The Atlantic that details the sexual exploits of Karen Owen among Duke’s athletic elite. Besides translating Karen’s now infamous PowerPoint presentation into a more intelligible form, Flanagan presents a fascinating analysis of the girl behind the hookups. On the surface, Karen’s thirteen conquests suggest that she’s the pinnacle of female sexual power, but Flanagan sees through this patina to a girl who is both hurt by and angry with the boys who have used her. However brutishly masculine a “fuck list” might sound, we find that Karen cannot escape the passivity of her situation. Though she may set out with a target in mind, she ultimately, as Flanagan describes, allows herself to be seduced and sometimes abused by the porn-watching, Mario Kart-playing, sports-obsessed athletes of Duke. Reminiscent of our comedian, Karen plays both sex partner and nanny. Flanagan writes, “What rotten luck that the first true daughter of sex-positive feminism would have an erotic proclivity for serving every kind of male need no matter how mundane or humiliating, that she would so eagerly turn herself from sex mate to soccer mom, depending on what was wanted from her.” At the mercy of juvenile but sexually aggressive males, Karen, the seeming pinnacle of female sexual liberation, proves it to be its own undoing.

That feminism is a snake that bites its own tail is a case made by Harvey Mansfield in his book, Manliness. Feminism in its more radical forms relies on nihilism to obliterate the natural differences between men and women, and so establish the gender-neutral society, which leads to unemployed, and more distressingly, uncontrolled manliness. In its simplest form, manliness is confidence in the face of risk, whether from danger or from a situation where a man’s authority is questioned. But it also involves the defense of one’s own and the manly desire to have dominion over simple needs and drives. It implies a willingness to live for things beyond oneself in such a way that it separates the selfless men from the self-absorbed boys. Mansfield quotes the adage, “never send a boy to do a man’s work.” Boys lack the other-directed responsibility necessary for manly tasks.

Nietzsche says that a real man wants danger and play and that therefore “he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything.” And as bad as this line sounds to us, it might shed light on those PlayStation playing Duke Students. But more significantly, he uses the manly love of play to conclude that “the man is more childlike than woman.” Growing up, it seems, is more of a challenge for the man. Indeed, Mansfield says that it is boys, and not girls, who must wrench themselves from boyhood, as the Jewish boy does at his Bar Mitzvah. Transforming his selfish desire for significance into a selfless, protective care for those around him does not come easily. That sort of moral maturity comes through the education and support of a robust community. As James Davidson Hunter explains in his essay, “Whither Adulthood,” these rites of passage have played a crucial societal role in bringing children to maturity, which is best seen as a moral ideal. Furthermore, Hunter argues that maturity and rites of passage have always been gendered. The term “adult,” he tells us, only comes into use in the late 19^th century. Before that maturity was always seen in terms of a boy becoming a man or a girl becoming a woman. Sure, these notions were sexist and wrongly restricted women’s freedom, but at the other extreme we find that the gender-neutral society obscures the categories necessary for achieving maturity, which require that boys and girls be treated differently.

If anything is certain, it is that we have a historical record full of immature men, so it is naïve to believe that the problem of maturity is unique to our moment. Shakespeare takes up the issue in Measure for Measure, which begins with political calamity. The self-absorbed young men of Vienna spend their time in brothels, disease afflicts the city, and war with Hungary looms on the horizon. They are without families and ruled by untamed Eros. Without young men to care for the city, Vienna stands defenseless before her enemies. But in the drama that unfolds, the duke reforms the city by restoring chastity through laws against fornication. With the return of chastity comes the return of marriage and the family. Shakespeare, it seems, is saying that the family is where men become civilized. It is where they learn to sacrifice their own desires for the sake of the common good. The family helps all of us see that our own good is connected to the good of others. Marriage domesticates Eros and channels it for both the good of the individual and the city. The family fosters the selflessness required of patriots for the city’s defense. This dovetails well with the argument made by Hunter and others that increasing ages for marriage are getting in the way of maturity. Whether from continuing education, increased mobility, insecure futures, or the base pursuit of pleasure, the decline of marriage translates to the decline of maturity.

But I think we must go farther than marriage, and for this I would like to turn to Pheidippides from Aristophanes’ Clouds. Instead of PlayStation or lacrosse, Pheidippides is enamored with horseback riding with his friends. And though his vanity doesn’t translate to time bodybuilding at the gym, he is desperately afraid of losing his complexion. And though he has no BMW or big-screen TV, he lives extravagantly outside his means, bringing his father to financial ruin. But rather than encouraging him to self-restraint, responsibility, or maturity, his father sends his son to school to learn the sophistry necessary to be a high-class thief. But Pheidippides isn't the right student for this school, and he is expelled, but not before picking up a proto-nihilism to support his vices. To his father’s horror, he emerges from the school singing passages from the sexually perverse Euripides and shamelessly offers his father a seminar in father-beating. If this doesn’t sound familiar, it should. We send our children to school to learn the skills necessary (moral or not) to get-rich-quick. And so they learn sophistry, sing the songs of a soft-nihilism, and take a perverse delight in shocking their parents with what they have become.

Though I see the allure of blaming the immaturity of men on some unique set of historical circumstances, I think a much simpler explanation might be the better one. Perhaps sex and money have always been idols. Maybe maturity has never come easily. And it might be that the family and education, those essential guides to maturity, have very often been distorted by our misplaced longings. So instead of standing around wondering where all the good men have gone, it might be useful to remember that the past isn’t even past. And if the gods of sex and money are still very much with us, it might be useful to learn from those who have gone before and look for a vision of life that frees us from their grasp. 

Baby, It’s Always Been Cold Outside

By David Little and Nathan Chang

Somewhere along the way the 1960s were vilified as the crucial upheaval in American mores, a decade of disintegration where sex was liberated and the family crumbled. This has been the dominant narrative cast by conservatives for the past thirty years. But the storytellers of our time, whether Matthew Warner of Mad Men or Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg of The Pacific have asked us to question our Leave it to Beaver view of history by presenting us with the sexual exploits, broken relationships, and social fragmentation of our “greatest generation.” I must admit that I too am as Horace put it, a praiser of time past, but the past received another blow when I came to the realization that the Christmas pop standard, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” is from 1944.

The playful duet features what the original score calls a “mouse” and “wolf” dialogue between a girl and a boy in the boy’s apartment, as he tries to convince his date to stay the night. She is reluctant throughout, offering reservation after reservation, and he counters at every turn. First, he uses the “cold outside,” then alcohol, and then his wounded pride as his sexual advances are repeatedly denied. Her parents, her siblings, and her aunt will worry, and her neighbors will “faint” since there’ll be “plenty implied.” She knows she should say no, and yet in the end she consoles herself with the fact that she tried. In the resolution to the song, they both agree that it really is cold outside, and his pride overcomes her honor. The song is not unlike the crass t-shirt slogan that you might hear today in a soberingly half-joking tone, “No means yes.”

Let’s fast forward sixty years to Tom Wolfe being slammed by the critics for painting what has been declared by some, a wildly unrealistic picture of American hook-up culture. Though Wolfe’s setting is back seats and dorm rooms, “Baby It’s Cold Outside” could be I am Charlotte Simmons set to music. There’s cold. There’s alcohol. There’s a boy’s pride. And, there’s Charlotte constantly thinking of what her family will think, even though in this case they’re hundreds of miles away, tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Much has been said about the changes of this past century that have revolutionized human relationships. Leon Kass details the end of courtship, a practice that was virtually as old as civilization. Beth Bailey explains how our relationships have gone from front porches to back seats, and while I sense rosy-eyed nostalgia in this, I think it’s fair to draw a line between the anonymity made possible by modernity and the sexual liberation of this past century. The reality of our generation is that more so than ever before, our family isn’t on the other side of the screen door, and our neighbors probably don’t even know our names. And because of this we have lost an important check on our appetites and a crucial encouragement toward virtue. The presence of community connected us to the wisdom of generations past and checked our eros until it could be safely channeled within the confines of marriage. We were concerned with our reputations, or in a more robust sense, our honor.

To peg these changes in society on the 1960s, however, isn't enough, and it isn't sufficient to blame the 20^th century either. Even when St. Augustine was writing his Confessions, the pervasiveness with which individual passion won out over virtue was painfully felt. He too lived in a time of social fragmentation, where a “caldron of shameful loves seethed and sounded about [him] on every side.” In the case of young Augustine, not even his family cared much about the development of his virtue, instead being preoccupied with his progress in schooling. Certainly, it is not hard to see the relevance of the topic at hand.

And yet this is not cause to jettison our nostalgic sentiments and beliefs in cynical upheaval. In fact, we should take a certain comfort in readjusting our understanding of the relationship between the past and the present. The social fabric may be in disrepair, but this is not cause for despair because they were not perfect either. Nostalgia has a tendency to blind us to the faults of other eras, but we are still drawn to the past because we seek what was good about it. If we are careful to thoroughly understand history in the fullness of its best and worst moments, and in light of the ever-presence of human limitation, nostalgia can be incredibly helpful. To borrow the words of Aristotle, what we seek in the past is “not the ancestral but the good.”

Warner and Spielberg are right to remind us that eros is much older than Leave It To Beaver, that cultural change is much bigger than any one factor, but I don’t think our response to Mad Men should be a jaded realism about the world. There is a place for shattering rosy misconceptions of the past, but if it all leads to despair, there is something wrong. Instead, we should take our disillusionment as a call to confront the present age with the wisdom of our forebears. Human folly is a perennial problem, but culture and its ability to shape how we interact in society are not. Perhaps we can learn something from the time of front porches and old-fashioned courtship rituals. With the wisdom of their age we can work to build tightly knit families, strong communities, and a flourishing culture that is not naïve to the weaknesses of human nature. In doing so we may well restore limits that will protect us from the cauldron of shameful loves that tempt Charlotte, the boy and girl of the song, and ourselves.


This piece was subsequently published over at The Washington Institute. 

A Reflection on The Shallows

The piece that follows is a reflection on Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which began as an Atlantic article entitled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

As I struggled to concentrate on this book about how we can no longer concentrate on books, it was hard to disagree. Here is a man who has watched firsthand his ability to read and think deeply decline since the advent of the computer. I, on the other hand, have grown up with the computer. Indeed, it was at the feet of “Reader Rabbit” that I learned to read, and as I moved on to more substantive reading, the computers came with me. SparkNotes, Wikipedia, and now Google Books have all been my companions along the way. I find it hard to fathom how my predecessors had the patience to use card catalogues or to read whole books in search of a single idea. Certainly, “the Net,” as Carr calls it, has changed the way we interact with the written word. It teaches us to scan; it tempts us to “Jet Ski” through material, barely breaking the surface. My attention span is short, and it is definitely difficult to sit down and read for an extended period of time.

Still, Carr’s analysis seems a little dire to my computer-tutored mind. Somehow, despite Reader Rabbit and the Internet, I have developed a love for books - not text message books, not news abstracts - just books. And though most books don’t deserve a full reading, I’ve found that the greatest books can be read again and again. I’m rather nostalgic by disposition, so it seems I’ve faired the advance of technology a bit better than Carr. I still read those books made of paper and ink. And I print out articles of any length, so I can give them the same attention. For anything requiring real thought, I use a ruler to track the words and a pencil or ink pen to underline significant passages. If I am to do any serious editing, I print out the document and mark it up with my pen. It may not be green; it may not be efficient. But when it comes to books, efficiency gets in the way of a slow and careful reading.

One of Carr’s greatest insights is the mathematical nature of the Net and its tendency to keep us from deep reading and deep thinking. But this suggests that Carr cares about more than paper and ink in large quantities. Books are more importantly the repositories of ideas. The best things that have been thought and said simply cannot be contained in a blog post because the complexities of the great questions do not admit of such brevity. Even Nietzsche, who wrote mainly in aphorisms, published collections of them together as a unified whole so as to say something coherent about reality. Socrates, who along with Jesus never wrote a book, somewhere said,

Just as others are pleased by a good horse or dog or bird, I myself am pleased to an even higher degree by good friends. . . And the treasures of the wise men of old which they left behind by writing them in books, I unfold and go through them together with my friends, and if we see something good, we pick it out and regard it as a great gain if we thus become useful to one another.

Books are how we encounter the best that has been thought and said. They provide us with the means of putting great minds in conversation with one another about the most important questions. Reading and thinking deeply has never been easy. The focus and attention required for reading great books does not come naturally. Indeed, liberal education was originally to teach students how to read books. In his concluding lines Carr suggests that the Net might be cutting us off from our humanity, and yet he offers no solution to this predicament. He consoles himself by buying the latest Blue Ray player. Liberal education is, I think, the road back to reading books and to reflection on eternal things. It is a vital counterbalance to the transitory world of technology.

Thoughts on "An Education"

He studied Latin like the violin, because he liked it. – Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

My thoughts this summer have been on education. I have reached a milestone in mine, and my sister and her friends have reached one in theirs. And being lovers of learning, neither my sister nor I are very likely at the end. In fact, we are probably only at the commencement.

In addition to our commencements, I was recently struck by one portrayed in last year’s film, An Education. I could say something of this film’s beautiful aesthetic or its swank soundtrack. I could speak of Carey Mulligan’s magnificent performance and of her similarity to Audrey Hepburn, but this has been done by more qualified critics. What I wish to consider is the film’s questions of education.

Jenny, played by Carey Mulligan, is a 16-year-old Oxford-bound schoolgirl. Though she is set on Oxford and doing what it takes to get there, it seems that she secretly enjoys playing her cello and translating Latin. She stands out in the classroom with her enthusiasm and intelligence, and discusses Camus with her friends in their free-time. She wishes she could go to classical concerts, and she dreams of going to Paris. And while Jenny seems to legitimately love what she does, her father, Jack, encourages her endeavors for purely pragmatic reasons. She should, in his view, do everything for the sake of getting into Oxford, which will in turn promise financial security.

Enter David, a 35-year-old with deep pockets. He takes her to classical concerts, art auctions, and eventually to Paris. She is mesmerized by his sophistication and eloquence. The progress of the seduction is smooth and seemingly innocuous, such that she willingly gives herself to him. More surprisingly, her well-intentioned but dimwitted parents do not see through his chicanery and offer only minimal resistance as their daughter throws aside her Oxford dreams and gives herself to an older man.

Indeed, her father heroically stays true to his principles, admitting that David is a more than adequate substitute for Oxford, since he promises “connections” and safety. In a rather humorous moment, he avers that it is better to know great authors than actually be one. It is being well-connected that matters. And in a more sober moment, he confesses, “All my life, I’ve been scared, and I didn’t want you to be scared.” Jack, it seems, expresses a real human concern, and despite his naivety, compels us to sympathize with him.

Most surprisingly, her headmistress offers little more guidance. Though she condemns Jenny’s behavior and tells her that she must get a degree to do “anything worth doing,” her defense stays practical, and she admits that studying and teaching are “hard and boring.” To which Jenny responds, “So my choice is to do something hard and boring, or to marry my…my Jew, and go to Paris and Rome and listen to jazz and read and eat good food in nice restaurants and have fun. It’s not enough to educate us any more, Mrs. Walters. You’ve got to tell us why you’re doing it.” The headmistress feebly (and comically) replies that there is also the civil service, but this misses the point. She can give no apology for what she does.

Miss Stubbs, Jenny’s favorite professor, who has chosen a life of teaching, is the only character who comes close to conveying “the point of it all.” She tries to explain that university is also a path to “beautiful things, books and music and conversation.” And she tries to explain that exemplary students, like Jenny, make reading essays about ponies worth it. But, Jenny isn’t convinced. The unmarried Miss Stubbs must do things that are hard and boring, and she probably can’t afford many orchestral concerts or trips to Paris.

On one level, this film is an education in the fact that life is oftentimes hard and boring and is never simply fun. As a banner over my high school’s entrance read, “There are no shortcuts.” David’s way of life turns out to be too good to be true. This is a fairly simple lesson and one that is overtly taught by the film. But I think this film asks and largely leaves unanswered a deeper question of education. Jenny’s father and headmistress see education as inexorably practical. It is a way to achieve material freedom and security. Indeed, it promises to free us from being afraid.

Miss Stubbs and Jenny before she is seduced seem to know that there is something more to education. Though they cannot articulate it, their apparent love of learning betrays an understanding that knowledge is intrinsically good and that truth should be pursued for its own sake. The Jenny of the film’s beginning knows that cello and Latin, while hard, are also fun. Miss Stubbs, who does not eat good food in nice restaurants, still insists that education is a path to beautiful things. And indeed, it is somewhere said that education provides us with experience in things beautiful.

Not many of us will be seduced by 35-year-old men, but I dare say that all of us students question the meaning of it all. And I would even venture to say that some of us feel the allure of Paris and Rome, listening to jazz and eating good food in nice restaurants. While reading books does not provide us with the means to experience such things, they do ironically give us a taste for them. And so, even those that are drawn to the life of the mind are pulled in different directions. Though nothing in this life can escape being hard and boring, we are still faced with difficult choices. And though wealth can provide us with experience in things beautiful, we must recognize that it has the power to seduce us away from our love of learning and our pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty.