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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3772 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 9, 2022

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What is that quote about the British empire having such effective administrators because they had a broad education and so could draw on the lessons of ancient history to improvise a solution instead of floundering in the face of anything outside of their narrow expertise?

I found it! It's from Roger Scruton:

Moreover, the pursuit of irrelevant knowledge is, for that very reason, a mental discipline that can be adapted to the new and the unforeseeable. It is precisely the irrelevance of everything they knew that enabled a band of a thousand British civil servants, versed in Latin, Greek, and Ancient History, to govern the entire Indian sub-continent—not perfectly, but in many ways better than it had been governed in recent memory. It is the discipline of attending in depth to matters that were of no immediate use to them that made it possible for these civil servants to address situations that they had never imagined before they encountered them—strange languages, alphabets, religions, customs, and laws. It is no accident that it was a classical scholar—the judge Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1788—who did the most to rescue Sanskrit literature from oblivion, who introduced the world, the Indian world included, to the Vedas, and who launched his contemporaries on the search for the principles and repertoire of classical Indian music.

It is interesting Scruton calls the classics irrelevant information. I would call something like trivia and the accumulation of facts irrelevant, and I’d say the classics are filled with potentially relevant stories and solutions, and the learning of Ancient languages as taught created analytic and organized minds.

Our history today is largely filled with irrelevance, as there is no future applicability for knowing precise dates, names, and figures. The trivialization of learning is bad for brain snd soul and I think Jeopardy is the worst possible pastime. The Ancient histories contain inaccurate figures (60,000 perished… no, 100,000!), but the importance lies in the human stories and connections and the emphasis on faults and learning from human error. Great Man -styled history is nothing other than maximizing the utility of a history lesson for individual humans. Save the trivia for specialized excel workers, our leaders deserve Great Man theory!

It is interesting Scruton calls the classics irrelevant information. I would call something like trivia and the accumulation of facts irrelevant, and I’d say the classics are filled with potentially relevant stories and solutions, and the learning of Ancient languages as taught created analytic and organized minds.

Shamus Khan wrote a book - Privilege - exploring his education (both his own and the one he bestowed when he returned as a teacher) and he touches on the utility provided by such absurdly broad courses as "Western History"

His argument is that it's not so much teaching information as teaching ease: an ability to navigate a bunch of different cultural spheres and their products. Nobody ever really learns much about Western Civ in a high school class. But they learn how to navigate material and to not feel absolutely overwhelmed (or, less charitably: they learn how to bullshit according to the system's expectations)

We can apply the same logic to even more challenging endeavors like learning the classics or ancient Greek.

Of course, I think this misses a more obvious take: the "ease" being learned is about learning to fluently speak language of your fellow elites and civilization (hence the Iliad and not the Upanishads, which I don't doubt have meaningful human stories) but part of the book is about the changing character of the upper class so I guess it's not a bug.

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