Peacock's Trail

It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had happened in that fold or crack in the great gray hills except that the whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now. turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the colored Catholic imagery like a peacock's tail. (GK Chesterton, the Everlasting Man)

The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. Flannery O'Connor.

You probably already know of our family fondness for peacocks. Liam photographs them at his college, and has written one into a story he is working on. When I am talking to him on the phone on Sunday afternoons, while he strolls in the meadows below his campus, often the conversation is punctuated by comments like:

There's one up on the roof!
The others are looking up at it. They look concerned.
It looks concerned, too.
Now it's flying down.

Then you hear the background pea-chicken chorus that Flannery O'Connor transcribed like this:

Lee-yon, lee-yon,
Mee-yon, mee-yon!
Ee-e-oy ee-e-oy!
Ee-e-oy ee-e-oy!

She calls it a "chorus of jubilation" but filtered through a cell phone they always sound like cats yowling plaintively, to me.

For Flannery O'Connor they evoked mystery and manners. When I talked to the Dominican priest who lives near the peacocks on the campus, he told me that they like to perch on his roof and sometimes early in the morning, just as he is waking up, he hears them run heavily down the roof to land on the ground. The combination of respect for mystery and pained admiration for manners in his voice was quite indescribable.

I read in Stanley Jaki's book Savior of Science that Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend, Asa Grey:

"...and now trifling particulars of structure often make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!"

This struck me quite forcibly, that his reaction was so different from the wonder and amusement that these pheasant-folk inspire in my children, one of my favorite writers, and the priest acquaintance.

I went on a "peacock trail" online and found this much more appreciative passage in Darwin's Descent of Man:

The Argus pheasant does not possess brilliant colours, so that his success in love appears to depend on the great size of his plumes, and on the elaboration of the most elegant patterns. Many will declare that it is utterly incredible that a female bird should be able to appreciate fine shading and exquisite patterns, It is undoubtedly a marvellous fact that she should possess this almost human degree of taste. He who thinks that he can safely gauge the discrimination and taste of the lower animals may deny that the female Argus pheasant can appreciate such refined beauty; but he will then be compelled to admit that the extraordinary attitudes assumed by the male during the act of courtship, by which the wonderful beauty of his plumage is fully displayed, are purposeless; and this is a conclusion which I for one will never admit.

While I was looking for more thoughts upon peacocks and evolution, I found this site called The Third Evolutionary Synthesis. It's interesting because it contains all sorts of evolution-related material, including some critiques. I haven't looked enough to see whether it is weird marginal stuff or not. More central to my topic are the peacock feathers on the page's banner and these postscripts of the review of Johnson's Darwin on Trial.

In the postscripts, the webmaster mentions that Johnson critiqued Darwin's views on peacocks and sexual selection.

(Quoting Johnson)"what I find intriguing is that Darwinists are not troubled by the unfitness of the peahen's sexual taste. Why would natural selection, which supposedly formed all birds from lowly predessors, produce a species whose females lust for males with life-threatening decorations?" (p.30).

Biologists now have good explanations for the peacock's tail. It is called the handicap principle. It is beautifully and accessibly described in a book by A. and A Zahavi(1997,1999) 'The Handicap Principle - A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle'. In short: the long tails of male birds reliably demonstrate to females that those males are healthy and can afford such handicap. It can only be a reliable signal when it is a handicap. Females prefer strong males because they produce healthy children.

The Handicap Principle -- hey, there is another peacock tail on the cover!

Some people apparently don't think the handicap principle explains things sufficiently. I followed the trail a bit further and found this book, displaying another peacock-tail decor on its cover: Darwin Misread Miss Peacock's Mind.



It apparently makes the case that the handicap principle or Darwin's aesthetic appreciation explanation is too much like anthropomorphism:

But beyond this, many present-day students still maintain that at least part of the explanation for the origin of fancy males involves female choice. In support of this, some authors resort to many highly convoluted anthropomorphic interpretations that outdo even those of Darwin. Birds are seen as possessing a knowledge of population genetics in near mystical proportions. The female can evaluate the "fitness genes" of a male on the basis of intricate plumage designs, following a principle of "handicaps."

Mr. Darwin Misread Miss Peacock's Mind develops the idea that attraction of a female to a male warrants a straightforward stimulus-response interpretation. The female is driven by response to a food stimulus. The food may be found in the territory of the male or may be pictorially represented on the plumage of the male. The female obeys the laws of plain, old-fashioned home economics! Courtship-feeding is seen as a method of bringing together creatures of similar tastes and physiologies. The ensuing mate selection results in genetic specialization to differing food niches, finally resulting in species formation.

Hmm, that seems stretched to me. Home economics? Isn't that anthropomorphizing a bit too?

A National Geographic article puts forth another explanation in: How Did the Peacock Get His Tail?

A study published earlier this year in the journal Behavioural Ecology shows that a male's plumage is a direct indicator of the strength of his immune system; a signal to females of his internal workings.

It goes on to say that showy feathering may show lack of parasitical infestation, a survival trait that will be passed on to Mrs. Peacock's sons and daughters. However, the article goes on to say that the evidence on this is inconclusive. Infested peacocks often continue to have showy plumage to the very end stages.

This post on Peacock's Feathers: Darwin's Nightmare has some spectacular pictures of albino peacocks, and makes the point that things like feathers and eyes seem to be "irreducible" -- it is difficult to even imagine them evolving in stages.

The peacock's tail remains a mystery even after it is analyzed, and a related but even more mysterious thing is the paradoxical power of the brown peahen. Even more mysterious and paradoxical is the power of that"galaxy of gazing, haloed suns" has for a human mind, not leastly Darwin's.

List -- Classical & Unschooling Comparison

The discussion at barefoot meandering has been closed by KathyJo now (after 93 comments, no wonder!), but during the course of it, an interesting sub-thread developed about the possibly different worldviews and goals of classical homeschooling and unschooling (particularly radical unschooling).

In the combox, I wrote a list of ideas which seemed to me to overlap between the two, and I am reposting it here since this blog actually started with the thesis that Catholic classical thinking on learning coincided more than one would think with some of the ideals of unschooling.

So here goes:

1. –”All men by nature desire to know”. Aristotle. It’s a strong desire that’s inherent in people.
2. –Education (however defined) is more than equipment for the intellect — it ought to involve the whole person.
3. –The learner is the primary agent in learning, NOT the teacher, who is secondary.
4. – Education is not a matter of degrees pasted on the wall, but rather something that forms the individual, something that he or she acquires internally.
5. –Informal methods are more effective than formal — discovery leads to a higher quality of knowledge than instruction.
6. – Knowledge is interconnected and one of the highest goals of knowledge is to see the connections between different areas.
7. – Traditional education (meaning educational practices since pragmatic, utilitarian turn to standard public education in the early 1900’s) is often misguided in its aims (to create good servants of the economy) and correspondingly in its methods.
8. –Education (learning) is a lifelong process. You don’t stop — it becomes a habit of mind, a way of life.
9. – Wisdom begins in wonder, as Socrates said. Learning ought to be valued for its sheer intrinsic worth, not for where it gets you.

Also:

• Classical education encourages looking at the principles behind the rules, and so does radical unschooling.
  
• And one final one that came up which overlaps with the one just above -- classical types and unschoolers both tend to think of authority as something to be complied with only when it is right. In other words, neither values obedience (say to the State) as more important than virtue. Obedience, properly understood, is focused towards compliance with the good.

Now, surely there are many points of divergence too but that is for a different post.

Notes on the list:

One commenter said she would change education in #4 to "learning" since education unfortunately has become a loaded word, meaning something like "standard-based outcomes". That does seem to be true. I like the word but I probably would not if I had only heard it from the mouths of politicians and the NEA.

Drew Campbell thought that #1 and #5 were true only partly and in some circumstances, not true at all times absolutely. I am paraphrasing his comment below but you can find it in entirety in Kathy Jo's combox.

With #1, he agreed that we are "neurologically wired" to learn and make sense of our world but did not think it followed that we will all learn what is best to learn. People's reason can be misled by their appetite or spirit (to use Aristotle's terminology in Nichomachean Ethics) . Aquinas says that studiousness, the desire to learn and know, can be pulled off course by curiosity (interest in what is dangerous, trivial, or unsuitable in some other way) or by sloth (indifference, laziness, disinclination to put out the work necessary). Article here. There is also probably a difficulty with ignorance (I think Drew pointed this out somewhere else). You need to find out what is valuable to learn before you can learn what is valuable.

With #5, he thought that it would be correct to say broadly that students should "own" their knowledge, but he did not agree that to a classical educator informal methods are always better than formal, or that discovery necessarily leads to a higher quality of knowledge. This article that he wrote gives more detail. To quote:

So freedom, yes, but within limits. We may legitimately use methods of discovery, both empirical and Socratic, to educate our children where those methods are proper to the field of endeavor. We must use didactic methods in disciplines where they are appropriate. But we must never substitute the child's nature, his free will, for a wise teacher. We cannot abandon our responsibility to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, including the natural orders of knowledge and authority that God has ordained.

I suppose the terms I used, "discovery", "formal", "informal" were not really carefully defined in my listed item. I got the "informal/formal" terminology from Kolbe Academy's Implementation of Ignatian Education in the Home and you can find it stated in this pdf "Synopsis of Ignatian Education". The exact words are:

The informal agencies are more effective than the formal.

But if you asked me, I find I would have to make up my own definition of the meaning of this. It could be that it would differ from what Kolbe means by the sentence. I took it to mean that most of the formal agencies have to rest on the foundation of the informal. So yeah, it would definitely not be the same thing as saying "therefore only informal agencies should be used".

The discovery/instruction terminology is from Aquinas's De Magistro. I quoted the relevant part before on the blog. I'll just pull out a small part:

Now if someone proposes to another certain ideas that are not self-evident or if he does not manifest how they follow from self-evident principles, then he does not cause knowledge in that person, but rather opinion or belief. For those ideas that follow necessarily from the first self evident principles have to be true, and those that are contrary to them have to be false. But to all other ideas he can give his assent or not.

It is by no means a bad thing to have belief in something you are told on others' authority, particularly if you have reason to trust that authority, but it is not the same thing as knowledge.

There is more here on the distinction between knowledge and belief according to Aquinas. A couple of quotes:

Knowledge begins in sense and is completed in the intellect...

There are two different types of knowledge: sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge. Sense experience is the beginning for all of man's natural knowledge. It begins in the senses, and is completed in the intellect (Bourke, 1960, p. 12). There is a dual operation to the intellect. One operation is the understanding of indivisibility, where the intellect grasps the reality of each item in itself; the other operation relates to combining and distinguishing (Bourke, 1960, p. 14).

The second type of knowledge, intellectual knowledge, is abstract and general....The general ability to understand covers simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning. Simple apprehension is when the mind accepts an object without affirming or denying it. The issue of judgment is the reality that two objects are in agreement or disagreement. Reasoning is the production of new judgment by means of two others.

From reading Drew's article I am thinking that he is saying that formal agencies are useful in teaching the second type of knowledge (depending upon how the word "formal" is understood). Aquinas says of how to guide in matters of reason:

Now in those things that come about by nature and art, art works in the same way and uses the same sorts of tools as nature.... in the acquisition of knowledge, the teacher leads the student to the knowledge of things the student previously did not know in the same way that someone leads himself to discover what he previously did not know.

The process of discovery begins with applying common self-evident principles to particular subject matters, and then proceeding to some particular conclusions, and then from these moving on to other conclusions. In light of this, one is said to teach another, when he makes clear through certain signs the path (discursum) of reasoning he himself took. Thus the teacher's presentations are like tools that the natural reason of the student uses to come to an understanding of things previously unknown to him.

If you define this process of instruction by the teacher as "formal" then probably yes, formal agencies are valuable and effective in guiding a student to knowledge. I just read something about that recently; I can't remember where it was but if I find it I'll add it to the blog.

If you are a classical educator or unschooler who has a problem with any of the things I put on the list, or can think of another to add, I would really really like to know.

The Great Squirrel Invasion

That above is my 12 year old's proposal for a title. Certainly appropriate.

I wrote this on my journal blog, but pictures are easier to upload here. A nest of baby flying squirrels must have gotten to the age to explore their environment. Please ignore all the dirt up there, those rafters are about 20 feet off the floor and I can't find a duster to reach.

Two in the rafters:

One on the fireplace


One curled up in our pantry.
There is one more running up and down a rafter that I haven't been able to photograph.

They're babies and don't seem to understand caution yet. They seem to think they're our pets or vice versa. Sigh.

Educational Acquaintances

I had been looking for this bit from Aristotle for some time and couldn't figure out how to plug the right terms into Google, so I asked Liam and he knew it was in Parts of Animals:

EVERY systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgement as to the goodness or badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this; and even the man of universal education we deem to be such in virtue of his having this ability. It will, however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has a like ability merely in some special subject. For it is possible for a man to have this competence in some one branch of knowledge without having it in all.

It is plain then that, as in other sciences, so in that which inquires into nature, there must be certain canons, by reference to which a hearer shall be able to criticize the method of a professed exposition, quite independently of the question whether the statements made be true or false.

No doubt this kind of statement doesn't seem as relevant nowadays when most educated people tend to be specialists in one narrow area and know very little about anything else, but even nowadays when there is such a huge bulk of knowledge to be learned, it seems worthwhile to start from an idea that knowledge is interconnected.

Charlotte Mason seems to have something similar in mind in Education, the Science of Relations

Every child is heir to an enormous patrimony, heir to all the ages, inheritor of all the present. The question is, what are the formalities (educational, not legal) necessary to put him in possession of that which is his? You perceive the point of view is shifted, and is no longer subjective, but objective, as regards the child.

We take the child ... as we find him––a person with an enormous number of healthy affinities, embryo attachments; and we think it is our chief business to give him a chance to make the largest possible number of these attachments valid.

Finally, Cardinal Newman in Idea of a University

I have said that all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator. Hence it is that the Sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast, have multiplied bearings one on another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment. They complete, correct, balance each other. This consideration, if well-founded, must be taken into account, not only as regards the attainment of truth, which is their common end, but as regards the influence which they exercise upon those whose education consists in the study of them. I have said already, that to give undue prominence to one is to be unjust to another; to neglect or supersede these is to divert those from their proper object. It is to unsettle the boundary lines between science and science, to disturb their action, to destroy the harmony which binds them together. Such a proceeding will have a corresponding effect when introduced into a place of education. There is no science but tells a different tale, when viewed as a portion of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as I may call it, of others.

parenting as a structure

There is a very interesting discussion in the combox of barefoot meandering. The discussion started with an essay by an unschooled boy on limitation of video games, but in the comments brings up all sorts of interesting unschooling/classical education issues, which of course are my primary focus on this blog. It does get a bit controversial in parts and the equivocations in terminology are frustrating.

Some semantic-related questions:

• Is setting limits the same thing as "coercion"?
• Does freedom from explicit limits imply permissiveness or neglect?
• What is "addiction" and what is its origin? Is it better addressed by looking at the big picture of the addictive behavior, or just disallowing the object of addiction?
  

Where I see agreement between the "opposing sides":

• Everyone agrees that their parental goal is to raise children who as adults will make good decisions freely for themselves (though they may disagree on what constitutes a responsible adult) .
• Everyone agrees that parents have authority (with distinctions as to definition and implication) and that children are owed respect (with similar distinctions)

The disagreement seems to be basically prudential, then, prudence being defined as "the exercise of sound judgment in practical affairs." So then:

• Does allowing choices take parental guidance out of the picture? Can a child learn to make wise choices without limits being set?
  
• Does setting limits inhibit the ability of a child to make good choices in freedom?
  

Another question -- given the reality of human fallen nature in children and parents both, what is the best way to deal with that?

How does understanding of original sin play into one's parental policies? Can an understanding of fallen nature go hand-in-hand with some form of non-coercive parenting (here again the semantics are tricky and I feel like just writing my own definitions out so I can make some progress in actually thinking this through for myself).

And one more -- if limits are necessary in cases where the child's preservation is at stake, and are necessary *because* of the inexperience of a child, are there some important areas not directly concerned with preservation where the child's well-being is at stake?

What is more important in those cases -- letting the child learn to practice making good decisions and thus gain prudence, or imparting prudence by means of parental controls or limits? Obviously to a Thomist, discovery from real life is more valuable than second-hand instruction, but that doesn't mean instruction is never useful or required.

One of the quasi-integral parts of prudence is "docility" or teachableness and this is a virtue. This is a habit or disposition of learning from others and not having to constantly bump your own head against the consequences of your misjudgements. In its mature form it is a considered attitude, but children seem to have a natural tendency to look up to their elders.

I have read advice on teaching and training children that say that the more rebellious a child is, the more the wind should be tempered to the shorn lamb, so to speak. The child obviously lacks docility and in that state, by definition, he is not very teachable. There is often an implicit relationship problem and great care and concern is required not to "exasperate" the child. This does not mean fudging values, but is a description of method and approach. You want to work on docility, since this is the prerequisite of learning according to Adler.

Of course, I suppose that a non-Christian might disagree that docility is a virtue. It is often seen as synonymous with subservience though subservience is a defect of docility. In Adler's words (this is what I was looking for when I found the quote in the last post):

The two virtues of the student are studiousness (studiositas) and docility (docilitas).....Docility is much harder. Curiously enough, the word itself throws us off, though it is a virtue and, I think, the prime virtue of the student. The extremes between which it mediates are subservience and indocility or recalcitrance. Unfortunately most people use the word 'docility' in the sense of the extreme; they speak of a person as docile when they mean that he is submissive, lamb-like, subservient. But the extreme is a vice, not the virtue, just as recalcitrance or intransigence is a vice.

Docility, that middle ground between the two, involves a critical use on the part of the student of the teacher as an instrument of learning. I am saying that the docile student uses the teacher. It is perfectly right for him to use the teacher because the teacher is an instrument. To use the teacher critically means that the student is neither submissive to his authority without active inquiry (since nothing is to be accepted on the authority of the teacher, nothing is to be memorized and parroted) nor resistant to the art or skill of the teacher showing him the way to learn.

His attitude is one of respect; he listens. What the teacher says just by virtue of his office is worth asking about to see whether it is true. What the teacher says is listened to respectfully as a challenge. Where the student is initially inclined to disagree, he should watch himself from becoming indocile and recalcitrant; where he is initially inclined to agree, he should guard against becoming submissive.

Of course, the teacher/student relationship is not the same as the parent/child one, though there are definitely overlaps particularly when you are homeschooling.

I think I'll leave it there for now! Oh, one more quote given by Drew Campbell in the com box, from Jacques Maritain's "Education at the Crossroads" (hooray, my library has the book)

“The freedom of the child is not the spontaneity of animal nature, moving right from the start along the fixed determinate paths of instinct […]. The freedom of the child is the spontaneity of a human and rational nature, and this largely undetermined spontaneity has its inner principle of final determination only in reason, which is not yet developed in the child.

“The plastic and suggestible freedom of the child is harmed and led astray if it is not helped and guided. An education which consisted in making the child responsible for acquiring information about that of which he does not know he is ignorant, an education which only contemplated a blossoming forth of the child’s instincts, and which rendered the teacher a tractable and useless attendant, is but a bankruptcy of education and of the responsibility of adults toward the youth. The right of the child to be educated requires that the educator shall have moral authority over him, and this authority is nothing else than the duty of the adult to the freedom of the youth.”

This is a great quote; however, I don't really see radical unschoolers disagreeing with this in essence. Their main point has always seemed to me that coercion tends to be at least a mild disruption to the relationship, whereas a mindful, non-reflexive way of parenting that looks clearly at the various choices in a given situation is preferable in terms of moral authority and in helping the child gain wisdom.

Lifelong Learning

This is interesting: from The Professor or the Dialogue, by Mortimer Adler. I came upon it when I was looking for something quite different:

When you understand this, you understand something that is profoundly important to understand, which I am sorry to say our twentieth century and our generation has forgotten. None of our ancestors misunderstood this. You can take all the theories of education from the Greeks down to the end of the nineteenth century and no one made the mistake we make. Our contemporaries, our teachers, our students, our parents -- all of us think that education is something that happens in school. This is preposterous. It cannot happen there. Schooling is not education. Schooling is preparation for education. That is why I said let's use those words carefully.

Education cannot possibly be accomplished in school. No one in the past ever thought it could. No one thought that a boy graduated from school with a B.A. was an educated man, no one who understood that education consists in slowly, slowly becoming wise, acquiring a little understanding. No young man at the age of twenty could possibly be educated, no matter what kind of school he went to and what he did there. He could not possibly be wise or have much understanding or much insight. How could you talk about schooling as producing an educated man? The purpose of schooling is to prepare young people to go out of school and get an education thereafter.

Wisdom Begins in Wonder

In lieu of a real post I thought I would put up John Senior's words on the value of the Good Books -- taken from this site called Great Books Academy, the quote is originally from a very thought-provoking book called Restoration of Christian Culture. Here is a review of the book from Alicia, who was the first to mention the book to me years and years ago:

"The Great Books movement of the last generation has not failed as much as fizzled, not because of any defect in the books - 'the best that has been thought and said,' in Matthew Arnold's phrase - but like good champagne in plastic bottles, they went flat.

To change the figure, the seeds are good but the cultural soil has been depleted; the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas thrive only in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, and adventures: the thousand books of Grimm, Anderson, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest.

Taking all that was best of the Greco-Roman world into itself, Western tradition has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones - and for all studies in the arts and sciences. Without them all studies are inhumane. The brutal athlete and the foppish aesthete suffer vices opposed to the virtue of Newman's gentleman. Anyone working at college, whether in the pure arts and sciences or the practical ones, will discover he has made a quantum leap when he gets even a small amount of cultural ground under him: he will grow up like an undernourished plant suddenly fertilized and watered.

Now just notice how that copia of metaphors -- champagne, soil and seedlings, quantam leaps -- still manage to evoke a unity. I think it's interesting how he brings in "quantam" when he discusses how even the scientific mind can benefit from the "cultural ground".

Albert Einstein said:

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking."

Other quotes on the value of imagination and fairy tales at Sur La Lune.

I went and hunted for the quote because of a discussion going on at Real Learning about the role of Great Books and Good Books in the high school years in the home school.

Oh, that's about all I have time or mental focus for right now. Aidan and Paddy are trying to play SET; Liam, who came home this weekend, is sitting opposite me in front of the fireplace with his laptop; Kieron is constructing with pattern beads; and everyone else seems to be asleep. Aidan's IEP is today. More little details of life in the homeschool over at Every Waking Hour.

mystery in the mundane

I already linked to Elizabeth's posts on intentionality in housekeeping.

Here are some more that are in the same train of thought for me.

• A Noble Chore from High Desert Home
• Eating Mindfully from Rachel at Lean but Not Mean.

The first is about laundry among other things, and the second is about healthy living, but they overlap to me in thought process (admittedly, my thought processes can be rather free-associative at times).


Susan at High Desert Home mentioned Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and 'Woman's Work' by Kathleen Norris. The link is to a review which says:

Here, she takes a much more specific topic: how are the menial tasks of life —the tasks we don’t educate our children to do, those little jobs that we think of as work for other, less fortunate people’s children, the daily chores often considered “women’s work— islands of holiness, just like the Daily Office might be.

......

Norris makes clear that she doesn’t think that these tasks should define or confine us, but that they should not simply be disregarded as “menial” but looked at as a small but no less important part of our stewardship of the world, our recognition of God and the holy residing in almost every thing, our participation in what Jews call the tikkun olam, the fixing of the world.

Yes, I know the photo does not show the "mundane" -- but I thought it was lovely (daughter gets the credit) and shows how different things look in a different perspective -- a thought I want to remember in connection with these "islands of holiness!" Chari, do you recognize the scene?

Obiter Dictum

.... I must, for the moment, content myself with pointing out that it is a philosophical and not a literary position. In filling their book with it they have been unjust to the parent or headmaster who buys it and who has got the work of amateur philosophers where he expected the work of professional grammarians. A man would be annoyed if his son returned from the dentist with his teeth untouched and his head crammed with the dentist's obiter dicta on bimetallism or the Baconian theory.

CS Lewis, Abolition of Man

I guess that this quote best expresses my uneasiness with the recent controversies about whether Intelligent Design ought to be taught as an alternative theory to evolution in public school science classes. It is often expressed as a controversy between religious and non-religious types, but I don't think that this dichotomy accurately represents the difference between the positions on this.

As a Catholic, I teach my children that the universe is, as Pope Benedict VI says, an "intelligent project". But supposing I were sending them to school. Why on earth would I want amateurish metaphysics taught under the name of hopefully slightly-less-amateurish secondary-level science? I can't think of a way it could work in a secular setting, especially nowadays. I don't like the way even the natural sciences are taught in school, but at least the classes transmit some sort of content to do with their own proper sphere. I can't think of a way that a concept of Intelligent Design could be brought into this without muddling the disciplines and thus muddling the minds of the students even more than they are now.

This article Vatican: Intelligent Design is not Science sums up the ID position this way:

Supporters of "intelligent design" hold that some features of the universe and living things are so complex they must have been designed by a higher intelligence.

That is what I think too. But how is that to be transmitted in a science class? Studying the natural world may lead to indications of the presence of an intelligent Hand in its design, but that would not explain anything about the "how" which is what the natural sciences are concerned with. If I said "how does a watch work?" it would not answer my question to be told, "some think the best watches are made in Switzerland and some think California."

In some ways, this reminds me of some forms of literary criticism that "explain" Hamlet's theme, say, in terms of some life event of Shakespeare's. This is a blending of two distinct types of investigation. The worst is that it is not done well; you get a sort of soup that does not integrate, but muddles the different elements. The literary critic goes outside his scope in psychoanalyzing Shakespeare. The natural scientist goes outside his scope and bends metaphysics out of shape by trying to employ them in physical investigations.

The article I linked above about the Vatican's opposition to teaching of Intelligent Design quotes Professor Facchini, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bologna wrote in L'Osservatore Romano:

"This isn't how science is done. If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it's not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science."

(Intelligent design) "doesn't belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin's explanation is unjustified,"

"It only creates confusion between the scientific and philosophical and religious planes."

The Professor clarifies what he means by the different planes :

"In a vision that goes beyond the empirical horizon, we can say that we aren't men by chance or by necessity, and that the human experience has a sense and a direction signaled by a superior design."

In the old days, metaphysics was seen as above physical science... in fact, that is a circular statement because metaphysics MEANS beyond physics. Evidence from the natural world can be used to some extent in religious and philosophical investigations and proofs; but not vice versa. Nature cannot prove or disprove what stands beyond its realm. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity holds that a larger system that is at more of a remove should not do for the smaller system what it can do for itself. Theology is the larger discipline with the higher object, in this case. True religion and true science can never contradict each other; science cannot properly concern itself with theology, which stands beyond it. When Professor Facchini says that Intelligent Design does not belong to science he is speaking with strict precision. To our modern ears that may sound like he thinks theology is less important than science, but I read it as rather the reverse. I do not belong to my house, but vice versa.

Father Fessio details the distinction clearly in a letter to First Things :

Modern science does not investigate finality or purpose. It limits itself to “natural” phenomena: material and immediate efficient causes. Therefore, from within its own (very successful) method, the scientist as scientist can neither conclude that there is not an Intelligent Designer, i.e. that physical processes are unguided or unplanned, or, for that matter, that there is one. But the scientist as a human being can affirm the latter. As Cardinal Schönborn puts it: “by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world.”.

.....Cardinal Newman in his discourse “Christianity and Physical Science” said: The Physicist “contemplates facts before him; the Theologian gives the reasons of these facts. The Physicist treats of efficient causes; the Theologian of final. The Physicist tells us of laws. The Theologian of the Author, Maintainer, and Controller of them.”

I do think Darwinian evolution can be taught in a reductionistic, glib way without recognition of the problems such as irreducible complexity, thus giving explicit or implicit accordance to the philosophy of materialism -- the view that everything that exists is material. I think that those who combine genuine scholarship in science and philosophy can be helpful to the scientific world in providing a sorely needed reality check, at times. But as far as the schools go, I would be deeply concerned with a muddled metaphysical approach to science that didn't respect the legitimate province of the fields of metaphysics OR natural science.

I think the proponents of ID in schools probably think that evolutionary theory already stakes out a field in metaphysics, the materialistic or physicalist one, so the ID theory is needed to provide an alternative. But I can't see a way that ID in those circumstances would become anything but a tool, a subset of science and a rather strained one at that. It is First Causes being wrenched into the service of subsidiary ones. This is what I don't think the proponents of ID in schools understand. They hope to use science to point to something outside of science, but instead they would be bringing what is beyond science into the province of the field, and thus falling into the same trap as the professional scientists who think themselves qualified to pronounce on amateur metaphysics.

total effect and literature

A bit more on a similar topic from Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: --- Total Effect and the Eighth Grade). She is writing about a couple of cases where books, specifically Steinbeck's East of Eden and Hersey's A Bell for Adono, were assigned in 8th and 9th grade, and parents objected, and a teacher was subsequently dismissed, and Hersey wrote to the state school superintendent to protest. (This was in 1963, by the way). The issue of whether it is to be parents or teachers who decide what schoolchildren should read is not her main concern, though. The whole article is at the second link above.

This is the part that reminded me a bit of what I was writing about yesterday:

The total effect of a novel depends not only on its innate impact, but upon the experience, literary and otherwise, with which it is approached..... the fact that these works (she is talking about the English novels of the 18th and 19th centuries) do not present him (the student) with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable.

She defines the term "total effect" as:

that principle followed in legal cases by which a book is judged not for isolated parts but by the final effect of the whole book upon the general reader.

I think the term "total effect" is still used today. First, here is an English lesson plan version which seems a bit reductionistic and overly subjective to me. Don't you think?

Firstly, we are affected by literature -- we love it, hate it, or
are indifferent. This is the total effect.

"Meaning" is the total effect -- the sum of all of the parts is
what it "means" to you. A work may have made a didactic point or
not but you responded to it.

Here is one I like somewhat better --from Writing an Analysis of Literature

Assume everything is significant. In good literature, nothing should be an accident. Each word, each character, each thought, each incident should make a contribution to the total effect the author is trying for. The contribution is sometimes obvious and direct: the author casually mentions that a car is nine years old because later on the car will break down. At other times, the contribution is indirect: the author spends a paragraph describing a glowing fireplace in order to establish a homey mood that fits in with the story's central idea -- the joys of family life. As you think about the material you are going to analyze, as you brood about what you are going to say and how you are going to say it, keep in mind that nothing is beneath your notice. Assume that everything serves a purpose and that you have not reached a full understanding of the story, poem, or play until you clearly see the purpose that everything serves.

Finally, an essay on Literature and Science by Matthew Arnold. He starts with Plato and proceeds to a defense of the value of Greek literature with very brief and respectful excursions into the territory of Darwin, Faraday, and Ruskin. What could be better! But here is what he says about "total effect":

Fit details strictly combined, in view of a large general result nobly conceived; that is just the beautiful symmetria prisca of the Greeks, and it is just where we English fail, where all our art fails. Striking ideas we have, and well-executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, with satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom or never have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not come from single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a gateway there;—no, it arose from all things being perfectly combined for a supreme total effect.

I think I've diverged a bit from the original point, with these various definitions of "total effect". But Flannery O'Connor's point was that the principle of total effect could and ought to be conceived more broadly than when talking about the education of a child. Part of the total effect of a book is going to be what the student (of any age) brings to it. So I am staying to my point after all -- that it is the context and backdrop of the child's reading that affects his perspective on the new ones that come his way.