The Sociology of Social Studies
From the Hosts
In this second installment of our Cultural Transmission series, we take a look at "Social Studies": what is that section on standardized tests? Why does nobody know what it is? Well, partially because the people who came up with it weren't interested in telling us precisely what it meant. Today we'll dig a little bit into the history of social studies, and why its origins are a bit insidious as well as ambiguous.
This Episode Features: Social Studies; The Rat Dies; Isaac Asimov; Oculus Reparo; Cata-What-Now; McGuffey's Readers; Storytelling And Mysticism; and Bryan Is A History Teacher He Just Doesn't Get Paid For It.
In this episode
Works
Times will appear once this episode's audio is aligned.
Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome. Welcome back, Bryan.
Today we’re talking about Deuteronomy. We’re continuing our 4-part series. It’s always a gamble to say how many parts are going to be in the series, but we’re planning on four parts. This is Part 2 in the series on Deuteronomy and cultural transmission. Today we’re talking about The Sociology of Social Studies.
I was just saying to Greg before we started recording that I was homeschooled, then I went to Cornerstone Christian School, and then I went to Hillsdale College, so I have no idea what social studies are. I took history classes all the way through, and the only place I ever heard of social studies was on standardized tests. So Greg, what are social studies? What’s this thing?
You know, that’s the thing that no one is quite sure about. In the article I originally wrote that’s sort of the basis for our discussion, just in the research I spent a good deal of time trying to find a standardized definition. I had to look through a number of state educational documents from all over the place, and I finally got something along these lines. This is from Montana. “1) Students access, synthesize, and evaluate information to communicate and apply social studies knowledge to real-world situations.”
The definition of the class is, “This class will teach you how to use this class in the real world.”
This was an English major being hired to come up with something compelling to get state funding, wasn’t it.
“2) Students analyze how people create and change structures of power, authority, and governance, to understand the operation of government and to demonstrate civic responsibility.”
Yes. I’m sure they define all this – well, maybe not. Here’s 4. I don’t know what happened to 3. I must have eliminated it.
“4) Students demonstrate an understanding of the effects of time, continuity, and change on historical and future perspectives and relationships.”
Presumably we’re looking at the past and the future, which is now past, to see how the past past affected the past future, so that we can make guesses about how our present will affect our own future, since we can’t see our future.
If you go to the past, you can’t change your past because the future is now your past, which you can’t now change because you went to the past.
But you’re seeing how it works, though. If someone in 1900 did X, and by 1940 the result was Y, then something like that probably would happen if we did X or an X-like thing today, 40 years in the future, or a Y-like thing would happen, assuming that the culture, the people, and the ethical constraints from the above remain consistent.
Doesn’t every social studies class admit that none of that stays consistent?
Also there’s this whole complex problem about establishing causality. Even in science that’s a very tricky and specific thing to do.
I’m being reminded of one of the arguments in a book by Carl Trueman where he was talking about why people don’t like written creeds for the most part. It’s a very Enlightenment idea of, “Well, we can’t listen to things from 1200 years ago because people were so different then. We’re better. We’re more enlightened or more evolved.”
“We can’t listen to St. Augustine because he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a 21st-century Christian.” I’m seeing a lot of that here. Oh, can we ring the Gnosticism bell? <ding!>
A general statement from E. Wayne Ross in the Social Studies curriculum 2006 says, “Social studies are meant to provide young people with the ‘knowledge, skills, and values necessary for active participation in society.’” The words “social competence” and “citizenship education” show up a lot in these documents as sort of a summary.
Yeah, but they want you to participate, not just exist, and they want you to apparently be good citizens. As one of you already said, that depends a lot on definitions, doesn’t it. What does a good citizen do? Submit in all circumstances? Help the thing grow and change positively? Change it dramatically now because anything less is compromise and a pact with hell?
There is so much here that is not said, and in an older generation a lot of people didn’t think you needed to say, because we all believe and assume the same things, right?
Yeah, and unfortunately they did, and they were wrong. They all thought they knew, and that’s kind of where we’re going with this.
Social studies draws from economics, history, geography, government, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, with elements of the humanities such as literature, music, visual arts, and such, but these are presented in traditional social studies courses, not as a chronological story.
We’re going to be talking I think next week more about the idea of history as communicating a people’s story, one’s own story, one’s family’s story.
These are not stories. Stories you do not find. If you do, it’s that little breath of fresh air that slips in real fast and is gone, because this is science. “It’s science, man, and we don’t do stories. We have facts. We have statistics. We have graphs. We have charts.”
Yeah, numbers, things that can be quantified, because we want this to be science. We’re studying society scientifically. Is it any wonder that Lewis and Rushdoony both had kind of a paranoid fear of sociology? “This is what you’re doing? You’re treating humanity like beetles under a microscope.” We know what happens to the beetles.
We know what happens to the rats in the maze. Paul Simon told us in his song.
You kind of wonder how they put historical events into numerical form. “So, one Weimer Republic is equal to the passage of time + the Depression = 1 Hitler.”
I think you need some calculus symbols – integrating the Weimar Republic from poverty to victory is equal to Hitler.
It tracks a community, I guess. I’ll be honest. It’s not my genre and we were listening to it on audiobooks, which are not my medium, so I was spacing out for a solid 85% of the last part of the book. But the first part of the book was about the psychohistorian Hari Seldon, who has quantified to the point of being able to predict events far into the future with a great probability of accuracy.
He can’t predict individual actions because there are too many unknowns, but as you brought in your field of data that you’re using and give it enough time, he’s got this wizard-like prophetic power and it’s leveraged in different ways as time progresses through this society.
It’s purely mathematical. As long as you’re dealing with groups that are large enough (say, the size of a planet) and time periods that are long enough (say, decades or centuries), the assumption is that human nature is pretty consistent. The laws of economics and politics are pretty consistent, so you can predict the future, and I think it was Robert Nesbit who says, “barring things like the genius, the maniac, and the catastrophe.” Nesbit goes on to say, “Unfortunately, those are the very things that keep showing up all the time!”
Okay, you’re familiar with it. There’s a machine that watches everyone and it basically learns everything and eventually starts to do things like predict the future and predict when people are going to try and break into where its files are stored in hard copy, so it moves itself. It orders itself through various levels of government to be moved. Characters show up, and one them is really weird who starts calling it a god, and it’s like, “Oh, this is sounding familiar, too.”
Not to give away too much about Foundation, but eventually – and I don’t remember if it’s the end of the second book or the third book – the weird manifestation, the mutant, shows up that throws everything off.
What you eventually learn is that it’s not quite as scientific as we’ve been led to believe. If you actually told everyone what’s really going on, it would have been far too easy to thwart. One of the things that’s going on is he’s deliberately creating the aura that “This is science. This is unstoppable. This is for your best. We have it all figured out. Nothing could possibly go wrong. Trust us.” It turns out, yeah, a lot actually could go wrong, but there’s a back-up plan that they don’t know about, because science has its limitations after all and they’re pretty severe.
That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. When we come out of the Enlightenment, the basic idea was, the light of Newton’s Principia, was that if the heavens themselves can be reduced to mathematical formulas, everything can – human nature, human society, economics, the flow of history, government. Everything can be quantified and dissected in a mathematical way, following Descartes and Newton.
Once we do that, once we have enough data and we know the rules, yes, we can tell the future, but we can also manipulate the future, and we will do that for the good of the world. And the ironic thing was, at that point, the good that they were talking about still bore the heavy impress of Christianity. We’re going to care for the poor and love one another and not kill each other and not steal.
But the more consistent members of that society said, “Yeah, you guys have got a problem. You’ve denied God, but you’re still acting as if his rules matter. That’s inconsistent.” There was a generation there that struggled between, “No, we got rid of superstition because it was the problem and it kept us from realizing an ideal society. When it’s all based on us it should be so much better!”
Turns out it wasn’t, and you can look up Marxism, Naziism, American technocracy, and you get the same thing. “We have the science. We have the math. We have the smarts.”
“Yeah, and give us time, give us power, give us comprehensive information, and what we will give you will be scientifically accurate. You can trust in the science. Our priests wear these lab coats and these pocket protectors and their glasses are broken in the center and taped. That’s how you recognize the priesthood now.”
Side note. One of my favorite moments in the Goblet of Fire audiobook is where Krum is talking to her and she’s trying to tell him how to pronounce her name. He keeps calling her “Herr-me-own.”
As I recall, J.K. Rowling got a letter from someone who said, “People are telling me now it’s her-my-ohnee, but I look at it as her-me-own.” She wrote back, “You can pronounce it however you like. Don’t let them boss you around.” It was the first time she realized, “People don’t know how to pronounce that word? That’s probably a bad choice on names.”
E. Wayne Ross, the man who wrote The Social Studies Curriculum, the first introduction to the whole thing, gave some background. He said, almost in passing, “Of course at the beginning of our country, basic moral instruction, this kind of thing that we now do in social studies, was grounded in religion, particularly instruction in the Bible and the catechism.”
Whoa! Surprise, surprise. You mean the Church once had a way of preparing their children for engagement in society that involved an infallible textbook and a very fallible, but nevertheless very competent explanation thereof, the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
This is what people did for generations. As late as Anne of Green Gables you’re reading along and it says Anne had to go memorize her catechism. No one today knows what that means unless you belong to a Presbyterian or Reformed church, and maybe Lutheran, and Catholic, I guess. But the average evangelical says, “What’s that? Cata-chism?” But when Lucy Maud Montgomery was writing, she assumed everyone knew what a catechism was because everybody did, not just Presbyterians.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism formed one of the key elements of education for anybody who went to any kind of religious school, or they had some version altered by the Baptists or Congregationalists, but the basic questions like, “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever,” everybody knew that.
But then there came a problem. Once the Revolution was over, the problem was we now had 13 former colonies, now states, with their own history and identity. Most of that identity has been defined not only ethnically, but religiously or denominationally. With the Dutch you have the Dutch Reformed. In Pennsylvania maybe you have some Lutherans. In Pennsylvania you’ve got some Quakers. In the Carolinas and Virginia, you’ve got ex-Anglicans because you can’t be Anglican anymore so you’re Episcopalian now. In Massachusetts you’ve got the Congregationalists, who used to be called Puritans.
These all have their own religious settlements, their own doctrinal distinctives, and they used to be very, very jealous of each other, and they continued to be jealous of them. But along the way they’ve learned, “You know, we have these differences, but that doesn’t mean we have to kill each other over them.” A step forward, a good thing.
The problem is, “Then how do we relate?” and the answer came to be, “Let’s just leave that to the Church and the family, and in the public sector we’ll come up with some other common ground, particularly in the realm of education, because now we want to educate everybody together in a way that will be fit for this new republic.”
We got rid of the church calendar. Baptists and Congregationalists don’t particularly use it, so we’re not going to be setting up the saints as heroes. Augustine who? Athanasius what? Patrick? Isn’t he Roman Catholic? So we now need new heroes, like Washington, Adams, Franklin, Patrick Henry, but we also need a new curriculum that’s going to emphasize the things that are basic to what this nation needs – virtues like bravery, honesty, self-reliance, temperance (a big one, and temperance actually meant abstinence), industry (hard work), and of course patriotism.
The goal here was to produce patriotic citizens loyal now to the nation and not just to their state, because people thought that was necessary if this was going to work. We can’t be single-minded and just focus upon the small little area we know. We have to have a love for America. We have to have American heroes and an American calendar and American history.
But if we do that, if we start teaching the Bible, then which interpretation? Do you teach as if we’re Quakers? As if we’re Baptists? As if we’re Presbyterians? Calvinists? Armenians? What exactly?
The argument that came back was, “We’ll just pick a generic theism, a generic Christianity, the things that all Christians agree on,” and remember that Christians include Deists and Unitarians. “We’re going to pick all the things that they agree on and we will teach those. We’ll teach men to respect the Bible and God in heaven, who’s our Creator (whatever that means), but we’ll never teach any doctrinal distinctives. We’ll leave that to the churches, so no one needs to be afraid of sending your child to the local public school,” even before they were called public schools. “In fact, we need a curriculum that will do this.” There was this guy named McGuffy that was hired to do this.
Now, I don’t know about you. I grew up in a school that used McGuffey’s readers. The logic was that there’s moral lessons here, and you’re not going to have to apologize for the language or any such thing, and it reflects the basic Christian worldview. I never questioned it. I was a kid when I read those. In fact, we even had our oldest daughter read some of them when she got ahead of her reading level.
But at one point, my wife was tasked with writing an article, and you can find it online – Kate Uttinger, “Old Gruff and His Readers” in Leben magazine, Vol 7 No 4. She was asked to write this article, so we thought, “Well, we’ve gotten kind of skeptical of McGuffy’s readers. To do him justice we need to read them, or at least skim them pretty thoroughly,” so we went through all of them, looking at each story in turn. We were looking for something very specific. We were looking for references to Jesus.
We found about two in the entire series that clearly referenced anything that might be considered religion. There was one on God as Creator, and it comes towards the end of the series, and there was one on Jesus, emphasizing how kind and good and unusual he was as a human being. That was it in the entire series. There was lots about being moral. No hint of what the gospel may be, and almost no reference to God directly. It was frightening.
So that was the compromise that lasted into the early 1900s and that was what people learned from. When I was a kid, Christian schools coming online had no curriculum. They went back to McGuffy’s readers and said, “Oh, this is what our Christian forefathers used.”
You know, there’s always a problem with going back to yesterday, because yesterday is what got us to today. Just going back and saying, “Let’s undo the flaws and not change anything,” we’re going to relive them again, except we’re going to relive them a generation behind time so they’re going to be even less applicable and useful.
I’ve known people in Christian educational circles who argued, “Let’s go back and adopt John Locke.” We tried that. It got us here. Someone said, “Well, we can’t use biblical arguments because unbelievers don’t listen to the Bible, but they’ll listen to Locke.”
First, no, they won’t. Second, wait, isn’t that exactly the problem? They won’t listen to the Bible, so you’re coming up with something that’s not the Bible but that seems to you like some kind of compromise? Anyway, side issue, but not by much.
Somewhere around 1916, I believe, the Bureau of Education published “Social Studies in Secondary Education.” It was a report from the committee on social studies, chaired by Thomas Jesse Jones, and he used the words ‘social studies’ for the first time. Well, nearly the first time. He was one of the first writers to use them, but he’d actually used the words earlier in an article appearing in The Southern Workman. Southern is important here because the article wasn’t theoretical. He was describing an existing curriculum used at the Hampton Institute. Anybody who’s read articles on Booker T. Washington will recognize that.
The Hampton Institute was an institute for training young black men to integrate – well, to fail to integrate into white society, because the argument was, “You can’t; therefore, what you need to do is not follow the leader of the Socialist agitators, the Marxist agitators, and stir up trouble. You just need to be calm and submissive and not emotional. And if you hang out with white people enough and learn to discipline your passions and learn to be hard and nice workers, in a few generations eventually your great-great-grandchildren will evolve to the point where they can enjoy the full benefits of being free people in a free society. But don’t try to rush it, because evolution, you know, takes its time.”
Yeah, that’s racist. First of all, it assumes that there is such a thing as race. For those of you who haven’t worked your way all through this series, please go back and listen to the one that’s called Of One Blood, which is our discussion on the whole idea of the non-existence of race in God’s creation. God did not create races, he created people. He created one human race and he always analyzed it in terms of covenantal groupings – nations, languages, people groups, families.
The one exception was tongues, but since at Babel the tongues were divided very explicitly, we’re told, according to their families, the Bible does not recognize this race thing. Biology may have some use for it. I’m highly suspicious of that – it sounds like it stinks of hell – but the Bible certainly never acknowledges it. There’s no such thing as race.
People grow up with different cultural backgrounds, and we have earlier episodes talking about that – the effect of religion, as well as other circumstances on culture. So the first thing about racism is that race is not a thing, so to make race a dividing issue over anything is about as bad as saying, “Okay, you people are all from Pluto, and you’re all from Venus, so Plutonians are over there, you people from Venus are out there in the work camp, and that’s the way it’s going to be.” This is mythology. This is science fiction. There’s no such thing.
The second thing, of course, is it’s a simple violation of the gospel. Jesus died for men of all sorts, without qualification. In Christ there is no Jew, no Gentile, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. Christ is all, and we in Him are one collective body, the new Jerusalem, and the new Jerusalem doesn’t wipe away these distinctives. It glorifies them and uses them.
So we say without hesitation that racism is first stupid, and secondly it’s a sin. It’s a hatred of other people who are the image of God, and even if that hatred is a nice hatred – “I just want to help these poor people” – if you’re treating them as less than the image of God, if you’re treating them as your pets, however sweet, that’s racism. That’s hatred. When you consider somebody who is the image of God as being less than the image of God, and that’s your justification for being nice to them, that’s still hatred. It’s just a sweeter sugary kind of hatred and contempt.
Interestingly enough, Michael Lybarger, who writes about this whole thing in “Origins of the Modern Social Studies” in History of Education Quarterly, he says this. “Hampton students were taught that social evolution, however slow, was inevitable and only time and the continued influence of whites were required for blacks to reach a level of the Anglo-Saxons. The assumption that racist institutions were subject to the law of evolution was common to all Hampton social studies.”
Is this racist? Yeah, it’s evolutionary. We go back to the subtitle of Origin of Species, which very few people seem to know. Darwin subtitled his classic work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Some people say, “No, he’s talking about races of animals.” Excuse me, that’s what he’s arguing man is, so no, that’s not an escape hatch for you.
Yeah, where some of God is a little more equal than other parts of God for now, but give us time.
I found at Barnes & Noble what was supposed to be a facsimile copy of the original. It was from some anniversary of Origin of Species, and I looked at the cover and the subtitle was missing. I looked at the inside title page and it was missing. It was followed by lots and lots of introduction, introductory essays, and finally when you got to the facsimile title page it finally was there, but that was deep in the book of the reprint, because people don’t want to talk about it.
But yes, we are dealing with the reality that Darwinism leads to racism inevitably, because some races have got to be more evolved than others. Darwin saw that and he didn’t have a problem.
Yeah. He was a little sad. In the Descent of Man he wrote at one point that it’s kind of sad that one day we’re going to wipe out all of the larger primates on the one end, and all the lower semi-human races on the other, like Australian Aborigines and such, so that the distance will now be from the littlest monkey to the modern white man, and the beautiful ladder that we see still stretching from the one to the other will all be gone and we won’t even remember it. Thanks, Chuck, that’s just so noble of you to weep a tear over that.
What comes out of this then is that sociology and social studies exist then to create a workforce that will be docile, useful, productive, and of course the question becomes useful to whom?
This suggests the black people in the South at least constituted a working class, and one object of the Hampton social studies was to legitimate and perpetuate that status. This affords insights into the appeal the Hampton social studies might have held for educators and their wealthy patrons, especially in the North.
After 1900 these people became concerned with the educational problem presented by the increasing number of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. These newcomers and their children had to be educated. Their education had to be a special type, assisting them in making the best of their lot and securing their allegiance to the world of work, as well as existing political, economic, and social arrangement. The educators presented with such a social studies curriculum designed to inculcate the virtues found in the Hampton social studies must have seemed especially attractive.
“We’ve got a lot of people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe now settling in America. How can we teach them to be docile and productive and not cause trouble? Oh, wait. We have a template. How did we teach these young black guys?”
It’s kind of frightening. So as we go into the 20th and 21st century the question becomes, “Well, that was the goal then. Is it still the goal?” But unfortunately, as good Hegelians we’re always synthesizing. “That was the template then. We need workers for our new world order. But now when we need to push the old world order out of the way, topple it, we need to teach the young people how to do some toppling. We need to teach them how to be revolutionaries, how to question everything.” Ta da! The children of the ‘60s, who got their brain stuffed with this kind of nonsense.
Remember when we read the definition. Sometimes it was “understand your culture and participate.” Other times it was “evaluate it and change it.” And Emily said, “That’s Marxism.” Yup, the perfect vehicle when the time came, because the people who came at the beginning of the process had a different end goal than the people who were the product of the process. Isn’t that amazing that as things change, the people who are changed don’t believe what the founders had in mind. They see a newer picture. So the question “Toward what goal and by what standard?” becomes really, really important.
Three things we’re told today that social studies are supposed to do, or three different approaches. One says, “They ought to transmit facts and values from the academic disciplines.” That is, treat it like a science. Secondly, “They ought to function as a means of cultural transmission, a way of achieving cultural continuity from one generation to the next.” That’s broadly conservative in the sense of, “What’s our past? We want to keep that going.”
The third one is, “Have social studies emphasize reflective inquiry and informed social criticism. Students ought to learn to question and critique American society.” Remember, students here are all of 13 and 14. Yeah, they’re going to be great critics of something they know nothing about. “The goal here is the promotion of social transformation and the reconstruction of American society,” and this is the one that seems to be most favored today. The most fervent speak of “racial and economic justice and a new social order.”
A lot of these things on the face of them seem fairly innocuous. We’ve got facts and values. That’s a good thing to pass on to your kids. They should know that. Cultural continuity and stability – that’s pretty good. You don’t want things toppled from one generation to the next. Then you do want kids to think critically. We do a lot of that on this podcast, looking at America and saying, “Hmm, why are we here and where should we be?” So clearly there’s something going on under the hood here.
As my wife and children are fond of asking, “By what standard?” Your values – it’s great to have values, right?
“We should have multiple wives so we can fill the world with our spirit children.” That’s a family value for one cult.
Exactly, it’s as family as you can get. The Manson family had values. But there was a time when people would just scoff at that like, “You know what we mean.”
There was a time when it was blurred enough that people could get by with that saying, “Oh, you know what I mean.” We sure don’t anymore. There were a few voices in the past like Gresham Machen who warned of the dangers of a public educational system in the early 20th century. Then you get Cornelius van Til and some others, but by and large Christian Americans have been really stupid.
“You know, values! Like you know, be a good neighbor and love your neighbor and work hard.”
This is sounding really familiar, and all of those things require definitions. Today in the midst of the Corona virus the most common thing is, “Don’t you love your neighbor? Don’t you love Grandma?”
We’re getting some dubious deductions and implications here that have not been reasoned out, but are just said again and again and again, because that’s what’s going over social media. You have not proved your ability to think and to analyze critically, but your ability to swallow whole all kinds of propaganda. You’re not thinking.
Until you have definitions and until you have a standard and until that standard is the Word of God and those definitions come from scripture, all of this formality – here’s the thought. Because the Bible is in fact true, and its description of human nature and the ways humans interact is accurate, that is that man is a covenantal being, there are basic questions you can ask of every culture and there will be answers.
Who or what’s in control? How is that control represented to society? How shall we then live? What is the motive force that changes human hearts and human society? And what about the next generation?
Those are the five points of covenantalism, and every society has a response to them. Just to say, “Yeah, we have answers for all those,” is a non-answer answer. No kidding you have an answer. What is it, and how’d you get it and what are you going to do with it, and how many people will be alive once you’re done?
You think of the French Revolution. “Well, we’re only going to eliminate up to a third of the French population,” or was it to eliminate it? It’s unclear as to how many people they wanted to kill. In the killing fields of Cambodia it was more like 80-90% of people they wanted to get rid of, because it’s easier to work with fewer people. You have to break a lot of eggs to make an omelet, it seems.
Yeah, so the basic question of who is God, what is real, and what in the world are we talking about has got to be the starting point. If we do not start from scripture and say, “The creative God of the Bible who reveals himself in Genesis 1 as the one who made heaven and earth in six days,” any other God, or as Bryan said earlier, back to the continuity of being thing where the universe is simply a projection of God, we’re in God, God’s in us, and whatever we do in the long run is as good as anything else because there are no absolutes. It might be good for us for the moment, but someone else will no doubt reject is, but that’s okay because we’ll be dead, until we find out how to make ourselves live forever, and that will be scary.
Moving sort of now toward a conclusion, Deuteronomy. Remember we were supposed to be talking about Deuteronomy? You notice how much of this is not in Deuteronomy? There’s nothing like any of this in Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy comes to us and says, “Look, I’m God. Here’s my track record with you. Here’s history. Here’s how you don’t get to me. You don’t make images. You do submit to my laws and my court system. Here are my laws. Here’s how you should live. If you’re a redeemed people, if you’re walking with me, if you know me and my law is in your heart, this is what’s there and this is what I will keep on writing there, starting with love God and love your neighbor.
“Here are the Ten Commandments. Here are applications and explanations of them. Then here are the blessings and cursings that will pursue your society, depending on how you relate to me. And here are some practical ways of transmitting all this into the next generation.”
One key element again and again is history. Tell the story. I believe that’s what we’re going to talk about next week. History is story. Feel free to throw things in here, but just some ideas of how that works.
Our school has a lot of Slavic immigrants, mostly second or third generation now. My wife works with a lot of younger kids, junior high students. She’ll mention something about the Cold War or Soviet Empire or how bad things were with persecution of Christians, and her students will just sit there and stare at her blankly like, “What?”
“Okay, here’s your assignment. Go find your grandparents or the oldest living person of your family you can, and ask them to tell you what life was like in Russia, in the Ukraine, in Poland, in Romania, before the curtain fell, and see what they say.”
You think in time that might have an effect on how they view their world and their privileges here? I hope so, but it can’t happen until they talk to them.
Social studies, by its very nature, by eliminating story, by replacing them with abstract facts does exactly what it’s not supposed to do. It short-circuits continuity. We need to know whose story we’re in and what part we play. If we’re part of a story, we know instinctively that stories have meaning, because stories have a plot and they go someplace. They have a theme. They rush toward a conclusion, and that conclusion is a meaningful one. If we’re in a story, then that’s cool.
As a teacher, particularly teaching adults, the moment I go from, “Okay, here’s theology, theology, theology…let me tell you a story,” everyone sits up and brightens up. “Okay, I’ve got you all back now.”
When you read through the Bible, why is the Bible so much history? I wonder.
Do you two have any recollection stories or insights along these lines that you would like to share? Times when you told stories or heard stories or heard about stories?
I’ll tell you real fast what story I get asked for the most. “How did you meet Mrs. Uttinger?” and I’ve never had anyone fall asleep in that story, largely because she’s a really cool character, larger than life, and everyone is like, “Oh, she was so cool there!” and she was.
She is pretty cool. I remember teaching in 6th grade, and every time I said, “Pause, story time from Miss Peterson’s college days,” everyone got very interested.
Of course. And if you have connected with them at all, they actually do kind of want to know about you. One young man in my class now, I’ll sit with him and a couple of his friends at study hall, and he’ll just turn to me and ask me random questions about my past and my interests. “It sounds like you really want to know. I’m not sure why you care, but okay, I’ll tell you.” That was the time I told the story of our courtship, and everyone was like, “Oh, that’s so cool.” Thank you.
I can think of another one, but it’s not actually me personally. One of the things that my now-fiancé loves about me is that I will tell her historical events in very entertaining ways. She’s just like, “If you were teaching history class…”
Emily 2: I don’t care about history, but I’m actually interested when you’re telling it, because it’s highly entertaining.
But yeah, it’s great. One of my favorite history books I ever read is Rubicon by Tom Holland. I’ve recommended that on this podcast before. It’s because it opens with a hook, and he is an excellent writer. Throughout the entire book it is just like, “I have never been more focused on anything in my entire life. This is an amazing story,” and it’s the same stuff about Rome.
A lot of people know some of the details about Rome, but he just crafts a story out of it and you’re interested. You’re pulled in. I think everyone who wants to be a history book writer needs to read Tom Holland first and determine if they can reach that level, because really nothing else is worth reading.
I had a professor say one time that history is the purest form of storytelling because it’s the kind where you actually can’t make anything up. You have the data to work with, so the art of crafting the story is putting these pieces together, and that’s where your craft gets honed. And the purest form of history is biography, because then your start point and your end point are defined. You don’t get to decide those.
What makes the musical Hamilton so popular is this concept of story. We’re going to not only get to know these individuals, or a creative representation of these individuals, and tell their story, and the story belongs to them in the way that we want our stories to belong to us. That’s why the finale is so powerful. “Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?”
That reminds me, that’s a point that Gresham Machen makes in Christianity and Liberalism. He basically talks about the reason that Christianity is so effective and has changed the world so much is because it is primarily a story that, yes, is made up of true historical facts, but it’s a story. It’s not something that could have happened yesterday and be just as true as if it had happened 3,000 years ago, or the answers or the methods to greater spiritual enlightenment that will be true in all ages. It’s a thing that happened in history, and it’s an event that demarcated history from then going forward.
We have a God who steps into history because he created history. It’s unique. I was going to say very unique, but of course that’s foolish.
Redundantly redundant. The God who not only steps into history, but whose work history is. It is his workmanship, not in some deistic sense of knocking over the dominos and letting them fall because he planned it so wonderfully, but actively being involved and bringing about each event personally.
I keep trying to hit my kids with this, and maybe I’m not doing it right or I’m missing something, but I use this analogy. What if your true love were to send you a letter and say, “Here’s what I’ve been up to. Here’s the stuff I’ve been doing,” and you glance at it and say, “Eh, more of that stuff,” and toss it away.
Mom or Dad says, “You just got a letter from your fiancé. Aren’t you going to read it?”
“Nah, it’s just telling me about what he’s been doing, his job and stuff. When he starts saying something important I’ll read it. That’s no big deal.”
Of course, I question that because when you love somebody you want to know all about them. That’s the nature of love.
I’ve had a notebook with my stuff in it for the past however many episodes I’ve been on here.
I still have a recommendation off the top of my head, so it’ll work out. I’m going to recommend cheese curds.
The midwestern version of French fries. It’s its own thing. It’s really quite delicious, and there’s a few places out here that are a cut above the rest.
Not Culvers, actually. There’s a couple of specialized – Duke of Devon? What was the #1 that you mentioned?
I’m just really having trouble visualizing this. I’ll have to look for an opportunity to sample them in real life.
There’s not many places out there, unfortunately. It is very much a Midwest thing. I just realized I recommended an only-midwest thing to people who mainly listen from California. Sorry, everyone!
Mine is three poems, but especially one poem. I came upon these poems as part of a reading challenge. I was supposed to ask a child in my life for a book recommendation. I have a 7-year-old buddy at church named Robert, and I said, “Robert, I need a book recommendation,” and he said, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”
I did. This is one volume with three poems: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. Sir Orfeo is, as you might guess, Orpheus and Eurydice, but the Anglo-Saxon version, which has a happy ending which I appreciate.
Recommendation: Sir Gawain and the Green KnightMy favorite of the three poems was Pearl. It’s kind of the most personal. There’s a reason to believe that all of these poems were written by the same author. We don’t know who that is, but they are part of the Anglo-Saxon canon, as it were.
Pearl is from the perspective of a father who has lost a daughter, it sounds like. He speaks of her metaphorically as a pearl, a jewel that he lost. It rolled into the garden and he sort of stumbles over to the garden and has this vision where he sees the girl decked out in pearls and bright array. She talks to him about how happy she is in heaven with Jesus, being part of the bride of Christ, so it’s a really beautiful poem, really sweet, and I recommend it.
Well, you just out-classed me because I’m going to steal from you and recommend the Foundation trilogy, or the ever-increasingly misnamed Foundation trilogy, because when Asimov wrote it, it was just going to be this trilogy. Then later on he added another book, then another book, and then he made connecting links to every other series he ever wrote. So now to appreciate the full force of what’s going on you have to read the later books, the prequels that he wrote, and all his robot novels like I, Robot and all those that followed, and the space novels.
Yes, except Frank Herbert kind of planned it, and Asimov just had his ideas out there and realized, “Wait, if I just have them run into each other, the two universes match, then all of that becomes back story for all of this, and it explains the next thing I’m going to do – I’m going!”
Anyway, the original trilogy, as Emily sort of introduced it, starts with this idea of psychohistory. We can use mathematics to predict how people will act and predict the future, and what he shows us in the various ways that cultures can evolve and adapt.
It starts with this. We have the galactic empire that’s like the Roman empire in its decline. It’s about ready to totter and fall, and this intrepid group of encyclopedists and psychohistorians are trying to find a way – well, they can’t save it, they realize, but to create a new galactic empire on the other side that will be more stable. But in order to do that, they come up with the idea of, “Let’s put an outpost on the very edge of the galaxy, and we will put scholars there who are dedicated to one thing – producing a summary of all man’s knowledge, and we’ll call it the Encyclopedia Galactica,” except it’s all a lie.
We move through the story as we find out exactly how much everybody’s been lied to, and why the lie is necessary to perpetuate the plan. It’s subsidiary and eventually falls away because the plan is much deeper and much sneakier. Even when you find out what the plan is, “Oh, but even that’s not the real plan.”
So by the time you think you’ve got it all figured out – “So in order for this little island of civilization to survive, the one thing they have is atomic power.” That’s the first thing everyone loses track of, so now they’ve got their little edge in. “Oh, but wait. People won’t accept it unless you present it as magic and a religion,” so here’s how religion can enslave and transform cultures.
People eventually realize that, so that doesn’t work. Then they go to the free market. “Oh, the free market can transform…” and it keeps going with new ways of pushing cultural advancement, pushing civilization, but all the time, for our conspiracy buffs, there’s something going on here, something suspicious, something behind the scenes.
Only once the mutant shows up – mental mutant, not a physical mutant – then the heroes have to go looking for the real answer. Some of the chapter titles are actually like, “Oh, I know!” or “The answer that’s satisfied” or “The answer that seemed cool,” and the final one is, “The answer that was true,” because everyone thinks they have the solution and they’re wrong. That’s in the third book.
Asimov is not himself the greatest of writers, but in pursuing this Enlightenment ideal that mathematics can shape our future in the hands of the right people, it’s a good introduction. You can just say, “Yeah, Enlightenment? That.”
It’s just like with Kantian philosophy. “The Matrix? Yeah, that.” So there’s my recommendation, at least the first book in the series.
Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to our financial supporters. We appreciate you helping keep the show rolling. If you would like to join their number, by the way, you can visit our website, which is anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.
Write us an email. We’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at [email protected].