217 years ago last week, Louis XVI’s head rolled from a Paris guillotine. One of my students emailed me to tell me that, because we’d discussed that event on the very day of its anniversary. A few years after that bloody blade gave death to feudalism and birth to modernity, the French Revolution became so radical it tried to uproot the Christian church in France and replace it with what it considered a better alternative. This reminds me, sidewise, of a story I heard years back, and want to embellish in the telling. I’ve been using this space too much lately to merely blog, and tonight I feel like writing. It’s hard to get back into that swing, but harder not to swing in it.

Pride and Prejudice, Revisited

He was lower-middle class economically, above most of the “upper” class culturally, and long past much belief in, or need for, most things church-related.

But he was engaged now, and meeting his future family-in-law for the first time. They were opposite him in almost every way, but in two ways, above all, that made him nervous: they were unimaginably wealthy, and they were regular church-goers.

During their first meeting the day before, through several subtle signs — their exchange of glances when he told them he’d never golfed, and when he had to ask how to mount that horse at their estate; his future mother-in-law’s quick scold of her husband’s questions about his (non-existent) investment portfolio, followed by her pained change of subject — he had gathered that he had little hope of overcoming their disappointment in his lack of silver-spooned pedigree.

(Truth be told, he wished his girl lacked it too, so that they could leave this Jane Austen re-run, dispense with the class difference dramas, rely on their own talents and hard work for any future success, and just live and love more simply — as, when they were on neutral turf, they did. Like that day at the river the week before, when she was just her, and he was more than enough for her. She’d dropped her gold ring and watch, heirlooms both, off the rocks and into the river, and given them up for lost beneath the rapids. He told her to keep the faith, found a long branch in the forest, and told her to hold it straight down from the rock to the river-bottom. He dove in, followed the branch down, and felt his way along the silt in the dark, then rose fist-first from the depths, exultant and beaming, jewels in hand and glowing gold in the sun.

They’d told that story to her family later that day, but none of them seemed to think it mattered. He knew it didn’t either, but also knew it very much did.)

His friends didn’t believe him, but he really did regret that she came from wealth.

But if the wealth gap was spilt milk, he still had a fighting chance, he knew, to overcome that other difference. He told himself he would be a good sport about his in-laws’ faith, and go to their Sunday morning service with the open mind he prided himself on, and with his own version of faith: “good faith.” He would withhold judgment, and give their church the benefit of the doubt.

At the same time, he was honest enough with himself to recognize that he fully expected the service to be a pained, “smile until your lips bleed” affair.

Sunday

The colonial red-brick church was exclusive, for Virginia’s bluest bloods. Several of America’s Founding Fathers, who had lived in the neighborhood over two centuries earlier, had worshiped in these very pews. The Sunday morning parking lot was filled with the Saabs of the Old Money families, the Lexuses and Mercedes of the less secure and more self-conscious nouveau riche. His clothes and shoes were a couple of notches below the apparent Sunday standard here. He smiled through the doorway handshakes, the class inspections posing as introductions; then he smiled down the aisle and into the pew. His mother-in-law’s perfume seemed a thing made in heaven. He never knew perfume could so intoxicate, and could only imagine how dear the price tag.

To the podium came the pastor, a powerfully-built but kind-faced old man. He liked the old man instantly — naturally mild and at ease, much the mold of old man into which he hoped he’d ripen himself.

The opening remarks told him he’d come on a special day for this church: it was the old man’s last sermon. He’d given his first one in this church a full four decades ago, a much younger man with a long future ahead of him. The old man spoke of his imminent departure, and of the passage it marked to his life’s Final Stage, and all the while spoke like a man at peace with life’s impermanence, with the natural cycle of life and death that spins us all. Only the slightest sadness could be sensed; more palpable was the old man’s obvious concern that he’d chosen a suitable topic for his final performance on this sunny morn.

The Sermon

He’d chosen, the old man announced, to speak of a story surely known to all the faithful in the house, a story that had surely gripped them all in childhood, such were its wonders and beauties, such its gifts of wisdom and hope.

And that story, he said, was this: the Tale of the Frog and the Princess.

The groom-to-be scanned the faces of his in-laws-to-be and others in nearby pews for signs of scandal. Surely the congregation would find this choice inappropriate — it wasn’t from the Bible at all, and worse yet, it was a childish fairy tale! But all he saw on the all those faces was soft smiles and eyes aglow with an anticipation both childlike and mature. He smiled too, and with no lip-bleeding grit. While he fully expected the old man to somehow, by the end of the sermon, tie the fairy tale to the predictable narrative he’d heard so often when small, he nonetheless adored the idea of letting the old man lead him, along with the rest, back to those days of childhood.

In this return to the “teachings of childhood” — his favorite line from Gone With the Wind, and his favorite silver moment in all of Clark Gable’s celluloid immortality — what meanings would he hear in this story now, as an adult, that he couldn’t hear as a child? He’d forgotten much of the story. What were the details?

He was ready to listen to the old man with the best of his own “good faith.”

The old man eased into his tale. “You remember the story,” he said. “How the Princess had a golden ball she loved to throw into the air and catch — how it so glowed in the sky she imagined she was catching the very sun.

“And you remember,” he continued, “how her parents told her never to go beyond the palace walls into the forest. It was full of dirt and, worse than dirt, of the lowly people of the realm — the ‘commoners.’

“But we know how the old tales work,” he went on. “Of course the Princess was fated to transgress her parents’ boundaries.

“One day, she threw the ball too high, and over the palace wall it went, with her in hot pursuit. She exited the gate just in time to see her golden ball bounce down the hill, bounce high once, and again, and then plop into a deep, dark well. Of course that well was dirty — too dirty for our Princess. All she could do was kneel there by the well, the silly bird, crying and crying over that stupid golden ball.

“She was at least lucky in one respect,” he added with a pause long enough to look a good half of the congregation in the eye: “There were no dirty poor people around.”

A faint laugh came from the faithful.

“You remember too, I’m sure, that the Princess stopped her blubbering when a frog approached her, all slimy and wet and, in a word, dirty — and she recoiled from it in disgust that soon turned to wonder. Because it spoke to her.

” ‘What are you crying about, Princess?’,” it croaked.

“She answered it the way a Princess should answer a dirty thing: dripping with disdain. ‘I’m crying because my golden ball fell into the well, you dirty frog.’

“But the frog’s next croak caught her attention: ‘What if I can get your ball for you? What will you give me?’

“The Princess’ life was so stuffed with gold, she knew she could give him a small fortune without noticing its absence. ‘I’ll give you my golden crown,’ she said.

“Now it was the frog’s turn for disdain. ‘What would I do with a golden crown? All it would do is drag me to the bottom of the pond and drown me.’

“The King’s little girl was dense enough to follow with an offer of a perfect pearl necklace — she surely had dozens of them, so no worries there,” he added. “But the frog explained they’d just tangle around his legs and, again, cause him to drown. No thanks, said he.

“The Princess huffed and, like our friend Mr. Pooh — Of Very Little Brain — said, ‘What about my ruby ring, then?’ And again the frog croaked out a snort: ‘It would fall off my finger and I’d be left with nothing at all.’

The old man stopped the story to observe that so far, the girl had failed to recognize the frog as a “person” at all. It was just a thing to be bought off, a laborer to do the dirty-work and get her back her gold. It never occurred to her to ask the frog what he needed; never occurred to her to think of the frog as another living “person” at all. He sighed and shook his head, and as he took a breath to continue, the groom thought, “Here comes the pivot to the preaching.”

He was wrong.

“But in the classic ‘Rule of Threes’ pattern so common in stories, it seems our Princess, after hearing the frog three times try to tell her that what she valued for him had no value, finally — though probably dimly, for our dear princess is a dimwit  — finally, I say, she begins to catch on: she’s talking to another living soul. How do I know? Because her next offer is different: ‘I’ll give you one of my silk slippers,’ she says — wait for it, now….ready? — ’so that you may sleep in it and keep warm.’”

Another gaze into the pews, then: “That’s more like it,” he said. “There’s always hope. A warm place to sleep is something we all need. It’s a lot more important than jewels to our cold, clammy frog. Our Princess is waking up.” His eyebrows arched above his bifocals, and he smiled.

The groom smiled back.

“Mr. Frog still wasn’t sold, though, but — if you’ll pardon this old man for saying so — the offer seemed to bring out his kinky side: ‘I don’t want your slipper,’ he says. ‘But it gives me an idea. What I do want,’ Frog continued, ‘is…’ — and pardon me, ladies — ‘to sleep in your bed. With you.’”

[I hate to do this to you, but it's late, so: to be continued. Soon.]

1 Comments

• At January 25, 2010, TonySearl wrote:

  TBC soon I hope! …left hanging by The Frog & a princess RT @cburell Sunday – a Story at Beyond School http://tinyurl.com/y9dewsx

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books.

9 Comments

• At January 7, 2010, hjarche wrote:

  A modern reader doesn’t read on his knees http://is.gd/5Ph7J via @cburell | yes, that’s the big shift!

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 7, 2010, Micah Sittig wrote:

  "Modern"?

• At January 7, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Would you take, "since the Renaissance" (okay, and before Theodosius, maybe)?

• At January 7, 2010, “On Two Ways of Reading” (Maxim) at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] comments Print This Post Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its [...]

• At January 8, 2010, Hellen wrote:

  How do I teach that? Or how do I know if what I am doing is facilitating "taking the authority back" for my students? Is this something that can only happen for an experienced, mature reader?

  More ques than answers.

  .-= Hellen´s last blog ..THIS I BELIEVE =-.

• At January 8, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Hellen,

  That it doesn't seem to be a habit of most (?) adults says to me that getting them while they're young and raising them to at least have an inkling that "mature" reading exists is a good idea. That's why I'm playing with aphorisms to point, bumper-sticker style, to what may be a mystery for them now, but through repetition may stick in their memory so they don't forget such a skill exists after they leave me.

  That most adults don't read at all beyond fluff (in America, anyway) tells me likewise that it's a good idea. Maybe they don't read because they were never introduced to liberated reading. Maybe that introduction will turn some people onto the pleasures of reading and thinking that seem endangered practices in American culture.

  On a simpler level, encouraging or requiring them to criticize the people, ideas, and events in their history or liberal arts classes -- to pass judgment on these things -- may be a good start. Then they can graduate to justifying their judgments with reason and evidence.

  I like the phrase "habits of mind." This is an unrelated stab at the general concept.

• At January 14, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  Sage words indeed. If the reverse of the Socratic method is provoking students' doubts, far as "truth", more precisely, facts, students can question you through that mechanical appendage permanently attached to the tip of their finger tips in the form of iPhones. I don't mind that they look for facts or doubt me but surf the phone for the facts while I'm lecturing is down right annoying ;-) Not legitimately lamentable as your point perhaps. I see your point; they have the facts but not the truths or thinking outside the box critical skills.

  I have to veered off a little from yoru path, although it`s more for EAP ``English`` English-class than adult EFL. I have always like the book ``How to Read a Book (Touchstone book) by Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles Lincoln Van Doren`.

  I still make notes on margins... How would you do that with ebook readers such as Kindle or ``iTablet``? I am ambivalent about the these new devices for future readers. (Obviously I`m a Kinesthetic learner :) ...The prospect of traveling with thousands, (maybe long 100s) of books in one little 4x10 plastic encasing is very seductive. Cheap too! The average novel is just below $10.

  Great post as usual. Looking forward to the next.

• At January 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Chuck,

  First, I feel your pain about the ereader bit. I haven't tried them out yet, but some are starting to integrate social highlighting and annotating, where readers can share and see each other's responses to passages on the "page," which is an interesting development. Somebody on Twitter shared this link with me: http://www.thecopia.com/

  In 10 years things should be interesting, but right now it's all primitive. I've read arguments that cost levels after purchasing a certain number of books because ebooks are cheaper, but again, I don't know.

  Time to plan the day's lesson. Thanks for stopping by.

  I love How to Read a Book and use it too.

• At January 16, 2010, tonnet wrote:

  Modern reading: “It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.” http://is.gd/6kyX0

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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This “Critical Thinking” video is worth a watch.

Now: What follow-up questions for discussion or writing will get the most bang for the buck if used in the classroom?

(h/t One Good Move)

12 Comments

• At December 27, 2009, Stephen Downes wrote:

  An outstanding video.

  .-= Stephen Downes´s last blog ..Dad's Web Guide to Delivering Tot =-.

• At December 28, 2009, (How) Would You Use This Critical Thinking Video? « BOOKER ENGLISH wrote:

  [...] (How) Would You Use This Critical Thinking Video? (How) Would You Use This Critical Thinking Video?. [...]

• At December 28, 2009, Edith wrote:

  great video, thanks for sharing. I am thinking of watching it once in the classroom and then replay it and ask for examples, stopping for each part, linking it to their experiences.

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  It would be a good beginning of year/course activity, if it could implant the concept in a short-hand sort of way so that weeks and months later a quick reference to it could prompt students to clear their biases as quickly as they clear their desks when "ordered."

  That this is difficult for them to do was made abundantly clear to me a couple weeks ago as I read the semester exam essays on European civ from beginnings to Scientific Revolution. Almost nothing critical about the Greeks, Romans, or Monotheism despite having toured the low points of all of them. Instead, pom-poms.

  So a definite need. (I've tried "Think like an alien in his first year on Earth" as a similar short-hand.)

• At December 29, 2009, Bruce Schauble wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  I like this. Thanks for posting. Very clear and compact, covers a lot of territory in a short period of time. I'd be inclined, like Edith, to watch it once through with a class and then go back through slowly and ask for illustrations, clarifying questions, objections. I'd also want to cycle back to some of the basic moves suggested and have them practice.

  If you want to play with the "alien in his first year on earth" angle, you might want to have your students look at Craig Raine, and/or have them read about the Nacirema.

  http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-raine.html

  http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~thompsoc/Body.html

  - Bruce

  .-= Bruce Schauble´s last blog ..Red Cliff =-.

• At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Bruce, thanks for the two excellent links. I'd seen them both before, but the Nacirema piece took on a lot more value for me in this reading.

  Nice to see you, by the way, and hope you're well. How's Chris? And how does the school feel about its famous alumnus?

• At December 30, 2009, Christopher D. Sessums wrote:

  Clay,

  Thank you for sharing this. I am putting together my intro to ed tech class as we speak and this vid will feature prominently.

  As I watched it, I began thinking about how I will get students to think critically about the contents. I could "threaten" them with a quiz. But that's no way to get them to synthesize the info. Instead I'm thinking of asking them to create a lesson that involves the principles shared. (This is a teacher ed course.) I will also ask them to determine how we will evaluate lessons. (~My students hate me!)

  .-= Christopher D. Sessums´s last blog ..GARAGE SALE: an art show in disguise (via davidhorvitz &... =-.

• At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  And their lessons would be excellent things to share. If ever you do, please update here with a link.

  Best of the New Year for you, Chris. "Always Forward, hoo-ah!"

  (Right.)

• At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for spreading it and a good new year to you, Stephen.

• At December 30, 2009, (How) Would You Use This Critical Thinking Video? at Beyond School « LTSG wrote:

  [...] (How) Would You Use This Critical Thinking Video? at Beyond School By mgvh@ltsg (How) Would You Use This Critical Thinking Video? at Beyond School [...]

• At January 1, 2010, Harold Jarche » Choose with care in 2010 wrote:

  [...] Would you use this critical thinking video? - I’d suggest there is an inability of many teachers to reject the bias of their culture and [...]

• At January 23, 2010, Anne Bartlett-Bragg wrote:

  Nice one Clay!

  I'd like to follow the video directly with an activity that got people challenging their assumptions - particularly around the use of technology and learning... Then we could use the video to provide a framework, check back in at some of the critical points to review how those assumptions have been arrived at..

  Rather like Edith and Bruce are suggesting - however, I'm also thinking that less experienced learners may find aspects of this challenging... perhaps some warm up introductory activties on meta-cognition first?

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Interesting:

Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

I always thought the Sumerians, like dinosaurs and fossils and Galileo, were tricks of Satan.

(h/t to One Good Move)

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Holidays are happy now, vacation having begun. I’ve wanted to share this one for the past few weeks. It concerns a wonderful teach-in by an evangelical Christian professor of biology to a group of what I gather to be creationists, possibly from his church.

A bit of historical background makes it all the more interesting. I mentioned in my “back from the dead” post that I’ve been reading a good bit on the history of science, and that one of those books, Richard E. Rubenstein’s Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middles Ages, zoomed in on the re-discovery of Aristotelian philosophy by Aquinas and other churchmen in the first European universities beginning around 1100 c.e. It traces the twisting relationship of scientific thinking and religious authority from that time forward through the next two or three centuries, with Aristotelian thought and thinkers sometimes embraced by the Church and sometimes condemned and declared heretical by it, depending on the politics and personalities of the day.

One important take-away from the book is its demonstration that religion and science weren’t always at loggerheads, and that many Christian theologians were instrumental in laying the foundation for the ultimate ascendancy of the scientific viewpoint in the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s a refreshing thing to realize in this age of headlines endlessly pitting religion versus science.

That background made all the more refreshing the discovery, via the excellent blog, Science and Religion: A View from an Evolutionary Creationist/Theistic Evolutionist, of the lecture on Youtube. The writer of that blog, the nicely-monikered “Jimpithecus,” introduces the video thus:

In his post on Focus on the Family’s “Truth” Project, Steve Martin had a link to some videos done by Dennis Venema on how a Christian can accept evolution. Dennis teaches biology at Trinity Wesleyan University and was faced with a situation where his church began to use the “Truth Project.” He felt that he needed to respond, so he gave a series of lectures on evolution. He has graciously posted these to YouTube….

I watched the full seven- or eight-episode lecture on YouTube and was thoroughly impressed not only by the tour-de-force “slam-dunk” of the case for evolution — based simply on genomics, only one of evolution’s many lines of overwhelming evidence — but also by the Q&A between Prof. Venema and his audience of creationists willing to listen to him, and think about what he showed. The patience, humor, and civility on both sides was a breath of fresh air.

Venema respectfully explains that he was once one of the first to dispute evolution with its adherents in the scientific community, until he honestly confronted the evidence for evolution made possible by the Human Genome Project. Better still, he — like “Jimpithecus” — underscores the possibility of being a Christian without being an evolution-denier by giving a much-needed mini-lesson in more sophisticated ways of reading and thinking about the Bible.

Regardless of your theology or lack thereof, the lecture is well worth watching on its educational merits alone. He really does a great job of translating the genomic evidence into lay terms, and unpacking the force with which it demolishes the anti-evolutionary position.

I’m embedding the first lecture below, and adding below that a few screenshots of the entire lecture as a teaser for those who need motivating to watch the entire thing.

Screenshots:

The Scientific Method

The Genomic Evidence

Overview of Arguments Based on Genomic Evidence

More screenshots below the fold…

Argument from Redundancy

Redundancy, cont'd

Driving Redundancy Home

Evolution v. Non-evolutionary Designer

Danger of "Either/Or" Position to Faith

Ways of Reading "Genesis"

Conclusions

4 Comments

• At January 7, 2010, Gunnar Schei wrote:

  This is truly fantastic! Venema is so well-spoken, so polite and patient. It was a true pleasure to watch all 12(!) episodes.

  And his evidence is the strongest I've ever seen pro-evolution. I'm really looking forward to discussing this with some of my friends who dispute evolution. Great post, keep 'em coming Clay!

• At January 8, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Gunnar, glad you liked it and I agree whole-heartedly. It's educational for anybody.

  I'm glad somebody noticed it. Most didn't seem to bother :(

• At January 30, 2010, Dennis Venema wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  Thanks for your kind words and your posting of this material - I'm glad you found it interesting and helpful.

  Best,

  Dennis

• At January 30, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Your efforts deserved the post, Dennis. A wonderfully educational experience on several fronts, for which you really do deserve our thanks.

  And please keep us updated on any following efforts!

  Best,

  Clay

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I mentioned in my “back from the dead” post that I’ve been swimming, on alternating days throughout this closing semester, in the history of China and the history of “Western Civilization” (irony quotes due to the fact that it really starts in Mesopotamia, Persia, the Levant, and Egypt, none of which are “Western”), and what a mind-party it’s been for the constant pricking of our so-often over-inflated opinion of Europe. I just want to throw a couple of examples that have been the life of that party — for this teacher, at least. My students haven’t had the good fortune of taking both classes, so they missed these lovely juxtapositions.

1. Myths of Pre-History

The Monotheistic West: The world was made in six days. A man and woman were created in a garden with magical trees and talking snakes. They didn’t have to work until they broke a rule that made all of us die in the end. Then they had to start farming.¹

Non-theistic China: Long before the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600-1150 bce), during which the Chinese invented their writing and Chinese history begins, there were five dimly remembered “Pre-Xia Emperors” (the Xia is a so-far legendary dynasty due to the lack of solid evidence it existed; the same was said for the Shang until the last century, so we may be in for a surprise if an archaeologist gets lucky in the future). Those legendary emperors just ruled, and presumably they had even more dimly-remembered ancestors stretching back into oblivion. What these emperors did to make them remembered, according to legend, was to give the following “gifts” to Chinese civilization: “fire, agriculture, animal domestication, calendrics, writing, and flood control.”²

The party moment? Those five legendary emperors are some seriously impressive, reality-based myths. They commemorate nothing less than the major accomplishments of our species that brought us out of caves, into farming villages, and finally into civilization. Call them the mythological history of the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. Then ask if Western monotheism’s foundational myth comes even remotely close to that sort of scientific accuracy.³

2. Moral Frameworks

The West: Zoroastrianism and Christianity (and later Islam) both posit a Manichean, dualistic moral framework. The universe is a “cosmic battlefield” between the forces of a “good” god and the forces of an “evil” one. Humanity’s job is to choose sides in this war, and suffer the punishment for choosing wrongly. It’s a black and white world.

China: There’s the Yin, and there’s the Yang. While the Yin is primarily black and the Yang primarily white, they each contain a seed of the other in their cores. They also merge in a harmonious whole. Humanity’s job is to behave in harmony with both of those forces, neither of which is “good” or “evil,” but merely natural. There are no gods outside of this order and no sides to choose. There’s just a Way — a Tao — to follow to try to keep things balanced. There’s a lot of gray in this world. I think they must scratch their heads at the easy moral and metaphysical certainties of many Westerners.

The party moment? One of the most remarkable aspects of life in Asia — for this Westerner, at least — is the absence of holy wars, holy warriors, suicide bombers, abortion doctor assassinations, and so forth. Airports in East Asia are much easier to travel through, with few-to-no soldiers patrolling for terrorists.

3. Political Frameworks

Obama is surely thinking, “At best, I’ve got eight whole years to make my mark and turn this country around.” The Chinese response to the Tiananmen Square protesters, by contrast, was to say, in essence, “Don’t be impatient. The Party has had only eight years to turn this country around.” The Chinese see politics from the perspective of their 3,000-year dynastic history, in which it was not unusual for rulers to hold the Dragon Throne for decades. To them, eight years is just getting started — and that’s what Deng Xiaoping seemed to want the protesters to understand when they were demanding radical (for the Chinese) political reforms after “only” a decade or so of China’s economic reforms.

Maybe the Chinese taxi drivers I chatted with in Shanghai during my six years there were trained to say, after learning that I’m American, “We’re a 4,000 year old country. America is very young.” Training or no, what they say is true, and Westerners don’t get this. Because of that history, in which the average age of a single dynasty is 300 years — longer than the entire age of America, in other words — the Chinese have the Long View. Deng Zhou Enlai gave us an example of that when, asked if he thought the reforms brought on in 1789 by the French Revolution had worked, he answered — 200 years after that event — “It’s too soon to say.”

It’s all just so hen hao….

1. Though this might offend some, it really is the basic plot of Genesis, looked at objectively.
2. Rhoades Murphey, A History of Asia, p. 45. 1996 edition, I think.
3. I’m aware of the myth of Pan-Gu, of course — the cosmic giant whose corpse morphed into trees and rivers and mountains and so forth, and from the maggots infesting which evolved human beings. But I don’t think most Chinese, outside of the most back-water peasant old wives, ever believed that. And even if they did, it just shows, among other things, that the Chinese have a sense of humor about the importance of humanity. And we could stretch it and note there is a hint of evolution in that “maggots to man” detail.

1 Comments

• At December 16, 2009, cburell wrote:

  [New Post] Chinese v. Western History: A Few "Mental Party" Highlights - via @twitoaster http://beyond-school.org/2009/12/17/chin...

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[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

A good thousand years before the Israelites were putting the final touches, in their scriptures, on the God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims,² the Mesopotamian gods of Gilgamesh were already ancient. And a good thousand years before Adam and Eve committed their first sin and brought death into the world by disobeying that God³, the “Adam” of the Sumerians – Gilgamesh’s sidekick, Enkidu – had committed his earlier “original sin.”⁴

In this lecture, I’m going to argue that Enkidu’s “sin” — which had nothing to do with disobeying any god, nor with his epic and far-from-shameful sex with Shamhat — cost our race far more than Adam and Eve’s. And we’re only now, in this generation, really able to appreciate that truth. Call it a 4,000-year-old prophecy that we’re now seeing unfold all around us.

It happens in Book V of Gilgamesh, and for the life of this modern, scientifically-minded skeptic, this “prophecy” is far more true and far more disturbing than anything we see in Eden, or perhaps in the whole Bible. If it doesn’t haunt you a bit by the end of this lecture, then one of us has problems.

The funny thing is, it happens in such a subtle form that it’s easy to miss. And it’s that subtlety that makes me want to state, for the millionth time in this series, that the poets who wrote Gilgamesh were among humanity’s finest ever.

Funnier still, it happens in the very suckiest episode in all of Gilgamesh: the slaying of the monster Humbaba.

Predictably, the well-meaning sadists who produce our suckiest literature textbook anthologies seem to always inflict this episode on our high school students. These out of touch souls seem to think teens will find monster-slaying scenes really cool. Between movies like Harry Potter that let us see and hear monsters like the Dementors almost sucking our souls out, and video games that let us chop the bastards’ heads off ourselves and be covered in their blood and gore, this Humbaba scene in Gilgamesh doesn’t stand a chance. It ranks about as high on today’s adventure scale as an exposed Victorian ankle ranks on the scale of modern sexiness.

So fear not: this English teacher isn’t going to insult your intelligence by arguing that this this chapter is good for its scary monster. There’s terror enough in this chapter – reality-based terror, at least in my reading of it – for us to need no supernatural special effects.

Background: Before the Divine Divorce

Adam and Eve’s original sin reflects a recent, radical stage in the evolution of Israelite religion: the separation of the divine from the realm of Nature. It’s the first religion we know of that saw God outside of Nature, transcending it. Unlike all the other religions in the Near East up to that time, the Jewish religion saw God not as created within Nature, but as creator of it. So it makes sense that the “original sin” in the book of Genesis is disobeying that God. He’s the King, the Lord, the Master of the Universe. He ordered Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and they disobeyed. That’s the sin.

We can play with some of the depths of this myth some other time, because there’s much more beneath the surface of this seemingly silly “I told you not to eat that fruit” story. But the point I want to make here is that this myth only makes sense within the revolutionary worldview of a certain set of Hebrews around 1,000 BCE. It doesn’t make sense inside the older Mesopotamian view of the Gilgamesh poets.

Their gods are not divorced from Nature. They live in it, they have natural bodies and functions, they even have divine animals like the Bull of Heaven (which, as we see later when it takes what the British might call an “epic shite” on Enkidu, has divine-but-natural bodily functions).

As importantly, there’s no “Master of the Universe” god in the Mesopotamian worldview, so there’s nobody to give absolute “commandments” like “Thou shalt not eat that fruit.” One god might be stronger than another, but that doesn’t make him or her all-powerful over all the others. Remember from Lecture 1 that these gods, additionally, don’t seem to think the Biblical god’s authoritarian commandments are the best way to deal with humans anyway: they didn’t punish Gilgamesh for deflowering all his subjects’ brides, and they didn’t command him to stop – or, as so often in the Bible, declare he be stoned to death. Instead, they pulled that totally mysterious and totally cool trick of creating Enkidu to somehow, wtf?, give Gilgamesh an experience that will wise him up and make him stop being such a royal ass. In short, they weren’t punishing “sin” – they were curing stupidity.

And yet I still claim that Enkidu, in Book V, commits an “original sin.” So what gives?

A Question of Balance

Let’s recap Enkidu’s story, because Enkidu is more interesting than Gilgamesh in this episode. It ain’t about the hero here.

As we’ve seen, Enkidu starts as a sort of “wild-man Adam,” created out of dust and outside of civilization, to be the “balance” who will “bring peace” to Gilgamesh and his city.⁵ Unlike Adam, Enkidu lives in a nature that we recognize as realistically Darwinian: animals prey on other animals in Enkidu’s Nature, and Enkidu seems one animal among many in the way he drinks at the watering hole with them and runs as fast as the gazelles. The only difference we see between Enkidu and the other animals is his role in defending animals from predators. So Enkidu seems compassionate, and in a very specific and important sense: he’s compassionate toward natural creatures. His most outstanding trait, in this stage of innocence, is that he’s a defender of Nature.

Then along comes the prostitute Shamhat, you’ll remember, and her civilizing mission: she seduces him into civilization with that epic six-day roll in the hay (and boy, how Enkidu must have needed, like that later god in Genesis, to take a day of rest on the seventh). Similar to Samson, Enkidu loses much of his physical power after this epic sex scene, can’t sprint like he used to, and so forth – but he gains language, the ability to share ideas and conversation, the need for friendship, and the desire to follow Shamhat into the city and meet Gilgamesh. Still, though, Enkidu seems not to have lost his character as the compassionate defender: he wants to fight Gilgamesh after hearing of his bride-stealing ass-hattery.

Remember the “double that balances” motif? The “balance” seems to be thrown off when natural Enkidu leaves the wild, and crosses the gateway into civilized Gilgamesh’s city. It’s like both guys are now sitting on the same side of the see-saw – the city side. Nature’s left hanging in mid-air now.

Then they fight, Enkidu loses, and he and Gilgamesh become fast friends. Enkidu likes clothes and bread and beer, and life is good – until Gilgamesh gets that royally wild hair up his royally dumb ass to go kill Humbaba, who he calls a “monster.”⁶

Enkidu, Defender of Animals, tells Gilgamesh it’s a really bad idea to kill Humbaba, and reminds him that he’s not just a monster: he’s the divinely-appointed Guardian of the Cedar Forest. Enlil put him there to keep the forest, which is sacred to the gods, untouched by man, and off-limits to him.

Gilgamesh cares no more for the virgin forest than he cares for the virginity of his brides. Whether he’s taking his metaphorical axe to the virgin brides, or his literal one to the virgin cedars, it’s all the same to this swaggering dumb jock of a king: if it redounds to his glory and gives him an heroic notch for his belt, his name won’t die and he’ll achieve everlasting fame.

After Enkidu loses the argument, he tries to get the city elders to talk sense into Gilgamesh with their religious “knowledge” and urgings to fear the gods. At their pious warning that no human could succeed at this task against the gods’ will, Gilgamesh laughs possibly the first heretic’s laugh in history – or literature, anyway – and off he and Enkidu go to slay the monster.⁷

Off they go, straight through the gate from civilization, and back into Nature. Our “balance that doubles” motif has now seen both men jump onto the Nature side of the see-saw. Now it’s civilization that’s left hanging in mid-air – and hanging, the way I see it, fatefully.

The Original Sin – Literally

By the logic of the “double that balances” motif, everything hangs on Enkidu now. He originally balanced the civilization-symbol Gilgamesh by being the Nature-symbol “defender of animals” in the wild. He threw things out of balance by “crossing over” to civilization. Now we’ve got Gilgamesh crossing over into Enkidu’s original realm with him, balancing Enkidu’s earlier “crossing-over.” We know Gilgamesh has predatory motives for this trip: he’s going to kill the Forest Guardian, and chop down the “highest cedars.” So the question is, is Enkidu going to stay true to his original role, when he was “innocent” and Adam-like, of defending nature’s creatures against predators – even if the predator is now his friend and king?⁸

(to be continued)

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh.
2. let’s put that at around 622 BCE in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, when King Josiah’s reforms wiped out the Jewish worship of Baal and Asherah
3. in Genesis 2, which was written around 1,000 BCE
4. I know that “original sin” is a Christian, not a Jewish, doctrine, but grant me the poetic license.
5. The Bible’s story of Adam and Eve was written in Jerusalem, scholars think, at about the same time David conquered that city and made it his capital around 1,000 BCE. That’s a full 3,000 years later in history than the founding of civilization in cities like Uruk. This is significant: it corrects the view that Genesis is a story from the beginning of civilization, when it’s actually precisely mid-way between the founding of Uruk and today. If Gilgamesh is pictured as the letter “A”, and our time the letter “Z,” the Jewish scriptures would be not “B” or “C,” but “M.” In strictly chronological terms, the period from the Jews’ King David in 1,000 BCE to the life of Jesus in the First Century CE are really the “Middle Ages” of the 6,000 years between Sumer and today.

   This may help explain why the Judeo-Christian story of humanity’s “state of nature” – the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 – rings so false, while the Sumerian story of Enkidu rings more true: the authors of Genesis came too late in our history to have any ancestral memory of man’s true, historical state of nature. What we know now of human evolution tells us the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is fiction – fiction with depths that give it the status of a fascinating myth, in the best sense of the word, but fiction nonetheless. Not so for the Sumerians and, through them – via Gilgamesh – the Babylonians. Since the people of Uruk were among the first to transition from neolithic life within nature to civilized life isolated from it, it’s no wonder that the story of Enkidu living as an animal among animals in nature is much closer to the truth of human evolution as we now know it through science. Unlike Adam and Eve, then, which is clearly a myth, Enkidu is just as clearly closer to history. Yes, he was made, like Adam, from clay, but the similarity ends there. Enkidu is not in any paradisal Eden, living a life of pre-lapsarian ease; he’s more of a primate living a Darwinian existence, drinking among other animals at a watering hole, fighting off predators in the kill-or-be-killed struggle to survive in the wild. He has the ring of less of myth than of legend – of something closer to dimly-remembered truth.

6. In his Introduction to Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell, who wrote the version of the epic I’m primarily using for these lectures, compares Gilgamesh here to our previous Royal Dumb-Ass in Chief George W. Bush when he decided to invade Iraq, and it’s an interesting parallel. I’m going for a reading less topical and more timeless here, though.
7. Now give me a medal, because I just summarized the 10,000 or so words of all the previous lectures in a few paragraphs.
8. And while we’re at it, it’s worth getting abstract for a second to entertain the idea that, on the symbolic level, Enkidu is Humbaba, in a sense. They’re both, after all, guardians of nature. If Gilgamesh kills Humbaba, he’s in a weird sense also killing Enkidu. Maybe that’s a stretch, but reading symbols often is. Whatever.

9 Comments

• At June 28, 2009, Kate wrote:

  Hi Clay - I'm glad to think about Gilgamesh again -

  This seems a question of who is civilized, if you excuse the term. Enkidu seems to have - like all good protagonists - the choice to change. But change to what?

  Enkidu can choose to live with nature or above nature. Gilgamesh seems to have made his choice. He feels that he is above nature or that nature is there to serve him.

  (Christianity translates this in Genesis 1:26 "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." [king james] It's ordained. But I like Enkidu's choice better.

  Enkidu can choose to not play god. Who do we wish to be?

  On another topic - Lolita. I sat in a meeting the other day with three left-brained white male English teachers - and one admitted that the reason he wouldn't dream of teaching the book was his fear of the parent body. So sad. I just found it creepy as a 17 year old, so my prejudice is just as bad. I return to teach 12 year olds, so Nabokov is not on the syllabus.

  .-= Kate´s last blog ..Four types of tears =-.

• At June 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  I'll hold off on Enkidu's choice since it's the subject of the next installment, but as for the English teachers, I can't fault them for fearing for their livelihoods (and I know you're not, either). It's just another factor of schooliness that keeps us from hitting teens educationally where they probably already live.

  And I certainly wouldn't expect 12 year olds to handle it - except for the occasional ilk of Dolores....

• At July 23, 2009, Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [Next: Lecture 9: Gilgamesh and the Original "Original Sin"] [...]

• At July 23, 2009, Unsucky English, Lecture 1: On Gilgamesh | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] [This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Later posts in the "Unsucky Gilgamesh" series: 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets 9. The Original "Original Sin"] [...]

• At August 30, 2009, Jonathan Chambers wrote:

  Clay, I just received my first "Gilgamesh SPAM"... take it as a compliment, or as a dementor/scary monster, or possibly as yet another actor in the polytheistic mythological tradition?

  Jungian sensibilities (and vast series of Joseph Campbell lectures) aside, I hope you're enjoying Singapore, and that they "get you".

  .-= Jonathan Chambers´s last blog ..It’s a goal! =-.

• At September 6, 2009, Tamara wrote:

  I am 34 yrs old and in the second year ( nearly third)of college trying to get my teaching degree.

  My English class is doing essays on Gilgamesh.

  I am having trouble with some of the answers required in all the symbolism within the epic. Can you help me to understand the symbolism between woman, evil and the relationship of civilization to nature?

  If you can,..it would help tutor me in something that has long since been studied. I hate to fail and love to learn and am dis-satisfied with myself that something I read nearly 20 years ago has so escaped me. I do not wish to sound incoherent or just plain dumb.

  Sincere thanks,

  Tamara

• At September 6, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Tamara, I'm so sorry to answer this way, but beyond what I've written in the nine posts so far, I don't have time to discuss G right now. I'm in the middle of week 3 of my first year teaching in a new school in a new country, and barely have time to breathe.

  I will say that symbols are something that are inferred by the reader anyway, so there are no clear-cut right/wrong answers to the types of questions you asked, as much as there are well-argued and -supported versus weakly-argued and -supported answers.

  Have you talked to your prof or other students in your class? Prayed to Google for insights? Read the book again, and its preface/intro? (Mitchell's intro is longer than his translation. It may help.)

  Good luck,

  Clay

• At September 8, 2009, Elizabeth Barrette wrote:

  This is a wonderful analysis of Gilgamesh, particularly the original sin being Enkidu's abandonment of Nature. Indeed, compare the land then and now: the Fertile Crescent is pretty much all desert today, with no forests left to hold the water table in place.

• At October 2, 2009, Joel wrote:

  Hi Clay

  Discovered this site today looking for Gilgamesh (link on Wikipedia) and enjoyed immensely your observations on the story. I've been reading it but unlike your dream student did not initially appreciate the depths of symbolism contained within. This has notched-up my already significant interest in the ancient world.

  I guess I'm commenting in hope that the series continues. Your site reminds me of the brilliant philosophy blog by Todd Park Mohr, which seemed to collapse pretty much as soon as I'd discovered it. Just hoping this one doesn't go the same way. I know you're busy but just thought I'd express my interest.

  I'll put the ancient wisdon on hold in the meantime and explore the other topics you've posted.

  I also wondered if you'd considered an audio podcast? Then I could listen in the car which would be sweet.

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1. Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...
2. Unsucky English Lecture 8: The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets [The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous...

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