Making Root Beer

I have decided to make Root Beer. I did Ginger Ale a few weeks back and was pretty happy with the results. I am using a combination recipe from the Nourished Kitchen and the Learning Herbs websites. Basically, I am using the method from Learning Herbs and a modified recipe from Nourished Kitchen. My wife bought me the bottles to keep it in for Christmas, though we just picked them up today because they were on order. I am really excited about it. I love the taste of Root Beer and can't wait to try my own. It should be a more healthy version of the drink (sans high fructose corn sugar), using real ingredients and no artificial colors. I'll let keep up a running post on the progress and the results. It should take about a month from start to finish.

On Regional Writing, by Flannery O'Connor

The best American fiction has always been regional. The ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light. In these things the South still has a degree of advantage. It is a slight degree and getting slighter, but it is a degree of kind as well as of intensity, and it is enough to feed good literature if our people - whether they be newcomers or have roots here - are enough aware of it to foster its growth in themselves.
Every serious writer will put his finger on it at a slightly different spot but in the same region of sensitivity. When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, "Because we lost the War." He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence - as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of the country.
Not every lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening it at every point, has been another history. Mencken called the South the Bible Belt, in scorn and thus in incredible innocence. In the South we have, in however attenuated form a form, a vision of Moses' face as he pulverized our idols. This knowledge is what makes the Georgia writer different from the writer from Hollywood or New York. It is the knowledge that the novelist finds in his community. When he ceases to find it there, he will cease to write, or at least he will cease to write anything enduring. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

From "The Regional Writer" in Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 58-59.

Eliot on Tradition

From T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

Knee Deep in Research

I haven't posted anything recently because I am knee deep in research. Every once in a while, until I get a draft of my thesis, I may post something I find interesting from my research.
Here is an interesting quote from Donald Davidson...
"A civilization cannot feed and flourish upon perishable things. Only imperishable at its center can give it life. Nothing is more imperishable than poetry. In comparison, the material works of science and industry are but fleeting trifles. No civilization of the past has ever lived without poetry. Our civilization can hardly be an exception."

Agrarianism

The more I read of Davidson, the more I get the impression that to him, Agrarianism meant a balance life. He didn't say it very well, all the time, but as I read more and more of what he wrote, he doesn't have a beef with machines per se. He has a problem with a messianic faith in machines. He doesn't have a problem with industry per se, he has a problem with a messianic faith in industrialism to relieve all our woes.
Davidson seems to hold on to Agrarianism as the best way to bring everything back into balance. A clear harmony between the life of the land and the life of the city seems to be in view with him. Now if I can just prove it.

Home ... where you least expect it

In researching the life and career of Donald Davidson and the Agrarians I have found many interesting notes about my own home, Middle Tennessee. For instance, Donald Davidson great-great-grandfather, Andrew Davidson put down roots near Shelbyville, TN after his first family was murdered by Shawnee Indians in Virginia. Donald's father spent some time in Winchester, TN (my hometown) at a teacher preparatory school I never knew existed.
Allen Tate's family often came down to Estill Springs for a family vacation. Apparently it used to be quite the wealthy Nashvillian hang out. Several of these men spent time in or around Sewanee and the University of the South. Tate edited the Sewanee Review for a while, as did Andrew Nelson Lytle. Lytle actually retired to Monteagle and died there in 1995.
This has been one of the interesting and exciting things about this research. It has given me a new glimpse of the home I grew up in and yet never really appreciated.

Davidson on Education

In an essay written in 1935 to document and explain the history of the book, I'll Take My Stand, Donald Davidson indicates that he and the other Agrarians wrote the book to Southerners as Southerners. He laments that perhaps, this was presumptuous. The Agrarians and the critics of the book did not even use the primary terms (Agrarianism and Industrialism) in the same way. Later he makes the following statement:

It was first of all a book for mature Southerners of the late nineteen-twenties, in the so-called New South - Southerners who, we trusted, were not so far gone in modern education as to require, for the act of comprehension, coloured charts, statistical tables, graphs, and journalistic monosullables, but were prepared to use intelligence and memory.

Wouldn't it be nice to have people like that? He didn't and I doubt we will either for a long time. But that is one of the things a good classical education seeks to remedy. The act of interacting with primary sources, as much as possible, helps build the kind of person who can use his intelligence and memory. Sure we use maps and sometimes charts to help us colect similar types of information. I think Davidson went a little too far. However, the modern education system, including modern journalism (which is supposed to be a primary agent of continuing education for adults) has reduced all learning to statistics, graphs, and monosyllables.

Paternalism in Southern History

I find it very interesting that, in Southern historiography, no white southerner can have any concern for an African-American without it being paternalistic. There is no room for generosity, love, compassion, or genuine fellowship. Every attempt by a white southerner to reach out to the African-American is dubbed "paternalism" which means that they are reaching down, not out.
To a large degree I suppose we have brought this on ourselves, but it ticks me off.

Lost Causes

As I continue to work through the life of Donald Davidson for my thesis, I am amazed at how easy it is to get mixed up in lost causes. The idea of the lost cause is a favorite of historians, especially those of the Civil War era. Davidson backed the agrarian movement, the regionalism movement, and the distributist movement. All of these failed completely to make any changes in national policy about anything.
What is a lost cause? My first year of post-baccalaureate work required me to take a senior level history class called Great Losers. Each week we had to write a presentation that presented some person or civilization as a great loser in history. The genius of this class was, of course, you had to really know about history in order to argue that someone was a great loser. The idea of losing is really significant to us, I think. It goes right along with the idea of martyrdom. We are drawn to ideas and movements that create martyrs because we are mystified by the fact that anybody would die for anything. How can someone believe something so much that he or she would be willing to die for it. Davidson was not a martyr, at least not in the traditional sense, but he did latch onto several movements that were destined to fail.
The draw of the lost cause, I think, is the notion that you stood with something when there was little to no evidence that you ought to do so. The decision to remain on the sinking ship has a heroism about it that we relish in, if even vicariously. Tennyson wrote about the lost cause in the Charge of the Light Brigade.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.

So many events come to mind when we consider the idea of lost cause. The Song of Roland captures the imagery of such an event, as Roland makes the decision to remain an fight, knowing death waits, to give the rest of the army time to get away. The Battle of Dunkirk is another moment when the idea of the lost cause rears its head, though in point of fact, not much was really lost then; maybe dignity. This brings us to one of the underlying roots of the lost cause and its attraction. Who could not have respect for someone who stood for a lost cause? Well, that depends on the cause I guess. It depends on whether your lost cause was the rescue of British soldiers from the beach of Dunkirk or racial segregation. They would, and should, be perceived very differently by most people. But in a majority of cases, someone who stood for a lost cause is going to get a lot of respect for having stood firm. That is because we are intoxicated with the desire for perseverance. We show so little of it, yet it permeates our human emotions. We persevere at so little that we are drawn to those who do, for whatever reason. I suspect that most people even have a minuscule amount of admiration for religious extremists simply because they believed what they believed so much that they were willing to die or blow themselves up for it. Most of us would not admit that in public, but I'll bet its there.
Sadly, this devotion to the lost cause because of the lack of evidence is where many people get stuck with religion. There are many people out there who are attracted to religious movements because they are the underdogs of society. Science and modernity are the big guys on the block these days and religion has been kicked to the corner. But along with religion has gone much of our social consciousness as well as those intangible things like manners, civility, honesty, integrity, and so forth. Many people cling to religion as a means to get those back and back the underdog at the same time. This is not right!
Rather we should consider the ways in which biblical, orthodox Christianity is like a lost cause to see why it isn't. First it certainly seems as though the reality of Christ's reign is disputed by every event of history. If Christ were ruling, how could cancer be so prevalent among us? If Christ were reigning, why would sexual predators get away with so much? It feels like a lost cause. But feelings can be deceiving. The objectivity of Christ's reign is not in the headlines, but in the Scriptures which declare, without compromise, that Christ reigns until His enemies are made His footstool. All the enemies of the gospel (not the established church, mind you) must be defeated through the spread of the gospel (Rev. 19:15).
Second, the social benefits of biblical Christianity are rooted in the faith of Christianity. Those who cling to religion for the social benefits usually do not really accept the faith. They are social Christians. Many people, especially in the South, have been reduced to this kind of faith. This is due to the fact that the modern world has tried its best to erase the antithesis from life. They are deceived into believing that they can synthesize Christianity and modernity into one seamless whole; that they can have their cake and eat it too. We want to be able to rebel against the law, to be antinomian, and have the benefits of the law at the same time. We want a religion that does not criticize our decisions to have pre-marital sex, view pornography, be deceptive for our own gain, or ignore the suffering of others. But at the same time we want the social benefits of the faith. We want people to get along, be civil , to each other. We want people to share of their good fortune with others. We want happiness.
Davidson, I think, understood that you can't have it both ways. That is why he chose to draw the line with the lost cuases. All of his lost causes were causes that stood in line with biblical Christianity, even if he didn't necessarily, against the failure and lies of modernity. Davidson understood the antithesis and stood firm, even if it meant ridicule or disdain, which it did.

Culture

Many of us are aware of Henry Van Til's classic formulation in The Calvinistic Concept of Culture.
that culture is religion externalized. It turns out he was not the first to make such a suggestion, though he was the first that I know of to explore it from a purely Reformed and theological perspective. In 1930, the Agrarians made this statement concerning culture.

the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition.

They were defining humanism as a culture, something we have still not really caught on to as clearly as we ought to.
I am constantly amazed at how right they were about so much.

On a Replica of the Parthenon

Why do they come? What do they seek
Who build but never read their Greek?
The classic stillness of a pool
Beleaguered in its certitude
By aimless motors that can make
Only incertainty more sure;
And where the willows crowd the pure
Expanse of clouds and blue that stood
Around the gables Athens wrought
Shop-girls embrace a plaster thought,
And eye Poseidon's loins ungirt,
And never heed the brandished spear
Or feel the bright-eyed maiden's rage
Whose gaze the sparrows violate;
But the sky drips its spectral dirt,
And gods, like men, to soot revert.
Gone is the mild, the serene air.
The golden years are come too late.
Pursue not wisdom or virtue here,
But what blind motion, what dim last
Regret of men who slew their past
Raised up this bribe against their fate.

Donald Davidson

17 years before Sayers...

John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950) included an essay on education in the 1930 I'll Take My Stand that bears remarkable similarity to aspects of Dorothy Sayers Lost Tools of Learning essay from 1947. An apologetic needs to be made before any discussion of Fletcher's essay is done. This is done in case anyone ever follows up this post with an actual reading of the primary source and finds, as I did, that Fletcher has some very racist language in his writing. Fletcher frequently betrays himself as "undemocratic" and anti-egalitarian in his opinions about education. Yet, politically incorrect as he is, Fletcher has some excellent ideas if we are willing to listen.
According to Fletcher, the purpose of education is "to produce the balanced character - the man of the world in the true sense, who is also the man with spiritual roots in his own community in the local sense" (111). In Fletcher's perspective the antebellum Southern education system did this much better than the public school postbellum system. He does not go so far as to say the Southern system is the best period. He acknowledges the victories of the Northern system in the North and attributes it to the industrial and urban character of the North. In the South, however, the rural character brought about a much different system of education, that of the Academy. Fletcher describes the Academy as a school of tutors and pupils who pay tuition to learn. He says "Their object was to teach nothing that the teacher himself had not mastered, and could not convey to his pupils." Sounds a lot like John Milton Gregory here. The result, according to Fletcher was that "their training was therefore classical and humanistic, rather than scientific and technical" (103).
What is a classical education according to Fletcher? He describes the three stages of the trivium very well. He begins with the Grammar stage.

Primary instruction in the English language in the elements of grammar and mathematics, in geography, in elementary history, is, after all, largely a question of being able to remember certain facts. It depends on memory - on being able to repeat a lesson correctly once it is given. (115)

From this basic understanding of fact, Fletcher represents an interesting picture of the Logic (Dialectic) stage. This stage lasts from "ten to twelve years of age" according to Fletcher and during this period "the sole abiding object of education is not to convey information at all" (115).

It is to train the pupil's mind in such a manner that he can master for himself whatever subject he wishes to take up, and to enlarge his mental horizon by showing the relationship of this subject to the whole of human life. (115-116)

Technically, Fletcher does not represent a Rhetoric stage in his map of education. But given what he does say, one can deduce the content of the Rhetoric stage. It is whatever exists past the training stage. That period of a child's life after twelve years of age when he does introduce himself to new learning and does master whatever he desires. This is just what Sayers had in mind.
It is fascinating to me that we have come to expect so little from our school children. Given the opportunities open to them, we should expect much more. I often wonder what Martin Luther or St. Augustine would have done with a word processor, given their already prodigious output of works. I had a parent of an eleventh grader come to me expressing concern that her daughter had not learned something several years ago. I listened carefully and respectfully and then suggested that now was the time to expect her daughter to learn that for herself, to teach that to herself. She should begin using the tools of learning to teach herself. Needless to say, this wasn't what this mother wanted to hear. But it should represent exactly what we want our students to do in life. No school can teach every art and science that will be needed. Public schools may try, but then look at what comes out. We have graduates who have very open minds to all forms of religion and sexuality, but cannot make change at a cash register.
Fletcher represents a picture of what American education could be again. He does so in a fallen state, remember this if you read him, but he does paint a beautiful picture of the educated man.

Hometown

I have lived in Greenville, SC for a little more than 8 years. Before that I lived in Chattanooga, TN for about 5 years. Yet for some reason, every time I go back to Winchester, TN to see my parents, I feel like I have come home. None of the places I have lived since high school have felt like home to me.
This gets even more interesting when I recognize that the overwhelming desire for many children that grow up in small towns (including myself) it to get out as fast as possible and as far away as possible. I remember the first time a student of mine here in Greenville told me he wanted to get out of this small town. I laughed at him and told him the population of the city of Greenville alone was greater than the entire county I grew up in. Yet, for some reason, I am trying to get back.
It may have something to do with the agrarian streak developing in me (I picked the topic for a reason, you know). It may simply be a product of my middle age (I am a thirty-something now). Whatever it is, I miss Skip's Grill. I miss the Oldham Theater. I miss the Blue Front Drug Store and the Creekside Market. I miss so much about that place that I don't want to leave once I have visited.
Yet this can't just turn into a trip down nostalgia lane. I have to do analysis, even on myself. While there last week I was saddened by how much Winchester looks like everywhere; which is another way of saying it looks like nowhere. James Kunstler's fascinating book The Geography of Nowhere, explains how this has happened all across America. This process has turned vital and regional communities into "developments" and places for "growth." I saw this with my own two eyes last week. Housing subdivisions have gone crazy in my hometown. This wouldn't be so bad if they had some character to them, but sadly they all look alike.
I can't for the life of me figure out why a vibrant community would want to approve a by-pass around their town. I guess on some level they figure it will keep very large trucks from barreling through the town. But it will also keep people who need to see Hammer's department store and the Winchester Speedway from ever setting their eyes on these places. Watch Cars for heaven's sake. I cried (and still cry) through parts of that movie because it reminded me so much of what is happening in our towns.
I will probably never move back to Winchester. One reason for this is the lack of community. Community it partly where you make it, but there must be some like-mindedness as well. We are very different from the folks we grew up with. Christianity is mostly a social religion in places like Winchester. I know there are many, very many, authentic Christians there. But for a gross amount of people, their is no life in their religion. We take our religion very seriously and have a church that does as well. There would be no place to worship there. There is also the problem of occupation and calling. I am a teacher, but am not state certified. I don't even have a education degree (for which I continue to be grateful). There are no private schools of the caliber I teach at in that part of Tennessee. There are some in more urban centers of Tennessee (like Franklin, Memphis, Knoxville, Murfreesboro, even Columbia). But in little ole Winchester there are no classical schools. It is very interesting to talk to people there about what I teach and how. They don't even have categories to put it in. "So do you teach history or literature?" "Well, both actually, and philsophy and art, with aesthetics and theology." (Insert puzzled face here)
After visiting my hometown, I have to work out the reasons I am grateful to live where I live and work where I work. I have to remind myself of what I would give up just to eat at Skip's once a week or so. I can't say I'd never do it if I had a real opporunity to, but it's not on the To Do list.

Busy couple of weeks

In the last two weeks I have done quite a bit. I first went to Charleston, SC for the Society for Classical Learning conference. I had a wonderful time there listening to and learning from many in the classical school community. Charleston was, of course, fantastic. I made some new friends in schools I hadn't heard of before.
One of the most interesting folks I met was Andrew Kern. Andrew is director of CiRCE in Charlotte, NC and editor of the Quiddity blog on the blogroll. I highly recommend checking his blog out from time to time.
After the SCL conference I went over to my home state of Tennessee and visited family for about a week. While there I did the impossible, I read an entire book. R.J. Rushdoony's Foundations of Social Order made it into my bag because I have been trying to read through the Bannockburn reading list. I found it a fascinating read with much to contribute to my thinking and the church as well. I highly recommend it. Through commentary on the creeds and councils of the early church, Rushdoony points out four key concepts that must be understood to lie at the heart of any social order. 1) A Creed: Every society has one. Even not having one is having one. 2) The State: The State with either be a ministry of justice (its god-given role) or it will attempt to be messianic (its humanistic desire). 3) Sovereignty: This will either be immanent or transcendent. 4) Grace: This element puts every outworking of the social order in proper perspective. Social action only makes sense if done through grace, which must understand the nature of sin and corruption. If done without a proper understanding of grace social action is just humanistic and attempting to fix a problem by adjusting the environment of the sinner. This will never work.
I just got back from Tennessee and think I have found a starting place for my thesis. After finishing Rushdoony I picked up my Agrarianism reading again. Donald Davidson wrote a piece about the New Deal in which he talks about a Agrarian-Distributist view. Once I read that something began clicking into place.
It has been amazing to see that stuff I've been thinking about for years has begun making sense the more I read the agrarians. They have dealt with much of this before. Immigration, industrialism, social action, ancient history, Chesterton and Belloc. All of this has begun to coalesce while I have been reading these guys.
I will have to do some serious study of Davidson and Distributism, but I think I'm going to latch onto that idea (the idea of a Agrarian-Distributist view) and move with it.
I am still blogging about Angels in the Architecture, or rather intend to still blog about it. I already have some later chapters blogged out, but want to do them in order.