Recently I’ve wired up nvim-obsidian ‘daily notes’ to get posted here automatically. So, perhaps there’ll be more note-takings and musings here under the Notes (anything) and Techne (nerd stuf) sections.

In citations to the Summa, c. => contra and co. => corpus. The contra is the short sed contra est (On the contrary) section after the opening objections. The corpus is the respondeo dicendum (I answer that) section where St. Thomas elaborates his answer.

in ipsa, forma non est potentia ad non esse I, q.9, a.2, co.

From How Western democracy died

As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalisation — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. Politics, Crouch said, was “slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times”.

One might say that the defining characteristic of post-democracy is that, despite the existence of elections, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.

The important choices are now made by unelected organizations. Insignificant choices are left to the people to retain an illusion of democracy.

This historical trend was exacerbated by policies deliberately aimed at reducing labour’s bargaining power (anti-union laws, labour market flexibilisation), and promoting privatised consumerism and apathy. Meanwhile, decision-making processes were increasingly insulated from democratic pressures, chiefly through the surrendering of national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union. This strategy of depoliticising democracy birthed what some have called “post-politics”: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed. The American journalist Thomas Friedman aptly described the post-political neoliberal regime as one where “policy choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke” — minor variations within an unchallenged framework.

One might say that the defining characteristic of post-democracy is that, despite the existence of elections, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. Instead, power and influence are concentrated in the hands of a small subset of society.

Most anti-establishment analyses of the current “crisis of democracy”, however, rest on flawed assumptions: that the current phase deviates from a historical norm; that postwar social-democratic capitalism was truly democratic; and that a return to it is possible. These assumptions crumble under scrutiny.

Fazi says there was a time, the 40s-70s, in which the people had more sway over political action, but not so much as to be idealized. The state bureaucracies do what they like until a court corrects them. In other words, much if not most of the time they do what they wish, despite enacted or altered policy.

The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true — even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics. In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse, but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state power into blindingly sharp relief.

From Classical Schools Aren’t Really Classical.

In study after study over the last forty years, Krashen has found that exposure to extensive comprehensible input is the decisive factor in language mastery.

The implication for language instructors is clear: Students should read and hear as much interesting, intelligible content in the target language as possible.

Sayers reminded her audience of the Medieval Trivium, the core subjects of a classical education: grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric. Then, in an imaginative reapplication, she proposed that these subjects were not merely complementary areas of study but corresponded to distinct stages of child development. Elementary-age children should be taught grammar, channeling their love for rote memorization; junior high students should learn logic, since they are beginning to form independent opinions; and high school students ought to study rhetoric, the pinnacle of the pyramid, since they are honing the art of persuasion. The problem with this interpretation of the Trivium is that it has no basis in history. Earlier educators never conceived of the Trivium primarily as a sequence, and Sayers’ assertions about children’s learning preferences were founded solely on her own recollections of childhood.

Regrettably, today’s “classical” educators have embraced this hypothesis in the realm of Latin teaching. They argue that the goal of studying Latin is to develop problem-solving skills, recognize English word roots, or learn how to think in systems—in short, anything other than to actually read Latin.

It is not hard to conclude that the claim to be “classical,” like the insistence on Latin teaching, is rooted in nostalgia. Older is better; ancient is virtuous. But it is a nostalgia for something that never existed. As we have seen above, CCE’s script has little in common with the educational philosophies of Aristotle, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Rhabanus Maurus. It does not appear to have been examined in the light of actual classical thinking. The many, many articles commending the “classical” model to parents and defending it against critics—and expanding its definition to encompass all sorts of non-classical things—suggest that whatever is not “progressive” is “classical” by default. The term is being used as a foil.

There is a terrible irony in all of this. CCE advocates want to guard the treasures of Western civilization against an iconoclastic liberalism, but instead they wind up constructing a totally novel interpretation of the classical tradition and an instrumentalist view of language learning, revealing themselves to be just as “progressive” as their opponents. By prioritizing process over content, using superficial Latin study to develop other skill sets, they follow the standard progressive model of education, which treats “critical thinking” as the end-all, be-all of schooling.

The answer is that we learn by reading. We need lots of comprehensible input in the form of engaging texts and audio content, and that rules out many of the go-to course materials (looking at you, Wheelock’s)

In the words of the earthy and brilliant Reginald Foster, the Vatican’s official Latinist for many years, “Every bum and prostitute in ancient Rome spoke Latin, and they didn’t learn it by memorization.”