Meta-Discussion: Tracks for this Curriculum

What content is being created here, and how delivered

A bit of administrivia. The primary goal of this account is to deliver content (free) for a Classical Education curriculum. It is intended to be suitable for children, in part, and adult learners, and to be a Liberal Arts preparation for Scholastic Philosophy and the ‘Aristotelian Curriculum’ — if you want.

I will expand on this topic in our new ‘chat’ feature, which is open to all subscribers (only one kind for now - the free kind, for now). In those chat topics I will explain where and how to obtain ‘source’ or ‘finished artifacts’. You have my personal guarantee that there will always be a free (zero cost and open source — so ‘free as in beer’ and ‘free as in freedom’) version of what is published here. I’m a fan of *both* publishing freed and paid copies of the same work, because I personally have found those two paths to be synergistic to any financial goal, and hate ‘freemium + annoy me’ models with a passion. If I ever create a ‘paid tier’ for this substack, and I’m in no hurry, it will be to support the work and not restrict its reach, so the content in both tiers will always be the same. But enough about basic Economics and Stewardship — synonyms, as you will learn here.

These are challenging objectives I have stated above, because we live in a ‘cleft’ intellectual world. Alasdair Macintyre, in his After Virtue trilogy/tetralogy on the end of ‘Virtue Ethics’ and the world we live in since the 18th century Revolutions, especially the second and third numbers, divided them into three: The Aristotelian-Augustinian Tradition (which is clearly where the Scholastic Philosophy of the ‘Third Scholastic’ emerged, but also includes Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Scholasticism from the Middle Ages on), is our focus here. But there are other — Namely, the ‘Encyclopedists’ of the Enlightenment, and what he calls, rather obscurely in my tradition, the primary inspiration for Modern Academia, Nietzscheans (or as he terms them ‘Genealogists’ from A Genealogy of Morals).

However you feel about the matters above, I do think this classification is useful. It highlights that until the Revolutionary period of 1776-1820 (taking the Congress of Vienna as a convenient end to it), there was one intellectual tradition throughout the West (and to some extent, Islam and the Eastern Christians, Orthodox or otherwise), and there was a brief flourishing of ‘The Enlightenment’ which is where a lot of our STEM subjects hail from, and later an second ‘pulse’ of intellect from the Romantic (Idealist, Hegelian, to some lesser extent Kantian) movement. C.P. Snow poignantly called these ‘the Two Cultures’ — the rift between Hard Science and the ‘Softer’ subjects of the Humanities and the ‘Social Sciences’ (invented by Comteans and Positivism in some cases).

I think the detailed historical matters and a more precise taxonomy belong in comments. But I will in this ‘headline’ for the comments, point out how these matters track with the current analysis of our political situation in Western Europe and Anglo-America (the Anglosphere generally, and I include Commonwealth and Ex-Commonwealth countries, such as India and [obviously] America in that — viz. the Allies who ‘won WW2’ and created the current World Nomos).

The modern ‘woke Revolution’ is by inspiration Marxism of the most extreme kind (Bolshevism, essentially), but it is predicatede on Hegelian-Deweyite core of Progressivism, to which it is in reality a competing party (Obama v Clintonites say), with Biden as the Progressive figurehead, a divided ‘Deep State’ and a full on revolt and attempted take down of the American Second Republic, in its post-Rooseveltian ‘Security State of 1947’ and ‘Neo-Liberal coup of 1975’ forms.

Whether you agree with my political analysis of the situation in America in the above paragraph, the alignment of these parts with ‘Woke Progressivism’ being the outcome of Academia seems secure, but increasingly radicalised by the Marxists, which otherwise hardly differs in our hemisphere from the failed experiments of Comtean Positivism in Brazil and Mexico, and seems to tend in that failure towards the same ‘Pink Tide’ outcome.

Likewise, ‘The Encyclopedists’ align well with the older take on ‘Hard Science’ and also ‘Classical Liberalism’ of the Locke - Scottish Enlightenment - Hume - Bentham - Mill trajectory (the latter stages coming under increased influence from Progressivism and before that Pragmatism — the subjective, psychologist turn of the 19th century, that also spawned what Marx called ‘vulgar, Bourgeois, economics’).

I will add however that the status of Marx is ambiguous between the Classical Liberal and the Romantic/Hegelian strands, and his relation to Comte’s Positivism of interest. In a very real sense, he stands as the culmination of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the first tasks of a Mill or a Mises, were to punch down the Enlightenment (a paradox, in the case of a classical liberal like Mises!) and establish German Idealism in some form, that is, modern Academic Economics for the most part. (Marx and the neo-Ricardian and post-Keynesians are a partial exception here — more discussion for the comments).

That is, I would take the (perhaps very unpopular position, since the end of the Soviet Union) position that ‘what we really mean by STEM is Dialectical Materialism now’. Again, I think it more appropriate to discuss this topic in chat, since the thesis is controversial and its defence here, as a sort of Historicism, is not to the point.

What is clear, however, is that the TRADITIONALISTS have never successfully challenged either Enlightenment STEM or Hegelian/Idealist STEM. That, I think, is something that needs to change, and this content is designed to do that. To challenge ‘The Science’ as it is now called, on several fronts.