Humanity, Please

By Anthony Esolen
The other day I saw a photo of some homework a schoolboy did, marked wrong by the teacher. The question asked, "Which is greater, 0.2 or 0.14?" The boy correctly said it was 0.2. But the teacher wrote, "0.14 has more digits! Please study." I hardly know where to begin. A schoolteacher who does not know what decimals mean? I suppose she would have thought that 0.20 was greater than 0.2, and 0.2000 much greater than both!
I also had occasion to write about the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "Hurrahing in Harvest," and because I'm away from home and my books, I had to look it up online. The first site that came up featured a brief analysis, under copyright. It was the work of AI, clotted with stupidity and incoherence. But how can an algorithm know what it is like to behold the clouds in a bright and windy autumn sky, much less to know what it is like to think or to praise God?
The work of the human manager of the site, introducing Hopkins, was no better. I fear that though Western man may no longer heed the loving command in Genesis, "Increase and multiply," stupidity does, and will continue to do so in those who have no real education to shield them from it.
Then I happened on a clip of the podcaster Ben Shapiro interviewing the popular promoter of science and despiser of religion, Neil deGrasse Tyson. The subject was liberty, and the apparently insoluble conundrum – insoluble only if you deny reality – of men pretending to be female and barging in on women's sports. "It's a free country," said Tyson, concluding that that means you should be permitted to do whatever you like sexually, because freedom, as he saw it, was a mere negative: barring obvious material harm, no one may prohibit you from your favorite source of pleasure.
I remarked that not one of the ancient pagan philosophers, not even Epicurus, would have agreed with him. They all understood the difference between liberty and license. They all warned that license enslaves.
Christians agreed. Here is the archangel Michael, replying to Adam in Paradise Lost, after Adam has expressed his displeasure to hear that one of his descendants, Nimrod, will be the first tyrant, a "mighty hunter":
Yet know withal,
Since thy original lapse true liberty
Is lost, which always with right reason dwells
Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being.
Reason in man obscured or not obeyed,
Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart passions catch the government
From reason, and to servitude reduce
Man till then free. Since therefore he permits
Within himself unworthy powers to reign
Over free reason, God in judgment just
Submits him from without to violent lords
Who oft as undeservedly enthrall
His outward freedom: tyranny must be,
Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse.
A licentious nation is also a stupid one. Its enthrallment is inevitable. So too for all human groups – churches and schools are by no means immune – and for individual persons.
You will notice that I used for examples three things I found online. I am wary of it, because I feel the mighty pull to swim in that lagoon of information and deformation, where passions are kept ever simmering, to raise a constant dermatitis of the soul. You may also notice that I possessed in each case a counterweight, some means to judge what I saw, or to break free of the magnetic force.
But it is wearying both ways. And if I find it so, how much more will it be for young people who do not have Hopkins or Milton at their fingertips or in their hearts, or even the simplest facts of arithmetic?

Older generations could not be so distracted, because the means was lacking; nor could they be so stupid, because the near and pressing demands of life forbade it. For confirmation, I happened to open at random an old book on the nightstand while I lay sick in bed, and there read a speech delivered in the Senate by John Sherman, the younger brother of the celebrated general William Sherman, on gold and silver currency, their relative val...