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T. Greer Profile picture
@Scholars_Stage
Jul 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
IMHO they already know this -- moves over the last year can be seen as "lets try and wipe the slate clean while we still have the option; if we do not come up with a lasting reshaping of our security environment now, we will not be able to anything about it in a decades time."
Or to put this another way: one major driver of conflict is the perception among one of the players that their position will diminish in the future. "We will never have more relative strength than we do, so we must act before the balance of forces is less favorable."
This is one of the reasons imperial Japan was willing to gamble on Pearl Harbor -- if you believe the conflict is inevitable, better to go now, even if the situation is not favorable, than in the future, where the situation will be worse.
The American public's generational about-face on Israel is one of the most important inputs into the Israeli calculus of "are the trend lines in our favor, or are they against us?"

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More from @Scholars_Stage

T. Greer Profile picture
Jul 28
This is a really valuable piece.

A few of you might have remembered the rumors and reactions a month back arguing that Xi is losing his grip on power.

This piece lays out a framework for analyzing Xi's hold on power and then applies it to the current moment.

Few notes:
The piece describes five fields of power within the PRC:

1) "The gun" (PLA)
2) "The knife" (domestic security services)
3) "The pen" (propaganda system)
4) "The paper" (Secretariat, CC Gen Office, CCDI, Org Dep)
5) "The blood" (the princeling families and social networks)
This itself is a good and useful framework.
Read 13 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Jul 17
Several years ago I wrote an essay reviewing big synthetic histories of antebellum America published over the last few decades. One of my conclusions: “ One can follow the mood of America’s liberal intelligentsia decade by decade through these volumes. ” Image
Three of the four were very good books. One —Daniel Walker Howe’s—ranks among my absolute favorite books. Image
Image
Image
However, it is obvious how each book’s interpretation of the antebellum era transparently reflects the moment in which it was written.

Seller’s thesis mirrors liberal angst about capitalism in Reaganite America Image
Read 23 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Jul 17
Been reading Reddit threads about Edward Gibbon’s DECLINE AND FALL.

It is full of folks who read excerpts/ a few chapters in a historiography class, now lecturing on how “outdated” it is, “historically inaccurate,” and “useful only for understanding the Enlightenment.” Bah!
There is an astounding arrogance in these comments I find infuriating.
Gibbon’s work is encyclopedic in length. With archeology excepted he for the most used the exact same primary sources used by historians today, and for classical and late antiquity this corpus has not grown. He often provided the first sustained analysis of many of minor sources.
Read 11 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Jul 6
I was pondering the other day what would be required to make an English major as rigorous as possible (i.e. comparable to a hard science degree).

A few tentative thoughts.

1. The major in English should be first and foremost a major in English philology. Every student takes the basic linguistics core courses (phonology, semantics, morphology, syntax). A semester survey on English grammar caps that section off.

Every student takes 2 courses on old english, 1 on middle English, 1 one Early modern English, and then something on modern English varieties or modern English socio-linguistics.

You probably also want to include 3 years of Latin or French, or a passing test grade in either.

This is probably sufficient to give the student foundational knowledge in English *as a language.*

2. You would want a core set of courses that require technical mastery in interpreting texts. This means a poetry class that requires you to memorize poetic forms and scan hundreds of poems. It means memorizing and reciting poetry and other passages for credit. It means a prose class where people are taking big blocks of Faulkner or Conrad and diagramming the sentences and passages. It means diagramming famous essays and the structures of novels.

I am not sure how many courses this would require, but maybe two, one focused on prosody in poetry, the other on structure in prose.

3. Something like the following progression of foundational surveys:

a) Classical antecedents: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Metamorphosis. Even better if the class also assigns poems or short stories that allude to this material so that students can see the connections over time.
b) King James Bible. (Same thing as before--but perhaps even more critical to include the poems/short stories). Make students memorize key Bible passages.
c) Shakespeare survey. At least 8 plays across genres. Make students memorize key passages.
d) English poetry to Milton + Paradise Lost. Make students memorize.
e) English poetry after Milton survey. Make students memorize.
f) 18th and 19th century novels (assign 12, unless you have a really big novel like Moby Dick, in which case you can shorten a bit; at least half of the novels should have been written in English).
g) Development of the essay to 1900 (Start with Montaigne and Bacon and move forward in time. Include several book length works)
g) The modern essay and narrative nonfiction (include several book length works--Didion, Wolf, McPherson, that sort of thing).

There also should be at least one research based class, but I suppose they can choose can between different topics/authors there.

4. I would have previously said a series of courses on composition but given ChatGPT and the inevitability of cheating I do not really know if there is a point to this anymore. The curriculum would need to be focused on things that can be tested, things that can be recited, and class discussions and debates. Students will have to learn how to write well through reading good models.
Unfortunately, the inability to assign essays makes it difficult to reach out rigor goal but I do not have any good solutions to this.
On a semester by semester basis this might look like:

SEMESTER I
-Linguistics: Intro to Linguistics and English Language
-Lit Survey: Classical Literature
-Eng Lang: Old English I
-GE credit
-GE Credit

SEMESTER II

-Linguistics: Phonology and Phoentics
-Eng Lang: Old English II
-Text Interpretation: Prosody and Form
-Lit Survey: King James Bible
-GE Credit

SEMESTER III
-Linguistics: Morphology
-Latin 101
-Eng Lang: Middle English
-Lit Survey: Poetry through Milton
-GE Credit

SEMESTER IV
-Linguistics: Syntax
-Latin 202
-Eng Lang: Early Modern English
-Lit Survey: Shakespeare
-GE Credit

SEMESTER V

-Latin 301
-Linguistics: Semantics
-Textual Interpretation: Prose and Structure
-Lit Survey: Development of the Essay
-Elective

Semester VI

-Latin 302
-Lit Survey: 17th and 19th Century Novel
-Lit Survey: English poetry after Milton
-Elective (research intensive)
-Elective

Semester VII

-Lit Survey: Narrative Nonfiction
-Eng Lang: Sociolinguistics/Modern dialects
-Elective
-Elective
-Elective

Semester VIII:

-Elective (x5)
Other things that could be considered:

-History of medieval England; history of early modern England.
-Philosophy survey courses

With these as with the surveys, the key thing is making the class hard: high standards, high page numbers, close reading, tough grading. Hard to capture that in course titles.
Read 7 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Jul 4
So my basic theory for why this happened goes something like this:
1. There are intellectual reasons for the shift, but they were less important than the practical reasons.

The practical reason: a large portion of the western elite ended up with fairly good Latin right up to the 20th century, but did not have corresponding skill in Greek.
(side note: This is true even after the renaissance brought the Greek classics back into circulation in the Latin West. Milton could read Greek, but wrote actual poetry in Latin; Shakespeare could not read Greek, and was most inspired by Seneca and Ovid, and so on).
Read 38 tweets
T. Greer Profile picture
Jul 1
I can think of a few actually.

Here is what I can say in defense of Scheidel: there are a certain class of interesting questions that classics is not well made to handle.

[1/x
"Why did the Roman empire fall?" is one of these.

"Was the Roman empire similar or different from Han China, and in what ways?" is another. (Scheidel of course has written a book on the latter).
Classics, which is first about philology, and secondly about literature and philosophy, does not provide the tools or tenure lines for integrating evidence in the historical record with ancient DNA or climatic data...
Read 30 tweets

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