Trapped by mass media, a culture that valorizes banality, and the consequences of a collapsing school system, people of my generation struggle to imagine a country in which politicians regularly composed fine, noble paragraphs according to the best canons of classical rhetoric. Much less a populace that could be relied upon to understand their politicians’ Latinate vocabulary or follow the thread of their complex, yet elegant syntax.
Decrying the shift that occurred in our nation’s collective ability to think and speak, Neil Postman contrasts the contemporary American scene with that of the Lincoln–Douglas debates, in which ordinary farmers stood for hours following intricately argued and articulately expressed sequences of reasoning between two opponents who spoke to each other civilly as fellow citizens and gentlemen. Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, and Postman’s focus was on the degradation of discourse occasioned by television and radio. That was 40 years ago. I wonder what he would say about TikTok.
My foregoing comments might seem to strike a note of hopelessness, but nothing could be further from the truth. I am full of optimism. I see signs of intellectual renewal popping up all around me like saplings from the ashes of some great forest fire. In time, I hope — though I dare not trust — that we will again become a people who demand of our representatives both eloquence and truth, both classical erudition and Christian virtue.
One such sapling is the book I now hold in my hands, the inaugural volume in a series called Finding Our Words, under the editorship of Allison Ellis. This series collects, under various themes, foundational texts in the Western canon, what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” These editions are aimed at the middle or high school student looking to gain a classical education. The selections are accompanied by remarkably good introductions by Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus and On Being Civilized. Further, students are given memorization assignments following each reading, consisting of the most critical extracts.
Finding Our Words is right. Only by immersing ourselves in the best words of our forebears, savoring them on our tongues, reciting them over and over until they rest permanently in our hearts, feeling the sting of tears even after the thousandth recitation, only then will we recover something of the culture that made these words possible in the first place. Only by making their words our own will we be able to speak our own words with their command of language.
The first volume in this series is titled Words That Made America, and it focuses on pivotal speeches made in the course of American history, valuable not just for their historical effects but also as models of classical rhetoric. The selections include several presidents (Washington, Adams, Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Coolidge, Kennedy, and Reagan), but also several other notable American figures (Patrick Henry, Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Booker T. Washington, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas MacArthur). It even includes one matrilineal demi-American (Winston Churchill).
Despite these speeches taking place in very different circumstances across more than two centuries, each one of them draws its pathos from the deep well of the American founding myth. In reading them, I was struck by just how confidently the speakers, all the way from Washington to Reagan, could appeal to the sacred symbols of this myth: republican government of the people, by the people, for the people, the natural quality of all men endowed with inalienable rights, an appeal to nature and nature’s God, and a sense of duty that every man must be willing to defend these sacred symbols, if need be, at the cost of his very life. I sensed that these speakers could make such appeals so confidently because they took for granted in their audience a shared sense of American identity and a commitment to these sacred symbols, regardless of whatever partisan interests might divide men in the various crises of the moment. In other words, Americans believed in their myth.
Many Americans, of course, still believe, but it’s no longer the kind of thing that can be taken for granted. What happened? For one thing, Americans used to memorize whole speeches, such as the Gettysburg Address, in grade school. But then memory work became unfashionable along with anything else to which the self-proclaimed education experts could attach the label “rote” with a sneer. It’s hard for people who have never done it extensively to understand just how much an educated mind depends on the memorization of facts, names, places, dates, poems, and, yes, whole speeches. But if we want an educated country back, we’ll need to make memorization great again.
D.T. Sheffler is professor of philosophy and academic dean at Memoria College and author of the forthcoming book “Plato and Christian Personalism.” His writing has appeared in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Quaestiones Disputatae, Touchstone, The Classical Teacher, and The Imaginative Conservative.
Jesus Christ is King
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