Nice Aim, Wrong Target: St Augustine on Adderall

Plus: More Trans Madness and the Best Eclipse Essay You Haven't Read

Imagine life without wheels. No, I’m not asking you to picture yourself in some prehistoric cave. I mean imagine your life today – only, wheel-free. After spending three hours in a sea of pedestrians (and the occasional horse) on the trek to work, you get in a couple hours at the office, then it’s time for the long walk home before dark. And so on, day after day, year after year. Until one day, you hear a rumor, a rumor of something life-changing…

You learn about this incredible invention: the wheel! Only, to your further shock, it’s nothing new. It’s been around for centuries, millennia – in fact, the entire city you live in was designed with the wheel in mind. It all makes sense now! The highways crisscrossing town, the abandoned parking lots – they weren’t built, as you had been taught, by deranged architectural madmen, but were the infrastructure of a long-forgotten way of life. You learn that a cabal of crazed wheel-despising activists had taken control a few generations before and worked fanatically to destroy every wheel, every hint of a wheel, and all memory of wheels for good.

That feeling – that you have been miserably trudging to work all these years when there’s been a whole world of planes, trains, and automobiles out there the whole time – is pretty much what it’s like to read great literature in the 21^st century. The most brilliant minds of all time wrestled with the great questions of existence, fought lies and ignorance, found the light and pointed us, their descendants, towards it… only to have our teachers, our schools, despise their wisdom and do everything possible to keep us mired in darkness. With each “new” old classic I read, I am torn between gratitude to the author for its revelations and bitterness at my education for keeping it from me.

The subject of today’s rant: St. Augustine’s Confessions. I know, I know. It’s more than a little ridiculous to recommend this book. It’s like saying, “Hey, have y’all heard of this Beethoven guy? He’s a pretty good musician.” Confessions, the world’s first and greatest autobiography, is one of the most influential books ever written, a masterpiece among masterpieces. And yet… I spent my formative years in the best schools on the planet and never got so much as a whiff of it. Funny, learned plenty of Marx and Foucault, though.

So, if you, like me, had an excellent fake education, please go read Confessions and start your real one. A new edition with excellent notes by Professor Esolen is available here. Jacob Allee from Study the Great Books is posting a free study guide here. I know what you may be thinking (it’s what I thought): I can’t possibly enjoy a book by a saint. It’s gonna be boring, holier-than-thou philosophizing, over my head, perhaps a duty to read, but hardly any fun. Reader, I could not have been more wrong. Augustine might have ended up a saint, but he started out anything but, and he writes an action-packed, riveting account of all his wayward days, not flinching from depicting every scandal, whether the crimes his gang committed or the out of wedlock child he had with one of his many mistresses.

Even when he does delve into the world of ideas and the evolution of his own thoughts, there is nothing archaic or off-putting about the language. It reads as if it could have been written today, and if you’re at all like me you will recognize many of your own thoughts in it. If you’re a CS Lewis fan (and you ought to be!), you may even recognize many of his thoughts in it – at least to me, Lewis’ famous argument about our longing for our true home seems to come straight out of Confessions. To read this, to know it was written over a thousand years ago, and to see how achingly timely it remains, is nothing short of astounding.

One small example for today: the school system. A major contributor to my ranting about ADHD is that the ADHD diagnosis depends on a child’s poor report cards – yet doctors absolutely refuse to question whether the subjects at hand are even worth learning, or what mechanically regurgitating a teacher’s instruction could possibly reveal about a student’s soul. Well, turns out that Augustine was an outstanding student – and is thoroughly angry about it. He learned exactly what he was taught to learn and learned it well… only to realize that his education was built on “empty lies.” His teachers were drunk on the errors of the time, filled their students with this “wine of error,” “and we had no sober judge to appeal to.” Yet the young Augustine went along with it all because it made his teachers happy and “to please the sorts of men who praised me seemed a life well lived.” The American Academy of Pediatrics certainly agrees. Contra the AAP, and sixteen hundred years before Common Core, Augustine came to realize what I’ve been trying to get across the past few months: that doing well in school is not an inherent good. If the aim of your education is mistaken, being really good at it just means you’re excelling in error. In Augustine’s case, he was exceedingly well-trained and talented in rhetoric – think of the most skilled, clever, and unscrupulous lawyer who ever chased an ambulance – yet was never taught any actual truth. His schooling was oriented towards getting him to excel in the world, accruing wealth and honor – yet never asked whether that world was worth succeeding in. Do you want to earn straight As, be honored by the dishonorable, and get paid in false riches – while failing every test that really matters, sinning against the righteous, and wasting your soul’s priceless inheritance?   

Add that to the list of insights it would have been good to be exposed to, like, yesterday. But of course, because Augustine scandalously leaves crime, lust, and lies behind him and turns to God, the book could never have made an appearance at any of my fancy private schools, nor at any public one (regardless of what their founding purpose was, or what they were like a couple lifetimes ago). You see, my introductory wheel-free fantasia is not so far-fetched. The fanatics who took over our society a generation or two back are not anti-wheel lunatics, they’re anti-God ones. We are left to rediscover His truth on our own. Thank God for old books.

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I’ve missed writing here regularly (big project remains underway, hopefully). The less I write, the more subscribers I get! I’d take another few months off but I don’t think I could handle an audience that large. Welcome new readers (and thanks for sticking with me, dear old ones!). Some odds and ends from the past few weeks:

JAMA – the Journal of the American Medical Association – is the gift that keeps on giving, as far as content for this substack goes. One of their big articles from last month has to be seen to be believed. A summary of the keynote address at the National Academy of Medicine’s latest Women’s Health symposium, the opening took me off guard, since I never expect to read any bold truth from our medical leaders. Yet here it was, a clear defense of women’s unique biology: “Every cell has a sex.” Men and women are fundamentally different: “Because women and men are different at cellular and molecular levels thanks to the 23rd pair of chromosomes, it is not just women’s sex organs that develop differently but also their hearts, lungs, immune systems, and more.” Could this be it? After all the pain, the devastation caused by doctors mutilating children in the name of this trans insanity, was the medical establishment finally going to fight back? Sadly, no. As you can see for yourself here with the full speech text (which, unlike the JAMA article, you don’t need a subscription to read), later parts of the speech buy completely into the idea that, actually, cells can be whatever sex you want them to be: “We need to expand the study of gender to include gender minorities and to develop strategies to study the health of transgender people across the life span.” I believe this is what the hip folk call cognitive dissonance…

Finally, did you hear about the eclipse? Chances are, you didn’t hear about it in this way. If you’d like to be humbled by the odds of this celestial phenomenon being seen from your back yard – something Artificial Intelligence explains to be an astronomically implausible and remarkable cosmic “coincidence,” please read my friend Jonathan’s beautiful essay.