All right, thank you so much for that kind
introduction, Dr. Kennyi already mentioned, uh,
that. Title of my talk is We Come to play school
and Aristotelian defensive, athletic and academic.
Excellence. Now, very briefly, before we get into
the topic at hand, I just wanted to give you a
visual learners out there, a little bit of part
about me building on what Dr. Kenny mentioned. I
got my master's at Michigan, my Ph.D. at Penn
State. The ethics textbook he mentioned is cover
is there up on the left. And then I am actively an
athlete still today. And I did play college soccer
at the NCAA level, you see. Sure. Of me there back
when I was young and still had hair. And then on
the top. Right. One of the teams I coached last
fall.
But turning specifically to the topic of. The
lecture.
I want to talk about Cardale Jones as a condensed
symbol. What is the condensed symbol, cadenced
symbol as a paradigm example, which means an
example that encapsulates and thereby stands in
for a larger problem. So I think he's a key
instance of an all too prevalent attitude among
college students. Well, what's the problem? The
problem is a commitment to only one type of
excellence that is on the field excellence. So
that's where the title of this lecture comes from.
We ain't come to play school. It comes from
Cardale Jones is tweet. From almost 10 years ago
now when he was the quarterback at. Ohio State,
where he said this, Why should we have to go to
class if we came here to play football? We ain't
come to play school. Classes are pointless.
So is that the typical attitude, I would say,
again, all too often it is so it's not necessarily
that all students or all student athletes are
openly hostile to academic endeavor, but there is
widespread indifference. In other words, athletic
excellence is treated with the utmost seriousness,
but then on the flip side, you think about
classroom excellence and it's like the emoji
they're most students is whatever, you know, hey,
I'm eligible coach. I'm eligible mom and dad. I
got my gentlemens two point five. What more could
you want?
Now, one way to think about this issue is to start
with ancient Greek athletics, which, of course, is
a culture in which Aristotle was writing. And
ancient Greek athletics offers some very
interesting parallels that in some ways modern
this mirror of this modern attitude. So, for
example, the Greeks, their games had literal
religious importance. All the great Greek
festivals were dedicated to gods. The Olympics,
most famously, are dedicated to zoos. The Temple
of Zoos was actually at Olympio, one of the
ancient wonders of the world and so forth. So they
took it very seriously. In fact, a Greek Olympic
winner in some circumstances would achieve
essentially demigod status. Related to that, the
Greeks were intensely interested in winning. There
were no moral victories. There were no silver
medals. There was no hey, good job. That's a
personal record. I'm proud of you. Either you won
or you were a loser.
Third, they were only interested in individual
sports because individual sports eliminated
ambiguity as to who won and why they wanted Peyton
Manning or Tom Brady throws drops a dime in the
end zone in somebody's hands and they fumble it
out of their hands and dropped a touchdown pass.
Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, whoever
it is, loses. But to what degree was that his
fault? We would have good questions to say. Well,
a large degree it wasn't his fault. So team games
get in the way of analyzing whether or not
individual excellence was actually demonstrated.
If you're in a race with eight other guys and you
run and you don't finish first, it's clear you
weren't the best. They also competed naked, did
lots of explanations and theories for why they did
that, some of it I think, is just range of motion.
And they didn't have spandex. They didn't have the
modern equipment that we have. And if you're
serious, you want to move freely and move well.
But another important thing was a social leveling
mechanism. It didn't matter whether you're rich or
poor, didn't matter what family you came from,
didn't matter what your occupation was, it
mattered whether you were the fastest, whether you
could jump the farthest and so forth. And when you
stripped everybody down to naked, then that level,
that social reality to we're here not because
you're rich or poor. What we're here to see is
who's the best. Your social status didn't matter.
Very quickly, the book here, ancient Greek
athletics, Steven Miller, very accessible to
undergraduates. A very interesting read. If you
have interest in any of the things I've briefly
discussed there, I would recommend any. But he's
interested. Get it. Take forty dollars so it's not
even that expensive.
So why was victory so important to the Greeks?
Well, the Greek term for victory was Arrietty.
Another translation of that would be excellence.
So the athletic victory demonstrated unambiguously
because of these concerns. We are only interested
in the winner only in regional sports and so forth.
Athletic victory unambiguously demonstrated
Oriente excellence. But authority doesn't just
apply to sport, and winning and demonstrating
excellence via winning and excellence isn't the
only translation of the term. So it can also be
translated as virtue. In fact, people that are
interested in virtue ethics, which I'll talk about
here just in a moment, sometimes call it automatic
ethics for that very reason. What is virtue?
Virtue is a good or excellent character trait. So
if we're thinking about moral traits, for example,
that are good, we would go most famously to the
cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, courage and
moderation. But obviously, those aren't the only
virtues. And moral virtues aren't the only virtues
either.
That leads us to Aristotle, Aristotle was an
ancient Greek philosopher from the 4th century
B.C. He was the student of Plato. So Plato was his
teacher and he was inturn teacher Alexander the
Great. Alexander the Great was not a scholar in
the sense that we think of Plato and Aristotle,
but he obviously was a world historical character
and so forth. And according to reports and stories,
he was even more convinced by Aristotle to send
back samples and specimens that he found along the
way into his conquering meditated Darwinian world
in the Middle East. But anyway, Aristotle, great
important thinker in the Western tradition and for
our purposes, the father of virtue ethics. So what
is virtue? Ethics, virtue? Ethics is the school of
thought that says the two great questions of
ethics can be answered by focusing on good
character. Good character is what demonstrates or
allows to demonstrate right action in the world.
What then are the two great questions of ethics,
the primarily these two? What is a good life and
how should we treat each other?
I can imagine a student might be sitting in their
seat or in their dorm watching this lecture and
saying, OK, that's nice, but let's get back to
your original premise. I don't care about school.
This Aristotelian stuff that's putting me to sleep.
Why do these questions matter to me? I'm only here
for the extra credit. So let me try and defend why
these two questions are of inherent interest to
you and the extra credit is just a bonus, just
icing on the cake on the good life question, what
is a good life? Why does that question matter to
you here and now as an 18 to 22 year old? Because
you only get to lead your life once and all of the
older people in the room will tell you it goes by
quickly and there's no rewind and there's no do
overs. And if you make a mistake and waste a year,
you waste time or you ruin a relationship, you
don't get it back. So your time is limited and any
serious person is going to deliberate on how it
ought to be spent, but if you're going to
deliberate on that, seriously, you have to ask
this question seriously. What is a good life and
my using my time well and so forth. Another way to
put that in more colloquial terms would be to ask
this question, what counts as success? Right. If
you listen to sports, black radio and ESPN, if you
watch commercials, the pop culture answer, of
course, is very shallow, essentially says fame,
winning power, money, pleasure. Those are what
kind of success? That's a pretty thin answer and
the experience of people that pursue those things
and testify unanimously that once they got those
things, they thought they'd be happy. And once
they got those things, they're not because you
make those things bad. But a good life is more
than material success. What about treating each
other? How should we treat each other? Why is that
an important question? Well, because human beings
are, as Aristotle puts it, in a different text
than politics, political animals. Now, we live in
a politically partisan, contentious age. Some
people don't bring politics into it. Well, what
what Aristotle means is politics in the generic
philosophical sense. And politics actually comes
from the Greek word for city or city state policy.
So what Aristotle means when he says that is that
not that we should be partisans in the sense we
think of politics in everyday language, but that
we're all born into communities. Human beings are
political animals because they're social. They
need each other and they're political animals,
unlike, say, wolves that are also social because
human beings have the gift of reason and can
deliberate how we should organize our communities,
how we should organize our teams, how we should
organize our leagues. Here's a relatively trivial
example to prove the point. Major League Baseball
for the last two years has had two novel rules,
one, doubleheaders or seven innings, and two, if
it goes extra innings, the runners automatically
start at second base. Is that good? Is that bad?
Does that make baseball better? Does it cheapen
the game? Does it ruin the game and so forth?
That's a political question in the sense that
Aristotle is talking about. Now, could we get
deeper and more important questions? Of course.
But his point is human beings are born into
communities and they debate and deliberate how
those communities ought to be best organized. And
that includes our families, our teams, our
societies.
So another way to put that is human beings need
each other. If this political animal, if this
social argument is correct, then there's some
important insights related to what we learn and
how we learn and what we know and how we know. So
think about this, your favorite sport. I am a
soccer player. I am a football player. I'm a
swimmer. You didn't teach yourself to play. You
didn't create the pool yourself. You didn't create
the game or the rules. It was inheritance and
tradition and mentorship that made you what you
are. Does free will and choice play a role? Of
course, but within a community, within
relationships and so forth. But if that's right,
then how you were treated and how you treat others
matters to them because they're invested in these
relationships, too, which means you can't escape
if you're a serious person. This question as an
ongoing reality, as you lead your life, how should
we treat each other? What obligations do others
have to me? What obligations do I have to them?
For visual learners are just some examples, when
and how should we stop and help a fallen runner?
Do we have an obligation to help our competitors
in certain circumstances and forgo victory?
Because if you stop and help, one thing's clear,
you're not going to win or the Houston Astros with
that phone logo there and their cheating scandal,
stealing signs and so forth, what what should we
think of cheating? What should we think of
forgiveness? What should we think of repentance to
use a theological or religious term? And I don't
mean it needs to be theological or religious, but.
Were the Astros sufficiently contrite that they
deserve forgiveness? What should we think of
punishment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?
Bottom left American football, to what degree
might the game become a moral if the evidence we
have that's increasing that collisions that such
lead to brain damage becomes determinative? Does
that mean we shouldn't play anymore? Bottom right,
there's no prestige, there's no ESPN cameras,
nobody cares but dad, but might we say that that's
the most important thing that happens in sport,
passing on a tradition, passing on love, teaching
the next generation about this precious gift of
baseball, soccer, hockey, whatever it is. I don't
know, we could debate that for the rest of the
hour. My point is these things should make it
alive to you or make these questions live to you.
What is it? Good life. It matters. How should we
treat each other? It matters.
So turning back to Aristotle and getting into
specifically some of his claims in his virtue,
ethics would be vital. If we're going to think
about these two questions seriously, at least from
an Aristotelian perspective. So what is your so
say? Well, if I wanted to summarize his entire
ethical philosophy in one phrase, which can be a
little bit dangerous, but still pedagogically
useful, I would say this. What Aristotle says is
we become what we practice. Where does he say this
in the next MacKean ethics and in the Nicole
McCain ethics, primarily in the first two books
that I'm going to talk about. He makes several
points I think we're worth spending a little time
on. First, he makes a distinction between
intrinsic and extrinsic goods. Second, he talks
about how ethics is social and tied to human
nature. Already alluded to that a little bit. And
with my analysis of why how we treat each other is
an important question. Obviously, if it's called
virtue ethics, we spend some time talking about
virtue. So I'll try to unpack that a little more
and talk about how he comes to settle on virtue as
being so important. He also talks about habit in
relationship to skill development, primarily on
read anyway. And I'll talk a little bit more about
that. And then he also talks about the mean, which
I'm not going to get into due to time constraints
and any sort of great detail other than to say
this when Aristotle tries to identify virtues that
his good character traits, he says they are mean
conditions between two extremes. One extreme is an
excess and overdoing one is the deficiency. So
courage, for example, is not cowardice. Hiding in
the corner because you're afraid is deficient, but
neither is it foolhardy. So most people are pretty
clear that cowardice is the opposite of courage.
But they forget about foolhardiness. Charging up
the hill, so to speak, and getting your head blown
off is just as bad as hiding in the foxhole,
wetting your pants. Courage is the mean condition
between the two. As an example, so on that first
point of intrinsic versus extrinsic goods, why is
this important in general and why is it important
to Aristotle in general? It's important because
there are different types of goods in the world.
So some goods are means to other goods and some
goods are ends in themselves. What does that mean?
It means some goods are useful for something else
and some goods are just plain good. So Aristotle,
for example, talks about medicine and wealth and
he says medicine is good because it leads to
health.
A living example that I think students would grasp
on to would be this nobody goes to the dentist for
the sake of the dentist. Nobody says, hurray, it's
been six months. If I'm lucky, I'll have a cavity
and I'll be able to come back. Nevertheless,
people go to the dentist regularly because they
don't want cavities. They want a healthy smile.
They want to be able to bite into an apple without
clutching their cheek or living the rest of their
life in pain from a persistent to a toothache and
so forth. So the dentist is really good, but the
dentist is good because it gets us something else,
health, and that would make it an extrinsic good.
It's not pursued for its own sake. It's pursued
because it leads to a healthy smile and so forth.
Now, interestingly, Aristotle says wealth is an
extrinsic good. And this is surprising to a lot of
people because in his day in and hours, a lot of
people are enraptured with money, money, money. He
says money is good. It allows for a lot of things,
but it's not inherently good. It's merely a tool
for other goods. So if you wanted to summarize his
position, it would be something like this. Money
is supposed to be for life. It serves human beings.
We're not supposed to reduce our lives to the
endless pursuit of money. He then says towards the
end of a book when something very interesting, he
says ultimately pretty much everything is an
extrinsic good. Everything's an exchange of good.
How Aristotle, he says, well, because happiness is
that good at which all other goods and we pursue
this, we pursue this, we pursue this and so forth.
But ultimately all of them are aimed at we want to
be happy. Now, critics might say and the students
might be thinking this as they're listening along.
Oh, well, this is why we have this enduring text
from twenty five hundred years ago, because he
said people want to be happy. Give me a break. I'm
going to tune out yet again. Did I mention I'm
only here for the extra credit? Well, Aristotle
anticipates that he doesn't say happiness, is it?
Is that good at all? Which all other goods aim and
then period, end of sentence, close the book. It's
a starting point. And he knows the follow up
question is obvious. OK, big deal. What is
happiness? That's the real question. And he says
there's three common definition CFT. Sound
familiar to you? Because he said this twenty five
hundred years ago. He says a lot of people think
pleasure is the root of happiness. Some other
people think it's an honor and then a few people
think it's contemplation. It's not surprising and
you can probably anticipate this, that a
philosopher says the good life, the happy life is
the life of contemplation. So maybe he's not being
fair to the other two. Does he have any good
reasons to reject them other than his bias? I
think he does have good reasons. The first one of
pleasure is mistaken because hedonism twenty five
hundred years ago and hedonism today has been
tried and found wanting and tried and found
wanting and tried and found wanting people that
lived the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle
for Mick Jagger, Deon Sanders to Andre Agassi on
and on and on it goes. They universally say, I was
miserable. Doesn't work. You just want a basic
metaphor for the problem for your party all night
tonight, on Friday night, you wake up tomorrow
with a headache and it's eventually going to hurt
your grades, lead to addiction, ruin relationships
and so forth. So he dismisses hedonistic life, and
I think rightly so. But what about honor? What's
wrong with an honorable life? Isn't that just as
good as contemplation? Don't we want active people
just as much as we want contemplative people? Well,
here's the limitation in Aristotle's mind. And I
think personally speaking, for myself, it's
decisive. He says there's nothing wrong with honor,
Persay, but honor is always dependent upon other
people. Which means we might be honored for the
wrong things or we might receive scorn for doing
the right thing. But doing the right thing is what
we ought to do, whether or not it's popular.
Therefore, he says, ultimately, the contemplative
life is the path to happiness. Now he needs a
positive argument for that above and beyond, just
rejecting the other two possibilities, or at least
on his account of three possibilities. So what is
his positive account for contemplation? He says
happiness is contemplation because happiness is to
live in accord with our nature. Now, I mentioned
before that Aristotle says human beings are
political animals and the politics very famous
quote, probably the most famous quote of that book.
People that have never read it, but took a good
Western civ class would be able to identify it as
Aristotle. But he also says in the economy and
ethics, that man is by nature rational animal. So.
We're not just social. We're not just political,
we're also rational. So the social and natural
point is important to understand Aristotle,
because again, we are born into communities, which
means ethics is never merely personal. We tend to
get sucked into that in our individualistic,
modern culture where ethics is about me and my
action and whether or not I'm a good person. But
Aristotle says those questions are important. But
you're nested in a community. Your actions affect
other people. There's this political aspect and
again, in the philosophic sense to ethical action,
because it's about how we order our lives together,
how our behavior affects other people, not just
how it affects us. Now, why and how does he say
reason is the path to happiness? Well, he makes a
metaphysical claim about what human beings are,
and metaphysics just means the study of the nature
of things. So he's making a claim about human
nature. He says the function of the eyes to see
what then is the function of man or human beings.
Well, somebody might say the function of human
beings to be alive. He says that can't be right.
That's too broad. Lots of things are alive besides
human beings, plants, animals, so forth. All right.
Well, then the function of the human being a
sensation using our senses is that I can't be
right. All animals share sensation. Is there
anything uniquely human? According to Aristotle's
account, what's uniquely human is reason. The
intellect is uniquely human. Therefore, if we're
going to be what we ought to be and be happy, we
have to exercise that gift. We have to exercise
that nature. Now, the interesting thing here
between this metaphysical claim and ethics is this.
He's making a claim about the nature of thing and
the goodness of a thing, and this applies to
ethics. So if you think, for example, about a
knife, how do we know what a good knife is? A good
knife has to be sharp. Follow up question. Why?
Because a knife is meant for cutting. So when
Aristotle saying here is the same thing, we know a
good knife because we know what a knife is to be a
good knife is to be sharp because knives are meant
to cut. To be a good human is to be rational and
reasonable and exercise that capacity because
that's what a human being is, a rational animal.
So if we're going to exercise our reason, well,
we've got to cultivate those skills and that is
where virtue and habit comes in, we have to learn
to embody those excellences that are naturally
human. So Aristotle famously puts it this way. And
ethics is neither by nature nor in defiance of
nature. That virtue grows in us. Nature gives us
the capacity to receive them the virtues and that
capacity is perfected by habit. So we become
virtuous not merely by understanding the good, but
by practicing it and then becoming what we
practice. So it's a process of maturation or
growth, whether you're on the ball field or in the
classroom. And this leads to a recognition of the
goodness of inaction, because you embody it and
you can see it in a way you couldn't when it was
purely theoretical, in other words, is not merely
passive, but the activity of active cultivation of
a particular virtue, humility, kindness, justice,
courage, what have you, and a way that this really
aligns well with athletics, if you think about it,
to try and understand what Aristotle saying is
this just as we can be in shape or out of shape
physically, we can be in shape or out of shape
morally. And whether or not we're in shape matters
in the last 10 minutes of a soccer game when your
heart feels like it's about to explode and whether
or not we're in shape morally matters when we're
called on to be courageous and we're afraid.
Again, to summarize, Aristotle, I think really
it's dangerous to ever summarize any deep thinker
in one phrase, but I think this is as close as you
can get. And it's a good guiding principle to keep
clear in your mind what he's after. We become we
become what we practice. So let's stick with an
athletic metaphor again to try and see how this
applies and what he's after. You want to be a good
soccer player, and that soccer player is a
placeholder term because I'm a soccer player,
swimmer or anything else with a violin player,
which would fit as well. And as far as I'm
alluding to, being a good person would fit as well.
Well, you want to be good soccer player. You don't
sit down and read a theory of soccer and say, aha,
I read a theory of soccer. I am now a soccer
player. No, to be a soccer player, you have to
practice and eventually through repetition and
correction and so forth, you become a soccer
player. That is, you embody the skills of soccer
theory is not bad, but it doesn't take you very,
very far. So similar with ethics. If you want to
be honest, work on telling the truth. You want to
be courageous. Work on suffering for the truth.
And here's the scary part, because we become what
we practice and because you can be in shape or out
of shape physically and morally, it's exactly the
same thing with Vice. Tell the first lie and it's
painful, I can't believe I lied to my parents, I
told myself I would never lie to my parents, but I
just did. Hey, but the sun came up tomorrow. Oh,
my grades just came in. I better lie to my parents
again. I didn't like it, but, you know, the
world's got to move on. And I was in a pressure
situation. And then you tell another lie and
another lie and then one horrible day you wake up
after the five fly, the thousand fly or whatever,
and you look in the mirror and you see, I am a
liar. The. What a terrible day. Now, the good news
is with hard work, just like this guy getting rid
of his beer gut, you can turn back towards virtue
and honesty. But it's going to be hard work, just
like it would be to lose those 30 pounds.
So the basic point is this, so, too, this is
Aristotle again from the Committee on Ethics. We
become just by doing things that are just
temperate or moderate, by doing things that are
temperate and courageous, by doing things that are
courageous. In other words, how we live, the
skills, virtues or vices that we develop directly
impact who we are.
OK, now I can see the skeptical student again
saying, oh, all right, I guess I see your point.
Excellence matters. There's many types of
excellence. OK, but what does this have to do with
me? We can't be all things I care about sport. I
love sport. It's an intrinsic good for me. See, I
was paying attention. I listen to what you said.
But I don't care about school, I don't care about
academics, it allows me to be on the field. So I
go to class and do what I need to do to get the
rubber stamp that says I can play. But it's an
extrinsic good. It's only valuable for what it
bureaucratically procures and a diploma,
eligibility, a job, etc. Education for its own
sake, has an intrinsic good. Give me a break. Well,
how might somebody respond to such skepticism, I
would give it essentially for answers, for a
squandered opportunity. Second, I would return to
Aristotle's point about human nature and expound
on that a little bit. Third, I would talk about
avoiding the tyranny of the moment. And fourth, I
would say education increases your odds for good
life. So very quickly, about four. And then I'll
go into detail about each. Just think about
squandered opportunity for a moment. Most
Americans even today, don't graduate from college.
You're in college, that's an amazing opportunity.
And historically, most human beings never had the
opportunities you have right at your fingertips.
Second, human nature you need, if Aristotle is
right, contemplation to lead a fully human life,
but contemplation requires community, it requires
skill development, just like you need coaching and
football, you need coaching in English and
philosophy in science.
It's not an individual activity.
The tyranny of the moment, avoiding the tyranny of
moment education allows you to be well read, as
they say, to have a larger perspective, to realize
things don't have to be the way they are for good
or for ill. Things can change because they've been
different in the past, because different
philosophies exist, because different, plausible,
intelligent answers have been offered and so forth.
If you're ignorant of all that, well, then you're
stuck with the tyranny of the moment. Here's what
everybody says is true. Well, it must be true. And
then last, increased jobs for good life, knowing
your options obviously doesn't guarantee you will
live well, but I think it gives you a fighting
chance.
A little bit more on each, as I said, squandered
opportunity, education should be understood as a
privilege, not a burden. Even today, only thirty
two percent of American adults have a bachelor's
degree, which, of course, means two thirds don't.
You're in college, don't squander the opportunity,
go back slightly beyond living memory, I know when
you're 18 years old and the 1980s seem like
ancient history, that the mid 19th century really
seems like ancient history. But it's not. It's
barely beyond living memory. You go back to the
mid 19th century, one percent of Americans had a
college degree, almost all of them white men. You
have a precious gift in your hands, don't squander
it, it doesn't mean you can't love football,
doesn't mean you can't love soccer. I am a big
proponent of athletics. But there's a lot more
going on in life than just sport, and when you're
there with those opportunities, your fingerprint
fingertips, it would be a tragedy to squander that.
So another way to make this last point, this point
one last time is generations. Your ancestors had
no access to higher education and you do. Don't
waste the opportunity.
Instead of coming across like a scold, you could
also say it this way. Education opens doors to an
amazing world, and the more you learn, the more
you can appreciate and see and understand that
world from literature to biomechanical analysis to
pitching to amazing art like Monet, to music and
violin playing and musical skill to history. So
that
marble statue, there's actually a Roman copy of an
ancient Greek statue of a female athlete.
Very interesting because anybody that only knows
the surface of ancient Greek sport will say, well,
only the men competed and it competed naked. Well,
no, we have limited but intriguing evidence that
at least sometimes in some places the women did
compete and they were clothed.
Nature, again, as I said, this alludes to
Aristotle were rational animals, were political
animals, rational animals needs we need it means
we need to examine our lives to lead fully human
lives. Education will help you examine your life.
We're political animals, which means we're in a
community. Education is a communal process as
anything else. And your education allows you to be
better at answering those questions. What is a
good life and how should we treat each other and
other obligations? Do I have the community and
what obligations of the community have to be it?
The other thing it cultivates, if you pay
attention, is the virtue of gratitude because you
realize how much was given to you and how you need
to give back to the next generation because you're
only on the stage for a while. Or to reiterate is
my summary of his philosophy in terms of ethics,
we've become what we practiced. Think about it
this way. If you act like a philistine and not
uncultured brute. An uneducated boob. Then you
become a philistine. But with intellectual
development, you cultivate your palate, you
cultivate your sense of taste and discrimination,
right? You go to a wine tasting place as a as a
brute like me and you say it tastes like wine.
Tastes like wine. Yeah, tastes like wine. You
cultivate your palate and you can make
distinctions and say this is a better wine than
that. I taste this subtle flavor and not that and
so forth. And it's just as true in education as
such. In other words, it sharpens your sense of
the good, the true and the beautiful. What's more
important in life than those three things? In
other words, again, to criticize sort of the
dominant hedonistic perspective that we get in
popular culture, there's a lot more to the world.
There's a lot more to life than sex, drugs and
rock and roll
art. Avoiding the to the tyranny of the moment, as
I said, is about realizing that most questions are
not new and that the question is trendy and
popular right now, or the answer to that question
may not be correct. So just one example of
insightful answers across the age is one place you
could go. Among myriad different examples would be
religion. The Bible has interesting answers.
Whether or not you're a Christian, whether or not
your same story, the Koran and Islam, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera, these are enduring texts
just like the economic and ethics, because they're
powerful, even if they're ultimately mistaken.
That, of course, is up to you to decide. But you
can't make an informed decision if you're ignorant
of them all. And evidence suggests most Americans
are. So the religious studies scholar Steven
Pithier wrote a book about 10 years ago now,
Religious Literacy, where he suggests with
evidence that the average American is a religious
ignoramus. Now, this is interesting because if you
quiz people on pop culture, they can answer
everything about some stupid commercial that they
get hit over the head constantly about what
happened in Game of Thrones season six. But you
ask them about the Bible or the teaching or the
Koran and what have you, and they can't tell you.
So this is a problem because you succumb then to
the tyranny of the moment, the trendy current
opinion, even if it's false, is what you're stuck
with. You don't even know that you're ignorant
because you have no horizon beyond the present or
the present moment or the news cycle, you have no
broader perspective. You have the truncated,
myopic vision of somebody sucked into the
immediate moment, the immediate culture. Education,
in turn, allows for deep consideration rather than
mere superficial concern.
Increases the odds of a good life. Why? Well,
here's one example being a good person is far more
than winning games or winning the game of life
with the big job or the good job or the big house
or what have you. Similarly, life is hard. Doing
the right thing is hard. If you haven't considered
what the right thing is, you have very little hope
of doing the right thing because anybody who's
honest with themselves knows that when the
pressure is high or the stakes are high and their
backs against the wall and they know what the
right thing to do is, their knees are still
quaking, their forehead is still sweating, they're
still wringing their hands and saying, will I be
able to do what I know I ought to do? And again,
if you look in the mirror, you can think of myriad
times where you knew what you ought to do and you
didn't do it anyway. To take a very simple example,
to prove the point, how many times have you said,
you know, I shouldn't have that second chocolate
slice of chocolate cake and then you find yourself?
Now, that's low stakes just to prove the point,
because I don't want to get in a fight about any
particular high stakes moral issue. But the point
is, we often know what the right thing to do is
and we don't do it if we have no idea and we've
never considered what the right thing to do is.
We're really in big trouble. Third life is short,
so what hope is there, if any, in the face of
death enduring important human question? I got
news for you, HBO, ESPN, Facebook. They're not
going to take it seriously and they're not going
to offer you an answer. Education allows you, as
we talked about in the previous example, with
seriously engaging those questions and see what
smart people had to say. So education shows you
the full world of human experience, human
excellence, human foibles and failures, and then
allows you to confront and consider wisdom across
the ages and deliberately say, here's where I
think the truth is. Here's where I take my stand.
Here's what I think life is about. Here's how I
ought to live and then struggle to achieve what
you ought to do. Because, as I said, it's not
always easy to do what you know you ought to do.
So this knowledge doesn't guarantee a good life,
but it's certainly going to help.
So let's turn back to athletics quick here. I got
about five minutes left, three or four more slides,
open it up to questions. Look at it this way. You
hold yourself to account on the field. You're
tenaciously committed to being the best athlete
you can be. And I would say rightly so. You hold
your coaches to account. You hold your peers to
and teammates to account, and you demand a
commitment to excellence. We're here to be the
best we can be. We might fail. We might come up
short, but we're going to try to do our best to
win as much as we can to display human excellence
as best we can, both in terms of competitive
effectiveness and also sportsmanship and so forth.
But you should want to do the same thing in the
classroom. That's my point. Athletics is an
important part of life, but it's only a part of a
well-rounded life in the classroom. You should
thirst for knowledge, wisdom and truth, just like
you thirst for athletic excellence. You should
hold your professors to account like you hold your
coaches to account. If your professors are not
challenging you, if you're in a quote unquote,
best class, as the students call it, you shouldn't
be elated, you should be angry. I am here to learn
there's important questions to try and address and
figure out. Just like on the field. I'm committed
to excellence. I'm not going to half assed my way
around the track. I shouldn't have to ask my way
through class. Think about how your attitude to
class would change with that philosophy. Think how
your performance would change if the classroom was
treated like the playing field.
So in closing, I would say this think about skills
in the good life when Aristotle talks about habit
again on my read anyway and what he really means
is the cultivation of moral skill. Skills are
necessary to see and experience the goods of sport,
achieve authority to achieve excellence. We know
this. It's obvious all you have to do is think
about it. You can't swim and you're going to drown.
You can't skate, all the goods of hockey are
locked away from you. If you don't understand
soccer, if you haven't rubbed shoulders with it
long enough, people say it's the beautiful game.
You say, what are you talking about? There's no
scoring. It's so boring. What a waste of time. And
I always tell students this because you don't
understand the game. Go spend some time with it.
You'll fall in love with it. It's the most popular
game in the world for a reason. Maybe you don't
think it's the best game. There's an argument to
be made for that. Baseball is better than soccer.
I think ultimately it fails, just barely. That's
me. But soccer is an enduring part of human
culture because it is a beautiful game, if you
don't see that, you need to spend more time with
it. And the same is true in the academic life, you
need skills to read and understand Shakespeare,
you need skills to listen to Bach and understand
what's so amazing about classical music. Classical
music. Classical music. Because you're a brute,
because you're uncultured, because you're
untrained, just like if I go to a wine tasting
event, I say wine. Interesting. Similarly, you
want to understand biomechanics and break down how
a pitch curves or how somebody actually jumps over
a high jump or what have you. All of that has to
be cultivated to achieve Ourika. You have to
cultivate academic skills. So just as in sport, so
to the classroom, you cultivate those skills
through time, patience, dedication and correction.
Now, it's very interesting, again, the college
athlete, and that is dedicated to sport in terms
of time, patience, dedication and correction. But
in the classroom, it's a coin flip at best. That's
a big mistake for all the reasons I've been trying
to articulate. So here's one more final example to
try and get this point across, if you ever get a
chance to study abroad, take advantage of it. It's
never going to be easier than as a college student.
And if you go study abroad and you get to Europe,
you have to spend at least a little time in Rome
for a whole host of reasons. But people go to Rome
and they miss a lot of things because they don't
know what to look for. Here's one example outside
of the Vatican, as people are walking to the
Vatican, I'm going to see the the Sistine Chapel.
I'm going to see the piazza. I'm going to see the
St Peter's Cathedral. This is going to be great.
True, true, true. But as they walk into the
Vatican, they walk past this empty field with the
remnants of a weird walking track on it. And they
say here, the Romans don't really take care of
their walking tracks just because they're not
Americans. But it's not a walking track. It's the
old Circus Maximus. It's where the Romans had
their chariot races, which at its peak, according
to some scholars, could host two hundred and fifty
thousand people. Now, that's the high. And maybe
it wasn't that high, but we're talking about tens
of thousands of people gathering to see these
races and the races, contrary to what you would
believe from Gladiator and other movies, the
Circus Maximus deteriorations were more popular
than the Colosseum. This is what it looks like now.
And people go to Rome and they walk past it and
don't even realize what they're seeing because
they have not been educated. They haven't
cultivated the eyes to see. They haven't developed
the skills to see. Now, this is relatively a
trivial example, but it's blatant and obvious what
I'm getting at. And what I'm saying is this
applies to everything else in education as well.
The more you learn, the more you see, the more
skills you have, the more places you can go. Just
like swimming allows you to go to the pool.
Skating allows you to play hockey. Literature
opens up a whole new world if you're cultivated in
it, philosophy, science, et cetera, math, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Don't squander your
opportunity to learn.
So final slide in closing, think about it this way,
beauty amidst suffering. We live in a painful
world in many ways, but despite all the pain and
suffering we endure from the relatively trivial to
the profound, the world's a beautiful and wondrous
place. So cultivate myriad skills, at least at the
basic level. We're not all going to be experts at
math. We're not all going to be experts in science,
but become a connoisseur enough to appreciate and
understand so you can see things and have more
opportunities to see and experience the beautiful
things in the world. You don't want to walk past
them. You don't want to miss opportunities because
of your ignorance. And that will give you the
chance to lead a virtuous or excellence life like
this picture, to grow flowers amidst the rubble
and the pain that is inevitable in life. And
you'll be able to do that because of these skills
in myriad places. Like I said, sport places,
science places, language places, art places, dance
places, math, literature. In other words,
education frees you. It liberates you. This is
where the liberal arts come from, which is the
genesis of this lecture. They liberate you to lead
a fully human life. But you have to cultivate
those skills, just like you did with basketball or
hockey or soccer or football. And that skill
allows for deliberation and deliberation, makes
you capable of choosing again, deliberately a way
of life.
Thank you.
Great. Thank you so much, Dr. Tweek Meyer. Good
stuff. So I will immediately throw the floor open
to questions. If you have if you want to ask a
question with your voice, you can raise your hand
and I will call on you in order. If you want to
include a question in the text, I will see if I
can go through those again in order and we'll see
what we get. So if there's a student out there who
has a question, there's one of my faculty
colleagues who has a question for anybody at all
to get us going or break the ice. Yeah. How many
girls did I score in college? Three, I was
midfielder's, so it's not a terrible day, but
obviously I wasn't a great soccer player.
OK, so we have a we have our first question and
the chat here. What advice would you give to
students about achieving excellence?
Oh, boy. Well, that's that's an open ended
question. I guess the first thing would be to
reorient yourself to the fact that it matters. So
if you think about. If you think about your
athletic experience, I'm assuming I'm talking to
an athlete, but even if I'm not talking about
college athlete, most of us play the sport to some
degree and so forth.
It takes time to cultivate the ability to dribble
a basketball shoot with proper form. Use your weak
foot in soccer. Use your weekend when you're
dribbling in basketball and so forth. So I think
students sometimes get frustrated too quickly and
forget that the same is true of any other endeavor.
And they say, oh, they get all fired up. Listen to
this tweet my she says I should take school
seriously. I go to my math class and oh, man, this
is terrible. This is torture. Let you give it some
time, rub shoulders with it, cultivate the skills.
Math may not ever be something you love, but the
more you learn, the more you'll be able to
appreciate, understand why other people do love it.
So a sporting analogy would be I'm not a swimmer
for various reasons. The most immediate being my
ears don't drain very well. So if I go into the
water, I can spend the rest of the afternoon
sometimes trying to get that water out of my ears.
But I know how to swim and I spend enough time in
the pool depreciate. Why? Somebody in a slightly
different circumstance than me could completely
fall in love with the ball and be a swimmer.
Similarly, if you engage math, it doesn't mean you
have to be a mathematician. But the attitude, the
shift in the direction of saying I have to
cultivate skills here and it will take time and
dedication and discipline and maybe to some degree
suffering. Right. You want to get good at soccer
and be able to play 90 minutes without any
substitutions. You're going have to work and work
hard to get into shape or your heart will explode
with 10 minutes left in the second half. And
sometimes that suffering isn't that much fun,
right? When I was in college, we had four a day
practices. We had a morning run of at least two
miles, and we had a vigorous practice at 10 a.m.
Then we ate lunch. Then we had to kick around at
too. And then we had another vigorous practice as
the sun went down at 5:00. And you get through two
days for two weeks, and you can barely move when
you go back to your dorm, but you realize it's
part of this larger project, this thing that you
love. And the same is true of math as people that
love math. The same is true of philosophy. It's
always my goal with my students to look at my city,
if I can hook you, you will fall in love with
philosophy. You'll be looking philosophically
around the world all the time and you'll come back
and say, wow, this was difficult and hard. But
Aristotle told me some things I hadn't thought
about before. What if I cultivate more skills? I
might learn some more things from him or from
somebody else. So I guess to summarize what I'm
saying here, I would say that the first step to
cultivating excellence is patience. And it's a
process. All right, good. Thank you. Another
question. Come in the chat. What would you do? So
I guess you you mention you become what you
practice, you do to try and build up that
motivation to try new things. Oh, boy. I mean,
that's a big open ended question, too. If I wanted
to try and put it in one word again, I would say
instead of patience, inspiration, what you believe
in and why you believe it, and then think about
the things that can push you closer to those
overarching things that really get you fired up in
life. I love soccer. I want to be a good coach. OK,
what makes a good coach beyond the obvious X's and
O's? Here's an example. You're going to have to
deal with parents. You forgot about that. What can
you do to make yourself better at dealing with
parents or think about the amount of communication
that's important in terms of motivation and
dealing with the athletes and the ability to write
and how important that would be and being a better
and more effective coach? Or think about how the
fact that you probably want to move from coach
athletic director someday and how is the athletic
director a a leader and how leaders often have to
get people on board with what they think is right,
even though they don't actually think at the time
you have to be persuasive. So here's an example
then. Related to that train of thought, cultivate
the ability at public speaking. I don't like to
speak in public. Ninety five percent of my
students say and I say, that's exactly why we're
going to work on it. You don't have to fall in
love with it. Some of you will once you cultivate
a little skill at it. But all of you are going to
need to do it, God forbid, at a funeral or at your
brother's wedding. That would be obviously not a
bad thing or in a boardroom or in a job interview.
Cultivate those skills, too, even though they're
not obviously immediately associated with that
thing you're passionate about. I want to be a
soccer. But another question come in in the chat,
is it possible to achieve excellence in all these
areas, given a person's limited time and energy?
Is it as simple as, quote unquote, good time
management skills? I would say a simple answer no.
And I don't think we're all called to be excellent
in everything. But if we cultivate that liberal
arts attitude, we can appreciate excellence in
areas that we ourselves are excellent and we all
appreciate our ignorance and be open to the
possibility that math not for me, I don't really
understand it, but I'm not going to make fun of,
quote unquote the math nerds. If I go back to my
swimming example for a variety of reasons,
swimming is not for me, but because I'm educated
and cultivated and I appreciate it enough both in
the larger sense of this attitude and the sense of
spending some time in the pool. Despite the fact
that my peers don't train, I don't scorn or laugh
or mock at the people that are swimmers or the
people that are jotters. I like to run to chase a
ball. I don't particularly like to run for its own
sake, but I did enough running pre-season and
soccer to get to the point where I could run two
miles in 12 minutes, which is not an amazing time,
but it means you're really in shape. And that was
intoxicating. That was like, wow, this is like
Forrest Gump. This is meaningful. I can go
somewhere I couldn't go before. That didn't turn
me into a runner, but it did cultivate
appreciation for an excellence that I don't
particularly have or engage.
But, uh, any other questions
either in the chat? Steve, thank you for this
interesting talk. What was the Greek or Roman
response to then? It can be a and ethics. Oh, well,
I mean. I don't know that I could give you a
strictly historical answer to that, other than to
say obviously it's endured, which means people
were affected by it. The Roman man on the street
or the or the Greek woman on the street probably
didn't have access to it because as I mentioned
before, education was a very limited thing for a
long time.
But Aristotle's text, to some degree survived due
to dumb luck, but also because people were trying
to cultivate and protect them and pass them on
because of how impactful they were to the people
that engaged and read them. You know, Plato had at
his school, the Academy, Aristotle had his
peripatetic school at the Lyceum and so forth. So
in one sense, it was probably quite limited, but
in another sense, obviously quite profound because
we're still here talking about it. Twenty five
years, twenty five hundred years later, because it
is profound and still speaks to people and also
because it survived, because of how important the
limited number of people who had the tools and
skills to engage it found it as profound.
OK, anybody else I have a question or two myself
is provided with the opportunity, but I will leave
it open to the floor if the questions are coming
from.
Let me let me show you, Dr. Touma, so what how
would you respond to somebody who says, look, this
is an elitist position. It's like youth here. Are
you telling me to become cultivated and the things
that you find important to be cultivated? I find
it to be important to be cultivated in that stuff.
I'm OK. You're watching ESPN and had to be correct.
And that's a move that can be made. And I would
not want to compel or force people to get up off
the couch as much as they ought to. I guess I
would go back to the argument I made against
hedonism in principle and say, go ahead, test it
out, see if you lead a flourishing life, which is,
strictly speaking, what Aristotle was talking
about with their happiness. The word is eudaimonia,
human flourishing, tested. See if HBO and Facebook
and Funyuns on the couch really lead to a happy,
flourishing life. And we could look at the
physiological outcomes to the personal outcomes
and everything else. And we were good evidence to
say nothing wrong with a movie per say. We
shouldn't be banning video games. We shouldn't
necessarily tell people they can't eat this or
that in any sort of legalistic way. But we know
what counts as human flourishing and it's not
sitting on the couch watching HBO 24/7. So there
are objective facts basically when it comes to
human flourishing, is what you're saying, given
the kind of species? Yeah, yeah, of course. And
the more the the more specific we get, the more
dubious it becomes because we would end up in a
one size fits all situation, which is a problem.
But that doesn't mean there are no general
principles that are objective.
Could anybody nobody wants to talk at all. It's
scary. I mentioned public speaking, nobody likes
it. Here's here's a question from a student. How
can students balance sports, school and life while
still trying to maintain good grades? And I would
say I would add maybe that the our community
college population very much there's there's not
just part time jobs. There's full time jobs here,
like students often have full time jobs, sports,
school life. How do you try to do all of that and
maintain good grades? Well, I mean, a one word
answer that doesn't do much work would say
prioritize the easy way to escape the dilemma. The
tongue in cheek answer would be, don't go to
Division one school where the athletic demands are
higher and ridiculous. But you're speaking, I
think, practically to your own situation. And I
would say I don't have a one size fits all answer
there other than to say you've got to prioritize
what's most important. There's only so many hours
in the day you do need to eat and a roof over your
head. You got to pay tuition and you probably do
need to work to some degree.
But on the other hand, right, education should
probably take a priority because the job you have
now is probably not the job you want to keep.
Never mind education for its own sake, because I
tried to argue.
I don't know if that's an answer or a dodge, but,
you know, these these are that this is why
philosophy and this this deliberative mindset that
Aristotle was talking about so important, because
real world interrupts and we have to have the
prudence, the practical wisdom to decide how
should I lead my life when I've got to pay my bill
and I want to excel in school and so forth. And
there's not a one size fits all answer there other
than say, don't overload yourself because there's
so many hours in the day. There's not a magic
bookkeeping formula that will do it. But that idea
of prioritization will help because
if you pay attention, you'll find yourself to some
degree, squandering time. It's not purely a time
management issue, but when you prioritize, you'll
find that your limited time gets spent better by
remembering what really matters and what doesn't.
But I'm hearing patients I'm hearing prioritize. I
have one where I one started about last last
second question. Our son talks a lot about or at
least refers to exemplars. Right. Not the kind of
person who exemplifies and like the virtuous
person, the excellent person. Is there anybody
that we might recognize? Is there anybody you
think is an exemplar? And maybe more specifically
is the kind of person who balances the academic
excellence with sporting excellence without a
college athlete or a professional athlete, anybody?
Good question. I'm trying to get a name to leap to
mind and nobody's leaping to mind immediately. I'm
sure if you look, you'll find some people who are
athletic, academic and all conference at the same
time and so forth.
That's one measure of what you're talking about.
You know, I can't think of anybody specifically
off the top of my head, and I guess what I would
say is instead of looking for an exemplar out
there in the media or in a popular culture, you're
really better off finding an exemplar in your
immediate circle of people you interact with. Look,
this is what we do when we choose good mentors,
for example. So
your teammates will exhibit virtues on the field
that you try to emulate, for example.
And your peers will do the same thing in the in
the lunchroom, in the classroom and so forth, if
you start to pay attention and look, it's the same
thing with your coaches. Your coaches aren't
perfect, your teachers aren't perfect, and you
don't necessarily want to emulate everything they
do. But if you pay attention, the attitude of
inquiry should be infectious. If you pay attention
to your your teachers and so forth. OK, good stuff.
OK, thank you, Dr. Touma. It's one thirty two so
we are out of time. So thanks again to our our
speaker here, Dr. Tweet. My thanks to everybody
who showed up with one last comment here is not
quite to question. Our students who are in sports
tend to be the exemplars in our classrooms that
also you see. So that's a that's that's a good
thing to hear. I'm sure you'll agree. So thanks
again, Dr. Meyer and I will be in touch on the
emails. All right. And we will well, have a
wonderful weekend. You do the same. Thanks so much
for having me. Thank you. And I will make the
recording available as soon as I as soon as I
figure that out. Sounds good. Have a great weekend.
OK. By everyone, thank you. Thanks, Pat.