Reviving the Classical Mind

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0:00 Gentlemen, thank you for being here. My name is Warren. I'll be your host this evening. Before I talk too much, the first thing I want to point out is the type of men that are in this room right now. I think this is probably one of the most impressive crowds in Nashville, at least tonight. Certainly, we've got entrepreneurs, writers, at least one farmer, an architect, a book dealer. Really, really a gathering of brilliant minds. So, please take as much opportunity as you have to meet. Hopefully, you make some friends and build some new relationships with some interesting people. Just a few housekeeping things. We have water, sweet tea, bread, wine. Please make yourselves comfortable. the format of our event. We're going to start with a talk with our guest for about 40 minutes. Then we're going to serve dinner. And while we're eating, we're going to participate in what we

1:03 call a Jeffersonian dinner, which will be explained later, but it's an interactive dining experience where all of you will have the opportunity to share your thoughts on the topic. We can bring up new ideas, we can debate, we can challenge each other. All of that is invited here. All done civily, of course. We have coffee in the back. There's some more water and some more tea back there. We have our restrooms down this hallway. And if you guys need anything at all at any point during the night, please just ask me. Um Ryan also knows the building pretty well. And uh just find us. We'll make you guys comfortable. You know, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is revival. And what does it mean to revive something? It means to bring it back. So before we bring something back, we have to have a knowledge of the past and the things of the past. And then before we

2:05 decide to revive something, we have to deem it worthy of revival. Some things are probably better left in the past. So tonight we're gathered to have a conversation, a discussion, all of us, on something that just might be worthy of revival, the classical tradition of the liberal arts and humanities. Now, as reasonable men, I think before we endeavor on this mission together, I think we should pray. Um, if you guys will join me. Dear God, thank you for another beautiful day. Thank you for our lives. Thank you for all of the happiness and the joy that you continue to give us. We ask that you bless us this evening with just an inkling of your wisdom. You allow us to learn something together. That you allow us to grow as men. to go back home as better workers,

3:07 better fathers, better husbands, better brothers, and better friends. Lord, please allow this food and this wine to nourish our bodies and our souls that we may continue to do good work on this earth. Amen. So, our speaker this evening, really excited for this event. He is a very well-published historian with a doctorate in medieval history from Yale. He specializes in Islamic Spain and also is very fascinatingly interested in culinary history which is very cool. And tonight he's going to talk to us about this tradition of the liberal arts and humanities. So, please put your hands together for Dr. HD Miller. Okay. Well, okay. Oh, thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Well, it the mood lighting. I'm uh not used to speaking in the semi dark, so

4:14 I'm not sure uh not sure what the feedback will be. I'll just pretend I'm I just pretend I'm speaking in a darkened room as I am. So, um, you know, Warren asked me to speak about the the the classical liberal arts and and the usefulness of the liberal arts, which again, I'm not really sure that they're exactly that useful in the way that most students would think about them, which is that um they're going to get you a job as an accountant or a a business manager or something like that. But my my point about the liberal arts is that they don't get you your first job. And this is what I tell students all the time, but they might get you your last job. They might get you that CEO position. And the reason is is that it the liberal arts do a couple of things for you that are really quite important. And the first is that they train your mind in to think. And this is really something that I have a hard time convincing 18-year-olds of, which is that when you write that paper in history or English or you write that

5:16 paper in in in a literature class that what you're doing is you're exercising your mind. And oftentimes I'll talk to college athletes about this. And and my daughters, both of my daughters are now rowers at Colombia. I like to say I have two man-sized daughters. uh one's six foot tall and the other's 5'11 and and they came from Nashville and they're they're uh they're they're they're uh uh you know doing quite well. So I talked to the athletes and I and I asked these athletes, do you lift weights? And and of course you know the the baseball players, the basketball players, and then you go around the room and pretty soon you're finding out that the golfers are lifting weights and and the cross-country runners. And oftentimes I ask them, why do you think you do that? and and and the an you know why aren't you just running more or why aren't you spending more time on the course? Why are you why are you in the weight room with the meattheads? And the answer is always well it it gets at muscles that we can't work out other

6:16 ways. And so my my comparison for the liberal arts is that they do exactly the same thing. It gets at muscles you can't work out the other way. when you write a paper on Hamlet or you you um analyze Shelley's poem or uh the poem Oamandius right what you're doing is you're engaging in critical thinking you know I often point out I ask students what's your f I ask a student what's your favorite movie and one one today told me I'm meeting students this week individually one told me today it was Scarface and and so I say why why is Scarface your favorite movie and you force a student to to literally go through the exact same process that you go through or I'm assuming some of you are businessmen that you go through when you're writing a business report that you're forced to to think about the reasons to advocate for your position that you're forced to a to to prioritize what is the most important reason.

7:17 You're forced to dig deep into your brain to come up with reasons to justify your choice. And that's critical thinking. Critical thinking is organizing material, digging it out of your brain, uh putting together a persuasive argument and presenting it to someone. And and and I don't really like often I have to use it because this is what people know. I have to use the phrase critical thinking, but I just like to call it thinking, right? That's just thinking. And it's thinking like an adult. It's not thinking like a child in the sense that, you know, it's not chaotic thoughts. It's an organized way of trying to figure out why you take this particular course of action. And so my my my conclusion with these students, this is the punchline in my lectures, is that um the liberal arts are like lifting lifting weights for your brain. that even when you're doing something that seems pointless, when you're when you're studying, you know, some aspect of Renaissance history with me or or as I said, you're analyzing a piece of

8:19 poetry, it's like you're in the wait room. You're you're doing that. And this is proven there. I'm trying to remember the name of this u the the the AC the acronym is the CLA, which is the uh a test that used to be given. that's sometimes still given which is given to freshmen and then given to to seniors in college to prove how much they've increased in critical thinking. And the test is this. They give you a box. They give you a box with u uh u newspaper clippings and spreadsheets and annual reports and they ask you to write a report on a business case on like why should you buy this stock or why should you do that and they measure they measure the results from freshman to senior year and again I'm sorry I can't remember the name of this it's the clas and invariably it turns out that um English majors and philosophy majors And students who've had a lot of liberal arts and the humanities do better at this because they've been through the process of critical thinking that maybe you don't get in in business

9:23 administration or maybe you don't get although the scientists do pretty well. So they you know they do their own form of critical thinking. So I my my my argument always to the provost at Lipkcom is and and and we've somewhat succeeded this year in changing our general ed to make it a little more a little more liberal arts heavy. it's taken us a decade to change it. And my argument to the provost was, look, here's the here's the numbers. Here's the uh here's the data. Uh people who have more liberal arts do better on this critical reasoning test regardless of what their major is. So that's that's my first argument. My first argument to the for the liberal arts is a very practical one based in the raw numbers that come from studying the outcomes from college. And of course, you know, as someone who's taught college going on 25 30 almost 30 years now, 30 years, I I think I taught my first class in 1995. As someone who's taught college for 30 years, um you can see this with students over the course of four years. How a

10:27 student comes in as 18 and leaves at 22 as a a significantly changed adult, someone who's able to approach the world better. And that's the second reason. The second reason is that the liberal arts train you for the world in a way that other fields don't. I often, you know, I'm I'm a medievalist by training. So I I kind of often talk about um the distinction between the old liberal arts, right? The liberal arts in the sense they free you. The liberal arts that that that that free you to do anything versus um what used to be called the surviile arts. surviile in the sense that you were moving towards a very specific occupation. So in the middle ages law school or or medical school both the medical schools and and legal schools are almost as old as the oldest universities and those were the surviile arts. Today we would talk about engineering as as being one. Again nobody uses the term survi art but me

11:27 and people I can convince to do this to get to get one up on the the scientists. uh you know so but but but in a sense is that that was the idea behind the liberal arts. It wasn't that it prepared you for a specific job. Uh they prepared you the the liberal arts and the humanities didn't prepare you to be a business manager. They prepared you to think and they prepared you to make adult decisions. You know this is this is the most shocking thing for many students um when you tell them that um frequently there is no good choice in your life or or or or equally bad there are two good choices both of which have negatives you know I'm I'm I'm from California I would love to live near my my my brothers in California but I felt my calling was to be a professor I felt that's what I had to do right so as an adult I have to make an adult decision and the adult decision ision is I can't have both things. I have to choose one or the other. And if you read literature, if you read history, that's the story of of of both of people being

12:32 forced to make decisions in which you have one one or two courses or three courses of action, none of which are very good. Or maybe they're all good in their own way with different different negatives to them. And one of the things you get from reading history and then I and and Warren Warren name checked my discipline there of talking about history and not repeating it. Um you know one of the things you read is that people are frequently in this really horrible spot where you've got nothing but bad decisions and how do you weight those decisions? How do you how do you choose what's the best co course of action? Or you read literature, right? you read uh you know you read war and peace or you read uh you know Anna Corinina you read Moby Dick right and as you read those um you realize that frequently you're just in a spot where nothing's going to work out the way you hope it will so you've got to make a decision and how do you make that decision and the answer is um well you pray you hope for the best but you've

13:35 got a kind of huristic there's a kind of way of dealing with uncertainty that the liberal arts deliver to you that literature delivers to you that that you know uh you know we so much of our so much of our uh our entertainment is entertainment for children you know Marvel movies are entertainment for children um you know you they they have a very you know pat ending um last time I checked there are and again this is you know I'm sorry to break this to you you're 18 but there really aren't happy endings. Um, you know, you can do very well, you can have a very happy life, but then people you love will die. You will die. And and that's the nature of life. This it's not happily ever after. It's happily for a set period of time and something goes wrong. And that's that's literature. Literature teaches you to deal with that. At least teaches you that you're not um that you're not on your own. It teaches you

14:35 that you're it teaches you that you're part of this continuity of human existence where you you experience something that others be for you have experienced. You know, at least you're not, you know, you're not stuck on a on a coffin after your ship has been sunk by an angry whale. You know, that's the way Moby Dick ends. It's, you know, it's it's both comic and horrifying. And and frequently life is both comic and horrifying. And you as a as a as as a person progressing through your teenage years into your early adulthood, you have to begin to confront that that reality, which is the reality that that life is both comic and good and bad and horrifying. And maybe you live in a period in the early 21st century where nobody's starving to death. there are no wars that are affecting you directly where no one's driving you from your home. And maybe you should learn to be somewhat

15:37 thankful for that because that's not the norm in human history. And and both literature and history teach you to deal with those problems. So oftentimes, you know, when I when I talk about the liberal arts, I'm I'm I'm I'm trying to bring them down a little bit. Not too much. I mean you have to they they they have they don't have much toleration for it when you start you know it's it's us old people who are more beaten down you know so uh so that that's the other reason the other reason is that literature and history they prepare you for what you're about to face as you enter adulthood and they prepare you know you can't be completely prepared for what life throws at you right you have to you have to be somewhat uh flexible but you But that's why literature does this. You you you read novels because they uh they allow you to good good novels, you know, Toltoy for example, Faulner. Good novels allow you to enter other consciousness, other the way other people think. They allow you to see the world from different

16:43 perspectives and they allow you to experience the sort of tribulations that people frequently go through. So that's the my second reason. Let's see if I can come up with another reason since I'm making this up as I go along. The uh so so those are those are the part of it, right? Um the other part and this is the part that I that I often tell students about um why why the liberal arts, why my class, this is specifically for my class on the Renaissance and Reformation. I teach a class for freshmen called uh reading the Renaissance. It's uh under the rubric at Lipkcom of great ideas in history and it's reading the Renaissance. We just read primary text from the Renaissance. And and so we get to uh Castiglion's Courtier, if you know the Courtiier, one of the great masterworks of the 16th century, probably the most popular book to come out of the Renaissance. It's never been out of print. It's in, you know, 17 languages. It was in five languages within a decade of its publication. Um when when Joyce, you

17:44 know, James Joyce uh uh read the book, he was 19, he read the book and his brother said, um, you've never been more polite and less sincere. Uh because a lot about what the uh the courtier is about is about uh uh how you appear to others. And so I I often talk to students about why reading the courtier and studying the Renaissance. And we we have a section on Renaissance art about my my I have um 30 years of teaching. I have one PowerPoint and uh I I get everything I can out of that PowerPoint which is an art PowerPoint talking about Renaissance art. And um I say here's why here's why this will be what gets you your final job. Um because when you move up the corporate ladder, you you've engaged yourself in this um what the Romans would have called the the corsis anorum, right? the the fight for honor, the race for honor. And as you move up the corporate ladder, right, the modern cursus results in you being the CEO of a

18:45 Fortune 500 company and raking in $30 million a year, right? As you move up that corporate ladder, they stop talking about the titans about the the seauite, right? Meaning that what happens at the top typically is that you're gonna go to parties with the CEO and his wife and they'll be spend the entire party talking about their art collection. And literally this is right this is what happens at the top of the heap is that yeah they might talk about sports a little bit. They might talk about politics a little bit, but oftentimes the social events you're invited to are social events that revolve around high culture, right? The the symphony, the the the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these sorts of things. And that's why it's good to have a a a beginning background in these things, a sort of cultural fluency, a sort of a knowledge of basic knowledge of the outlines of literature, American literature, right?

19:54 Russian literature, French literature, a little bit of that, a little bit of a little bit of uh art. Art's good to know, right? Some musical training. And and these are all the things. and Castiglleion. I love Castigleioni because Castiglleioni uh when you read the court here and I I like to read things out loud to students now. In fact, the uh I often talk about the favorite core and I I'm surprised why I don't teach this anymore. Sometimes I wonder why I stopped teaching things but uh I had a course that uh for a number of years and the course was this. It had 25 30 students uh all from all uh parts of Lipkcom. And what we did was we got a copy of the Iliad and we went around the room starting with the first thing reading it out loud to each other and everyone was like hating it at the start. They hated that. And by the time you get to like uh book three when people start stabbing each other in the face, all the young men are like, "Yeah, right. This is great." You know, and the young women are, you know, they're kind of engaged and people get engaged with it. And we talk, you know, we talk about uh I I I talk about the Greeks. I talk

20:58 about warfare. And uh you know, so so I I I like to do that with students. I like to read things out loud. Um I like I like to assign them to read things, but sometimes it's good to read things out loud. So I have a section from the courtier. I'll read out loud in class and challenge them. And it's about what it takes to be a courtier. Uh you know, what what does it take to be a courtier? and and and by courtier what he what Castiglion means is what does it take to be a servant to a very powerful man to be an assistant to a very powerful man and and I point out that you know some I just watched uh the um um what is it Hillary Mantel's uh the uh I forgot Wolf Hall and uh I was thinking about u uh Cromwell Thomas Cromwell who starts as a butcher son goes to Italy comes back and this is this is in the 1500s comes back and then starts off with Cardinal Woolsey and eventually ends up an Earl under Henry VIII. So, Castigleioni is describing that a young man on the make, a young man who can make his fortune is now possible as the Middle Ages Wayne

22:08 and the modern era begins. You know, the Middle Ages you you can't move up that social hierarchy. you're born a duke or you're b born a surf or a peasant, you cannot elevate yourself into the aristocracy. It happens. It happens occasionally sort of there sort of very rare circumstances. If you go if you go to the borderland of Spain, if you make it if you make it to the uh Tutonic Knights, um that's a place in these extreme situations on the edge of of of Europe. This is the place where you can maybe if you get lucky move into the f lowest ranks of the aristocracy. But the new world dawn, the modern world dawn, and now you can be a butcher son and end up an earl, one of the 12 most powerful men in England because you know what to do. You know how to serve a king. And so Castiglion is looking at examples like this. He's looking at the Medaches, a family that comes from nothing and moves to the top of European society. and he's

23:08 saying, "Okay, if you're a young man on the make, how do you go about this?" And so, Castigleion lays out in in in a few a few uh uh chapters there exactly what it is you have to do. And the first thing is you got to be good with a sword because, you know, of course, men are men are always being challenged for their honor. So, you have to be able to fight. And then he goes through a whole list of like physical characteristics like, you know, you should be of average height. You should be shapely and wellbuilt. Shapely of limb and well-built. Uh you got to learn how to wrestle. You got to learn how to run, throw stones. You have to know how to swim. It's like this. What the heck? There's like all this here, right? Have to know how to ride. You have to know how to ride in all the styles that are current among among gentlemen because the aristocrats love to ride horses, right? And then he turns to the next set of qualifications. And the next set of qualifications are you've got to learn how to be a good public speaker, right? You you have to train your voice not to be not to be soft like a woman or loud like a rustic. He says like you know a

24:09 hillbilly, right? You have to train your voice and and it's not enough to know how to speak. You've got to have something to speak about. And so he starts talking about the qualifications to to that he sees and he starts off saying, "Yeah, of course, Latin." And not just like the uh random quotes of Latin. You've got to be familiar with the historians, the orders, and and others, right? You've got to know Cicero. You've got to know all of these characters. And and it's good to know Greek. You should know Greek, too. And you should know the philosophers. You should be good in Italian. You should you should be a good writer in Italian. You know, study study writing because you'll be called upon to to write letters. And then he starts talking about the next the next set of qualifications, right? The next set of qualifications are um you should you should know how to play a musical instrument, right? Diverse musical instruments, not just one but several because um the ladies really love guys who can play a harps accord, right? And then it's uh you should know to draw and and and even maybe a little bit of

25:11 painting and and when I get to the end of this list and I get to this in this list, I ask my students, so what what are they describing? What are they describing in this list? And the answer is they don't know, right? And so I have to to prompt them. And I prompt them by saying the Italian phrase for what Castigleion is is describing iso universal, the universal man, a man who can do everything. And then usually one of the brighter students will say, "Oh, you mean the Renaissance man?" Like, "Yeah, of course." So then then what we do is we go through we go through the list of what they studied in school. So I'll ask a student, did you take did you take art in school? Yeah. Well, you know, in fifth grade I took art. Did you take music? And and half the students like, no, no, I didn't. Then I have to remind them that in fourth grade they got the recorder out. You know, everybody everybody has the the little plastic recorder they play. Right? So they had music. Did you have PE? Yeah, of course they had PE. Right. Did you have uh English? Yeah. Did you have history? Did you take a foreign language? That's increasingly that's,

26:14 you know, sadly high schools have left that behind. But the point is is that the education the education we give in in in in elementary school, high school and to some extent in college is the Renaissance education. We don't do it very well. Uh we we botch it frequently. Uh we've gotten away from that which made the education solid, you know, Latin and Greek. But uh we we try to do that. We try to produce the universal man, the universal woman. We try to produce Renaissance people. That's the point of our education. And at college, that's where you begin to differentiate yourself. Of course, there's a giant fight always between in almost every school in the country except maybe something like u St. John's University or St. John's College in Annapolis, the great book schools. Otherwise, it's a great fight between the practical education and the classical education or the more round education. Castigleion's

27:14 point about this. Castiggon's point about this education is that this education prepares you to associate with people of high status. It prepares you to be useful to people who who can reward you handsomely for it, people who can make you an earl counselor moves from the bottom of society to the very top. Then he has his head cut off. We all right? Uh we don't tell our students that. But uh you know uh so so but this this movement from the top to the bottom takes place because Cromwell is not just a well-rounded man. He's incredibly useful to Henry. He knows he knows what the king needs and he has the skills mostly lawyer skills but other reasoning skills that allow him to do this. So when when I say that the the liberal arts education can get you your last job, what I mean by that

28:14 is that this is this is the kind of education that allows you to move up the uh the ladder. The other point I the other point I make is what what's the liberal arts education for? And I and I have this little uh um this little uh PDF or I guess a screenshot a screenshot of an old book. Google books used to be much better. Now they're terrible. And I have a screenshot I took from a Google book a number of years ago that's in very small print and I wish I could blow it up and share it with people but every time I blow it up it doesn't work. It's a civil service exam right in England meaning you're 20 years old 22 years old. You've just graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. You go to London to the foreign office. You walk in and you say I want to be uh I want to go to India and make my fortune as an administrator for the Raj. And the test they give you is one of the following. You your choice. What did you study? What did you get your best grades in at Cambridge? Was it Greek? Was it math? Was it um medieval languages?

29:18 Was it history? And that's the test. The test is they give you what you what you majored in as the test. Could have been any of those. And if you score high enough, here's the training. here's 60 pounds right go away for six months come back knowing Hindi right that's and and if you come or choose choose your language Bengali Punjabi come back right and at 22 23 you're shipped off to the Punjab to be a a an assistant manager of a water district or the regional manager right lit literally that was what it took to join the bureaucracy Y and run the Raj was simply a liberal arts education and a test that proved you could think in one of these higher subjects. Literally, it's a a test in ancient Greek, which you can imagine the kind of score you would have to achieve on that to be hired by the foreign office to to to head to India. So that's why when I talk about the liberal arts, when I talk about the liberal arts and

30:23 what it prepares you for, it prepares you, if it's a good liberal arts, it prepares you to go to India and run a state. It prepares you to walk into an office and in six months learn everything you need to know to run run that business. And and and I think oftentimes we think practical education is the thing. And there are there are fields where practical educations are quite important. I mean, I don't I'm not I'm not suggesting I go to a doctor who's had uh six months on the job training, but at the same time, you know, uh uh you you might you might be perfectly happy with a u with a uh a business administrator who had no practical training. In fact, I I can guarantee that many of your fathers many of your fathers walked out of high school into a white collar job and made a very nice living on it. In fact, I know the two the two young men out of my high school graduating class, Corning,

31:25 California 1980. The two who did the best became insurance agents at 18 and a half. and both now on, you know, the the envy machine of Facebook. Um, they're both collecting muscle cars now, which is, you know, very very depressing to a professor, you know, so you know, I'm not I don't have a I don't have a GTO, a 75 GTO, but you know, so so literally you don't need a college degree to be an insurance salesman. You can build an incredibly good book and as a which was traditionally what happened traditionally, you were a banker. you walked into the bank at 18 and and and and four years later you were an assistant manager or manager. You didn't need those educations for that. Mainly because the high school education used to be good and now the college education has fallen by the wayside now. And now you're starting to look for for students with master's degrees to hire who still are not up to the level of those 18year-old boys from Corning High in 1980. Because when I went to high school, I'm like a like an I always this

32:27 is what this is the point where I start, you know, have to having to make fun of myself for my students because, you know, like an old man now. Uh you know, uh but the the the education was was fairly rigorous and and all of our teachers, you know, my my my high school English teacher went ashore on Guad Canal before the the invasion. He was a Marine scout. uh you know and he came back and he figured oh it's good to be it's good to go to college and become an English teacher uh you know and so that the the the English the the English class I had with with uh uh uh Mr. McFaden sticks with me very very compares very well to my college English classes. So, so when we talk about, you know, why the liberal arts are important, um, that that that previously the liberal arts in high school were enough to train a young man for success and college was that much more. You know, I I they often point out that in the 194 in the 1930s, the percentage of people who went to who graduated from college in 1935 in America was 3%.

33:36 and and it didn't rise above 20% until the 21st century, something like 2000, and now it's approaching 30%. 50% now go to college. Um, college used to be a sorting. It used to sort for for for both wealth to some extent, but also it sorted for intelligence. And the gentleman C uh the C you got at in 1964 um would be an A+ today. uh simply it's simply um the the the grade inflation has run away. So when when Warren talks about when I noticed Warren talks about uh founding a a a school for young men um I'm all for it assuming um that the the curriculum is sufficiently rigorous and uh directed towards towards learning the correct thing. So yes. All right. Let me check let me check the time here because I I have no idea where I am. Oh. Uh, how much more do I have? Keep going. All right, I gotta keep going. Uh, let

34:39 me take a drink. So, but this is, you know, this is this is what I talk about to students. So, I talk about Castigleion. I talk about uh, you know, why why why this education is so important. Um, I talk about I talk about u, you know, we talk about art and why why studying art is important for you. Not just because it's uh not just because it's something that's a conversational but because art in the Renaissance represents the peak of human achievement for that period. You know, we talk about, you know, we were talking today, I had this assignment where students have to read a three-page article about Michelangelo, and it's about the genius of Michelangelo, and then they have to come and talk to me about the uh creation of Adam is the is the topic, and they have to come and talk to me about it. And uh the reason the reason I find this article important and the reason I want students to consider this is because it's a kind of monumental achievement. It's not it's not an inconsequential thing. It's something that is beyond so far beyond the ordinary of human achievement that you should know about

35:42 it. You should know about Renaissance art because this these are people operating at the very very very highest level of human achievement. You know, Garrison Matthews, the one NBA player from Lipkcom, I guess he's now done. Garrison, you know, Garrison was my adise. He majored in um uh uh history. And so, um, Garrison was my adisee and he's a great, you know, he's a good good guy, very intense. And, uh, he, uh, was the best basketball player I I'd ever met, right? Uh, personally, the best basketball player of Lip Scum that year, the best basketball player in the Atlantic Sun Conference, right? And then he's like hanging on by his toenails in the NBA for seven years because he's a really good three-point shooter. Meaning literally our funnel for talent for basketball is so great that the the most gifted athlete you personally know is barely barely hanging on in the NBA. And I say, look, this is what the

36:42 Renaissance was for art. Every 10-year-old who could hold a pencil and draw on on on on a piece of paper, as long as he wasn't an aristocrat, although some of the aristocrats trained in art, too. As long any any 10-year-old who could draw was put into an apprentice program. And 99% of those apprentices ended up after seven years being incredibly good artists. You would be happy to own anything by any of those apprentices at the end of that seven 10 year training period. Churches throughout Europe are full of art produced by people you have never heard of. And then right there's LeBron, right? Literally like how how you know this is, you know, we we in English in in in in basketball there are these basketball players who almost have supernatural talent, right? Like you can't comprehend that. And so that's Michelangelo. Michelangelo is a person of superlative talent and he's the end result of this funnel. He's so impressive that when he dies, they invent art history. One of his younger

37:44 contemporaries, a guy named Giorgio Vasari, he's like, "There'll never be another Michelangelo." And Vasari sits down and writes an 80page biography of of Michelangelo. Um, literally, it's that, you know, talking about his background. And then he goes through and analyzes every piece of art he can find from Michelangelo. And Vasari does this so well that everyone's like, "You got to do this for everybody." And so Vasari puts out his lives of the artists. And but but the point I'm making is that someone like Michelangelo and the reason you study Michelangelo is for the same reason you might enjoy LeBron or Tom Brady more, right? Their their their talent is sort of ephemeral. You watch the game, it's incredible. You see LeBron move or I I would say Michael Jordan. Excuse me, I'm old. I'm sorry. I have to say LeBron for my students. I would say Michael I would say Michelangelo, too. uh Michael Jordan to you all, right? But that's ephemeral. You might see it on film and it's not as you know doesn't doesn't have the same impact to seeing

38:44 the game in person where the cyine chapel is still there and you can go look at it and that's maybe not eternal but a a work of art produced by someone at the far far end of human ability that that you know can still move you. So that's why I have my students talk about come talk to me about the creation of Adam and what we end up is I try to guide them to certain conclusions one of which is one and this the article is called the uh the gen the creation of Adam and the genius of Michelangelo by U Paul Barrosski and uh I try to guide them to a couple three conclusions. The first is and this is something this is the reason this article appeals to me so much is because I was you know went to a state went to a u a private a public high school and a state university and every time we saw this um image of this the central image of the cysteine chapel. Every time we saw it it was presented in my class in the classroom

39:44 as being about humanism about the the the the naked body of Adam and so that was how I learned it. And when I read this article seven, eight years ago, um, uh, the the author reminded me that guess what, this is an incredibly Christian work of art and and I kind of slap my head and I say, "Oh, yeah, of course." You know, it's in a church. How could I not see that it's of God? Um, but this is what many art historians miss, right? And Michelangelo knew his scripture backwards and forwards and chose a very key moment. The second and this is this is what makes that image so important what makes it so so uh affecting and that is that it's not merely that Michelangelo can paint a beautiful face. It's not merely that he can get all the muscles in uh in Adam's thigh correct in the right right place. It's what makes the genius of Michelangelo is that that composition is so radically different from the way

40:44 anybody else would do it. And I show I make them look at images of u make them look at images of other artists who've done this. It's always God standing over it pointing at the body of Adam. You know, you know, they're fine, right? But then Michelangelo chooses to have to have God swooping across the heavens with Adam, you know, like that. and God reaching and and so I make the students I try to lead the students to that that moment where they can see that um that indeed the the composition is what makes the genius of it that the ability to see things in this completely different it's like you know you watch you watch again I tell a student you watch LeBron make a shot or make a play and and you're wondering how can he do that and every artist in Italy was would see that when it was unveil you know Raphael has a breakdown down. Raphael would was competing with to some extent was competing with Michelangelo for that commission and uh it's un he gets he gets a preview of it before it's unveiled and Raphael starts crying and

41:48 runs off and spends like six six months retooling how he he draws figures. That's how impactful it is. So um so yeah so so that's that's the uh that's my uh my my attempt to lead students to a type of nosis to try to try to lead them to some understanding of why a knowledge of art of Renaissance art is important because you're looking at the peak of human achievement. You know, it's a my my fasile comparison to to uh LeBron or Michael Jordan is to try to get them to understand that you're seeing something that's that's extraordinary and extraordinary in human history. And it's because they're they're invested in this because it's not just that they do this because they're making money. is because the entire culture is pointing towards this art that they're searching for boys who can draw and they're training them in this intense way much as we search for boys who can play basketball and training them in a tense way. You know, now increasingly basketball young basketball players don't even go to high

42:48 school with other kids. They go to special basketballmies which you don't know no thank you right but uh they come out as very good basketball players and if you get the if you get to play in the NBA it's millions of dollars but if you could draw like Michelangelo if you could paint like Michelangelo it was the equivalent in the in the the uh 16th century you would make a fortune doing that. Not that Michelangelo seemed to care much about the money. He seemed to be a singular figure. So the so you know why why are the liberal arts important? The liberal arts are important because you have stories like that. You have stories about the uh the far side of human achievement. You know I I I read uh I read novels. I read Toltoy and I when I picked up I picked up War and Peace after a 30-year hiatus from the book. I picked it up again about six or seven years ago. And my first thought was how do you do this? Like how do you get into other people's heads this way? How do you how do you understand the human condition so perfectly,

43:50 right? And and so again, you think about human achievement and the far end of it and something like to read War and Peace, you experience that. To see Michelangelo, you experience that. And and I guess to see LeBron play, you might experience that, too. It's seems more mundane. Certainly not as emotional or as effective, but it's the same, right? And of course, we talk then we talk about I guess I'm just talking about my class. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Uh, you know, War Warren was expecting something more profound. The, uh, you know, we talk about my class and I talk about the, uh, we we'll expand from there and we'll talk about why Ratatouille is my one of my favorite movies. You all know Ratatouille. Uh, it's one of my favorite movies because Ratatouille has the absolute best portrait of a critic. Like, uh, like the the the uh, I, you know, I'm always pointing out a couple things. I'll always point out many things but I always point out that u Pixar at its peak when Pixar was the best movie theater movie uh studio in uh u Hollywood the best animation studio ever it was like almost exclusively Christian

44:53 and like explicitly church-going Christians um those guys all they they talk about they all talk about going to church and they have a sense of they have a sense of story that's um quite classical but the thing about Ratatouille is that the character of Anton Ego is a genuine critic. He presents initially as a as a as a villain. He looks like a vampire, but he's the pure critic. Um he doesn't care about the artist. He cares exclusively about the art. And he's to the point that when um excuse me, when it's revealed that uh his his favorite restaurant is uh staffed by a rat, um he destroys his career as a critic, but he doesn't care because he only cares about the art. And so literally something like something like um Ratatouille is a that that Anton ego is the perfect critic. And so then we talk about the feedback loop between critics and patrons and artists and the complexity of it. And that's that's

45:55 excuse me. So um yeah. All right. Um I think I'm done. Warren uh wrap up now. So