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By Edward Tingley
Learning from ‘those old dudes’
If you are a Christian thinking about college, but feel you are a rather
delicate young thing not quite ready for a wake-up call, then read no further.
This article is not for you.
However, if you plan to – as people say – ‘get an education,’ you need to hear about Lance.
Lance thinks college is the place to start living. He thinks living means doing
whatever beckons hardest, and just seeing how that goes – after which there’s the crash and burn (‘learning experience’), and . . . well, it all works out in the end, right? Life lessons. Lord have
mercy. It’s all good, dude.
Of course Lance hasn’t read Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas or Meister Eckhart – or, really, any other people who have actually studied life. They would have
told him that what he is doing in his four-year experiment in ‘living’ is practicing the habits that sap life – thus handicapping himself for when life begins, yet again, after college.
Life lessons? Try opposite of life: Gomorrah U, turning from grace, something like that.
He hasn’t read those old guys, because in that crazy course calendar, there were just
waaaay too many things that, well, beckoned harder.
Financial Management is important, because we all have to deal with money;
Propaganda and the News is going to help, because – duh – we all read news; Globalism and the Post-Industrial Corporation is essential
right now; Psych is key, because we are all coping with how we tick; and The
Sociology of Intimate Relationships is just way cool. Aristotle, et cetera?
Maybe next term.
But next term, when he signs up for Philosophy, his professor is not necessarily
going to zero in on the wake-up call that ‘those old dudes’ had for young people: that they were in danger of not becoming truly human
(i.e. Christlike, like The Man).
For some profs, that ‘becoming human’ stuff is either good for a laugh (comic mockery always goes over big) – or useful for setting up the real lecture, on how these ancient grandfathers
were so against life/pleasure/sex/self-determination.
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And in any case, Lance doesn’t always make it to class because . . . heck, freedom is sweet.
Okay. But what if Augustine (4th century dude) or Aristotle (4th century BC
dude) is right? What if John Addison (18th century English bloke) is right?
In 1709, Addison was writing about the choice each young person has to make – between a life of gratification (indulging every beckoning desire), and a life
that God would not disdain at the Last Judgement. (You haven’t forgotten that’s coming up, have you?)
Addison said he was writing for “those who are still in the deplorable state of non-existence, and whom I
earnestly entreat to come into the world.” Until we are formed – human, as he said – we are “embryos struggling towards birth.”
If you’re concerned about the global corporation, the news, war in the world, mental
disorders and other things you and I both care about, then pause to think:
might it be that we have too many ‘half-made’ people running around loose?
August 2009
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