Transcript Jacques Barzun Powerpoint

Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun is a French-born American historian of ideas and
culture.Barzun was born in Créteil, France, to Henri-Martin and Anna-Rose Barzun, he
spent his childhood in Paris and Grenoble. His father was a member of the Abbaye de
more..
Jacques Barzun:Among the words that can be all things to all
men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most
common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today
would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which
ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no
agreement seems to exist about what race means.
#Risk
Jacques Barzun:The truth is, when all is said and done, one
does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
#Truth
Jacques Barzun:If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science
offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think
scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think
scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they
think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday were
unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring
from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible; if they think that
the ability to write down symbols and read manometers is fair grounds for
superiority and pride, and if they think that science steadily and automatically
makes for a better world — then they have wasted their time in the science lecture
room; they live in an Ivory Laboratory more isolated than the poet's tower, and
they are a plain menace to the society they belong to. They are a menace whether
they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of
being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity.
#Science and Scientists
Jacques Barzun: Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it
is a lost tradition. #Teachers and Teaching
Jacques Barzun:The one thing that unifies men in a given age
is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem
that these philosophies are designed to solve.
#Philosophers and Philosophy
Jacques Barzun: Whoever wants to know the heart and mind
of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of
the game. #Baseball
Jacques Barzun:I have always been — I think any student of
history almost inevitably is — a cheerful pessimist.
#Pessimism
Jacques Barzun:My notion about any artist is that we honor
him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his
plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over
ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more.
#Music
Jacques Barzun:Everybody keeps calling for Excellence —
excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as
soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the
other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that
thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down.
"Standing out" is undemocratic.
#Science and Scientists
Jacques Barzun:On the one hand, society needs a common
faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on
the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a
new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult
enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds
another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time.
#Men
Jacques Barzun:Philosophers no longer write for the
intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few
thousand academic philosophers in the world do not stint
themselves: they maintain more than seventy learned journals.
But in the handful that cover more than one subdivision of
philosophy, any given philosopher can hardly follow more than
one or two articles in each issue. This hermetic condition is
attributed to "technical problems" in the subject. Since William
James, Russell, and Whitehead, philosophy, like history, has
been confiscated by scholarship and locked away from the
contamination of general use.
#Science and Scientists
Jacques Barzun:We seem to live mainly in order to see how we live, and this habit
brings on what might be called the externalizing of knowledge; with every new
manual there is less need for its internal, visceral presence. The owner or user
feels confident that he possesses its contents — there they are, in handy form on
the handy shelf. And with their imminent transfer to a computer, that sense of
possession will presumably attach itself to the hard disk or the phone number of
the data bank.
To say this is also to say that the age of ready reference is one in which
knowledge inevitably declines into information. The master of so much packaged
stuff has less need to grasp context or meaning than his forbears: he can always
look it up. His active memory is otherwise engaged anyway, full of the arbitrary
names, initials, and code figures essential to carrying on daily life. He can be
vague about the rest: he can always check it out.
#Computers
Jacques Barzun:A person is not a democrat thanks to his
ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or
she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes
for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose:
a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate
others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any
case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits
his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to
oppress the rest of us.
#Law and Lawyers
Jacques Barzun:No one has ever used historical examples,
near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be
found in every page of Shaw.
#Leaders and Leadership
Jacques Barzun:Can an idea — a notion as abstract as
Relativism — produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all
the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as
anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but
the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called)
has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it
absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society,
and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting
than Relativism.
#Philosophers and Philosophy
Jacques Barzun:On reflection, moral judgment in the arts
appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion
and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some
critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely
shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse
of righteousness to politics and social issues.
#Politicians and Politics
Jacques Barzun:A student under my care owes his first
allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be
burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had
contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying
my requirements.
#Politicians and Politics
Jacques Barzun: Only a great mind that is overthrown yields
tragedy. #Tragedies
Jacques Barzun:When plugged in, the least elaborate computer
can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The
greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its
variability is its superiority.
#Computers
Jacques Barzun:The need for a body of common knowledge and
common reference does not disappear when a society is
pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that
people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar
ground and as we say, speak a common language. It not only
saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of
mutual confidence and goodwill. One is not addressing an alien, as
blank as a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is
filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself.
Otherwise, with the unstoppable march of specialization, the
individual mind is doomed to solitude and the individual heart to
drying up.
#Writers and Writing
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