“I have a theory, and the theory is mine,” says the pompous twit on the old Monty Python show, “which is to say that it is my theory.” And after he engages in one pointless tautology after another, he delivers himself of his theory about the dinosaurs, which is that they are slender at the head, grow big in the middle, and then taper off again at the tail.

The main difference between his “theory” and most of what I encounter on social media is that he happens to be correct; that’s what bodies of dinosaurs do. But his theory, which he is quite proud of, is like the opinions that we are all encouraged to have and to express, in this way.  It takes no brains, and no careful study of the matter, to come up with it.  A salutary difficulty is lacking.  Difficulty keeps us honest.

I have sometimes called it the Principle of the Bad Violinist.  There is no such person, because it is so difficult to play the instrument well enough so that your audience will not bleed from their ears, you must be a very fine player, or you will not play at all.  The principle applies to a wide range of endeavors. (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: The Classical Education Reformers Have a Chance)

The poetry I find in my old editions of The Century Magazine is sometimes excellent; usually interesting; always at least competent. For there was a floor below which the poets could not sink.  That floor was provided by the need for metrical form. Few people can compose a good limerick, let alone a decent and sensible poem in meter and rhyme.  So most people will not make the attempt in the first place, or if they do and it does not succeed metrically, the result will be scouted at once. 

But once free verse became the norm, that initial and fundamental difficulty was obviated, and the result has been a flood of bad work. I am not saying that all free verse is bad: far from it.  I am saying that it is a hundred times easier to write bad poetry in free verse than it is to write it in meter and rhyme.  To extend Robert Frost’s metaphor, you get a lot more tennis players if you take away the net.

Similarly, you can tell the rate at which an academic discipline can be corrupted by the difficulty involved in engaging in it at all.  Medieval studies, for example, held out for a long time against the simplistic and the politically tendentious, because you actually had to know a lot of things to engage in the enterprise, and some of those things took a long time to learn: languages, most obviously.

In the sciences, physics is the last to go, because it is too heavily dependent upon high-level mathematics and the identification and analysis of interacting forces, none of which can be encapsulated in slogans.  It is very hard to be a bad physicist, simply because it is very hard to be any kind of physicist at all.

Other disciplines should also be thus protected, but are not, because the standards for engaging in them have been altered.  Take history, for example.  If the historian’s job is to determine what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and how most accurately, fairly, and dispassionately to conceive of it as a moment in the story of a people, then that takes many years of patient and sometimes tedious work.  The good historian must cultivate virtues that are of little use to the politician or the man of action: delayed gratification, humility, a broad survey of many apparently unrelated items, a scrupulous submission to the truth, the capacity to enter imaginatively into the motives of persons far removed from yourself and your own beliefs, and a modest assessment of what we can know for certain, what we can assert with a fair probability, and what must remain but a decent conjecture. 

Doubtless, the historian’s human biases will come into play: Edward Gibbon does not well hide his disdain for the ancient Church. Still, Gibbon was a great historian, as was Francis Parkman in his magisterial work on the Indian tribes of North America.  But once you let it be known that political utility is the criterion for judging the historian, or once you say that since no one is ever perfectly objective, the very demand of objectivity may be dismissed, as if one story were as good as another just because they are both stories, then you have cleared away that foundational difficulty, and fools rush in where wise men once walked only with the gravest circumspection.

For another example, take the teaching of English literature.  It used to be assumed that English was its own intellectual field, with its principal eras, genres, and authors to be studied.  Let us suppose that you conceive of your task, in the tenth grade, to introduce students to British poetry from its beginnings in Old English to the end of the Victorian era.  It is too much to cover, so of course you will have to let slip many a first-rank poet.  But the difficulty remains, and it is good for you that it does.  How do you teach students how to read a poem by John Donne, when they cannot hear the meter, and when they do not expect the images and the metaphors in a poem to refer to specific things and their specific actions?  How do you teach students how to hear the implicit and often quite subtle ironies in a dramatic monologue by Robert Browning?  How do you show them the difference between what Wordsworth means by Nature and what Pope meant by it? 

Please understand, dear Reader, that I know from nearly four decades of experience that most college freshmen will not recognize even the names of the four poets I have mentioned.  No, all these things involve some formidable initial difficulties, and that is why most college English majors now do their best to avoid them, and why our high school students will encounter very little poetry written before 1900.  It is also why English is so often taught as the tail-end of the political dog. (READ MORE: Tocqueville, the Indians, and America’s Natural Bounty)

In a democratic republic, or rather among the habits that persist after the soul of the thing itself has died, everyone is encouraged to have and to express political opinions, and the further most of us are from the exigencies of difficult labor (farming, mining, quarrying, lumbering, construction) and of difficult mercantile enterprise (transportation of materials and goods, manufacture, trade, banking), the easier it appears to us to form opinions about anything in the world, and the more gratification we derive from expressing them, if only because everyone else is doing so, and the fight is on.

And perhaps a certain psychological factor is also at work.  Somewhere, deep down, buried under the sludge of self-esteem and many years of slovenly schooling, the large majority of the protestors at our universities must know that they are pretty ignorant of Israeli and Arab politics; that they would be hard pressed to name a single figure of importance on either side in 1950 or even 2000; that they cannot describe the land and its features; that they do not know what it is like to be an ordinary Israeli citizen, whether Jew or Christian or Muslim, trying to live an ordinary life.  I am not taking sides in this issue.  I am suggesting, though, that an uneasy conscience, a sense in the gut that you do not know what you are talking about, tends, in a highly charged political atmosphere, to make you shriller, more strident, more obnoxious, quicker to charge your opponents with wickedness or bad faith, and less open to calm and rational discussion.  Again, there is no perceived initial difficulty.  The floodgates are open.

Since one shout raises another in opposition, we see that the habits of self-expressed stupidity and impatience breed the same in others, if only because nobody enjoys being yelled at.  The results are there on social media for everyone to see.  Let true schools learn the lesson.