In Praise of the Gods

The physical world contains the scars of these centuries of rationalism: Almost no new cities match the beauty of the few remaining medieval city centers, which themselves are so cherished that people will spend thousands to fly there, just to see them in person for a few days.

The largest scale art they may interact with daily is a fancy rug, or perhaps a movie on a screen, or a print from art dot com. People 1,000 years ago walked among squares with marble sculptures, domes, stone arcades, and past village churches with gardens kept by the clergy that lived there. As a matter of life, some walked through what constituted art on the scale that people today, even very rich people, may never experience.

When complexities are quickly grasped by experience, we call this intuition. It is our empirical (of the senses)—not our rational—insights that lead us towards good intuition. To practice this skill, you must grant your senses repeated exposure to the complex world. However it is a mistake to rely on only personal experience, for any one person’s life is not long or broad enough. To sustain the amount of experience needed to develop intuition, you must consume stories, take in all manner of literature, myths, and fables. In earlier times, everyone had a mythological education. More visual media does not have the same effect: TV is so pernicious because unlike other storytelling mediums, it almost never asks you to think, it asks only for your attention.

Good stories develop their meaning across many levels. To summarize them into statements is to void them of their images, metaphors, allegories. The meanings and knowledge are not in the summary, but in the art itself. Knowledge is gained as those works of art work upon us.

As it is with stories, so it is with other things in our environments. Modern construction feels permanently stale and doctored because most of it is not meant to create a desirable place to live, not composed of wonders, but instead is a summary of some features needed to house people, and a summary of some designs used before. Much is lost.

Without an education of stories, it is not only difficult to build your intuition, it is difficult to learn how to learn, and difficult to reason about virtue. Fairy tales and Bildungsroman stories work so well because maturity is almost impossible to transmit rationally, but is a very compelling concept aesthetically. It is learned by seeing others grow the courage to make meaningful decisions, and accept the duty and power and consequences that flow from them. It teaches a mastery that cannot simply be taught through abstract school lessons. If done properly, children will look forward to their place in the world. Ethics and aesthetics perish when intuition is feeble. Atrocities at scale are most possible when intuition is beaten out of people, and replaced with wholly authoritarian epistemic conditioning.

The stock of human wisdom in any individual is small, the store of wisdom held within society is much larger, and much less legible. With our own intuition, every person starts at the beginning. With tradition we partake in viewing and building larger maps of the world, and while the map is mostly water, and at the edges out of date, if you look closely you will find islands that you could never discover on your own. It is said that traditions are answers to enduring questions, and so dispensing with them because we do not understand them (or "see the point of them") is an unfortunate way to squander this inheritance. We today make few metaphorical cathedrals, and the reason may stem from this: A lack of tradition leaves us lopsided. Without traditions it is still easy for us to form opinions, but difficult to form convictions.

“The universities do not teach all things. A doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller because he must enquire of the world. Experiment is not sufficient. Experience must verify what can be accepted or not accepted.”