Leo D.M.J. Aurini - February 21, 2015


The Medieval Trivium


Episode Stats

Length

9 minutes

Words per Minute

139.38306

Word Count

1,345

Sentence Count

90

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

The Medieval Trivium was the foundation of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and without these things you can t reason in a proper manner. These three things were what was required for a liberal arts degree and without them, you just could not reason properly.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey folks,
00:00:29.980 in this video I'd like to tell you about the Medieval Trivium,
00:00:33.980 the foundation of the liberal arts degree that you would get in the time,
00:00:37.980 and why it is so superior to the modern joke that is liberal arts.
00:00:43.980 Now the Medieval Trivium came actually from ancient Greece,
00:00:47.980 you can find this in Plato's writings,
00:00:49.980 and it took up three parts, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, in that order.
00:00:57.980 These were the foundations of systemic reasoning,
00:01:02.980 of rational thought and public discourse,
00:01:06.980 and without these things you really cannot reason in a proper manner.
00:01:12.980 Now it certainly sounds strange to us today.
00:01:15.980 Grammar, logic, and rhetoric?
00:01:17.980 You know, logic sounds like an education,
00:01:19.980 but rhetoric is just what they have on commercials.
00:01:22.980 And grammar, well, does it really matter if you use the correct grammar in your writing?
00:01:28.980 Except there was a method to all of this.
00:01:30.980 There was a reason for it.
00:01:32.980 There's a reason that this tradition lasted for thousands of years,
00:01:35.980 and it was only recently that we threw it all out with our modern educational theories.
00:01:41.980 And it is this.
00:01:44.980 You start with grammar.
00:01:46.980 Grammar is about the basic building blocks of language.
00:01:51.980 It's not the didactic form of grammar that we have nowadays,
00:01:55.980 where you have to memorize how everything goes,
00:01:57.980 and you get it right or you get it wrong,
00:01:58.980 and why is this the way we do things?
00:02:00.980 We don't know, it just is.
00:02:02.980 Answer correctly on the test.
00:02:04.980 That's not what grammar used to be.
00:02:06.980 Grammar used to be about actually understanding how a language works,
00:02:12.980 how sentences are constructed, how they interact with one another.
00:02:17.980 And furthermore, studying grammar, Latin grammar specifically,
00:02:22.980 taught you history because you studied grammar by reading ancient texts,
00:02:28.980 historical works, medical works, so on and so forth.
00:02:32.980 You learn about the real world as you're teaching yourself grammar.
00:02:37.980 Not this lazy fox jumping over the log nonsense.
00:02:42.980 You're actually reading worthwhile material as you teach yourself the grammar.
00:02:47.980 And by understanding the grammar, understanding Latin grammar in particular,
00:02:52.980 English is a mutt tongue, and we don't understand half the rules
00:02:55.980 because there's no obvious consequence for any of the rules.
00:02:59.980 Who, whom? What's that? What's an accusative case?
00:03:03.980 In Latin, all of this makes sense.
00:03:05.980 Latin is a fundamentally rational language
00:03:08.980 where all the constructions are very well worked out and make a lot of sense.
00:03:13.980 And so by disciplining your mind to use words in these correct manners,
00:03:19.980 you discipline the basis of your thought.
00:03:22.980 Now, once you've studied grammar, you move up to logic.
00:03:27.980 Logic, and I'm sure some of you have studied the philosophy of logic.
00:03:31.980 It's the basis of electrical engineering.
00:03:34.980 All electric circuits work on Boolean logic.
00:03:38.980 Logic is taking these sentences that are grammatically correct
00:03:43.980 and manipulating them, having them interact with one another
00:03:47.980 to create a new synthesis, to create something new that you did not have
00:03:52.980 before you when you just had the grammar.
00:03:54.980 The grammar is the facts, and now you're using logic to take the facts
00:03:59.980 and build something new, to build a machine out of it.
00:04:02.980 And finally, rhetoric.
00:04:05.980 Rhetoric is the art of persuasion.
00:04:08.980 But, just like logic is built off of grammar, rhetoric is built off of logic.
00:04:15.980 To have a rhetorically sound argument that convinces people,
00:04:19.980 you need to have done your homework.
00:04:21.980 You need to have studied the material.
00:04:23.980 You need to have worked the logic of it all out,
00:04:27.980 how all these things interact.
00:04:30.980 And then rhetoric is the art of presenting it to other people,
00:04:35.980 communicating to other people,
00:04:37.980 and taking this synthesis, this new idea that you've developed with logic,
00:04:42.980 and bringing it into the world.
00:04:46.980 Of course, there are some higher arts as well, but the trivium.
00:04:50.980 These three basic things were what was required for a liberal arts degree,
00:04:55.980 and without them, you just could not reason properly.
00:05:00.980 Now, let's contrast that to the modern education system.
00:05:05.980 These days, we start out by teaching kids rhetoric.
00:05:14.980 All of the K-12 education is focused upon rhetoric.
00:05:19.980 Convincing arguments that you memorize, and then you toss them up on the test.
00:05:26.980 And if you remember what the argument is, you get a point.
00:05:29.980 If you get it wrong, you get dinged, and you have to go read the book and memorize it again.
00:05:35.980 So we are chock full of these rhetorical arguments.
00:05:38.980 You know, some of which are wonderfully true and accurate arguments.
00:05:42.980 Others, which are more than a little bit of nonsense.
00:05:45.980 Much of the environmentalism that we were fed back in the 90s was more about picking up garbage than saving the planet.
00:05:52.980 Which, picking up garbage doesn't really have much to do with saving the planet,
00:05:57.980 but they just wanted the kids to pick up garbage for free.
00:05:59.980 So, right there, you get an instance of rhetoric that was complete nonsense, that had a disingenuous motive behind it.
00:06:07.980 But, of course, kids are too stupid to see through it.
00:06:09.980 They buy into it hook, line, and sinker.
00:06:12.980 So we start with rhetoric from the K-12.
00:06:16.980 Here are all the arguments that you need to believe in, and you need to be able to repeat, to be a good citizen.
00:06:23.980 Now, if you move on to university, you might just start learning a little bit of logic.
00:06:30.980 See, in university, you take a whole bunch of rhetorical arguments, you go find a whole bunch of sources,
00:06:36.980 you know, for your English degree, or your history degree, or your, you know, social sciences degree.
00:06:42.980 You find these arguments, and then you logic them together to sort of, but not really, create a new argument.
00:06:49.980 You know, you're given a ridiculous binary question on the essay, and you have to find six sources,
00:06:55.980 cram them together using logic, and say yes or no.
00:07:00.980 It doesn't really matter.
00:07:01.980 Just as long as you have all the sources you should, and it's coherent, boom.
00:07:06.980 You pass.
00:07:08.980 And if you're really, really careful, if you pay attention in life, if you're an autodidact,
00:07:16.980 you just might get to grammar.
00:07:19.980 You might start reading things other than the editorials, other than the official history,
00:07:26.980 the concluded history, the story of history that we're taught.
00:07:30.980 You might actually go above and beyond and start looking up facts.
00:07:35.980 You might start looking up the basic construction of reality.
00:07:39.980 You look at the French Revolution, so I hear it was the greatest thing that ever happened, you know.
00:07:44.980 Liberté, fraternité, égalité, so on and so forth.
00:07:49.980 You might actually go look at the facts, and count how many people died,
00:07:52.980 and look at the mechanisms, and look at how the monarchy was before that.
00:07:55.980 And you might come to a very different conclusion.
00:07:58.980 This current education system sets us up to be the most opinionated and ignorant people on the planet,
00:08:10.980 because we start with rhetoric.
00:08:12.980 Rhetoric is the high-level stuff.
00:08:14.980 Until you've done the groundwork, you have no business doing rhetoric.
00:08:18.980 You don't want a salesman running a technology firm.
00:08:23.980 Heck, that was the message of Jurassic Park, that Hammond, great guy.
00:08:28.980 He was a salesman at heart, not a scientist.
00:08:30.980 He did not understand what he was playing with.
00:08:33.980 He did not understand the consequences.
00:08:36.980 And that's what we are.
00:08:37.980 We are a world, a country, a nation, a society of salesmen, of narcissists,
00:08:44.980 falling for any advertising jingle out there with not even the remotest idea that there are such things as facts.
00:08:51.980 A few of us are logical.
00:08:53.980 You know, you can certainly see this with some of them.
00:08:56.980 They take these rhetorical arguments, cram them together, and come up with ridiculous nonsense.
00:09:02.980 You know, this is the core of postmodernism.
00:09:04.980 It's rhetoric plus logic with no grammar whatsoever, no facts going into it.
00:09:09.980 It's quite a pretty little performance art.
00:09:13.980 But it's not knowledge.
00:09:15.980 It's not truth.
00:09:17.980 It's not systemized thought or reasoning.
00:09:25.980 So folks, that is why medieval scholars were far better educated than these scholars we have today.
00:09:36.980 Barini out.