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Feb. 21, 2015 - Davis Aurini
09:22
The Medieval Trivium

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Hey folks.
In this video, I'd like to tell you about the medieval trivium, the foundation of the liberal arts degree that you would get in the time, and why it is so superior to the modern joke, that is liberal arts.
Now, the medieval trivium came actually from ancient Greece.
You can find this in Plato's writings.
And it took up three parts.
Grammar, logic, and rhetoric, in that order.
These were the foundations of systemic reasoning, of rational thought and public discourse.
And without these things, you really cannot reason in a proper manner.
Now, it certainly sounds strange to us today.
Grammar, logic, and rhetoric?
You know, logic sounds like an education, but rhetoric is just what they have on commercials.
And grammar, well, does it really matter if you use the correct grammar in your writing?
Except there was a method to all of this.
There was a reason for it.
There's a reason that this tradition lasted for thousands of years, and it was only recently that we threw it all out with our modern educational theories.
And it is this.
You start with grammar.
Grammar is about the basic building blocks of language.
It's not the didactive form of grammar that we have nowadays, where you have to memorize how everything goes, and you get it right or you get it wrong, and why is this the way we do things?
We don't know, it just is.
Answer correctly on the test.
That's not what grammar used to be.
Grammar used to be about actually understanding how a language works, how sentences are constructed, how they interact with one another.
And furthermore, studying grammar, Latin grammar specifically, taught you history because you studied grammar by reading ancient texts, historical works, medical works, so on and so forth.
You learn about the real world as you're teaching yourself grammar.
None of this lazy fox jumping over the log nonsense.
You're actually reading worthwhile material as you teach yourself the grammar.
And by understanding the grammar, understanding Latin grammar in particular, English is a mutt tongue, and we don't understand half the rules because there's no obvious consequence for any of the rules.
Who, whom?
What's that?
What's an accusative case?
In Latin, all of this makes sense.
Latin is a fundamentally rational language where all the constructions are very well worked out and make a lot of sense.
And so by disciplining your mind to use words in these correct manners, you discipline the basis of your thought.
Now, once you've studied grammar, you move up to logic.
Logic, and I'm sure some of you have studied the philosophy of logic.
It's the basis of electrical engineering.
All electric circuits work on Boolean logic.
Logic is taking these sentences that are grammatically correct and manipulating them, having them interact with one another to create a new synthesis, to create something new that you did not have before you, when you just had the grammar.
The grammar is the facts, and now you're using logic to take the facts and build something new, to build a machine out of it.
And finally, rhetoric.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, but just like logic is built off of grammar, rhetoric is built off of logic.
To have a rhetorically sound argument that convinces people, you need to have done your homework.
You need to have studied the material.
You need to have worked the logic of it all out, how all these things interact.
And then rhetoric is the art of presenting it to other people, communicating to other people, and taking the synthesis, this new idea that you've developed with logic, and bringing it into the world.
Of course, there are some higher arts as well, but the trivium, these three basic things were what was required for a liberal arts degree, and without them, you just could not reason properly.
Now, let's contrast that to the modern education system.
These days, we start out by teaching kids rhetoric.
All of the K through 12 education is focused upon rhetoric.
Convincing arguments that you memorize, and then you toss them up on the test.
And if you remember what the argument is, you get a point.
If you get it wrong, you get dinged and you have to go read the book and memorize it again.
So we are chock full of these rhetorical arguments, you know, some of which are wonderfully true and accurate arguments, others, which are more than a little bit of nonsense.
Much of the environmentalism that we were fed back in the 90s was more about picking up garbage than saving the planet.
Which, picking up garbage doesn't really have much to do with saving the planet, but they just wanted the kids to pick up garbage for free.
So right there, you get an instance of rhetoric that was complete nonsense, that had a disingenuous motive behind it.
But of course, kids are too stupid to see through it.
They buy into it hook, line, and sinker.
So we start with rhetoric from the K through 12.
Here are all the arguments that you need to believe in and you need to be able to repeat to be a good citizen.
Now, if you move on to university, you might just start learning a little bit of logic.
See, in university, you take a whole bunch of rhetorical arguments, you go find a whole bunch of sources, you know, for your English degree or your history degree or your, you know, social sciences degree.
You find these arguments, and then you logic them together to sort of, but not really, create a new argument.
You know, you're given a ridiculous binary question on the essay, and you have to find six sources, cram them together using logic, and say yes or no.
It doesn't really matter.
Just as long as you have all the sources you should and it's coherent, boom, you pass.
And if you're really, really careful, if you pay attention in life, if you're an autodidact, you just might get to grammar.
You might start reading things other than the editorials, other than the official history, the concluded history, the story of history that we're taught.
You might actually go above and beyond and start looking up facts.
You might start looking up the basic construction of reality.
You look at the French Revolution.
So I hear it was the greatest thing that ever happened, you know, liberté, fraternité, et galité, so on and so forth.
You might actually go look at the facts and count how many people died and look at the mechanisms and look at how the monarchy was before that.
And you might come to a very different conclusion.
This current education system sets us up to be the most opinionated and ignorant people on the planet because we start with rhetoric.
Rhetoric is the high-level stuff.
Until you've done the groundwork, you have no business doing rhetoric.
You don't want a salesman running a technology firm.
Heck, that was the message of Jurassic Park, that Hammond, great guy, he was a salesman at heart, not a scientist.
He did not understand what he was playing with.
He did not understand the consequences.
And that's what we are.
We are a world, a country, a nation, a society of salesmen, of narcissists, falling for any advertising jingle out there with not even the remotest idea that there are such things as facts.
A few of us are logical.
You know, you can certainly see this with some of them.
They take these rhetorical arguments, cram them together, and come up with ridiculous nonsense.
You know, this is the core of postmodernism.
It's rhetoric plus logic with no grammar whatsoever, no facts going into it.
It's quite a pretty little performance art, but it's not knowledge.
It's not truth.
It's not systemized thought or reasoning.
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