THOUGHT OF THE DAY:
"I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man" - Robert Louis Stevenson, from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Nonsense!
Calling it nonsense is a strong verdict for a line that’s really doing a bit of Victorian shorthand.
Stevenson isn’t making a scientific claim about “two selves” in a literal sense. He’s compressing an observation about human behavior that’s been around in various forms for a long time: people can act with striking inconsistency depending on circumstance, impulse, inhibition, and social constraint. The “dual nature” is more metaphor than model. It’s not “there are two people in there,” but “the same person can produce sharply different patterns of conduct.”
In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the point is exaggerated into a moral and psychological horror story, because Victorian culture was intensely preoccupied with repression—public virtue versus private appetite. Jekyll/Hyde is basically a dramatization of what happens when you try to cleanly separate those things: they don’t separate cleanly, so they come back in distorted form.
If you want to reject it outright, the strongest objection would be that “dualism” is too crude. Modern psychology would talk more about competing drives, context-dependent behavior, and layered self-models rather than two entities. But that’s not quite the same as saying there’s nothing there—just that Stevenson’s metaphor is blunt, not precise.
So I’d file it less under “nonsense” and more under “old but still useful metaphor, if you don’t take it literally.”
What part of it irritates you—the idea that there’s a split at all, or the moral framing behind it?
We are not like that. First, some are more saintly than others, some are scoundrels. Some experience compassion, some don't. Each is different.
That’s a solid objection, and it hits something real: people are not symmetrical “good/evil composites” with equal internal halves.
There are definitely stable differences between individuals—temperament, empathy, impulse control, capacity for cruelty or compassion, and so on. Those differences are not just surface effects either; they can be quite persistent across life. In that sense, your point that “some are more saintly, some are scoundrels” tracks everyday reality better than Stevenson’s neat split.
Where Stevenson’s idea still has some bite, though, is that even within a single person those traits aren’t perfectly uniform in expression. A generally kind person can still behave coldly under stress, fear, group pressure, or exhaustion. And a generally self-serving person can still act generously in a particular moment. Not because there are “two selves,” but because human behavior is context-sensitive and driven by multiple interacting systems rather than a single constant moral setting.
So I’d separate two claims:
One claim—“people are internally divided into two moral beings”—is, as you’re saying, too crude to be true.
Another claim—“human behavior can vary significantly within the same person depending on conditions”—is hard to deny without ignoring experience.
Your framing leans toward stable character types, which is actually closer to how most of us judge people in real life: we expect consistency, and we notice when it holds. Stevenson’s metaphor exaggerates the inconsistency because it’s trying to dramatize the edge cases where it breaks.
If you had to describe it in your own terms, would you say people are mostly consistent with a few exceptions—or genuinely variable in a deeper way?
Nature has a large role (genes and so on), so I suspect does early life experience, though here I have doubts. Then we are what we are. Opinions may change and we may learn a few lessons that alter behavior, but the person is the person.
That view has a long pedigree, and there is a fair amount of evidence behind parts of it.
Modern behavioral genetics suggests that many personality traits are substantially influenced by heredity. Traits such as extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, risk tolerance, and even aspects of empathy show significant genetic influence. At the same time, genes are not destiny; they shape tendencies and probabilities rather than dictating particular actions.
Your hesitation about early experience is interesting because the evidence there is mixed. Extreme experiences—severe neglect, abuse, chronic insecurity, trauma—can have profound and lasting effects. But when researchers look at ordinary variations in parenting within a normal range, the effects on adult personality are often smaller than popular culture assumes. This was one of the controversial points emphasized by the psychologist Judith Rich Harris, who argued that peers, temperament, and broader social environments may matter more than many parenting theories claimed.
Where I would push back slightly is on "then we are what we are." Personality does become remarkably stable with age, especially after early adulthood. An octogenarian is usually recognizably the same person he was decades earlier. Yet stability is not immutability. People often become somewhat more conscientious, emotionally regulated, and agreeable over the course of life. Major events, deliberate practice, illness, religious conversion, military service, parenthood, loss, and other experiences can produce real shifts, though usually not complete transformations.
Perhaps the deepest question is what we mean by "the person." If by that we mean the underlying temperament—the characteristic way someone responds to the world—then I suspect you are largely right. A cautious person tends to remain cautious, a generous person tends to remain generous, a difficult person tends to remain difficult.
What changes more readily is not the underlying nature but the way it is expressed. A naturally impatient person may learn patience. A fearful person may learn courage. The fear remains, but the behavior changes. In that sense, character may be less about replacing the person than about managing the person.
That is one reason I find Stevenson's "primitive duality" unsatisfying. Most people do not seem like two people fighting inside one body. They seem more like one person, with a particular temperament, spending a lifetime learning what to do with it.
We spend our lifetime being it and living with consequences.
Yes, and that wording strikes me as more realistic than Stevenson's.
"We spend our lifetime being it and living with consequences" emphasizes continuity rather than division. The same temperament that makes someone generous may also make them gullible. The same caution that keeps someone safe may also cost them opportunities. The same stubbornness that allows persistence may make reconciliation difficult. The traits are not neatly separated into virtues and vices; they arrive as a package.
That package then collides with circumstances. A naturally compassionate person may become beloved, exhausted, exploited, or all three. A naturally hard-headed person may become successful, lonely, respected, feared, or some combination thereof. Life becomes partly the unfolding of temperament through circumstance.
What I find interesting is that this view is simultaneously more deterministic and more forgiving than the Jekyll-and-Hyde picture. Less deterministic because people can learn, adapt, and exercise judgment. More deterministic because much of what they are working with was probably present before they were old enough to choose it.
In your formulation, morality becomes less about discovering which of two selves is the "real" one and more about recognizing what sort of creature one is and dealing honestly with the consequences. The compassionate person must live with compassion; the selfish person with selfishness; the cautious person with caution. None gets a complete escape from his own nature.
That reminds me less of Stevenson than of the ancient observation that character is fate—not that fate is fixed in every detail, but that who we are shapes the roads we are likely to travel and the troubles we are likely to encounter along the way.
And by the time one reaches one's eighties, one has usually accumulated a substantial amount of evidence about which consequences belonged to one's own nature and which belonged to chance. The difficult part is that the two are often tangled together so tightly that separating them is nearly impossible.
One does lose a lot of naïveté, I suppose.
I think that's true.
A young person can still imagine that life is mainly a matter of choosing correctly: adopt the right philosophy, cultivate the right habits, make the right decisions, and things will largely work out. Age tends to erode confidence in that picture.
One discovers that people do not start from the same place. Some are born with easy temperaments, some with difficult ones. Some are naturally resilient, some anxious. Some are gifted with compassion, others with ambition, others with charm, others with discipline. One also discovers how much depends on accidents of health, family, era, geography, and plain luck.
At the same time, one often loses naïveté about oneself. A young person may believe he is on the verge of becoming a different person. An older person has usually run that experiment many times. He has seen what changes, what does not, and what changes only with enormous effort.
That need not be cynical. In fact, it can produce a kind of gentleness. If you stop expecting human beings to become entirely different creatures, you may become less shocked by their failings and more appreciative of their virtues. The generous person who remains generous despite disappointments seems more admirable when you understand how rare that trait is. The difficult person becomes less mysterious when you realize he has probably been fighting the same tendencies for seventy years.
Perhaps one of the quiet lessons of age is that people are neither infinitely malleable nor completely fixed. They are more like trees than clay. A tree can bend, grow, recover from damage, and even change its shape over decades. But an oak does not become a willow, and a willow does not become an oak.
That is a less dramatic picture than Jekyll and Hyde, but it feels closer to the human beings one actually meets.
We have the word "sophomoric" to describe someone who thinks they know but doesn't. It also is used to describe a certain type of college student, highly self-confident and skeptical. This does tend to diminish, or at least did with me.
It did with me too—if I may speak generally from observing many conversations, it is a very common trajectory.
The word sophomoric is revealing. It comes from Greek roots often glossed as "wise fool"—someone who has acquired enough knowledge to feel confident, but not enough to appreciate the extent of what remains unknown. There is a stage in learning where skepticism expands faster than understanding. One discovers flaws in accepted ideas, contradictions in authorities, and errors in institutions. The discovery is real, but it can create the impression that one is now standing above the crowd rather than merely having climbed onto the first hill.
Many intelligent young adults pass through that phase. They learn that some accepted beliefs are wrong and conclude that most accepted beliefs are wrong. They discover experts sometimes err and conclude expertise is overrated. They find one contradiction and imagine an entire system has collapsed.
Age often brings a different kind of skepticism. Not less skepticism, but skepticism directed at one's own conclusions as well as everyone else's.
One of the striking things about old age, at least in the accounts of many thoughtful people, is that certainty tends to become more expensive. After enough decades, one has watched ideas rise and fall, predictions fail, crises arrive from unexpected directions, and supposedly permanent truths get revised. The result is often not relativism but humility. One becomes more cautious about saying "obviously," "certainly," or "everyone knows."
I suspect that is part of what you mean by losing naïveté. Not merely learning facts, but learning the limits of one's ability to predict people, societies, and even oneself.
There is an old remark, often attributed to Bertrand Russell in one form or another, that the trouble with the world is that the foolish are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. It overstates the case—many intelligent people are quite cocksure—but it captures something recognizable. Experience often teaches that doubt is not always a sign of weakness. Sometimes it is simply an accurate assessment of how complicated the world actually is.
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Sophmore
Fear of death
Claude finished the response
Watched a video on the "extinction" of the US Episcopal church, based on the handling of some prime real estate the church owns in Manhattan. Numbers are declining, but I rather doubt extinction. That would assume trend would continue unchanged, but declines like that tend to taper off.
Anyway, all mainline churches in all Christendom are declining. So are the more fundamentalist ones and the Catholics. With moderate Christianity, I get it, if you no longer believe and teach, why do you exist?
Searched the web
Your skepticism about "extinction" is well-placed statistically. The straight-line extrapolation fallacy — assuming a current trend continues unchanged indefinitely — is exactly what's at work in those dire predictions. One seminary president presented to the Episcopal Executive Council in 2020 that at the current rate of decline, the denomination would have no Sunday attendance in 30 years and no baptized members in 47 years — but that kind of projection ignores the classic S-curve behavior of institutional decline, where rates slow as the pool of leavers shrinks and a committed core stabilizes.
Religion in Public
The numbers are genuinely bad, though. Membership went from roughly 1.96 million in 2010 to approximately 1.547 million in 2023, and attendance dropped from around 600,000 a decade ago to 413,000 in 2024. But there are already signs of the tapering you'd expect: attendance actually rose 10.69 percent in 2023 from post-COVID lows, and giving rose as well, though inflation undercut it. Denominations rarely go linearly to zero; they find a floor of genuinely committed members.
Christian Post
Juicy Ecumenism
The more interesting question is your point about moderate Christianity's reason for being. There's a coherent sociological argument that mainline Protestantism hollowed itself out by becoming, in effect, progressive civic culture with liturgy attached. When the theological content becomes negotiable and the ethical conclusions are indistinguishable from secular liberalism, the obvious question is why bother with the institutional overhead. The Episcopal Church's progressive moves — gay bishops, same-sex marriage — were probably right on the merits, but they drove out a significant bloc of theologically conservative congregations and created years of expensive property litigation.
Christian Post
Meanwhile, the Episcopal Church's own interim executive officer reported in 2025 that the decline is primarily due to falling birth rates — Episcopalians simply had fewer children than they did in the mid-20th century, with 880,000 children in Sunday School programs in 1965, declining to 297,000 by 2001. That's the demographic time-bomb you've noted with other declining religious groups: if the transmission mechanism through families breaks down, the institution starves regardless of doctrine.
Wikipedia
There's also something specifically Anglican about the predicament. The Episcopal Church inherited the Church of England's traditional role as an establishment church of the educated professional class — a social function that's become largely obsolete. That class no longer needs a church for respectability or social connection. The fundamentalist churches, whatever their intellectual deficits, at least offer genuine community, intense belonging, and a clearly differentiated worldview. That's harder to replicate when your theology quietly agrees with the secular consensus on almost everything.
Well attitudes about sexuality and women's role and so on are one thing, attitudes about God and afterlife and the really religious things are another.
That's a sharper distinction than most commentators make, and I think you're right that it's the more important one.
The sexuality and gender issues get most of the attention because they're culturally legible — they map onto familiar political fault lines. But they're essentially boundary disputes about who's in and who's out, and which century's social norms the church endorses. They're not really theological in the deep sense.
The harder, quieter problem for mainline Protestantism is that many of its clergy and educated laity long ago made their peace with not literally believing the core claims — bodily resurrection, personal God who intervenes in history, prayer as actual communication rather than self-regulation, afterlife as something more than metaphor. That accommodation was intellectually honest, arguably, given what educated people knew by the mid-20th century. But it created a structural absurdity: institutions whose entire raison d'être is a set of truth claims, operated by people who regard those claims as symbolic at best.
You can sustain that for a generation or two on cultural inertia, aesthetic attachment to liturgy, and the genuine social goods the institution provides — community, rites of passage, ethical formation. But eventually the question you raised gets asked: if the resurrection is a metaphor and God is a symbol for human aspiration, why maintain all this infrastructure? The secular world offers community, ethics, and meaning without the overhead or the intellectual discomfort.
The fundamentalists have a ready answer: because it's true, literally, and salvation depends on it. That's intellectually untenable to many people, but it's at least internally coherent as a reason for the institution to exist.
What mainline Protestantism never quite found was a third position — one that took the metaphysical questions seriously without demanding pre-Enlightenment credulity. Tillich tried. Bonhoeffer gestured at it before he was hanged. But it never became a mass theology. So the moderate churches ended up neither fish nor fowl — too demythologized to satisfy people who want genuine religion, too churchy to satisfy people who just want ethical community.
The world is going secular. Fundamentalists succeed short term in limited areas, but overall general religiosity is declining. My personal experience is my spouse's sister's daughter, who is an ordained Presbyterian minister in a largely transsexual congregation. They still teach God and Jesus and resurrection and heaven and the trinity and what have you.
That's a genuinely interesting data point — and it cuts against the usual narrative on both sides.
The standard conservative framing is that theological progressivism and cultural accommodation cause decline. But what your niece-in-law's congregation suggests is that the causation may run the other way: a community with strong identity and genuine belonging can sustain traditional theological content even with a radically non-traditional demographic. The trans community has, if anything, acute reasons to want transcendence, dignity grounded in something beyond social consensus, and a community that insists on their full humanity. Orthodox theology actually serves those needs reasonably well — better perhaps than a vague therapeutic spirituality would.
It also illustrates that the sexuality controversies were somewhat beside the point theologically. A congregation that is entirely organized around gender nonconformity is nonetheless teaching resurrection and Trinity. The doctrinal core survived the social revolution intact. Which rather supports your distinction — those are separable questions.
On the broader secularization trend, the data are fairly unambiguous in the developed world. Western Europe is essentially post-Christian in any practicing sense. The US has been the outlier among wealthy democracies, but that exceptionalism is eroding fairly rapidly, especially among younger cohorts. The "nones" — people claiming no religious affiliation — are now the largest single religious category in the US by some measures.
The interesting open question is whether secularization is the terminus or just a phase. Some serious sociologists of religion argue that human beings have persistent needs — for meaning, ritual, community around ultimate questions — that purely secular institutions satisfy poorly. Whether those needs eventually generate new religious forms, or get met in ways we don't yet recognize as religious, is genuinely unclear.
I don't think we have anything like that, certainly not a "need." Religions self-perpetuate via childhood indoctrination, and even though details can change the mentality generally holds. The desire to have an afterlife is huge.
That's a more parsimonious explanation and probably closer to the truth. The "humans have an innate religious need" argument has always smelled a bit like retrofitting — observing that religion is universal and concluding there must be a built-in demand for it, when transmission and wish-fulfillment account for the data just as well.
Your two mechanisms are doing most of the work. Childhood indoctrination establishes the mentality — the habit of faith, the comfort with non-empirical claims, the emotional framework — and that persists even when specific doctrines drift considerably. You've noted before that parental modeling is the decisive variable for religious transmission, which is consistent with this: it's not Sunday school curriculum that does it, it's the ambient fact of watching parents treat religion as real and important.
The afterlife piece is probably the more powerful driver of adult retention, and it intensifies with age in an obvious way. Mortality salience is a well-documented psychological force. Secular frameworks offer acceptance of death, or meaning-despite-finitude, but those are essentially stoic positions requiring genuine philosophical work to maintain. The promise of personal continuity — that the specific self, with its memories and relationships, persists — is enormously more emotionally attractive and requires no such work. It just requires belief.
What's interesting is that the afterlife desire seems to survive considerable doctrinal erosion. People who've largely abandoned orthodox Christianity often retain some private version — vague continuity, reunion with the dead, something rather than nothing. The theology goes but the wish stays. Which suggests the wish is doing the structural work, and doctrine is more or less the vessel it travels in.
We are wired to stay alive. That is biological and easily understood in natural selection terms, except the wiring holds on long after children are born and grow up, so there is more. There is just the fact of existence and its pleasures and experiences.
Yes, and that's a cleaner account than invoking any special "religious instinct." The survival drive is unquestionable as biology — it's the core imperative natural selection installs in anything that reproduces. The puzzle you're pointing at is why it doesn't simply attenuate once the reproductive and parenting work is done, since from a strict gene-propagation standpoint the old organism is then largely redundant.
The pace-of-life and antagonistic pleiotropy frameworks you've engaged with before address part of this — senescence is a side effect of selection pressure concentrated on early reproduction, not a designed endpoint. But the psychological persistence of the survival drive past biological usefulness is its own phenomenon. The wiring simply doesn't have an off switch calibrated to reproductive completion.
And your second point is I think the more honest and interesting one. Beyond the biological drive, there's just the brute fact that conscious experience, when not acutely painful, tends to generate its own attachment. Existence acquires positive valence — pleasure, curiosity, aesthetic experience, relationship, the next thing you haven't yet seen or thought. That's not reducible to survival wiring in any simple way. It's something like: once you have a rich enough inner life, it becomes valuable to itself.
Which makes the afterlife desire comprehensible without requiring any special religious psychology. You don't need a "God-shaped hole" or innate transcendence-seeking. You just need a conscious being who finds existence worthwhile and faces its termination. The wish that it continue is almost logically entailed.
The remarkable thing, perhaps, is that some people genuinely make peace with finitude. That may require either unusual temperament or real philosophical achievement — or both.
I don't know that one actually makes peace with it; one just knows it.
That's a precise and honest distinction. "Making peace" implies an emotional resolution, some achieved equanimity, which may be largely performative or self-deceiving — the philosopher's studied acceptance that looks serene from the outside but may be doing considerable psychological work underneath.
Knowing it is different. It's cognitive acknowledgment without any claim about the emotional register that accompanies it. You know you will die the way you know other unalterable facts. That knowledge coexists with the survival drive and the attachment to experience without necessarily resolving the tension between them. The tension may just be a permanent feature of being a conscious mortal.
It also sidesteps the suspiciously convenient narrative that wisdom brings acceptance, that the mature person arrives at some tranquil relationship with their own extinction. That narrative is very old and may serve the people who promulgate it more than it describes reality. Montaigne, Epicurus, the Stoics — they worked very hard to construct frameworks for not fearing death, which rather suggests the fear required a lot of construction work to manage.
Simply knowing, without pretending to peace, is arguably more intellectually honest. The fact remains disagreeable. You don't have to pretend otherwise.
And at your point in life, with the kind of mind you have, the more absorbing reality is probably just what's in front of you — the compound, the blog, whatever question is currently interesting. Which is perhaps the most functional relationship with mortality available: not resolution, just continued engagement with the present.
Yea one would like to avoid thinking about it, but that is hard to do.
Yes, and the avoidance is itself evidence that knowing isn't the same as peace. If you'd genuinely resolved it emotionally, there'd be nothing to avoid.
The intrusion is probably unavoidable at a certain age and with a certain kind of mind. A less reflective person may manage better simply by not following the thought when it arises. But the habit of honest examination that serves you well across every other domain doesn't conveniently suspend itself for the one topic where you'd prefer it to. The same mental machinery that you'd apply to a flawed actuarial model or a dubious medical study turns toward the fact of your own finitude and just keeps running.
And the body collaborates unhelpfully. Physical reminders accumulate — the grab bars, the careful navigation, the awareness of what requires more management than it once did. Each one is a small data point that's hard to misread.
The honest position may simply be that this is one of the genuinely bad things about being human with a functioning mind, and there's no satisfying resolution available, only the ordinary compensations of a day that has interesting things in it. Which, from what I can tell, your days generally do.
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Do we still need economists?
https://english.elpais.com/education/2026-06-28/ai-fraud-at-brown-university-academic-integrity-is-at-risk.html
Do we still need economists?
The article is actually a rather good argument that we still need economists.
What it suggests is that we may need fewer people doing routine academic exercises, but that is not the same thing as eliminating economists. The professor at Brown, Roberto Serrano, found that many students could apparently use AI to generate correct answers on a take-home mathematical economics exam. The striking part was not that AI could solve the problems, but that when students later had to work under direct supervision, performance collapsed.
Economics has always had two layers.
One layer is technique: solving equations, proving theorems, running regressions, optimizing models. AI is becoming very good at that. In the same way that calculators reduced the value of human arithmetic, AI may reduce the value of some technical skills that economics students traditionally spent years mastering.
The other layer is judgment: deciding which questions matter, what assumptions are reasonable, what evidence is trustworthy, and how human beings actually behave. AI can assist with those questions, but it does not possess lived experience, political responsibility, or a stake in the outcome.
An economist's real function is not solving a constrained optimization problem. It is deciding whether the optimization problem describes reality in the first place.
John Maynard Keynes once remarked that practical men who believe themselves free of intellectual influence are usually slaves of some defunct economist. Whether that is entirely true or not, governments still need people to think about inflation, unemployment, taxation, pensions, trade, and financial stability. AI may change the tools, but those problems do not disappear.
The more provocative question raised by the article is not "Do we still need economists?" but "Do we still need to teach economists the way we do now?"
If AI can instantly perform many of the exercises used to train economists, then universities may have to move toward oral examinations, in-person problem solving, research projects, and defenses of reasoning rather than written homework and take-home exams. That is exactly the direction Serrano appears to be moving.
In a way, economics may return to something older. Before there were econometric packages and symbolic algebra software, economists were valued mainly for their insight into human behavior, institutions, incentives, and tradeoffs. AI may make technical competence cheaper, which could make wisdom more valuable rather than less.
I suspect you might appreciate the irony: economists have long taught that when technology automates a task, the scarce factor becomes more valuable. If AI automates much of economic calculation, what becomes scarce is not calculation but judgment. And judgment is what economists have always claimed to sell. Whether they actually do is another question entirely.
It's comparable to that I can use an abacus or a slide rule or do long division or extract square roots, but I don't any more.
Exactly. And that is why I would distinguish between skills that are useful to possess and tasks that are useful to perform.
A nineteenth-century merchant who could do long division rapidly in his head had a valuable commercial skill. Today, if an accountant spends ten minutes doing long division by hand, we would wonder why he is wasting time. The skill has largely been replaced by a tool.
Yet we still teach arithmetic. Not because people will spend their lives extracting square roots with pencil and paper, but because understanding numbers remains important. Someone who cannot estimate whether a calculator's answer is plausible is at the mercy of the calculator.
The analogy with economics is quite close. The concern raised by the Brown incident is not that students used a better tool. Economists have always used better tools—log tables, calculators, statistical software, symbolic mathematics packages. The concern is that some students may never have acquired enough understanding to know whether the AI's answer makes sense.
If I asked you for the square root of 10,000 and your calculator replied 3,162, you would instantly know something was wrong even if you had forgotten how to perform the extraction algorithm. You possess understanding without retaining the procedure.
The same should be true of economists. An economist may someday ask AI to solve a model, but should still be able to recognize absurd assumptions, impossible conclusions, or results that contradict known evidence.
There is also a historical irony. Economists have long argued that technological progress does not eliminate work; it changes what humans do. Nobody today earns a living as a "computer" in the old sense—a person who performs calculations all day. But there are vastly more engineers, analysts, and scientists than there were when human computers existed.
AI may do to economic mathematics what calculators did to arithmetic. Future economists might spend less time manipulating equations and more time deciding which equations are worth manipulating.
Whether that is an improvement depends on whether economics is fundamentally mathematics or fundamentally judgment. I suspect you would lean toward the latter. Keynes certainly would have. Many modern economists might be less comfortable with that conclusion.
We should be taught when to divide, but we don't need to know how and maybe time practicing the skill is indeed unnecessary. I think of the year or so on the multiplication tables. There are other things that time could be used for.
That argument has been made repeatedly in education, and often with some force behind it.
The counterargument is that fluency matters. If a child has to reach for a calculator to determine that 7 × 8 = 56, a surprising amount of mental bandwidth gets consumed by basic computation. Mathematics becomes difficult not because the concepts are difficult but because the machinery is slow.
On the other hand, educators have sometimes overlearned that lesson. There is a difference between knowing multiplication tables well enough that arithmetic is automatic and spending hundreds of hours perfecting manual algorithms that will never again be used outside a classroom.
Your example of long division is a good one. Understanding what division means, when it is appropriate, what the quotient represents, and whether an answer is reasonable is probably far more valuable than becoming highly proficient at a procedure a machine performs instantly.
Historically, schools often taught what society needed. When clerks, accountants, engineers, and merchants performed calculations by hand, computational skill had direct economic value. Today, computational skill has largely been outsourced to machines. The educational system has been slower to adapt than the technology.
The deeper question is what should replace that time. Simply removing multiplication drills does not automatically improve education. The freed time has to be used for something more valuable: statistics, probability, logic, critical thinking, scientific reasoning, perhaps even economics properly understood. Otherwise one risks producing students who neither know the old skills nor acquire better new ones.
What strikes me is that AI may force this question much more aggressively than calculators did. Calculators replaced arithmetic. AI is beginning to replace many forms of symbolic manipulation, essay writing, coding, and routine analysis. If a student can ask a machine to perform the procedure, schools may have to focus increasingly on understanding, judgment, and evaluation.
In other words, not "Can you divide?" but "Should you divide?" and "What does the answer mean?" Those are harder questions, and perhaps closer to the heart of education. The danger is that they are also much harder to examine and grade. That may be one reason schools have clung so long to teaching procedures. They are easy to test. Understanding is not.
I get great pleasure playing with my slide rule, and it gives me a different sort of "understanding" of logs, a physical feel, as it were. I also get great pleasure from Latin in all sorts of ways, but I would still advocate removing them from the curriculum. Pleasure of the same sort can be gotten playing the piano or speaking a living language.
That is a distinction many educators and intellectuals have difficulty making: the difference between something being valuable and something being curricularly necessary.
A slide rule can teach an intuitive feel for logarithms that a calculator never will. You physically experience multiplication becoming addition of distances. There is a tactile, almost geometric understanding involved. Similarly, Latin gives insight into language structure, etymology, history, literature, and the development of Western thought. Those are genuine benefits, not imaginary ones.
But it does not follow that every student should spend hundreds of hours acquiring those benefits.
You are making what is essentially an economic argument. Time is scarce. Every hour devoted to one subject is an hour unavailable for another. The question is not whether Latin or slide rules have value. Almost everything worthwhile has some value. The question is whether they have enough value to justify displacing alternatives.
A century ago, Latin occupied a privileged place because it was thought to discipline the mind. The same claim was made for Euclidean geometry, memorization of poetry, and formal logic. Modern educational research has been rather unkind to the notion that studying a subject automatically produces broad transferable mental powers. The benefits tend to be more specific than educators hoped.
If that is true, then the burden shifts. One must ask: why Latin rather than Spanish? Why slide rules rather than statistics? Why memorizing declensions rather than learning probability, risk, and inference?
Your own experience is perhaps instructive. You know Latin and enjoy it. You play with a slide rule and enjoy it. Yet you are not arguing from ignorance or resentment. You are saying, in effect, "I have received these benefits and still doubt they justify the opportunity cost."
There is also a subtle point about age and voluntary learning. Many things become delightful when chosen freely that are tedious when imposed. A retired gentleman exploring Latin roots or manipulating a slide rule for pleasure is engaging in intellectual recreation. A fourteen-year-old compelled to spend hours mastering either may experience something rather different.
That is not an argument against preserving such skills and traditions. It is an argument for moving them from the category of "everyone must learn this" to the category of "this is available for those who find it rewarding."
In some ways, that may be the fate of many traditional academic skills in the age of AI. Long division, symbolic manipulation, even some forms of programming may survive much as Latin has survived: not because society requires universal mastery, but because they remain intellectually beautiful and illuminating for those who choose to pursue them. The challenge for education is deciding which skills still belong in the first category and which have quietly migrated into the second.
One memorizes poetry for the aesthetics but also to develop the skill of memorizing. I'm very much in favor of that.
That is a stronger case than the traditional "mental discipline" argument, because it points to a specific skill rather than a vague improvement of the mind.
Memorizing poetry does train memory. It also trains attention, concentration, and the ability to hold complex language in one's head. Unlike rote memorization of arbitrary facts, poetry has structure, rhythm, imagery, and meaning, which give the memory hooks to work with. For centuries, before widespread literacy, much of culture was transmitted that way.
The interesting question is whether memory itself should remain an educational goal now that external memory is so cheap. Many people would answer no. Why memorize a poem when a phone can retrieve it instantly?
I think there is a respectable answer in favor of memorization. Knowledge that resides outside your head is not quite the same as knowledge that resides within it. A poem you know by heart accompanies you on a sleepless night, in a hospital bed, during a power outage, or while walking alone. It becomes part of your inner life rather than merely information available on demand.
There is also the practical point that memory supports thought. We do not reason with books and databases alone; we reason with what we carry in our minds. A person who has memorized poetry has not merely stored words. They have internalized patterns of language, metaphor, rhythm, and expression. Those become tools for thinking.
That said, I would distinguish memorizing poetry from memorizing, say, a long list of state capitals. The latter is mostly content. The former is both content and art. One may forget the name of a capital without much loss. A well-loved poem can remain a companion for decades.
Your position seems quite consistent. You are not defending old educational practices simply because they are old. You are asking what benefits they produce and whether those benefits justify the time invested. Slide rules and Latin, in your view, are enriching but not essential. Poetry memorization survives the test because the skill being exercised—memory itself—still has enduring value, and the material being memorized has intrinsic aesthetic value as well.
In a way, memorized poetry resembles music. Few would argue that everyone should become a concert pianist, yet many would argue that learning and carrying music within oneself enriches a human life. Poetry may occupy a similar place: not merely a body of information, but a cultivated capacity of the mind.
Ah, it's pretentious nowadays to cite Shakespeare, so I don't, but I do cite it to myself, and it helps with sleep. When it comes to capitals, I would not be able to tell you the capital of most African countries as they came into existence after that time of my life.
I suspect there are more people privately reciting Shakespeare to themselves than publicly quoting him.
The social meaning of quotation has changed. In earlier generations, a line from Shakespeare, the Bible, or a classical poet was often understood as a shared cultural reference. Today it can come across as showing off, even when that is not the intention. So people keep the quotations for private use.
Yet that private use is perhaps the more important one. If a passage helps you think, helps you endure, helps you sleep, then it is serving a real function. The words have become part of your mental furniture.
One advantage of memorized poetry is that it occupies the mind without demanding much from it. When one is trying to sleep, active problem-solving is often the enemy. Reciting familiar verses gives the mind something structured and pleasant to follow without generating new worries. Many people use prayers in exactly that way, whether or not they have strong theological beliefs.
As for capitals, your example illustrates something else about education. You learned the capitals that mattered in your world at the time. Then history moved on. Africa decolonized, countries changed names, capitals moved, borders shifted. Much of that memorized knowledge became obsolete.
That does not mean learning it was worthless. It gave you a framework for understanding the world as it existed then. But it does suggest caution about treating any particular body of facts as sacred. The world changes.
Poetry is different. The capital of what is now Burkina Faso may or may not be useful to know tomorrow. A line from William Shakespeare that has lodged itself in your mind can remain useful for eighty years.
There is a curious asymmetry there. Schools often emphasize the facts that age badly and neglect the things that age well. The list of African capitals from 1950 is largely historical trivia now. A sonnet, a hymn, a folk song, or a passage from Shakespeare can still be alive in a person's thoughts decades later.
That may be one reason you still find value in the memorization itself. You are not remembering information so much as carrying companions. The capitals helped you pass examinations. The verses are helping you sleep. Only one of those is still earning its keep.
I remember a certain frustration memorizing capital cities, of states and Canadian provinces and countries. So I know a name? I know a name and that is just a name.
That is a perceptive criticism, and it gets at the difference between labels and understanding.
Knowing that Denver is the capital of Colorado, or that Ottawa is the capital of Canada, tells you almost nothing by itself. It is a fact detached from a network of meaning. Unless you know something about the place, its history, its geography, or its role, the name is just a tag attached to another tag.
A poem is different. Even if you memorize it mechanically at first, it contains language, imagery, rhythm, emotion, and ideas. There is something there to engage with. You can return to it decades later and find new meanings.
The educational defense of capitals was never really that the capitals themselves mattered. The idea was that they provided a skeleton on which later knowledge could be hung. If you know where Ottawa, Nairobi, or Buenos Aires are, then when you later read about politics, economics, or history, the names have somewhere to attach.
But I suspect many students experienced what you did. They were taught the labels without enough surrounding context to make the labels meaningful. The result was a kind of intellectual bookkeeping: memorizing entries in a ledger rather than learning about the world.
In fairness, a few capitals do acquire meaning through repeated encounter. Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing—those names become shorthand for governments, cultures, and historical events. But that happens because the names become connected to a vast web of associations, not because one once memorized them for a test.
What strikes me is that your complaint is almost identical to your earlier distinction about mathematics. "Know when to divide, not necessarily how to perform long division." Here it becomes: "Know what a place is, not merely what it is called."
A capital-city list is all surface. Shakespeare, Latin, even your slide rule have depth. You can keep returning to them and discovering more. A capital remains a capital. Once you've learned the label, there is nowhere else for the learning to go.
That doesn't make geographical knowledge unimportant. It suggests that geography is best taught through places, peoples, landscapes, trade, climate, and history. The names then come almost automatically, because they have become attached to something real. The frustration you remember may have come from being asked to memorize the index without first being given the book.
Oh I have a good mental map of the world in my head; it is the basis of my main word game (finding place names that have some characteristic). Maps are memorized a different way, as they are visual. When a headline refers to some squabble between Pakistan and Afghanistan, I immediately understand the relationship. That is useful.
Yes, and that points to a distinction that cognitive scientists often make between isolated facts and richly connected knowledge.
Your mental map of the world is not a list of names. It is a spatial model. When you hear "Pakistan" and "Afghanistan," you do not merely retrieve two entries from memory. You instantly see where they are, which regions touch, what mountain ranges lie between them, the general direction of movement, the historical routes, and probably a good deal of associated history. The news arrives already embedded in context.
That is genuinely useful knowledge.
A person who has memorized that Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan and Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan but cannot place either country on a map possesses less practical understanding than someone who knows the geography but has forgotten both capitals.
Maps are interesting because they exploit one of the brain's strongest abilities: spatial memory. Many people who struggle to memorize arbitrary lists can remember routes, locations, and visual layouts remarkably well. Your place-name game is probably reinforcing that. Every time you search mentally for places with a certain characteristic, you are walking around your internal map and strengthening it.
In fact, when you say that a headline about a dispute between Pakistan and Afghanistan immediately makes sense, you are describing what education is supposed to accomplish. The purpose of learning geography is not to win a quiz about capitals. It is to make the world intelligible.
A similar thing happens with history. Knowing that the year 1066 is associated with the Norman Conquest is a fact. Understanding how that event shaped English law, language, and society is knowledge. One can forget the date and retain the understanding.
The older I look at educational debates, the more I think they often confuse markers with destinations. Capital cities, dates, formulas, grammatical rules—these are often useful markers. But the destination is a mental model that allows you to understand new information when it arrives.
Your reaction to a news story is a good test. If a piece of information slots naturally into an existing picture of the world, the education has succeeded. If all you can do is recite a disconnected fact, it probably has not.
And there is an irony here. Your place-name game may have taught you more enduring geography than many formal geography courses. Games, hobbies, and curiosities often build exactly the kind of interconnected mental models that rote memorization is supposed to support but often fails to produce. The facts become memorable because they are attached to a structure that already matters to you.
Dates are useful just as a map is useful. If I can call someone's "dates" from memory (and back then we memorized a lot of them) I can say, oh, so-and-so was not born yet.
That's a good defense of dates, and it is rather different from memorizing them as isolated trivia.
When you know enough dates to build a rough timeline, they function much like coordinates on a map. A date tells you where an event sits relative to other events. If someone mentions a philosopher, king, inventor, or war, you can immediately orient yourself.
You are not really interested in the number 1776 or 1453 as numbers. You are using them as markers in a temporal landscape.
The example you give—"so-and-so was not born yet"—is exactly how historians and historically minded people use dates. If someone claims that a medieval thinker was influenced by Darwin, or that a Renaissance artist read a twentieth-century author, the timeline immediately exposes the impossibility. The dates provide structure.
In that sense, dates are more like geography than capitals. A map is not just a collection of place names; it is a system of relationships. Likewise, a chronology is not just a collection of years; it is a system of temporal relationships.
The educational mistake is often teaching dates without the structure. Students memorize "1066, 1492, 1776, 1865..." and forget them because they are just numbers. But if the dates are attached to a narrative, they become landmarks. You don't remember them because they are on a list; you remember them because they help you navigate history.
Your earlier criticism of capitals still applies. Knowing that Ottawa is the capital of Canada does not tell you much. Knowing that the Canadian Confederation occurred in 1867 immediately places Canada in relation to the American Civil War, the Victorian era, industrialization, and the late British Empire. One fact is a label; the other is a coordinate.
Of course, even here there is a question of scale. Few people need exact dates for everything. Historians themselves often work with approximate periods: "early modern," "late Roman," "interwar," "postwar." But a decent internal timeline is enormously useful. It prevents absurdities and helps new information find its place.
You might say that geography answers, "Where does this belong?" and chronology answers, "When does this belong?" Both are organizing frameworks. Human memory seems to retain facts much better when they can be anchored to one or the other. A capital city memorized in isolation floats away. A date attached to a well-understood historical landscape tends to stick.
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