Give a Look at Marginalia

 I really do believe in self-education. If you doubt, please start rooting around the topics I have posted about.

The internet must be more than incessant Twitter wars and the narcissism of Instagram. What we can communicate must be more than the rantings of truculent sociopaths. I fear being correct in thinking we have ruined this world's climate to the point of destroying ourselves. If humanity shall persist, then we need to learn and learning requires knowledge, and perhaps from knowledge comes wisdom. Yes, there was a time I thought wisdom, redemption, was beyond us. Reading my notes you will see how I changed my mind, but put most simply: I saw how I had lived had done me no good and if I must continue living then I must live differently.

So, after all those words, let commend to you Marginalia. This is its mission statement:

The internet and education are in crisis.

The fragmentation of higher education parallels the divisions of the global community and the new tribalism the Internet has helped create, with each group closed into its own sphere of interests and information, custom-made to confirm its biases.

The result? We were promised knowledge and tolerance for everyone, and are now more divided than ever.

We witness this division in the splintering of human meaning in art, religion, and culture from scholarship and science. Knowledge disintegrated into specialized silos lacks meaning and has no impact, yet meaning that is not based on science and scholarship magnifies human prejudice and tribalism, making Fake News the new normal.

Depth of meaning combined with rigorous thinking continues the best of the Enlightenment project, and becomes our contribution to the public good: Deep Learning for the Digital Age.

Marginalia‘s Mission is to use the two great knowledge technologies of the modern world, the internet and the research university, to solve the crisis they have created: the fragmentation of rigorous knowledge from human meaning.

 We have only two limits: our imagination and our courage. If we have courage, we will have the will to learn how to be a better people, and by becoming better people we will become a better species. Retreating into nihilism is not the way. Hiding behind dogma and superstition is also not the way.

As to Marginalia, how could I not like a publication that publishes a piece like Why Livy Matters? I may be repeating myself, but I think for America it is the Roman Republic and not the Roman Empire that matters most to our future. Give it a reading, consider the following:

Livy was born in the latter day of an aristocratic republic, and he worked through the formation of a distinctive type of autocracy. That he shared in its project of aggrandizing the Roman people is indisputable, but the way he did it also mattered. Livy’s history as we have it is an exercise in evidentiary rigor and critical literacy. He gets things wrong, certainly, but that’s not the point: Livy matters because he tells a good story, and then shows us the holes in the narrative and invites us to make choices that matter to who you are and how you want to be, whether you’re a simple reader or the emperor of Rome.

Livy matters even more because he tells us, explicitly and repeatedly, that some lessons are better than others. And failing to learn them will end (reliably) in disaster. Livy reminds us that History happened to real, living people—it’s not an abstraction. At a time when learning, changing minds, and finding empathy are difficult, such history lessons might be the foundation for a new future.

sch 9/22/22