The Algernon Project

Rigorous liberal arts for the 21st century, or at least the mid-late 2020s.

I renamed this site “The Algernon Project,” with a corresponding URL change, last week. It derives from the the novel Flowers for Algernon (emphasis added):

In the story, scientists develop a treatment that allows a mouse, Algernon, to become vastly more intelligent. They then apply this treatment to a man of sub-normal intelligence, Charlie, and watch as he becomes more intelligent than any human alive, even to the point that he takes over managing the intelligence experiment with himself and Algernon as subjects.

The book is styled as Charlie’s diary. At the beginning the prose is simple and broken, and it blooms wonderfully as the “treatment” works. He easily learns more languages, discovers the world through books, advanced mathematics, and more. But eventually the treatment wears off for both him and Algernon, and the reader is helpless to watch as the book’s prose descends toward its original quality.

The part of the book that stays with me in when Charlie realizes, through the brilliant power of his new mind, that the treatment is degrading, and that he is regressing. He is still intelligent enough to realize what is happening to him, and to grieve what he is losing, but he is powerless to stop it. And, eventually, when he descends back to his previous state, we see that he can’t even conceive of what he had. He is kind of happy, even.

While many readers would recoil in horror at this prospect, they are currently inducing this very process in themselves by the use of their phones. They can feel it. Their attention is degrading. Their ability to focus is waning. They cannot get through a book, they cannot get their thoughts written down. “I used to read all the time as a kid,” these people say. They can viscerally sense that some essential part of themselves is being sapped, and they know their phone is the vampire. And yet they can only watch hopelessly, as a third-party observer, while they continue to lobotomize themselves.

The Algernon Project is dedicated to helping them understand that this is happening, why this is happening, and what to do about it. My solution: the rigorous, properly taught liberal arts—the strengthening and beautification of the mind. This project is to the liberal arts broadly what Maximum New York is to politics and government. MNY regularly delivers political understanding and power, and The Algernon Project will cultivate the potential and beauty of the mind. You’ll also find that my criticisms of the standard methods of government instruction are mirrored in subjects like reading, writing, and more. However, I will note at the outset, to avoid misunderstanding: I enjoy social media and screens, and I use them frequently without issue. The proper liberal arts bloom in the modern context, and embrace its unique advantages.

The symbol of The Algernon Project is a shield featuring a gladiolus flower and a gladius—a Roman short sword. Both are derivative from the same Latin root, and the gladiolus is also called the “sword lily.”

Why? First, take this excerpt from Flowers for Algernon. The main character, after realizing his whole new mind will deteriorate, has a panicked hallucination:

I stare inward in the center of my unseeing eye at the red spot that transforms itself into a multipetaled flower—the shimmering, swirling, luminescent flower that lies deep in the core of my unconscious. I am shrinking. Not in the sense of the atoms of my body becoming closer and more dense, but a fusion—as the atoms of my-self merge into microcosm. There will be great heat and unbearable light—the hell within hell—but I don’t look at the light, only at the flower, unmultiplying, undividing itself back from the many toward one. (283)

Second, take this excerpt from Sister Miriam Joseph’s (SMJ) classic on liberal education, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric:

“In true liberal education…the essential activity of the student is to relate the facts learned into a unified, organic whole, to assimilate them as…the rose assimilates food from the soil and increases in size, vitality, and beauty.” (7)

In both of these cases, a brilliant mind is compared to a blooming flower. And SMJ reveals a common traditional understanding of the liberal arts as a cultivation of the mind or soul, often with specific analogous reference to flowers.

So: to reverse the process of mental deterioration many have induced in themselves, especially (but not exclusively) through their phones, I choose a flower. And I choose its eponymous partner, a soldier’s sharp sword. Together they symbolize the robust cultivation of a beautiful mind, and an aggressive offense against any threats to it.

What will The Algernon Project do?

I will be teaching a Foundations of the Liberal Arts class this coming fall (announced via this newsletter), on a different week night than my Foundations of New York classes. Further, I will host one-off evenings where I explore different parts of the liberal arts; many of these will be cross-over events with Maximum New York, like my recent overview of the American Founding Era.

I will also be writing extensively, and this blog will carry technical commentary on the liberal arts, along with broader, related social and media commentary.

Here are some examples of what I will be publishing soon:

• What are the liberal arts?—What have they been? Are there competing conceptions? As opposed to what other arts? Is it a canon, a series of methods, or a series of principles?

• What do contemporary universities mean when they say they teach “the liberal arts”?

• Is education, particularly university education, broken? Is that new, if true? If true, in which ways?

• What is the rigorous version of the liberal arts that actually improves one’s life in explicit ways one can describe and easily demonstrate? Or that earns a proper place beside mathematics and engineering, or that properly subsumes them into a larger, consilient whole?

• Many opinions about what the liberal arts are, how they work, or what they could be, are colored by the season of life when people experienced them (or experienced what was offered in their name): ages ~17-22, on a college campus. Many people will find they have a different appraisal if they’re introduced to the liberal arts in a different season of life. They ought not anchor on their older conclusions.

• Why and how I love social media and screens, and think they are part of a good life.—How the liberal arts must integrate the modern context, not purely be a reaction against it.

• The concrete value of rote memorization.—Why and how to recite memorized content. The value of physically channeling the superior work of others as a method of self-improvement, especially as a beginner.

• Cultivating the mind is as self-justified as cultivating the body. There are external uses for both, but they stand on their own merits.—Via analogy, the difference between mere exercise and training.

• The technical craft of reading for adults.—Reading comprehension, Adler’s reading techniques, what does reading give you versus other media, the proper results of well-done reading versus otherwise, why you can’t read and what to do about it.

• Beyond reading.—How to use every part of the book. There is far more to most books than their story or chapters, literally and metaphorically. No book is more misunderstood than the dictionary.

• The technical craft of writing for adults.—Whether and how to write as an adult. Do you write? Can you write? As with reading, many adults cannot honestly say they know how to write, if by that they mean “write at will, according to an understood process, with no permanent blocks, to express myself.”

• The epistolary format.—Whether and how to incorporate it into your reading and writing. What value is it to study this format?

• Poetry and music.—Their comparisons to rhetoric. What is there to get from these fields with practice? When is it worth cultivating capacities in these fields, and in which ways?

• Lifestyle design.—Most people have arranged their lives, physically and socially, to prohibit reading, iterative learning, and deep contemplation; they must look that fact square in the eyes, and do the same with its remedies. Good lifestyle design does not lean solely on negative avoidance (don’t do X), but provides a positive vision that can outcompete the deleterious one (do X, and here’s how).

• The nature of the phone in one’s life.—How does it compare to past waves of radio and television? What is it to most people? How does it interact with patterns of the mind?

• When is it useful to teach the classics (pre-Christian material)? When is it cargo-culting? The example of Plato’s Cratylus.

• Historical inquiry, properly taught, is one of the sharpest methods of apprehending contemporary society. It performs a similar mental move of altering context just enough to loosen the mind’s biases to see what is true, in a similar way to some science fiction.

• The necessity of good friends for a proper liberal arts education, and for the full realization of the those arts throughout life.

I look forward to exploring and sharing the robust liberal arts with all of you. If you have any specific questions or other prompts, drop them in the comments.