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Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student newsmagazine distributed to over 600 stu-dents, faculty, and sta! of the Annapolis campus.Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gad-fly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way neces-sary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking newsmagazine.

Articles for the next issue should be submit-ted by Wednesday, February 20, at 11:59 PM to sjca.gadfly@gmail.com.

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In the rather unlikely event that you neither closely read Ms. Waters’ emails about next year’s campus neither housing. nor attended last Tuesday’s CSL

meeting, here is an overview of the campus housing situation.For the 2013-2014 school year, everyone (with few exceptions) who currently

resides on campus will be required to stay on campus. What has changed from last year is this: now any senior who desires to live o! campus will not be automatically allowed to do so. As it stands now, only a handful of students with compelling reasons will be given permission to live o! campus. Examples of compelling reasons are extreme financial burden and/or health problems. The more specific one is about his or her circumstances, the more likely it is that he or she will be given permission to live o! campus.

The reason why so few students will be granted permission to live o! campus next year is that the current freshmen class is fairly small (107 students on campus), and the incoming freshmen class looks as if it too is going to be quite small. However, if the number of incoming freshmen increases, then so too will the number of students allowed to live o! campus. Therefore, if you do not have a compelling reason to move o! campus, or your request was denied, there will be an o!-campus housing lottery held on Wednesday, February 27th, from 2:15 to 3:45. I was not given an exact percentage of how full the dorms need to be in order to satisfy the school’s budget, but I was given the impression that the answer was just about every room. So, since most of the people reading this article will be living on campus next year, know that there are still pods as well as the Loft available. For those who do not know, the Loft is on Paca 4th and is meant for five people. I find the layout slightly di"cult to describe, but essentially (with the proper situating of curtains) there is enough room for two singles, a triple, and a common room with furniture included. Applications for pods and the Loft are due Wednesday, February 13 by 4:30 pm. If you are not applying for a special kind of housing, then you will choose your lottery number for room selection on Wednesday, February 20th from 2:15 to 3:30. Actual room selection will not occur until April 8th, 9th, and 10th. On a final note, we all pay so much money to eat, live, and got to school here for what is the majority of the year, so if you have questions, concerns, or suggestions, please say something to me, your R.A., or Ms. Waters. For example, if something is broken or living in your dorm room that ought not to be, let someone know in addition to a work order, because things can fall through the cracks, and we want everyone to have the best living experience on campus as is possible.

Catherine Moon, Polity Attorney

We would like to congratulate the winners of the Greenfield Library book collecting contest: Jezebel St. John, A’15 (first prize), Alexandria

Hinds, Assistant Director of Admissions-On Campus, A’10 (second prize), and Day Harper, A’15 (honorable mention). Contestants were judged on the creativity and thoughtfulness in developing their collection, cohesion of the collection, and the significance of the collection to the owner. The Library is exhibiting books from each of the collections in the Lillian Vanous Nutt room through March 31st. The winners’ essays are also available to read.

While checking out the book collections, students should “Kiss and Tell.” Starting Tuesday, February 12th, students can pick up a paper heart at the Library’s circulation desk and “tell” others why you love the Library. All participants will receive a Hershey’s Kiss and the paper hearts will be posted on the Library’s basement wall. Come out and tell us what you love about the Library!

Cara Sabolcik, Public Services Librarian

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We'd like to extend our congratulations to this year's

senior class on the completion of their essays. In celebration of your achievement and in honor of your upcoming oral examinations, the Gadfly will be profiling seniors throughout the rest of the semester, asking a few brief questions about their essays. Check out page 5 in this issue for our first spotlight, as well as some wise words from sta!er Jonathan Barone on a particularly key bit of senior oral etiquette.

Please also note that tutor Daniel Harrell, who is profiled in this issue, will be delivering the weekly lecture, entitled “Does Music Move?”, this coming Friday. !

Nathan Goldman • Editor-in-ChiefIan Tuttle • Editor-in-Chief

Hayden Pendergrass • Layout EditorSasha Welm • CartoonistJonathan Barone • Sta!Andrew Kriehn • Sta!Robert Malka • Sta!

Sarah Meggison • Sta! Charles Zug • Sta!

C,'$+16%$,+#Jacob KilgoreRaymond Lau

Catherine MoonCara SabolcikPainter Bob

How did you come to be a tutor at St. John’s? I was appointed in 1998. For a couple of years prior, I was teaching part-time at a college in Atlanta, Oglethorpe, while finishing my dissertation in philosophy at Emory. But I was growing disillusioned with the possibility of philosophy in an academic setting, as well as with my own prospects at mak-ing any kind of serious life out of trying to succeed in such a setting. I wasn’t interested in publishing, found lecturing to be mostly a pain and somewhat dishonest, and anyway felt as if I was gaining a doctorate without having become particu-larly well educated. I had known about St. John’s both from a professor of mine in graduate school who had since become a tutor at the College (Mr. Page), and from a fellow graduate student and friend who had graduated from the college (and has since become a tutor, and now the dean, in Santa Fe). And what I understood of the place from them made it seem al-most too good to be true—the sort of place I wish I had attend-ed. Still, I hadn’t given any real thought to becoming a tutor here, mostly in thinking I wasn’t old enough or distinguished enough to put myself forward like that, and partly in suppos-ing I would have a hard time su!ering the disappointment if I tried to become a tutor and failed. But then the professor who hired me at Oglethorpe mentioned hearing that St. John’s was looking for prospective tutors for the coming school year (1998–1999), and strongly encouraged me to send a letter of interest to the dean at the time (Mr. Flaumenhaft). Which I promptly did, and this led to my being interviewed, which led to my being appointed (to my surprise, since, besides my own qualms about my age and experience, I thought I had been too nervous during the interview as well as too quick to make sweeping claims about such things as the nature of philosophy and the possibility of moral knowledge, coming o! more opin-ionated than thoughtful).

What classes are you teaching this year? I happen to be on a sabbatical this year, so I’m not teaching.

What was the biggest adventure you’ve ever had? Sigh. I’m not really one for having adventures. I never trav-el, for example, except out of necessity; and I tend to think—though maybe this rationalizes something in me that should be criticized and corrected for—that talk of adventures and adventure-seeking usually confuses the having of experiences with the gaining of experience. From that point of view, one’s life isn’t made of adventures, big or small, which makes the question ill-formulated (hence my sigh). Still, I think “adven-ture” could mean something else, that I’d consider a necessary part of any life worth living: the willingness to put oneself at risk of failure in the attempt to succeed or (maybe a better word) to achieve. In this sense, a sense that underlines the

“venture” part of “adventure,” adventures could include things like going up to the blackboard to do a proof in a mathematics tutorial when you’re unsure of how it will go, or thinking out loud in front of others at the risk of being unclear or uncer-tain—just to pick on two examples that show how the College asks its students to learn, in this sense, by adventure. And by that measure, I suppose my “biggest” adventure would be the writing and delivering of my first Friday Night lecture (even though I failed on that occasion, I think, writing something that really needed to be read rather than heard to be under-stood, and not addressing the questions in the question period as thoughtfully as I was hoping to).

What is the single most important piece of advice you would like to give to freshmen (or upperclassmen)? Just based on my experience with what can dissatisfy stu-dents at the College, to the point of getting in the way of their learning pretty quickly and early, I would give this advice (not very pithily): go into a classroom as if what happens in it were the most important part of your education at the College, but leave the classroom as if it were the least important part. Or to put this another way: treat the classroom as if its centrality to your education justifies your engagement with it, but not your dissatisfaction with it. I say this because it seems to me that students can get stuck when a class isn’t meeting their expectations, and do just the opposite of my advice, taking the importance of the class to their education, as they see it, to justify dissatisfaction and criticism rather than redoubled en-gagement and work. (I should add that I myself can be guilty of this, and could therefore use the advice I just gave.) Behind my advice too, I think, is my sense that classes at St. John’s are genuine adventures in the way I described in my answer to the question about adventures above. And they are likely to fail in one way or another most days, precisely because of the kind of success or achievement being aimed for, which is rare rather than common.

What is your favorite seminar book and why? I’m taking “favorite” not to mean “best,” but something closer to the right mix of profit and pleasure. For about ten years, my favorite book of seminar in this sense was probably Middle-march. I know that there are people (including some tutors) who find the book unconvincing, even to the point of wanting to get it o! the Program list (and they don’t read it in Santa Fe), and that they would say there is far more intellect than per-ception at work in Eliot’s narrative, by comparison with what you would find in any novel, say, of Austen’s. But for me the book has always seemed perfectly balanced between intellect

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Continued From Pg. 03and perception, and wholly compelling. That said, I’ve also had a suspicion that novels in general are defective expres-sions of the sel(ood, or at least the interiority of being human, that is more fully and even properly realized in musical works. And after teaching the music tutorial in Santa Fe for a year—this was back in 2009—my favorite “book” of seminar became Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. I used to hate the opera, and dis-liked operas more generally; but having to study that opera in Santa Fe caused me to listen to it repeatedly over the course of two months; and at a certain point, the opera suddenly started to make sense, all of it, right up to the cadence at the end that the entire work was pointing to and preparing for. It was the most convincing experience I’ve ever had of conclusiveness, and along with this the most convincing sense I’ve ever had of dramatic form, and it immediately justified for me everything Wagner claimed for his notion of a complete work of art.

What is your least favorite seminar book and why? This question is hard for me to answer, because last year, after an especially di)cult time in sophomore seminar with both the Calvin readings and the Summa readings after the first night on that work, I decided that my least favorite books of seminar are really the result of displeasure with having to read them excerpted rather than whole. And it goes beyond a mat-ter of preference for me: I’ve come to the conclusion that excerpts are a betrayal of the College’s commitment to liberal edu-cation, because they e*ectively decide for the student in advance what is im-portant about a book, rather than letting them make this decision for themselves. Indeed, the excerpts cast a doubtful light on the choice of the book itself, since it usually reflects some in-advance notion of why the book is so important that we are better o* reading it excerpted rather than reading something shorter whole. So we read Calvin excerpted, say, since we need some “representative” of Protestant thought in the Program, and Calvin is better than Luther for reasons x, y, z, etc. But to me this is a wrong-headed way of thinking about the role of books in the Program, what justifies their place on the seminar list, and treats that list as if it were like a profes-sor’s syllabus in a survey course. In any case, if I then had to choose a least favorite seminar book that we read the whole of, I’m afraid I would have to pick the Divine Comedy. When I reread it last year for sophomore seminar, I was hoping to be more compelled by the work than I’ve been in the past, since some things had happened to me in the interim to make the fate of Dante the Pilgrim more real to me. And I fooled myself for a time into thinking that yes, I was finally getting what what made this work so great. But by the time I finished Paradiso I had to admit otherwise to myself, and that I still had the same issues with the work I’ve always had. I find the book thoroughly and frustratingly undramatic, more like sculpture than like music. And it seems to me the work doesn’t really speak for itself in the end, as all the greatest books should, re-quiring rather than merely inviting all the commentary it has left in its wake on what it means down to the last detail. So while I don’t doubt its greatness in expressing a kind of thor-oughgoing vision of the whole of things, and in terms of their ultimate value no less, I do doubt its greatness in convincing

a reader of that vision inwardly rather than outwardly; which is to say, I doubt its ability to carry a reader into that vision, and make it something that can be truly inhabited and shared rather than simply studied and admired.

What is your favorite non-Program book and why? For about the last four years my favorite non-Program “book” has been The Mastersingers of Nuremburg, another opera of Wagner’s, that he wrote right after Tristan. I think it’s even better than Tristan (and for certain famous admirers of it, like Jan Paderewski and H. L. Mencken, the greatest work of art ever made). And in many ways I think it a better choice for senior seminar (and a good alternative to The Magic Flute for the music tutorial). For one thing, the subject of the opera is, explicitly, music, and its relation to nature on the one hand and art on the other, as well as its role in strengthening yet also subverting the bonds holding together social and po-litical communities. For another thing, the opera is self-con-sciously diatonic and organized around set pieces like arias and chorales, which makes it, I think, more digestible than Tristan. But since this favorite non-Program book comes from a comparatively recent change of heart about Wagner, I’ll also mention a favorite non-Program book of longer-standing for me: The Realms of Being by George Santayana, which I sus-

pect (not having read every such book to know rather than merely suspect) is the wisest book of philosophy written in the 20th century, and almost certainly the most beautifully written such book in English, even though it is nowadays rarely read or discussed.

What is your biggest pet peeve (that students do) in class? My biggest pet peeve, I think, isn’t some-thing that I see students do in class, but rather something they say, or more ex-actly, a kind of thing they say, where they

are careless with the names for things at the College. To give the two examples of this I encounter most: students will regu-larly refer to their language tutorials as a “Greek” or “French” tutorial, or even just “Greek class” or “French class,” or even even just “Greek” or “French”; and they will (even even) even talk of the language tutorials that way in their don rags, where one might think the proper names would prevail, and often without correction from the language tutor. The second ex-ample involves various alternatives for “sophomore enabling” such as “enablement” or—even worse—“disenablement.” My irritation at this has reasons behind it—there’s a point to the true names that makes the alternatives false—but it is also just irritation, and a stronger reaction to the misuse than I’ve seen in most other tutors. Hence my sense that it’s a pet peeve.

What is your favorite St. John’s tradition and why? Hands down, the dinner for seniors that happens the Friday before their Commencement on Sunday. It’s true that I find the gathering in the Great Hall beforehand awkward and the finding of a table to sit at afterwards even more awkward; but once every one is seated I think the occasion is just lovely (a word I rarely use for anything), and organized in such a way

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“ I’ve come to the conclusion that excerpts are a betrayal of the College’s commitment to liberal education, because they e!ectively decide for the student in advance what is important about a book, rather than letting them make this decision for themselves.

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As you may or may not know, we’re entering a new phase of the year. Seniors have handed in their papers, the culmi-

nation of a month (give or take) of hard work. I’m sure I speak for all of them when I say ringing the bell and walking out of McDowell was an incredible experience. Thanks to all of you who made that night special.

But I digress. Starting next week and running through about the end of the year, the seniors will be having public oral examinations on their essays in the King William Room. They run exactly an hour long, and all are welcome to attend. There are more aspects to it and more stipulations regarding what you should and should not do, but you’ll most likely be getting an email about that. And I’m sure you’ll be able to follow all the rules and regulations—but I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about a faux pas you won’t expect, a faux pas that no one ever tells you about. I’m here to warn you against falling asleep in a senior’s oral.

“That’s it? Not falling asleep? I think I can handle that,” you’re probably thinking. Let me tell you, I’ve attended my fair share of senior orals over the years, and I can say with con-fidence: You’re wrong. You’ll likely be going into these orals on a typical college student’s night’s sleep, and you won’t be prepared for the thermostat cranked to ungodly sleep-induc-ing temperatures. (I’m super serious. They really crank it. And it makes the room mad warm.) You won’t be prepared for the incredibly comfortable chairs. You’ll suddenly find your-self nodding o( as you listen to a conversation in which you cannot participate, and when it happens, there’s not much you can do about it. You can’t get up and start doing calisthenics, that’s for sure.

So here’s some advice to reduce your chance of public shame. First of all: Plan your week ahead of time. The list of orals for the upcoming week comes out weekly, so you have ample to time to prepare and plan your schedule if there’s an oral you really want to attend. Second, and most important-ly: After you plan your week, make sure you get a good (or at least a decent) night’s sleep before the day of the oral. It really makes a di(erence.

Third: This is a personal preference, but I prefer to sit in the wooden chairs, as opposed to the cushioned ones. If you can stay awake better in the cushioned ones, the more power to you, but I know I can’t. Besides, the wooden ones are not Johnnie chairs (i.e., they’re fairly comfortable). I can just stay more engaged that way.

Fourth: Sit beside someone and tell them to nudge (or smack) you if you start falling asleep. It’s a tried and true method, and being held accountable always increases your de-sire to succeed.

Fifth: Posture. Make sure you’re sitting up straight. Don’t rest your head against the back of the seat. And for God’s sake, don’t let your head drift downward. That is the path straight to Hell, my friends.

Sixth: Make sure all the lights are on in the room before the oral. Often tutors will turn on the lights if they’re o( before they enter, but they don’t always do this. Better be safe than sorry: turn on the lights before the tutors even get there. Trust

me, it makes a world of di(erence.Last: This is totally optional, but if you can, read the essay

in the library before you go to the oral. It’s a big investment: it takes a lot more time, but you’ll understand and follow the conversation much better. The précis before the oral helps a bit, but you’ll follow the conversation much better if you read the actual arguments made in the paper. If you want to get the most out of the senior oral, this is the way to go.

That about sums it up. I highly encourage you to check out some senior orals. By and large, they’re hit and miss, but it’s very rewarding to see a good conversation between people who know what they’re talking about. Have fun, and stay awake (especially you, seniors)! !

Jonathan Barone A’13To Avoid a Faux Pas: Senior Oral Etiquette

!"#$%&'())*+'!,%-.$/0-1Michael FoglemanTitle/topic?“Knowing Phaedrus, Remembering Ourselves”

Why this work/topic?I chose to write on Plato because he is Plato. In the Phaedrus, Socrates describes a philosophical rhetoric that can adjust its speech to the soul of the audience; if Plato’s writing does this, then it is the Phaedrus that speaks most directly to my soul. I wrote about Phaedrus and self-knowledge because it would allow me to talk about Phaedrus as a character and self-knowledge as an aspect of philosophy.

Advisor?Mr. Dink

Writing Period strategy?I kept a regular schedule: waking up early, medi-tating, eating, going to bed. During the day, I would read, think, and write. And I went to writ-ing assistance!

Advice?Start thinking about picking an author, book, and/or question sooner than later. Re-read the book frequently. Go to writing assistance early and often, not just for your Senior Essay but for other papers. Think of thought as inner speech, and have good conversations not just with others but with yourself.

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“And therefore never send to know for whom the

bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

What Margaret Winter (SF’66) lacked in career ideas after graduation, she made up for in grand ambitions:

“St. John’s taught me to think big and to want to do things on a heroic scale,” she said. Just out of the Johnnie bubble, she landed in a tumultuous world where the powerless many were demanding from the powerful few. One day, a stay-at-home mother of an infant, she met a young black woman with two young children who attended Howard Law School, who told her, “If I can go to law school, so can you.” Winter entered law school a year later. Fast forward: In 1996 she argued before the Supreme Court and won. Unanimously.

See? Things might not be so bad after graduation. Like her, you might even be the future winner of the Alumni Award of Merit.

To be sure, the first few years in the real world were chaotic ones: “I didn’t come out of St. John’s prepared for law school in any obvious way,” she said: she admits her law school career was mediocre (she didn’t write for the Law Journal, among many other missed opportunities). But she realized later the power of the St. John’s experience. “How can you not think big,” she said, “when you’ve spent four years discussing Hom-er, the Bible, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Dostoevski with your classmates?”

She developed the legal skills she need-ed in the heat of battle. “I took on very big cases early on. I don’t think I ever took a case that didn’t have a big theme,” she said. It was the action that guided her: wherever that was for her, she was in the fray.

And big action she got. Not many years after law school, she was suing the FBI—successfully—for its counter-intelligence programs against Vietnam-era antiwar ac-tivists. For the past eighteen years, she has focused on pris-oners’ rights, and rarely has there been a better time to do so. For at least the last fifteen years, the U.S. has been on an incar-ceration binge, fueled by prison industry lobbyists. Today the United States is the greatest incarcerator on the planet, with 2.3 million Americans behind bars. “One in every one hundred Americans is behind bars,” Winter explained. “The majority of prisoners are there on drug-related crimes, and very many have untreated mental illness. Overwhelmingly, they’re poor. The prison industry consumes vast resources that should go to education and treatment for drug addiction and mental ill-ness. The nation’s addiction to incarceration is warping our society, and everyone should care about that.”

It is hard, once you hear the horror stories she relays, not to

care. “You can’t see what I’ve seen and talk with hundreds of prisoners about their lives without concluding that we’re all part of the same human family,” she said. “You meet with the full range of humanity in prison. Just like in the free world, you encounter nobility and generosity as well as cruelty and selfishness.”

She has had too many major victories to list them here. To name a few: A couple of months ago, she won a class action against the state of Alabama for segregating all prisoners with HIV just because they had the disease. In 2011, she won a con-sent decree banning solitary confinement for all Mississippi youth convicted as adults. In 2008, she won a case against the self-styled “toughest Sheri! in America,” over conditions in one of the biggest jail systems in the nation. In 2006, she won a decree that reduced the population of Mississippi’s super-max prison by eighty percent. In 2004, she won an appellate decision on behalf of a gay Texas prisoner who sued prison o"cials for not protecting him from gang-run sexual slavery. In 2002, she won a class action challenging grossly inhumane conditions on Mississippi’s Death Row.

But the Supreme Court case is especially memorable for her. Some backstory: Prison is a business everywhere. Oklahoma

came up with the idea that, in order to keep beds full, they would let a model prisoner out when the prison was overcrowded, and then haul him back in once a bed opened up again. If Oklahoma succeeded, other states would follow.

Oklahoma started with one particularly well-behaved prisoner, who was 20 years into a life sentence for murder. They freed him into the community under supervision; he got a job and an apartment and soaked

in his freedom. Five months later, they suddenly announced that he must report back to prison the next morning—not for breaking any rule, but because there was an empty bed. He went back to prison, but took the state to court. When the tenth circuit sided with the prisoner, the state appealed to the Supreme Court. Ms. Winter was appointed as his attorney. “It was terrifying to appear before that Court,” she said. “The justices argue among themselves through you, shooting ques-tions at you at machine-gun speed. But it’s an incomparable experience, one that few lawyers ever have.”

If I may say so myself: what a ride. I had one final question: for all she went through in her starting years, would she go to St. John’s again, if she had the chance? “Oh, for sure,” she said, “I’d just be a more serious student.” !

“ ‘How can you not think big,’ [Winter] said, ‘when you’ve spent four years discussing Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, Cer-vantes, and Dostoevski with your classmates?’

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Robert Malka A’15

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Sta! writer Robert Malka pro"les alumna Margaret Winter, the As-sociate Director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, and winner of a 2012 Alumni Award of Merit.

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Anonymous

Do you ever wonder what people really think of you? Well, you’re in luck: a new Facebook page has com-

menced for the use of anonymous Johnnies who wish to express publicly (i.e., to the SJC population on Facebook) what they really think of you. Cruel, rude, and generally inappropriate comments are, of course, not part of the objective. Or are they?

A wise tutor of mine recently mentioned in class how what isn’t written is as impor-tant, if not more so, than what is. After all, Socrates is “wise” because he at least admits to not knowing anything. When it comes to knowing what is, it’s just as important to know what isn’t. Or, in this case, who isn’t.

Sure, it’s nice to see somebody write something kind about you, but it’s not that simple for most of us. What does it mean if your name hasn’t come up? What is it that people might have to say regarding what they really think of you that isn’t appropriate for public eyes? “Hateful or rude remarks will be completely disregarded,” the page description reads; is that why your name is not on that page? Or worse still, what if people don’t have any-thing to think about you at all? What if, at this tiny lit-tle liberal arts college where identity is crucial, no one can recall anything about you? If you’re silently thinking to yourself, “Well, Johnnie, you’re in the clear; someone’s already posted something ‘nice’ about you,” think again. This group has the potential to a(ect everyone negatively, even the populars.

Let’s propose a scenario. A friend of mine is very hand-some indeed but hasn’t really got much of a brain. Since this person is my friend, I would like to “share the love,” but also not lie. I write something along the lines of, “Johnnie is the most gorgeous person on campus!” Meanwhile, this comment is posted among one hundred others describing how “intel-ligent” or “strong” some other people are. Is Johnnie silently worrying to himself that he’s somehow inadequate with re-spect to these other fine attributes? Is he also silently scold-ing himself for being so cynical and sensitive over something so seemingly good-natured and loving? Well, sure he is! And why in the world, if you apparently feel so strongly about Johnnie in this way, would you want your proposed compli-ment to backfire entirely? Or maybe it didn’t backfire, and that’s exactly what you wanted to say to him. I have myself been tempted to throw a few spiteful remarks into the mix: “Despite everything, Johnnie, I care about you!” or “John-nie, I always feel smarter, classier, and more beautiful in your presence!” “Hateful or rude remarks will be completely dis-regarded”? Think again, Johnnie. You’re smarter than that.

If you know someone, and I mean really know them, why would you cowardly write something about them anony-mously? This is the online equivalent of that needy kid in high school who goes around trying to hug everybody, compliment-ing peoples’ shirts, because he hopes to God somebody will one day return the favor. If what you have to say is something genuinely true and good, why not say it to their face? Com-municating face to face is what fosters real relationships and genuine friendships. Don’t you feel somewhat cheated when

someone tries to be heartfelt via social media? Not to men-tion, if you feel strange saying your compliment to the person’s face, chances are, you don’t know them well enough to say what you’re saying anyway. If what we aspire to be for each

other amounts to nothing but cowardly, distant friends, this group will flourish. But our souls will not.

A final note to those of you still left skepti-cal. Maybe you’re thinking, “Whoever wrote this article is nothing but a sad and insecure

hypocrite.” It’s all true. Nobody wrote any-thing about me on this Facebook page. There are fewer compliments about me on that page than the number of times qua is used cor-rectly in an Aristotle seminar. I am insecure. And I’m not attaching my name to this article.

But like I said before, everyone is a(ected by this page, those mentioned and those not. And for the record, everyone’s a little insecure. We

all strive every day for virtue and for truth. Or maybe we just try to get through the day, hoping

that there are people out there who care about us enough to be vulnerable and tell us what they really think, face to face, human to hu-

man.And why should I not attach my name to this article? It’s not addressed to anyone in par-

ticular, and it’s not written by anyone in particular. In the words of Ms. Brann, listen not to me, but to the logos. !

as to make it so. I like the combination of formality and informality, the conviviality, even the nostalgia induced by it. For a gathering of that size there is still a sense of intimacy, and the giving of toasts poses a unique sort of challenge for students (and tutors), which compels them to say things about themselves and about the College they might otherwise not say. And while I have come to dislike the phrase “a community of learning” as a characteriza-tion of the College’s nature and integrity (mostly because I think that learning happens in the soul rather than in any community), the aptness of this characterization is reflected most, I think, in the senior dinner.

What is your favorite class to be a tutor for and why? Senior mathematics, I think. For one thing, there is more than enough time to do everything that needs to be done without rushing, or feeling the burden of the schedule. And within each semester there is a genuine line of in-quiry being pursued, without the division into distinct if related topics or readings that is more often the case in classes at the College. In particular, there is a sense of pa-tient exploration animating the first semester’s study of non-Euclidean geometry that I haven’t found so strongly or clearly in any other class I’ve been a tutor for. Finally, there is something genuinely elementary yet also recol-lective about the way that both semesters of the tutorial begin, in the first with a kind of renewed beginning in ge-ometry, and in the second with a similar kind of renewed beginning in physics. !

Continued From Pg. 04

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My mother had always tried to cultivate humility in me. There is always a mountain higher than the one you con-

quered, she would say, warning me not to revel in my achieve-ments. At once trying to nip arrogance—that obnoxious excess of self-importance which separates one from peers—in the bud and to press me to excel, she unfortunately did not build the intellectual foundation for humility which would have won me entirely over. From her I learned that society scorned the arrogant; the stories she told and the movies we watched taught me arrogance marked the foolish sidekicks and the ar-chetypical villains. Yet, my greatest lesson in humility was not taught through her admonitions or gener-al social pressure, but through my studies at St. John’s College.

Studying the “Great Books” which western civilization is founded on hum-bled me, but not in the same way looking at tall mountains did. Euclid, Plato, and Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch are indisput-able giants on whose shoulders our mod-ern fields of mathematics, philosophy, and biology build upon, yes—but at St. John’s College we explicate the texts by bringing these otherwise untouchable figures into the realm of conversation. We try to scrutinize the validity of their ideas; we test their logic for hollow cavities, and question relentlessly what justifies each claim. Such proximity to their literature naturally allows us to better admire their genius, but we do not let their author-ity carry more weight than the punch of their arguments. We beckon them down from their high mountain to talk on even ground. And it was here, where no past achievement counted, where I was only worth my grain of salt if Euclid did not pace circles around me, that I realized no amount of success puts one person above another.

Nearly every classroom discussion ends with more ques-tions than answers. When there are answers, they only bring clarity over what the author says, and rarely if at all shower clarity over some universal truth. I learn that even the most rigorous attempts made by Plato and Aristotle to find the truth rest on no solid logical foundation. There is no logic behind a priori principles. At a certain point, one is forced to accept premises on no basis other than that they appear self-evident-ly true. What is self-evident relies on human experience —and our experiences are pathetically limited by our cognitive and perceptive abilities. We build our mountainous achievements on a cloud we hope will hold true.

This realization blew to dust my last iota of superiority. I cannot claim I am a better or worse human than my peers when the judgement of “better” or “worse” is not staked in any solid truth. To say I am better or worse at any particular action, and then to proceed to take that di(erence in skill as a measure of my worth as a human, would only show I exag-gerate the importance of that action. When even Euclid must beg us to accept his postulates, for otherwise there can be no Euclidean geometry, how can I say my intelligence, achieve-

ments, and skills amount to anything more than what society allows? Just as we grant Euclid the grounds for his achieve-ments, our achievements only have significance insomuch as we grant it to them. To the extent which we acknowledge the mountains we have surmounted, we never become more than human for climbing them. In that sense, we never become more than anyone else.

I now take what I say, as well as what anyone else says, tentatively. I hesitate to accept claims promulgated by peo-ple who do not show similar humility, because I have come to believe arrogance obscures the truth. This applies to self-

righteous campaigns (often conducted by religious, political, scientific, or cultural leaders), which often make no e(ort to dispel the illusion of absolute confidence they intend to exert. This confidence risks becoming foolish, and the foolishly confident are prone to making mistakes we sometimes willingly ignore, because we thirst for the confidence they exude. Never having been quick to ally myself with any established dogma, learning hu-

mility made me even more cynical to ideas which time has pushed up to incontestable heights. When capitalism, social-ism, and all other –isms implore I be persuaded by the sheer genius of their achievements or theory, I demand a confronta-tion with them on even ground, and I demand an explication of their premises. I withhold my support until I understand what premises they must beg me to grant them, and then only if I grant them. Humility, in showing how lightly I should take myself, shows me how to take others lightly as well. !

Raymond Lau A’16

If I could write a poem, half as beautiful as youI’d take a bow, that all the world, would come to worship mebut then, I’d strike a bargain, with the devil if need beto sell the rights for all its worth, for one second spent with youfor the bliss within that instant, would transcend infinityand the dream within the dreamer could remake realitytill all the wishes ever wished, should mean no more than thisthe consummation of one life all wrapped up in a kiss...

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“ I now take what I say, as well as what anyone else says, tentatively. I hesitate to accept claims promulgated by people who do not show similar humility, because I have come to believe arro-gance obscures the truth.

Ian Tuttle A’14Some Thoughts on the Passing Scene:

•Hillary Clinton has stepped o! the national stage (for the moment…) and passed the reins of the U.S. State Department to John Forbes Kerry, formerly Massachusetts’ senior sena-tor and George W. Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 presidential election. Just after his tenure at State began, it was announced that all State Department “tweets” written by Kerry himself would be signed “JK.” How fitting.

•John Adams famously advocated “a government of laws, not of men.” That seems to have fallen out of vogue. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on immigration this week that will feature Jose Antonio Vargas, a Filipino-born journalist who appeared on the cover of TIME last summer. Vargas is also an illegal immigrant, who entered the country when he was 12 and never obtained permission to remain (he is now 32). He has been on the payroll of the Washington Post (in violation of federal law) and was arrested in Minnesota for driving without a valid driver’s license (he had previously obtained a Washington state license under false pretenses). Seated beside Vargas at the hearing? Chris Crane, head of the Im-migrations and Customs Enforcement em-ployees’ union, which is suing the Obama administration for the rules that make it all but impossible for ICE agents to arrest illegal immigrants—like the one sitting next to him.

•“It is almost a false argument to say that we have a spending problem,” said Nancy Pelosi on Sunday’s Meet the Press. “We have a budget deficit problem.” That’s the fiscal equivalent of, “It is almost a false argument to say that we have a cocaine problem. We have a withdrawal problem.”

•One of the lesser-discussed facts of Obamacare, which is set to take full e!ect at the beginning of next year, is that the al-batross of a law will be a bear to implement. Latest example: California, where there are not enough doctors to manage the expected crush of newly insured patients. Searching for solutions, state lawmakers are considering allowing pharma-cists, optometrists, and the like to act as primary care provid-ers, able to diagnose diabetes, high blood pressure, and other chronic illnesses. Think diagnoses are perfunctory now? Wait until your regular physician retires and his patients have to resort to the local eye doctor.

•North Carolina State University’s website declares that “happiness is being a student at a campus that makes you feel anything but small.” But if that doesn’t turn your crank, the school’s Union Activities Board recently purchased butt plugs, vibrators, dildos, edible underwear, and artificial female geni-talia for the institution’s “Dirty Bingo” event, during which “certified educators” could use the items to demonstrate an array of “healthy sex practices.” In its defense, the school does advertise that “Discovery begins at NC State.” Still, I’d bet this wasn’t the “education” most parents had in mind.

•When Jared Loughner opened fire on a crowd in Tuscon, AZ, in 2011, killing six and injuring 13 (including then-con-gresswoman Gabrielle Gi!ords), pundits laid the blame at the feet of former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her website’s “bullseye” campaign map, which “targeted” dis-tricts for the 2010 midterm elections. It’s a media reflex, in the aftermath of acts of potentially political violence, to blame the “heated rhetoric” of the American Right. Of course, of the dozen attacks that have garnered calls for the heads of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al., in just the past three years, none have actually turned out to have any connection to the “heat-ed, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces.”

Enter Floyd Corkins. Corkins recently pleaded guilty to last August’s shooting at the Family Research Council, a conserva-tive organization that promotes traditional marriage, that left a security guard wounded. Carrying three pistol magazines and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches, Corkins intended to “make a statement against the people who work in that building,” and, as CNN.com reported, he hoped to “smear [the sandwiches] in the dying faces of the sta!ers he expected to kill.” Strange-

ly, Chris Matthews has avoided all blame.

•For fans of the recent CBS hit Person of Interest, behavior-predicting software may soon be in a supercomputer near you. Defense contractor Raytheon has devel-oped an “extreme-scale analytics” system that compiles social network data—Face-book posts, Twitter messages, GPS data from Foursquare, etc.—which can be ana-lyzed to determine behavioral patterns. The software (Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or RIOT), has not yet been sold, but Raytheon hopes that the pro-

gram will “help meet our nation’s rapidly changing security needs.” While data mining for law enforcement purposes is generally legal, privacy advocates are worried about the lack of oversight for this type of covert data collection.

Add RIOT to the swelling list of technologies that may well be central to the ethical questions of our day. Drone use (for combat, surveillance, etc.), cyberwarfare (a key tool of the Chinese and non-state actors, such as the hacking group Anonymous), and the like have already begun to provoke questions about the increasingly indistinct lines between citi-zen and state. But neither a revived Luddism nor a new Fu-turism is the answer. As scholar Yuval Levin observes, “The trouble is not that technology can be used for both good and evil, but that people in the age of technology may have real trouble telling the di!erence between the two.”

• If you needed any assistance deciding whether ex-Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel ought to be confirmed as America’s next secretary of defense, the following statement should help to make up your mind. Asked about the Obama administration’s policy on Iran, Hagel announced, “I support the president’s strong position on containment.” A few minutes later: “I was just handed a note that I misspoke, that I said I supported the president’s position on containment. If I said that, I meant to say that we don’t have a position on containment.”

We’re doomed. !

“ “The trouble is not that technology can be used for both good and evil, but that people in the age of technology may have real trouble telling the di!er-ence between the two.”

- Yuval Levin

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Jacob Kilgore A’16

On a short visit just before his son’s January 30th performance at the Metropoli-tan, Erik Neave’s father said, “I’ve played for a long time and sound okay today,

I guess. But Erik picked it up late and sounded better in three months than I ever have.”

That Wednesday, about 35 students trekked through snow and rain down West Street in support of what was, for some, the band of a friend of a friend. Two hours later, they left together with more in common than wet weather and a long walk. They left with an understanding of what Neave’s father had meant.

It would be di(cult to classify Neave’s music: “folk” is inadequate, “indie” too cli-ché. Sometimes labels throw words at an album in the hopes of capturing the sound an artist: folk-acoustic-blues-indie-pop-rock. They never quite capture what they or the artist intend. In a word, though, Neave’s music is honest.

Through melodies at once rowdy and calm, angsty and somber, Neave confessed before an audience and shared the frustrating questions he entertains through his art. Although the words of each song were the same as on his band Cedarwell’s al-bums, the intimacy between the artist, the work, and the witnesses enhanced the personal quality and communal aspect of the event.

He transported participants to a kind of other-world, free of inhibition or pretense. It exhibited the quality of a vivid memory or dream, yet, espe-cially while singing along, the audience seemed moved to a very real and tangible front porch on the prairie, singing blue grass tunes with ma and pa.

He left the audience with questions like, “My love, where have you been?” and “Where is my God?”, as well as a resounding asser-tion: “Alone is not the only thing worth crying a tear.”

Erik G. Neave is both the magician and the rabbit under the hat, shocked to be in front of an audience at all. Because of his performance and performances like his, we deal boldly and together with the struggles each of us face. Somehow, the music pro-vides a forum wherein no fear taints our interaction, and nobody could be ashamed to identify. Perhaps because there is a courageous person on a stage, proclaiming and even re-creating his own struggle. !

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!e Music of Erik Neave (A’16)

We’re pleased to remind the Polity that the deadline for Energeia, St. John’s’ annual literary magazine, has been extended! We have received

only a few submissions, so dig through your files or sift through your notebooks and send in your work!

We welcome a wide variety of submissions, including short stories, poetry, paintings, drawings, photography, translations, essays (academic, expository, or lyric), and even musical scores and mathematical proofs. If you’re not sure whether your piece qualifies, send it in—our goal is a professional, creative, and eclectic publication. We welcome submissions from all members of the community, including undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, tutors, administration, and sta).

All submissions should be sent to our new Gmail address, sjca.energeia@gmail.com, by the new deadline: 11:59 pm, Sunday, February 17, 2013. Please don’t hesitate to contact the editors at the above address with any questions. We look forward to reading your work! !

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