As we noted in the last 'blog post, grammar was the initial stage of a liberal education. One might ask, What is a liberal education? To the classical mind, it is the education of the freeman, that prepares a man to be free and that he deserves by virtue of his freedom. Since the eighteenth century, however, our ideas of freedom have changed. In the classical world, freedom was strongly connected to goodness whereas in the eighteenth century, thanks largely to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it became identified for the first time with spontaneity. This has been termed naturalism, i.e. the belief that a child, if left to its own devices, will flourish better than if forced into an unnatural and impersonal 'mould'. One of the chief and most baleful consequences of this school of thought has been the notion that disorder is positively beneficial in education. Hence, the teaching and understanding of grammar have become very much obscured and its serious study rarely undertaken.
In the classical mind, grammar was not simply a linguistic term, but it denoted the structure of understanding. Thus, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, perhaps the greatest nineteenth century theologian, wrote his Grammar of Assent to describe the structure of religious faith. Various ideological movements have largely abolished this understanding; deconstruction is but one example. The notion that permanent rules, required by the nature of things, would help human understanding are now largely out of place, save in languages and the empirical sciences. We might say that method has come to replace grammar, that continually renewed investigation has come to replace inherited laws. At the heart of this change has been a philosophical revolution; the move to a much more fluid and relativistic understanding of the world has affected language deeply. The clarity and fixity of traditional grammar has become deeply unfashionable and rarely valued.
Historically, grammar was valued because it fixed meaning. An accusation thrown against the ancient sophists (and modern politicians) was that they used 'weasel words', words that might mean anything to different people. In ancient Athens, the Sophists were identified with a deceiving success; in the Phaedrus, Socrates (Plato's mouthpiece) disabuses his young interlocutor of the idea that the Sophist's way is the right one. The parallels today are uncanny; Sophists were considered to use language for their own advancement and success. They were the spin-doctors of Antiquity. As today, an excess of words with little fixed meaning allowed bad men to escape blame and responsibility. Plato and the Greek tradition fixed the Western mind until the last century upon "being" as the central philosophical principle. Sophistry would not experience such success until the modern era.
When I was at University, we were warned of the evils of "binaries". This encouraged us to reject such notions as male/female and good/evil. Although this term itself rests on a binary (of binary/non-binary understandings), we were meant to accept it as dogma. As in ancient days, the common man's understanding (i.e. that inherited from the past) was attacked in order to promote a new orthodoxy. The language was attacked for the sake of political power. The new "freedom-fighters" were given an otherwise unexplained moral authority. The language of old, along with institutions, had oppressed them and now they were to go largely unchallenged, their cause unanalysed. Resistance to changes in language comes in part from the well-founded belief that a new cause is being advanced in an underhand way. Changes in language often conceal something that wishes to be hidden.
So, what is the value of grammar? Knowledge of grammar and its use gives us precision and clarity in both reading and writing. It enables us to measure properly what another has communicated and to respond in a precise and measured way. It substitutes the common phrases that echo in our heads with mastery of the different possibilities of the language. Each day, we must consume and digest a vast amount of information, often emotionally conveyed, and we must make some sense and judgement of it. This is a mammoth task. Gauging and judging the clarity, content and correctness of any statement begins in the manner in which it is made. With practice, we become better at judging the truth of statements based on our knowledge of language and of facts. While grammar is not enough in itself, it is the indisputable foundation. Without it, we carry only the memory of strong emotions generated by slogans as the foundation of our (almost certainly erroneous) judgement.
Beyond this merely utilitarian purpose, grammar is also very enjoyable. There is something called pedant's pleasure, after all! The male mind, in particular, enjoys the challenge of rule-based understanding, of sharpening itself and catching others out. Agonising over whether a group of words is a sentence or phrase has a relieving catharsis when one finds the answer. There is also a deep, abiding pleasure in understanding how one's knowledge has deepened. Learning the French word nom ('noun' or 'name') and then coming to understand its connection to noun and its origin in the Latin nomen allows one to see the gathered heritage of many centuries and civilisations, from ancient Athens to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the modern era.
We conclude by exhorting our readers to fervent study of grammar. The Sorbonne gives the title of Cour de civilisation française to its grammar textbook. Its rules, like those in English, are derived from the best of its writers to give both clarity and style to the written language. This is likewise a Course in English Civilisation. The elaboration of English was one of the defining events of the early modern era and it was both a tool of Empire and born of a hitherto unparalleled exposure to the world. No modern student or scholar can afford to neglect either the study of English or of grammar. They are the foundation of prosperity and knowledge.
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