The Flow of Thought, Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians

I’ve never been one for journaling. It’s not for lack of trying or admiration for the idea behind the practice. But keeping a journal and writing down my thoughts about myself or what I experienced that day just never caught on for me. I was almost tempted to say that it would have felt too egotistical to me to record my everyday feelings and happenings, but that’s not entirely the truth. I’ve had plenty of egoism to support that; it’s more that the trivialities of most days didn’t strike me as worthy of that sort of memorialization. And so, not having something important enough to write every day meant it was impossible for me to keep journaling up as a habit. That is, until I found Ryder Carrol’s The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future (https://bulletjournal.com/pages/book).

I was musing around the local public library a year and a half ago looking for inspiring non-fiction, when what should I stumble across in the new books section but this gem. I’ve been hooked ever since. I think the reason is because it released me from the necessity of writing ornate literary prose about my life, and instead gave me a method for tracking the things that were important to me.

As I’ve delved deeper and deeper into the work of classical school administration and teaching, it’s become more and more necessary for me to increase my productivity and decrease my stress levels. As I’ve become a father, it’s become more important to keep my personal habits dialed in, like devotional reading and prayer, exercise, quality time with my wife and play time with my daughter. Bullet journaling has given me a way to track that and other things, as well as a space to dream and plan, such that I have a clear record of my own thoughts and goals and progress. And going back over my old journals from the past couple years clears away the fog from my memory, gives me a sense of peace, and makes me an amateur historian of my own life.

This little anecdote, or testimonial (whichever you prefer), is all a prelude to this next installment inspired by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In one of the later sections of his chapter on “The Flow of Thought” (in which are found more reasons per page for a classical education than most classical ed best-sellers), he discusses the realm of history, as an avenue into the flow state: that active ordering of consciousness where the challenge meets our current abilities and we enter a timeless experience of joy in the pursuit.

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought:

Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words.

Future installments: Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.

History as a Route into Flow

Our psychologist begins by conceding that history may be a little bit trickier of a flow activity than some other classical subjects:

“Although history lacks the clear rules that make other mental activities like logic, poetry, or mathematics so enjoyable, it has its own unambiguous structure established by the irreversible sequence of events in time.” (132)

You’ll remember that having clear rules is one of the qualities that make the experience of flow easily attainable. If your brain knows what to do and what not to do, then it’s easier to play the game with full intensity and without the hesitation and worry that so often causes our conscious minds to step out of focus on what we’re doing and start questioning the activity or ourselves. The saving grace of history is its “unambiguous structure” found in the sequence of time. Csikszentmihalyi goes on to claim that amateur historiography has served the purpose of ordering human consciousness for a long time:

“Observing, recording, and preserving the memory of both the large and small events of life is one of the oldest and most satisfying ways to bring order to consciousness.” (132)

Recall our earlier article on The Joy of Memory (pun intended), and how the recollection of one’s ancestors was one of the most satisfying and ubiquitous experiences of early, personal history. Just to recount the names of those who came before, often at great length, served the purpose of situating the individual within the larger tribe or clan, within the broader story of time. As human beings we have always felt great pleasure in this rehearsal (at least until our modern ultra-individualistic age).

There’s a reason the Bible is full of genealogies, and while part of that is how they establish the historical purpose and accuracy of the text, the genealogies also witness to this human love for knowledge of the past and how it leads up to the present.

History and Modern Individualism

One of the most striking features of our psychologist’s encouragement to amateur historiography is how focused it is on the individual. From a Christian and classical perspective, this seems both uniquely right, and strangely unsettling and off-kilter. To understand why this paradox could be the case, listen to this paragraph on becoming an amateur historian:

“In a sense, every individual is a historian of his or her own personal existence. Because of their emotional power, memories of childhood become crucial elements in determining the kind of adults we grow up to be, and how our minds will function. Psychoanalysis is to a large extent an attempt to bring order to people’s garbled histories of their childhood.” (132)

On the one hand, his emphasis here is perfectly understandable, given that he is a psychologist. His focus on the individual’s story, especially their childhood, makes perfect sense, given the history of the discipline and such luminaries as Freud and Jung.

And from a Christian perspective, the importance of a single individual cannot be overestimated: created in the image of God, our personal stories are of immense value and worth. All the hairs of our head are numbered and not a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of our Father. Our calling includes culture making and making something of our personal past is certainly a legitimate part of the human vocation.

However, the way that he approaches the subject seems symptomatic of one of the great failings of the modern era: the abandonment of piety and tradition. Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain in The Liberal Arts Tradition diagnose the modern offense of impiety against our whole culture that we have inherited (Version 2.0; pp. 15ff.)—a situation that explains more than any other our particular educational weaknesses in the study of history. I’m alluding to the outcry against our general ignorance of our own history (whether American history for us Americans, or basic world knowledge, like the “Who’s Shakespeare?” comments of young adults).

How does this ignorance stem from impiety, you may ask? Our psychologist’s description of the different levels of history provides a good example of what I mean. Notice the order in which his practical suggestions flow:

“There are several levels at which history as a flow activity can be practiced. The most personal involves simply keeping a journal. The next is to write a family chronicle, going as far into the past as possible. But there is no reason to stop there. Some people expand their interest to the ethnic group to which they belong, and start collecting relevant books and memorabilia. With an extra effort, they can begin to record their own impressions of the past, thus becoming ‘real’ amateur historians.” (133)

Did you catch it? First comes the individual and the journaling that I opened this article with, then comes the “family chronical,” followed lastly by the “ethnic group,” the larger cultural unit of one’s people. In a way, this is entirely backward. First in a child’s historical consciousness should be the history of his people, followed by how his family’s history is situated within it, and only lastly how his emerging personal history contributes and relates to the history of the family and people.

A sense of piety, of duty or obligation to one’s family, city, culture and the divine, would properly recognize the individual as coming into the world dependent and situated within the broader story of the culture, within which the family and individual find their place. This contrasts sharply with the quest for “self-discovery among a buffet of potential selves” that characterizes modern individualism (Clark and Jain 22).

But for understandable reasons, our psychologist’s instruction manual begins with the unmoored modern adult floating on a sea of individual preferences, and imagines her taking up the work of journaling to solve her “personal” problems, only to delve into the psychologically restorative and satisfying work of digging up her family past, ending in a great culmination of expanding interest in the history of her broader “ethnic group” as a sort of hobby to fill up the spare hours of old age.

As Csikszentmihalyi puts it,

“Remembering the past is not only instrumental in the creation and preservation of a personal identity, but it can also be a very enjoyable process.” (132)

What I find most saddening about this set of assumptions is how lonely it must feel to operate in a world of personal-history-making rather than the old ideal of grand historical discovery. We are born into a world that already has a history, irrespective of us and our psychological needs and preferences. And this historical sweep will continue on long after we are gone (assuming the Lord tarries), and it is immensely freeing and enlivening to recognize this fact.

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The Wide-Open Spaces of History

Interestingly, Charlotte Mason bemoaned the lack of historical knowledge in her own day (late 19^th and early 20^th century). This should caution us against the too ready nostalgia for the education of the past that we classical educators are susceptible to by nature. Golden eras in education come and go all too quickly in the history of the great classical liberal arts tradition. But we should have the confidence to hear God’s assurance that a remnant remains of 7,000 who have not bowed the knee to the Baals of educational nonsense of whatever era or name.

And so for the perennial problem of historical ignorance, Charlotte Mason points the finger at our methods of teaching history, rather than blaming the rising generation:

“If there is but little knowledge of history amongst us, no doubt our schools are in fault. Teachers will plead that there is no time save for a sketchy knowledge of English history given in a course of lectures of which the pupils take notes and work up reports. Most of us know how unsatisfying is such a course however entertaining.” (Vol. 6, Toward a Philosophy of Education)

History is deep and wide, vastly so, and a short series of entertaining lectures will not satisfy the amateur historian. He longs to ride free across the plains, and the method that Charlotte Mason recommends to multiply the time and secure the attention is, of course, narration:

“Each school period is quadrupled in time value and we find that we get through a surprising amount of history in a thorough way, in about the same time that in most schools affords no more than a skeleton of English History only. We know that young people are enormously interested in the subject and give concentrated attention if we give them the right books. We are aware that our own discursive talk is usually a waste of time and a strain on the scholars’ attention, so we (of the P.N.E.U.) confine ourselves to affording two things,––knowledge, and a keen sympathy in the interest roused by that knowledge. It is our part to see that every child knows and can tell, whether by way of oral narrative or written essay.” (Vol. 6, Toward a Philosophy of Education)

The key is to give students the right books, sizable books written by legitimate historians, not those canned books written by committees. The attention of students is strained, according to Mason, more by the teacher’s chatter than by a dusty and weighty tome of history. In fact, the dust is but the natural by-product of exploring dusty deserts!

Flow as a Signpost

And such exploration can be a gripping entrance into the flow state, but not as an end in itself. In a way this whole series on the flow of thought supporting classical education suffers from a major liability. By drawing attention to the joy of learning, the flow experiences possible through the classical liberal arts and sciences, it might make the impression that the real point of learning was the joy itself—as if happiness for its own sake was the goal at which growth and virtue was ultimately aimed.

Now I don’t mean to contend with Aristotle ill-advisedly on this issue—perhaps there is a better way of construing eudaimonia that doesn’t have the unfortunate resonance with fleeting emotional states, like the English “happiness”. So perhaps substituting it for ideas like “human flourishing” does the trick. However, a fully Christian view of this life as the domain of taking up one’s cross before receiving the crown might justify replacing flow as an end goal. Instead, I’m inclined to follow the modern sensation Jordan Peterson in designating the flow state, experienced in history or learning or anything else, as rather a clue to meaning and transcendence, than the final goal.

The joy of learning is not an end in itself, but a signal implanted in our souls by God of the path on up to ultimate value and purpose. The delight found in exploring the wide-open spaces of history points to the larger story of God’s work in the world and its ultimate goal in the new age. The flow state is meant to let us know we’re on the right track and to point us onward and upward into the foothills of the heavenly Zion.

C.S. Lewis used the term ‘joy’ or the German ‘sensucht’ to get at this very idea, even though he predated the psychological term ‘flow’. For him the presence of such desires or longings, that were at the same time so pleasurable, was part of what convinced him that heaven had to be a reality. This is sometimes called the argument from desire for the existence of God or heaven and it goes back at least to Aquinas. The logic is as follows:

• All natural desires (like for food, sex, companionship, etc.) have an object of fulfillment in this life.
• But there is this experience of ‘joy’ or ‘sensucht’ (flow?) which is at the same time pleasurable and an experience of longing for something that nothing in this natural world can satisfy.
• Therefore, since “nature does nothing in vain,” there must be something beyond this world that can satisfy this longing.

There may be some who still contest the legitimacy or usefulness of this argument. It does rely on a certain way of thinking about the world that not everyone may share. But I don’t see any reason to contest the commonsensical assumption that “nature does nothing in vain” (Aristotle, Politics, Book 1), and the corollary that makes it necessary to explain the longing aspect of Lewis’ ‘joy’ without some transcendent value.

Viewing the flow state through the lens of the argument from desire makes sense of Csikszentmihalyi’s discussions of meaning and transcendence. For Christians who have found the ultimate source of meaning and transcendence in the revelation of God and his story (within which our amateur historiography must be situated), all the transcendent experiences of humankind in pursuit of virtue, excellence, beauty or historical knowledge ultimately act as signposts to God himself. It was for this reason that the Christian liberal arts tradition culminated not in philosophy, but in theology. Wisdom and knowledge are swallowed up in wonder and worship.

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought:

Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words.

Future installments: Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.