Musing vs. Being Amused

BY NATHAN DOWD

“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
from Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

One of the reasons why a classical education can be challenging is that classical teachers seek to stretch the student’s ability to muse. Musing isn’t easy. There are legions of amusing things to distract us from the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The “a” prefix means “without” or “not”—so if “muse” means to turn our minds on in order to deeply consider something, then “amuse” means turning them off. Amusement is mentally cheap and requires little from us, yet our culture has a smorgasbord of offerings to cause the eyes to glaze over. In fact, we might say that the modern era sees life through the lens of amusement. How often do our children— or even we ourselves as adults—evaluate something by whether or not it was boring? And if it was boring, the implication is that it wasn’t worth our time. During their studies, classical students encounter a genre called “epic poetry” which begins with the invocation of the Muse. At the beginning of poems such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the poet calls upon the Muse (one of the nine daughters of Zeus in Greek mythology) to inspire and guide the skill of the storyteller, along with helping the audience to grasp the story itself.

It is from this invocation of the Greek Muse that we get our modern understanding of the English word “muse,” which means to ponder and consider something deeply. Beautiful stories, music, and equations require an engaged mind. You cannot watch YouTube and read Homer at the same time and hope to get anything out of Homer. We must muse upon the story by giving it our full attention. If we read Book I of the Iliad and get nothing out of it, the fault isn’t with Homer; it’s with us. Homer has been engaging minds and hearts for thousands of years, but we only gave him thirty minutes.

Amusement certainly has its place: The mind does need a rest after work in order to pick up the task of musing once more. But if we spend all (or most) of our time being amused, then we have a real problem. As Neil Postman says in the title of his book, we in the West are currently “amusing ourselves to death.”

Paul speaks on the subject of our attention in Philippians 4:8 (NKJV): “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.” Yet, we can do very little meditating if we are constantly amusing ourselves. In the context of education, asking students to muse often means that lessons require more attention from the student than our entertainment culture typically requires. When a teacher asks a student to study a Rembrandt painting for a full five minutes, it requires more from them than they are used to giving. They begin to struggle after the two-minute mark, as many of us would as well.

And yet, the struggle is worth the effort, for the rewards of musing on the true, good, and beautiful are far greater than hours of amusement spent on video games. The beauty of Rembrandt’s paintings and Homer’s epic poems have the power to shape students’ souls and affections in such a way as to make them better human beings. Hours spent looking at Zelda just can’t do the same.