Why Learn Latin?

Because Better Men Than You Did

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In The Cultured Thug Handbook, we included a chapter on utilitarianism, the idea that all moral imperatives ultimately boil down to “utility”, which in practice means something like happiness. This is a bugman philosophy. The purest paradigm of utilitarian moral perfection is a dog licking his balls, because utilitarianism is the ethic of the chronic masturbator.

This crude apotheosis of the bug philosophy often wears more subtle finery, though. Many times it is dressed up as something “practical”.¹ This is personified in the alt-centre, who put themselves forward as unsentimental realists, but who are in reality little more than incurious defenders of the status quo. But lacking the deeper theoretical foundations to defend the status quo, they resort to calling superior men stupid and/or gay.

A typical example was furnished by the Twitter anon “i/o”, questioning the wisdom of learning a dead language:

Has university education really advanced over the past 60 years though? Almost certainly not.

First, in 2011 researchers found that 45% of undergraduates showed no significant improvement in critical thinking, writing, or reasoning after their first two years—and 36% still showed no improvement after four years.² Second, in 1961, students spent approximately 40 hours/week on class and studying; by 2003, this fell to 27–28 hours/week.³ Third, Stanford University’s class hours decreased by 20–25% from the 1960s to the 1980s.⁴ We could go on for days with these kinds of statistics. Do you think that half of Victorian—or even pre-1960s—university students failed to reason one iota better, two years in? The question answers itself.

University is now essentially a business rather than an institution of higher learning. Its main concern is student satisfaction over academic rigour, causing it to skew toward identity-based courses, with obvious ideological slant. And where it does not (as in STEM, though not entirely), the university has been reduced to a kind of glorified vocational training. The university is no longer a place to learn about big ideas, but a place to be shaped into a cog whose intellectual horizon reaches no further than the departmental office across the hall—and that is the best case scenario.

Midwits like this “i/o” character sense this unconsciously. And so, out of insecurity, they resort to calling men whose knowledge extends beyond knowing how to manipulate a spreadsheet stupid and gay.

If you want to send i/o a link to this article, send him this one and call him an illiterate.

The sad reality of the alt-centre “aspiring technocrat” is that his worldview is self-defeating—if utility is what you’re after, you won’t get it by technics alone. Technical achievement is something your society can afford, and it can afford it because it can draw on a deep well of social capital, and it has that well of social capital because its worldview extends beyond the horizon of maximizing utility.

As someone who has both worked in a technical field and who has also learned a dead language, allow me to weigh in on the question of the utility of learning Latin.

Why did I learn Latin in the first place? You will be surprised to learn that it wasn’t my first choice—that was Hebrew, as I wanted to read the Old Testament untranslated. It wasn’t even my second choice—that was Greek, as I wanted to read Homer untranslated. I learned Latin not because I wanted to, but for no other reason than that men impossibly superior to me said I should—the Victorian English curriculum prescribed Latin before Greek, and Hebrew not at all. That is the only reason I did it. My own beliefs did not factor in at all. My own personal choosie-choosies did not factor in at all. My own ambitions were irrelevant. Do what your elders say—that is the formula for every civilization that was more than a historical footnote. That is the formula for a civilization that runs over people like “i/o” without even noticing their existence.

I learned Latin because I was told to. I had no idea what I would get out of it, only the faith that better men than me knew things and that this would be good for me. Turns out they did, and it was. What was the result? I was able to read Caesar and Cicero in the original. But a hell of a lot more than that.

To start with, I learned grammar as for the first time. I was public-schooled, but at a time and in a place where public school was still pretty good—good enough that they taught me Hesiod’s Theogony in high school and Lord of the Rings in middle school. Good though it was, I had never, ever learned grammar with the level of depth and rigour that I found in a basic Latin course.

Learning grammar from foundations opened me up to the fact that my native language is a massive outlier, being word-order dependent and only partially inflected. Most people who ever have lived thought through very different linguistic structures than we do, and it shows.

Latin as a highly-inflected language allows fluid word order, often placing the verb at the end of a sentence, which then becomes a little puzzle which is only “resolved” when the action word comes at the end, often to surprising effect.⁵ Meaning is delayed in Latin whereas in English meaning is parsed as you go. English must prioritize sequential, cause/effect logic. It also often requires syntactic elaboration (“It is Rome that the girl loves” vs. “Romam puella amat”), and a degree of precision that is possible in Latin, but not required. The autistic pettifogging demanded by alt-centre types is largely a product of the language that they speak, they very often being monoglots.

Perhaps more importantly, we have moral foundations. When you speak a language, you think in that language, as we just demonstrated. But not only that—language carries encoded in it a set of assumptions, norms, and imperatives, which you have internalized as surely as the bug alt-centrist has internalized the unimpeachability of “well-being”. When you speak another language, not only do you think in that language, but your very moral foundations take on its shape.

The Romans were a singularly impressive people. In just a few centuries, they went from a tiny tribe on the edge of the known world to creating globe-spanning infrastructure so durable that it is still in use today⁶—let us say nothing of their legal system, which is in large part still our legal system. If any people deserves the badge of “merit” so dear to our based liberal, it is the Romans. Here is one people whose moral foundations deserve close attention, thus attention to their language.

For [the Romans], the highest authority was not science, but the mos maiorum, the “way of the ancestors”, often translated as “tradition”. But the word maiorum, the genitive of “elders”, carried for the Romans the connotation “betters”. For them, what was old simply was good—no people ever rejected the cult of youth quite as completely. To question the mos maiorum was, literally, to question the experts, something unthinkable—even the modern bugman can question science when it conflicts with liberal ideology.⁷

If we wish to understand ourselves, we must first understand others. The Roman differs here from the modern Englishman (and his American descendant) in that he implicitly trusted tradition—for him, it was invested with supreme moral and even epistemic value. For the Roman, a thing was authoritative because it was old, because it was familiar, because it was his. Authority was not something “earned”, but something inherited. Later Roman jurisprudence echoes the archaic Roman sentiment of absolute authority when it pronounces rex est lex animata, “the king is the living law”.

The Germanic differs somewhat on this point. Throughout the Germanic linguistic corpus, we find the idea that the leader or authority must prove or earn his authority. The Havamal says “a gift demands a gift in return”.⁸ The Old-English poem Beowulf praises king Hrothgar as goldwine gumena, “gold-friend of men”, and this kenning encodes the idea that a leader earns loyalty by material provision. This moral assumption is also contained in the very term for authority in English, “lord”, descending from Old English hlaford, or “loaf-guardian”, the man who would ward off all threats to the material subsistence of his people. The assumption on the Roman side of the ledger is that authority is inherited; on the Germanic side, that authority is earned.⁹

Ironically, in his disinterest in the linguistic and moral foundations of others, the alt-centrist condemns himself to radical ignorance of his own moral depths. As the fish swimming in water, he is blind to the historical contingency of his own lusting after “merit” and his demands that all authority prove itself by what it can do for him. “Meritocracy” is not inherent in the nature of things, but grows out of a deep ethnic rootstock—what the alt-centrist believes is obvious and default is in fact quite accidental and without foundation (per his worldview anyway). Had he studied Latin, this contingency would have been eminently clear to him. Gnothi seauton—“know thyself”—was inscribed atop the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Alas, the alt-centrist cannot read it, because he is illiterate. I don’t just mean culturally—he… literally can’t read it.

These are among the deeper reasons to learn Latin, but we could point to some rather more practical ones.