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The Greatest Romantic Novelist and Poet Who Continues to Give Us Depth of Soul

September 18, 2019/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

Perhaps no one in history more poetically communicated the abstract concepts of justice and injustice better than Poetic Justice Warrior Victor Hugo.

As Poetic Justice Warrior Lisa VanDamme teaches us, “With a symphonic integration of all the resources of language, great poets take the most elusive nuances, thrills, mysteries, and motifs of love and throw them into sharp relief.”

Victor Hugo did this masterfully through the fictional characters he brought to our lives. Great literature is essential for showing us the heights of virtue and the depths of depravity. It teaches the richness of lives with purpose and the despair caused by ignorance or injustice. It gives our lives gravity.

Paquette’s Despair

In 1831 Hugo published his first novel, Notre Dame de Paris (aka Hunchback), in which he captured the grief of misfortune and injustice with his characterization of Paquette, a vibrant teenage girl who became orphaned, resorted to prostitution, began to age, and joined a monastery.

As she could not have a lover, she gave herself up to longing for a child. The good God had pity on her, and gave her a little girl. I cannot describe to you her delight; she covered it with a perfect rain of tears, kisses, and caresses. She grew handsome again. Her old friends came back to see her, and she readily found customers for her wares.

Upon leaving her daughter at home and asleep for a few moments, she returned to find the baby missing.

My pretty little daughter! If anyone will give me back my daughter, I will be his servant, the servant of his dog. When night came, she went home. A child’s cries were heard coming from Paquette’s room. Instead of her lovely little Agnes, so rosy and fresh, there was a hideous little monster, blind, deformed, and crawling about the floor.

The only thing remaining for Paquette to cling to was one little shoe that had adorned Agnes’ tiny foot. Poetic justice would be to see her daughter thriving again.

Radoub’s Virtue

Thirty three years later Hugo published his last novel, Ninety Three. It is the story of a peasant revolt during the French Revolution. Central to the narrative are the exploits of the “Blues,” the soldiers of the French Republic, and their encounter with a peasant woman and her three young children. Sergeant Radoub and his battalion dedicated themselves to the safety of the children. When they are taken hostage during a battle with the Royalist “Whites,” Radoub owned it,

You see, commander, our babies are in that tower. Do you understand this, master? We do not want any harm to happen to them. I took advantage of the truce to go up on the plateau, and I saw them through a window. I swear a thousand times by all that is holy that I, Sergeant Radoub, that I will do something desperate. And this is what all the battalion say: ‘We want the children saved, or we want to be all killed. This is our right, yes, to be all killed.

Its important to emphasize that Radoub’s battalion had no use for the arbitrary self-sacrifice required by collectivism; it was about their freely chosen values. Their virtue was selfishness. The novel’s philosophy is about the humane values of individualism that transcend tradition and duty to hierarchy.

An even more stark example of intransigent devotion to traditional hierarchies and systems of justice is in the character of police Inspector Javert in Hugo’s masterpiece Les Misérables, published in 1861.

Thenardier’s Evil

In the characters of the innkeepers who enslave a young child they are hired to care for, Cosette, Hugo does a marvelous job depicting the depths of human depravity in Les Misérables. The Thenardier’s extort her mother Fantine over Cosette’s care. As only Hugo can explain,

In all Thénardier’s outpourings, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul – in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.

Unfortunately, the hugely successful and brilliant Broadway musical version makes light of their cruelty. Instead, it portrays them as cartoon characters. In the personage of Fantine, Hugo revisits Paquette’s despair, but he also introduces Fantine to a character of justice, courage, and virtue. Poetic justice was served by the one who saves her daughter Cosette – Jean Valjean.

Valjean’s Entrepreneurship

In Jean Valjean, Hugo creates the ultimate self-made man. Destitute, he is arrested for stealing bread for his starving sister’s family, and his sentence is extended to 19 years because of escape attempts. Once released he is still destitute, and also a convict. Ultimately, Valjean has a spiritual epiphany, adopts an alias, and after six years of living dedicated to honor and virtue, he becomes a wealthy factory owner and mayor of his city. As Hugo explains about the transformation:

Before going to the galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became vicious: I became a firebrand. Later on, indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me.

His company hired Fantine, but the manager eventually fired her without cause. This destroyed her ability to send money to the Thénardier’s, and it destroyed her spirit. Valjean found her in the direst of straits, recognized her, and did everything possible to redeem his manager’s decision. He knew despair as well as anyone, and he knew redemption even more. He paid it forward with the morality and resources of a successful capitalist. As the novel marvelously illustrates, Valjean had respect and compassion for his employees, customers and strangers.

Depth of Soul

As Poetic Justice Warrior Frederic Bastiat explained, justice is achieved only when we rid ourselves of injustice. Victor Hugo was a keen observer of injustice and he understood that the solution is within us individually. It is spiritual, then cultural, and lastly political. As Hugo tells us about Les Misérables:

The book which the reader has before him, in its entirety and details, is a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from corruption to life, from hell to heaven. The starting point: matter, destination: the soul.

Here Hugo states clearly that metaphysics is the essential fundamental in the philosophy for human flourishing. In ethics, justice manifests itself in the compassion and benevolence of the individual self-made man and woman. Great artists have perfected their ability to integrate these ideals into a philosophical theme and present them in concrete form. Like Beethoven‘s Eroica and Ode to Joy, great romantic novels and poetry educate us about our deepest human emotions and our greatest potentialities. They give us depth of soul.

British Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson saluted Hugo by saying: “Victor in Poetry. Victor in Romance. Victor in Life.” It is poetic justice that nearly 1 million mourners participated in Victor Marie Hugo’s funeral procession in 1885.

“How Far That Little Candle Throws ‘Her’ Beams! So Shines a Good Deed In a Weary World.”

August 8, 2019/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

In 1960 Harper Lee published her Southern Gothic classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. In it, Miss Lee integrates several layers of human interaction and character development including the psychological and moral growth of the children who are central to the narrative. For example, Lee was able describe in a few powerful words the state of progressive education in 1936 Alabama from the point of view of a highly literate seven year old:

The remainder of my school days were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit in which miles of construction paper and wax crayons were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless effort to teach me Group Dynamics.

This little girl called Scout had been taught to read by her father who read to her every night, yet her first experience with school included her teacher declaring “Its best to begin reading with a fresh mind. Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.” Reflecting on this experience Scout recalled:

I could only look around me. Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything – at least what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father served for years in the state legislature innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship.

Already, this work of great literature has introduced two heroic characters, Atticus and Scout, who inspire readers to look at their lives differently, develop their own values and improve their lives through principled and rational behavior. That is what great art can do, that is what great teachers must do, and that is what Poetic Justice Warrior Lisa VanDamme is doing every single day.

Pygmalion of the Soul

Lisa’s story begins with her revelation about her own education and that of her grandparents. After thirteen years of public school, AP English and History classes, high grades and SAT scores, she knew that her education had been truly wanting and unenjoyable. By contrast, she observed,

Whereas my peers and I could crank out a passable five-paragraph essay, my grandparents’ writing was impeccably grammatical, exquisitely eloquent, and deeply insightful. They possessed the knowledge, the wisdom, and the depth of soul of truly educated people.

While pursuing her Masters in Education Lisa received a phone call from the parents of a gifted child who was bored with school, much like Scout. Home schooling was a career path Lisa had never considered, her intention was to teach literature to high school students. After a sleepless night of contemplation, she realized that her traditional education was a travesty, and “this job would be an opportunity for me to offer my students an educational experience utterly unlike my own.”

This led to running a home school business that grew through word of mouth, and eventually the opening of the VanDamme Academy in 2001. Its mission is simply “Raising Children with Exalted Ambition and Depth of Soul.” More specifically,

Our aim is to empower children with the lessons of history, to equip them with the tools of math and science, to provide them the fuel and inspiration of literature—to endow them with the wisdom that will give them the means to live a meaningful and deeply fulfilled life.

VanDamme’s favorite author and teaching inspiration is Victor Hugo who instructs: “It is a beautiful thing to mold a statue and give it life; it is more beautiful to shape an intelligence and give it truth.” To Hugo, teachers are The Pygmalion of the Soul.

The Scandal of Ignorance

As VanDamme explains, America’s schools are not teaching students the heights of human virtue or the depths of human depravity. Instead, our society is dominated by souls with no gravity. She then asks and answers “What has brought education to this state of disintegration, superficiality, and mindlessness? Bad philosophy. The philosophy that most influenced modern education lies in the writings of 18th century philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant.”

As Lisa wrote about them in The Objective Standard,

The role of the tutor was to protect students from the influence of society so that he could develop instinctively and spontaneously. Rousseau urged the importance of an inactive mind, Kant argued the human mind is fundamentally incapable of knowing true reality. It is limited to a world of mere appearances.

“Such a philosophy undermines the very concept of education. If education means training a child’s conceptual faculty in the process of gaining objective knowledge of reality, then education and Rousseau’s theories are fundamentally at odds. They upheld emotion over reason, “creativity” over knowledge, fantasy over science, and the sanctity of untouched nature over the “materialistic” world of civilized man.”

Rousseau’s and Kant’s thinking was further championed in American schools by John Dewey‘s idea that the function of the mind, or society’s collective mind, is to reconstruct reality from the material of subjective experience. Man cannot objectively understand reality; he can only subjectively reconstruct it. They regarded the mind to be cut off from the outside world. Hence, Scout’s frustration with construction paper and group identity.

The Principle of Conceptual Hierarchy

The VanDamme Academy, grades K – 8, is committed to teaching methods that allow students to grasp simple concepts before forming more abstract ideas. As her essay The Hierarchy of Knowledge: The Most Neglected Issue in Education explains,

There is a necessary order to the formation of concepts and generalizations. An abstract idea should never be taught to a child unless he has already grasped those ideas that necessarily precede it in the hierarchy, all the way down to the perceptual level.

And this is particularly true for the appropriate teaching of history, literature and their moral principles. According to VanDamme’s Teaching Values in the Classroom,

Extensive knowledge of the consequences of history’s ideas and actions; of the great discoveries of science, how they were made, and what they made possible; of the classics of literature and the characters and situations they describe; these are the raw material from which rational moral principles are drawn.

For VanDamme, “the basis of this educational reform is Ayn Rand’s revolutionary understanding of the relationship between concepts and reality, including the crucial principle of conceptual hierarchy.”

Literature and Lives of Meaning

In the VanDamme classrooms, every line of great literature is examined for its core principles and meaning so as to enlighten the students with their personal applications. As Lisa explains,

I LOVE classic literature. Hugo wrenches my heart, Rostand stirs me to noble ambition, Tolstoy challenges me to think on planes higher than I had ever known. Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Austen, Maupassant, Rattigan, Sinclair Lewis – all helped me to see, that life is bigger, sweeter, and more alive with meaning than I had thought. I love helping others to discover that meaning.

Lisa VanDamme has entertained the overtures of many admirers to franchise her school, but she has resisted in order to stay closely connected with her students and perfect the experience. Instead, a new YouTube documentary highlighting Lisa and her school titled A Little Candle is now available online, and it will hopefully shed light on American education’s badly needed philosophical reform. For that to happen, it needs to eradicate the dominant philosophy of multiculturalism, and replace it with decentralized politics, individualist ethics and concept formation epistemology.

When asked how she measures success Lisa says, “Our graduates have a sort of wisdom that is really rare in today’s culture. They have learned how to write clearly and eloquently. They have drawn inspiration from countless, beautiful works of literature. They have learned things in science where they can look at the world and see order and intelligibility. They have learned the overall stories and scope of history to understand some of the basic principles on which freedom and human flourishing depend. We don’t talk about college.”

Poetic Justice is a child who loves school, who loves to learn, who loves to read and sing her life’s song like a Mockingbird.

Notre Dame de Paris – It’s Up To Us to Preserve Its Spiritual Symbolism of Beauty and Peace

April 16, 2019/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

“Upon the face of this aged queen of French cathedrals, beside every wrinkle, we find a scar.” These words are from Victor Hugo, and his classic novel Notre Dame de Paris (from which we get The Hunchback Of Notre Dame). This “sublime and majestic building” was begun in 1163 during the reign of King Louis VII, and finished more than a century later. Hugo explains that “the various marks of destruction” by the work of Time are not nearly as egregious as “that of Men, especially the ‘men of art,’ since they are the ones who have styled themselves architects.”

The Premodern World

So who were the original builders of Europe’s medieval shrines to the divine? We don’t know them as individuals. As historian William Manchester explains in his book on the subject, A World Lit Only by Fire:

In many ways the most significant dimensions of the medieval mind were invisible and silent. Even those with creative powers had no sense of self. We know nothing of the architects or builders. They were glorifying God. To them, their identity in this life was irrelevant.

Of course the skilled laborers and designers were quarrymen, stone masons, engineers, architects, and artists. And what a marvelous testament they gave to division of labor and specialization as the foundations of human peace and prosperity.

Upon completion of the Gothic masterpiece, Our Lady of Paris suffered many attempts to improve its façade. Hugo claims “these modern fashions, more and more silly and grotesque,” have done more damage than revolutionary crowds. This treasure was finally rescued from further defacement toward the end of the Renaissance.

And during that era, another massive project was being launched, a structure whose gravity would shake the earth. While the medieval builders are unknown, and possessed only first names, the designers of this new structure had surnames, and egos. They included Montesquieu, Voltaire, Locke, and Madison. And they replaced the building material of choice, the gray matter of stone, with the gray matter of neurons and synapses.

The Great Upheaval

It was a time when the power of the human mind was unleashed. After a millennium of dormancy, the wonders of spontaneous order spread like stardust throughout the universe. As historian Jay Winik reveals in his epic account of the late 18th century titled The Great Upheaval:

In a symbolic passing of the torch from the Old World to the New, Voltaire embraced the rustic republican Franklin in Paris, yet simultaneously worshipped Catherine the Great. In the end, this founding moment of our modern world is not simply a story of America, France, or Russia, or for that matter, any one nation. It is a global story, and it is an extraordinary tale.

While Russia regressed into repressive despotism, and France into tragic revolution, the promise of the Enlightenment coalesced into America’s Declaration of Independence. British philosopher G. K. Chesterton describes it as “perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just.”

The ground shaking edifice, the one that enshrines the ideals of the Declaration, is the American Constitution. And it was a stunning innovation; one whose engine was fueled by a uniquely modernist invention: connectivity. As psychiatry professor Jordan Peterson explains, “Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better.”

Time, Turmoil, and Torts

Like the architectural and moral center of Paris, the most enduring moral achievement of the Enlightenment quickly came under siege. In the three hundred years following their respective christenings, both were forced to endure changing times and cultural upheaval. But most appalling of all, defacement by their caretakers. In both cases the same forces were at work: the elites of expert planning.

As Hugo asks, “Who set cold white panes in place of that stained glass of gorgeous hue, which led the wondering gaze of our fathers to roam uncertain? An architect, on the plea of good taste, amputated it.”

And one might also ask, what has become of the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution, the one that guarantees federalism? Our progressive masters, on the plea of the common good, amputated it.

Both crimes evoke Hugo’s explanation: “Time is blind, man is stupid.” In the case of the postmodern defacers of the Constitution, whose stated intent is to amputate the preface to the Declaration of Independence, meaning repeal Natural Law, they justify it with their claim that human nature has evolved.

The Emergence of Ego

Victor Hugo, a 19th century Romantic, had a keen vision of Europe’s history, powerful communication skills, and a humanist outlook for the way things should and could be. His work has given voice to France’s premodern creative minds, because in their time that was not possible. To appeal from the supreme voice of the Church was heresy, and a treason. As Manchester explains about medieval times:

Any innovation was inconceivable; to suggest the possibility of one would have invited suspicion, and because the accused were guilty until proven innocent by surviving impossible ordeals, to be suspect was to be doomed.

This all changed with the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy. The upheaval it created, when blended with the mysticism of the Church, became the Renaissance. As Peterson tell us, “Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.” And 18th century economist Adam Smith also gave voice, to specialization and the miracles of division of labor.

Instead of living a premodern life of determinist resignation to the divine G (almighty God), or a postmodern life of collectivist resignation to the profane g (almighty government), Hugo has taught us there is a better way. It is the affirmation that comes with a life of self-creation.