Hildegarde

Let me try backtracking a little and see if I can make myself clearer.

I was NOT trying to assert the superiority of the Ivy League over all other American colleges and universities–although for one reason or another, that’s what always ends up being under discussion when  I try to bring this up.

What I was trying to point out is this:

In this culture, at this time, “Ivy League” is used as a code word for “well educated,” and it is BEING WELL EDUCATED that a big hunking minority of us resent.

Whether you actually get well educated in the Ivy League is another question, and I even mean to get to it later, but at the moment, it’s not the point.

The point is this:  why do so many Americans seem to think that being well educated is a BAD thing?

And my point about Sarah  Palin is this:  whatever else she may be as a person or a politician, she seems to be on the Republican ticket at the moment BECAUSE  she could not in any way be mistaken for being well-educated. 

It’s this, this hatred and revulsion at education, that strikes me, continually, about this culture at this time. 

Of course, we talk endlessly about “education,” and we even claim to support it, but what we actually support is training.  Going to college is supposed to be about getting to “be” something–a doctor, or a nurse, or a social worker, or a lawyer, or even (in one of the places where I have taught) a garage mechanic.

But this is not education, and at one level or another I think we know it.   Education does not give you practical skills for the marketplace.  It introduces you to what one of the literary critics of the 1950s called The  Great Conversation–the history of ideas in the West, what those ideas were, what they are, how they have affected us.  

In Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, the librarian accosts the hero, Brutha, when Brutha wants to take out a pile of books.  “Why those books?”  the librarian demands.  “They teach you how to be a plumber,” Brutha says.  The librarian holds out a different stack of books:  literature, philosophy, history.  “These,” the librarian says, “teach you how to be a human being.”

My apologies to Mr. Pratchett.  I’m always getting my copy of that book stolen, so what I just did up above was from memory.  But I got the gist of it right. 

Unlike being a cat, or even a dog, being a human being is a problem that every one of has has to resolve one way or the other.   That’s not the same thing as saying it’s a problem society has to resolve-I think that I could make a good case for there being one, and only one, answer to the question “what does it mean to be human?” for societies.  One of the advantages of the Great Tradition is precisely that we can test ideas against their historical consequences, and for this particular question and its answers we have more than we need to connect the dots.

But for individuals, the “meaning” of life, the way it fits, the way we fit, even what it means to be a “decent human being” is more complicated than quantum mechanics and a lot more likely to get us into trouble.

If you’re part of a religious tradition that answers these questions for you, maybe you can drop out of the conversation, but I don’t it.  At least in the West,  even devout religious believers have found themselves taking part in the arguments, discussions, and, yes, the art that asks the question and tests the answers.

Augustine did it.  Aquinas did it.  Kant did it.  Matthew Arnold did it.  Even Freud and Marx did it.

They left for us a record of their ideas, and history has left for us a record of what has happened when people have adopted their ideas, or tried to.  To be educated means to become part of that conversation, to be able to situate yourself in it.  It means to be able to reference it when things turn up that seem to be “new.”  It means to know what is actually “new” and what is really something old dressed up in modern rhetoric.

Hell, some of the recycling of ideas over the last forty years hasn’t even bothered to go in for modern rhetoric.  It uses the same old same old, and it gets away with it, because too few people are actually educated, and know what they’re seeing.

Robert complains that there’s nothing “objective” about philosophy because we haven’t decided that Aristotle was “right’ and Plato was “wrong” or vice versa, but we still study them both.

But that misses the point.

First, because what he’s asking for from philosophy is not objectivity–which just means that the standards by which you judge something are not something you invent but something you discover–but certainty.

Second, because objectivity in this cases means not deciding if Aristotle was “right” and Plato was “wrong,” but first and foremost in deciding whether Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel, produce work that rises to the level of philosophy, which is the application of reason to the human condition.

As opposed to, say,  Chicken Soup for the  Soul.

Or just about anything by Sam Harris.

Reason is not the same as “thinking,” nor is it the same as “not religiously based.”  Thomas Aquinas applied reason to the human condition just as much as Aristotle did. 

Reason is not “written in complicated language practically nobody can understand,” either.  Which is why  Heidigger produced philosophy–bad philosophy, that is bad for us, but maybe more on that later–but Sartre did not.  Being and Nothingness is, at best, derivative (and of Heidigger, yet), but at worst it’s gibberish, and politically dangerous gibberish at that.  There was a reason Albert Camus refused to call himself an existentialist.

Once we’ve figured out whether or not we’re actually looking at philosophy,  the next question–also possible to investigate objectively–is whether or not the work in question has influenced other philosophers and societies and how and when it has done so.

We can see the influence of Aristotle in medieval Europe, for instance, not just in the sillinesses that sometimes passed for knowledge (the whale is a fish), but in an entire approach to politics, ethics and morals, and science.

When Aquinas “Christianized” Aristotle, he brought into the culture the idea that it was not only possible, but necessary, for human beings to investigate the world around them “by reason alone”–that is, that man could, and should, study nature on its own terms, without the help of revelation.  Revelation was forever afterward to be relegated to the purely religious.  Revelation would tell us (and reason could not) that Christ died for our sins, but we could discover how the blood circulated in the body and even what it meant to be a morally good man “by reason alone.”

It is, to this day, a dogma of the Catholic Church that any human being, making use “of reason alone” and a good conscience, can discover God’s moral law without being exposed to revelation of any kind. 

We can go in to whether or not this is true at some other point, my point is just that the second question we ask about philosophy is whether it has had a long term impact on the culture and what that impact has been.  With Aristotle, the impact has been long and very complicated, but without it there would have been no science as we know it.  

In every other civilization on earth, the workings of nature were supposed to be a religious question, or completely irrelevant to anything any sensible person would think about (the “life is an illusion” of some forms of Buddhism).  Only where Aristotle had an impact did men being to investigate, experiment, and test in the way we now call “scientific.”   Polio vaccine, jet airplanes, the Empire State Building, central heating–it’s not an accident that they happened here and nowhere else.  It’s the direct result of a specific set of philosophical ideas.

Of course, those same ideas have had other results as well, and some of those are not so good for us.  They can be catalogued and examined, too, and the catalogue and examination can be entirely objective.   It is not “just a matter of opinion” that investigating nature on nature’s terms brings many benefits to human beings.  The only “subjective” element comes in the ability to delare (in contradiction to reason) that it is not “beneficial” to human beings to be protected against dying of polio at six or of cold in the winter at any time of life. 

And the fact that human beings can do this–that they can deny reality with conviction if they want to–dos not make the investigation of philosophy as described above any less objective.

Education makes you an active participant in the  Great  Conversation.  It does not make you a morally better person, all by itself.  It does not increase your IQ or decrease your golf score.   It simply makes you aware of where we’ve been and how we’ve gotten there, and of the full range of human possibilities, both good and evil.   It leaves it up to you to decide what to do with what you know.

It is, however, the single most vitally important set of knowledge you can have, and to live without it is to live always in the danger of recreating the mistakes and the evils of the past, and of wasting the one life you have on trivialities and worse.

What I’m objecting to in the marketing of  Sarah Palin is not that she didn’t go to Yale, but that she PRESENTS HERSELF as ignorant and proud of it.

If she was just ignorant, she wouldn’t bother me half as much.  

But that thing–that “Look at me, I’m ignorant–that makes me better than you!  I’m stupid–that makes me better than you!”–which is, in fact, the subtext of the entire Palin campaign, is something worse than actually being either ignorant or stupid.

I’ll try to get to just what tomorrow.