Hildegarde

So, Robert opines that education and health care are the two fields where there is the most government money and the least competition, and that that explains the soaring costs.

But I don’t think so.  I think the government money is reflective of the fact that medicine and education are two fields badly suited to a market model of operation.

With medicine, the explanation is simple–if you’ve just been diagnozed with cancer, you’re not looking for the cheapest doctor or the most cost efficient hospital.  You’re looking for the ones most likely to cure you, and you’re willing to pay just about anything to get that result.  If anything, this mental attitude on the part of health care consumers actually causes prices to rise, because they’re willing to outbid each other, to mortgage the house, sell the cars, do whatever it takes to get what they want.

With education, the issue is a little more complicated.  Consider, first, the case of Mount Holyoke College, one of the original Seven Sisters and still well into Newsweek’s first tier of higher educational institutions.  About ten or fifteen years ago, MH decided to take aim at rising tuition costs as a way of recruiting more bright, first-level students.  So they lowered tuition significantly, and used that as a recruiting tool.

The result?  Total applications went down, and applications from first-rate candidates went way down. 

The reasons were twofold–first, because prospective students and their parents were convinced that the lower price was an indication of lower quality, that really excellent schools charge really high prices, that you get what you pay for.  The second reason was that the economics of college tuition isn’t what it seems to be.  Sticker prices on first tier colleges are less honest than the ones on cars.  A student admitted to Harvard from a family making less than $60K pays no tuition at all.  Even students with parents making as much as $150K get significant grants and other financial aid from first-tier schools.  These schools are ALREADY cheaper, in fact, than the local public university.  The trick is getting into them.

The second thing to consider is thi–the only parents who are interested in picking colleges by their price tags are the ones that know absolutely nothing about the system.  They don’t realize that Yale may actually charge Susie a lot less than the University of Connecticut, if Susie can get in and has board scores in the top 1%.  What’s more, they don’t realize that all schools are not creatd equal, that even if the only thing you’re interested in is the job your kid can get after graduation, Yale may be a better bargain even if you have to pay full price.

But the worst thing about trying to shove education into a market model is that it intensifies the attitude that’s already far too prevalent among students, and makes it damned near impossible for universities to fulfill the gatekeeper function we say we want them to.

That is, when students think of themselves as consumers,  they want their universities to deliver on their demands–As, thank you very much.  They’re not paying $40k s year to get Cs.  They didn’t meet the standard?  It’s the teacher’s job to get them up to standard and the teacher’s fault if they don’t make it, even if they’ve cut two thirds of all their classwork and handed in less than half the reading. 

Harvard and Yale can buck these attitudes–and they’re more likely to have student bodies who understand why they have to take English literature even if they’re a math major.  Third tier colleges and universities, however, are essentially already on a for-profit model, they just pretend they’re not.  That means keeping the number of their students up, keeping classes packed, hiring mostly part time teachers at what would be less than minimum wage if it were honestly figured–and riding teachers who give out “too many” bad grades. 

A college education at these places is rapidly becoming what a high school education is in too many places–in other words, nothing at all.  A survey of local businesses will tell you that graduates of these places do not even have the rudimentary skills that are supposed to accompany a “degree,” such as being able to write clearly or knowing English grammar from a kumquat.  What’s more, you can’t even count on the degree to insure that you’ve got a candidate who knows he has to show up and on time and get his work done.  Adjunct lecturers–part timers hired on a course by course basis–live and die by student evaluations.  Grade too harshly, be too strict about attendance and deadlines–and you’re dead in the water.

And I agree with Cheryl, and with Robert, that the whole house of cards rests on the fact that so many businesses and government agencies now require a college degree for employment–the content of the degree is useless, but it serves as a filter.  It also serves as insurance, at least in the US, because it provides a way to document that you are not discriminating according to race or sex. 

But insisting that we can fix education by subjecting it to a market model is, I think, wrongheaded.  I’m all for getting government money out of the mix for private colleges, but I don’t think that doing that would fix things either.  What we need is some reality.

Im my state, the community colleges offer two year associates degrees and four year bachelors degrees in…auto mechanics.  Among other things.  It is, to me, a massive transfer of wealth in the wrong direction.  Public education is free–you pay your taxes, your kid can go to public school–and if that school teaches your kid what he needs to learn, your tax money is well spent.  If it doesn’t, then you’re out of pocket for teh tution for a “higher education” experience only meant to teach what should have been taught in high school.

I’m getting very complicated about stuff here.  But what it amounts to is this:  we (meaning the US) seem to keep getting ourselves into ruts.  Need better trained people to do x?  Let’s start a college program and send them to that!  Need to punish wrongdoers?  Jail time, absolutely, even if the crime is kiting checks and the perpetrator is eighty six.  System clogged and inefficient?  It must need the market!

Personally, I think ther eal problem with higher education these days is that it is TOO MUCH part of the market.  We’ve given kids the idea that education is something they can buy that will be delivered to them.  Their job is to passively receive what they’ve paid for.

Forget liberal arts educations. NO education will work on that system.

And more of the kind of thing that makes me think the country is not trending in the direction Robert thinks it is.  Also, this is about what I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, about an earthquake coming in higher education.

It’s also from the only blog I read, called Critical Mass.  You’re looking for a post called Burst.

http://www.erinoconnor.org/

Oh, and the news.

Antioch College, one of the two most left-leaning, stridenlly, self-righteously politically correct colleges in the country, the instigator of the infamous Antioch Policy on sexual harrassment (you have to stop and ask permission at every step–can I touch your arm?  can I touch your breast?–or it’s rape), and in my day one of the most prestigious of liberal arts colleges–

Has closed.  After 157 years.

This week-end, the part of my family that has been in Connecticut Forever–longer than the Indians, if you listen to some of them–fulfilled that part of their family mythology that they seem to be proudest of:  they have now had at least one person die in every war the United States has ever fought. 

The other side of my family, the Greek immigrant side, tends to counter this sort of declaration by saying that they’ve had at least one relative fight in every war since they’ve been here, but their people tend to come back.

It was an odd time to hear this news, because I’ve got an e-mail from Robert about the decline and fall of  Western Civilization I’ve been intending to post for comment, and I’m reading the Brenda Wineapple biography of Nathaniel  Hawthorne, and it all sort of connects.

About the war business, for instance:  Robert has noted a couple of times, both on and off, that he thinks that Americans are no longer willing to take up arms to defend their country, and that the existence of some small number of them who buck the trend doesn’t change the disastrous nature of that trend.

But I wonder if that’s true–I wonder especially if there was ever a time when the majority of young American males went joyously into battle to defend the United States.  And it seems to me that once we get past the  Revolution–and maybe not even then, although it’s hard to determine–the only time when it was ever true was for the  Confederacy, and the Confederacy lost.

Lincoln had to institute a draft to get enough soldiers to fight for the survival of the union, and although there were a few “upper class” young men who joined up, lots of others took advantage of the fact that you could buy your way out of a draft notice by doing just that.  We needed drafts in WWI and WWII, too, never mind in Korea and Vietnam.

In this latest round of fighting–and in fact, in wars as we’ve fought them starting in Korea–I think the problem is more a lack of feeling that there is a clear and present danger.  Part of this is definitely because a lot of these wars were fought in nations that the people of the United States had a hard time connecting to anything immediately to do with life in the  United States.  They were fought for ideological reasons.  The domino theory might be true or false, but it was out there somewhere, not here.

Not being able to make the mental leap for Korea and  Vietnam is a lack of imagination, not of patriotism.  I think a lot of people who would be willing to jump up and defend the nation if she were directly attacked had a hard time figuring out what was going on in Saigon that required their sacrifice.

In the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a lot more enthusiasm for Afghanistan, again because I think it was relatively easy to see what the issue was.  There was Al Qaeda, and it was headquartered in Afghanistan, and it blew down the twin towers, so let’s go get it.

Whatever you think of the case for war in Iraq, it was made badly.  And to really explain it would have required an administration that did not think of the American people as too stupid to follow the line of argument and that was then willing to put that line of argument out there as many times and in as many ways as it was necessary to get it across.

Instead, the administration seemed to grab for whatever sound bite was available to hand when the microphones were turned on, and to go for easy sloganeering aimed at people’s emotions instead of their brains.  If W. is going to be faulted for being a very bad president, I think his worst performance will  have been in this, in going in to a war he wasn’t willing to make a strong case for, in underestimating the American people’s ability to understand and follow a line of reasoning.

As for the other kind of willingness to serve–the willingness of our best and brightest people to run for elected office–I think the problem is not in an unwillingness to serve, but in an unwillingness to subject oneself to scrutiny of a kind meant to disqualify anybody who wasn’t produced fully adult from a virgin birth the day before yesterday.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think much of people who dump their friends or denounce them because those friends have done something or said something or even continue to believe something that the press corps and the other political party will view with shock! horror!  Nor do  I think much of people who only associate with people they agree with, or who are unable to maintain close bonds of love or friendship because of political or ideological differences.  I’ve even got problems with people who dump good friends or relatives who have actually gone to jail.

Then, of course, there are the candidates themselves–ever smoked dope?  flunked out of school?  snorted cocaine?  got caught drunk driving?  joined a radical political group in college?  mistakenly hired an illegal alien?  written an op-ed or a letter to the editor that was off the wall?  It’s all an issue, as is your wife’s abortion and your daughter’s refusal to have one, which will be portrayed, in both cases, as you forcing the poor women to do it your way.

Let’s face it.  The best of every generation will almost inevitably have a checkered past.   Very bright, very ambitious, very principled people–especially very principled people–tend to get themselves into trouble when they’re young.   Very bright people born into situations that look hopeless tend to get into a lot of trouble when they’re young, and we’ve pretty much ruled them out of ever holding public office.  Come in from the cold and  play by the rules, we tell the street kids who are joining gangs these days–but don’t hope to get any farther than a workaday job.  You’ve been in a gang.  You can’t run for President no matter what you make of the rest of your life.  And you’re not going to end up CEO of a major corporation, either, because they check, and they don’t like your record.

There are no second acts in American lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, and Richard Nixon proved him wrong, but  we’ve created a system in which we expect the people we elect to not actually be people.  And not just the people we elect, either.  There’s a rap artist out there called Snoop Dogg who has done, I think, remarkable things with his life.  He started out not just poor, but ghetto.  He ran with a very violent gang in LA.  Most of the friends he had growing up are either dead or doing long prison terms for drugs, rape and murder.

Snoop Dogg has made a pile of money from his music, acted (and not badly) in a few movies, started a foundation to help kids in the kinds of neighborhoods where he grew up, and launched a reality show highlighting his life as a hands-on father to his children.  But run for something?  Not a chance.  He’s never condemned that gang he was in!

Why should any drunk get sober or drug addict get straight, why should any felon reform or any prostitute give up the street, if their lives are to be forever circumscribed by what they did at fifteen or eighteen or twenty-one?  And if they’ve managed to beat the odds and make it up the ladder by successfully hiding that stuff, why should they try to run for public office when what will inevitably happen is that all that stuff will become the issue, and they’ll not only lose the election, they’ll lose everything they’ve managed to achieve up to then?

Then, of course, there’s the issue of flip flops–apparently, the only politicians we want are the ones who take a stand in college and never deviate from it, not an iota.  New evidence?  Doesn’t matter.   Evolution in your thinking?  Doesn’t matter.  More maturity?  Doesn’t matter.  You can’t change your mind.  That’s a flip flop!

It’s not that the best people don’t want to serve their country.   It’s that we don’t want them to serve, because the best people will not be able to fit into the iron maiden we have created to validate our politicians.

It was one of the brighter spots of this last election that the Obama people did very little of this to McCain (and the public didn’t listen–Keating Five?  What’s that?) and that Republican attempts to do it to Obama (Reverend Wright! Bill Ayers! Snorting cocaine in college!) had absolutely no effect on anybody that I know of. 

I’m going to go do some housekeeping stuff on Living Witness, and then I’m going to settle down for the rest of the day with that biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  I’m at the place where Hawthorne is attending Bowdoin College with Franklin Pierce, where they have rounded up several of their classmates to form a club that does things like drag entire kegs of wine into the Maine woods and then drink themselves silly so that they can go rampaging around causing trouble in town, vandalizing stores and pubs, scaring women on the street, and otherwise coming close to getting themselves expelled from what was then a strictly Calvinist college.

Some years after they graduated, Franklin Pierce became the fourteenth President of the United States.

I’m having one of those mornings where I think  I ought to be in another business, because I seem to have so much trouble getting things across.

Robert complains that he’s looking for a Cincinnatus and I’m refining a curriculum, but I’m not.

What I found interesting in the VDH  piece had nothing to do with the curriculum, and everything to do with yet one more indication that one of the biggest assets we have is our inherent decentralization.   In every society that has existed on the planet before us, and in most societies that exist now, the job of passing on an appreciation of and a commitment to that society was lodged firmly in institutions.   When the institutions began to fail, there was no turning back.

But when our educational institutions aren’t giving us what we want we…do something else.  And the curriculum is important in one way, because what it is is a way of recruiting students to your society and what it stands for. 

And to do that, you must first teach them what it is your society stands for, and then why it is that it’s preferable to the other options out there.   That’s why VDH wants to teach classics, because he thinks classics will help make clear that “differentness” and superiority of Western Civilization, along with outlining the ideals that have been important in that civilization over time. 

One way or another, though, the first thing we have to do if we are to support this civilization is to make sure people know what it consists of, and if you don’t think you can do that through the existing education system, then either you find another way to deliver that information or you’re dead in the water.

I said at one point in this thing that I  wasn’t really worried about the fate of the humanities, and I wasn’t, because even if every college and university in the contry fell into the sea tomorrow, the simple fact is that the humanities would be alive and well in DVD courses, Internet web sites, and dozens of other alternative venues that have grown up in the last twenty years to provide the connection with our history that the standard educational institutions seem less than adequately interested in.

Nor am I worried that we will not find our  Cincinnatus–hell,  I’ve met him.  His name is  Rob, and when 9/11 happened he walked out on a good job to join the Air Force.  He flew missions in Afghanistan and then the Air Force insisted he get a degree if they were going to go on promoting him, so when  I knew him he was doing that during the week and training on helocopters on the week-ends.  His name is Doug, too, and he had already done three hitches in the Navy when the attacks happened.   He called up whoever it is you have to call, kicked and screamed a little, and was on a boat somewhere in the Persian Gulf last time I heard from him.

Cincinnatus is out there, and there are a lot more of them than you realize.  But Cincinnatus was never in the majority.  He wasn’t in ancient Rome, and he never has been here.  Even in WWII, we needed a draft. 

What we also need right now,  however, are ways to get the information out, and those ways are NOT going to be getting a curriculum onto a college campus or into a public school system.   I suppose it would be nice if we could do that, but if we did it and that was all we did, it wouldn’t make all that much difference.

Schools are not where people learn love of country or admiration for their societyy’s history and ideals.  What we need is not a Department of Education demanding that every tenth grader take a civics course–although  I definitely think nobody should get out of high school without passing an exit exam in American government–but movies, miniseries, television shows, novels, and maybe even music that presents the narrative.

Because the narrative is a good one.  I’m back at Nathaniel Hawthorne this morning, reading a biography that covers not only his life but the “New  England  flowering,” and it occurs to me that I do know how to get my students “interested” in the narrative–and that’s to present it as a narrative.   They like hearing about  Emily Dickinson, believe it or not, and if I give them the  Civil War as a clash of personalities, they’ll not only listen, but remember.

I don’t think it is possible to get everybody in a society with the program, whatever the program is.  I do think it’s possible that you can put the narrative out there in a compelling enough way that it will penetrate the fog of car chases and caper movies that sometimes seems to be haunting us, and I do think that you can change a cultural climate–significantly change it–in that way.

It’s cultural climate that matters, not schools or churches or even government departments. Get the cultural climate on your side and you can do pretty much anything.

If I had to rely on the institutions, I’d be as pessimistic as Robert is about the future of Western Civilization in general and the American Idea in particular.  But I just watched this country vote for a narrative–because that’s what we did.  Not on the issues, and not because we hated George  W. Bush, but for an American narrative so iconic it could have been invented wholesale by  Parson Weems.  From good stamps to the White House in under half a century.   From racist segregation to all  Americans together in just about the same time.  The Amerian narrative is alive and well, thank you very much.  What we need is to reinforce it, and to do that we don’t need schools but stories.

Okay, I apologize to the Australians and the  Canadians for getting all American at the moment, but American culture is what I know most about (at least, in terms of the contemporary).

There are things that have disturbed me greatly over the last couple of decades, and those things will have to be fixed, in the long run.  But our strength is in the fact that we don’t just sit on our hands when things go wrong.  Can’t find a college or university willing to teach you the humanities?  Buy DVDs from The Great Courses or The Teaching Company.  Can’t find a school that will teach your child the three Rs and patriotism?   Homeschool him, establish a charter school, unschool him, move him over to the Christian academy.

There was really never a time when most American children knew all their history or reached a tenth grade reading level or could handle mathematics beyond basic arithmatic.  In the days when our high schools were “better,” they taught fewer than twenty percent of our adolescents.  The rest dropped out early and went to work. 

I think we’re actually educating more children now and to a higher level than we did then, we’ve just changed our focus–we’re concerned about all the ones who aren’t making it.  In my father’s generation, the school systems looked at kids like the ones who attend my classes, said “absolutely no point in bothering,’ and just ignored them.

Sometimes the task looks impossible, and disheartening.  Consider one of my students, who works pretty much full time, and who responded to a request for an in class essay about abolishing the income tax with “I don’t really get all that stuff about taxes.”

She was, apparently, unclear that she was having taxes taken out of her paycheck every week.   I mean, what does it take, if she’s not intersted in what happens to her own money?

But there were always students like that one, and there always will be.  The country never did depend on them, and it doesn’t depend on them now.

It does depend on the cultural climate, but we shouldn’t be going through schools to fix it.

So, anyway, here I am finally, for real.  John said:

>>>Intellectually I believe we evolved from animals whose behavior was governed by
instinct. And I don’t believe in a personal God who takes an interest in human
beings. This means I can not say “God saw that humans had evolved intelligence
and discovered agriculture, so God reached down from heaven and turned off all
our animal instincts.”
>>>

And I agree with him.  In fact, I agree with all the above.  He also says:

>>>Consider tolerance. A group of 10 or 20 hunter- gatherers living in a cave need
a large amount of territory. (IIRC, something like 100 square miles per person.)
If another group moves into their territory, tolerance of strangers is NOT a
virtue. There simply are not enough resources in the territory to support both
groups.

But I am not a hunter-gatherer. I live in a city of 200,000 and we don’t have
20,000,000 square miles to live in. Things like art, literature, music,
education, good medical care are only possible becuase so many people are
crowded into a small area.

For us, tolerance of strangers is a virtue.

I would say the relious narratives provided a general cultural basis for
fighting our animal instincts and developing the skills and restraint necessary
for large groups.
>>>

I agree with this too.  I’m simply pointing out what ought to be obvious to common sense–the very fact that we can think in terms of “virtue” and act in ways that contradict our instincts means there’s a difference of kind, not just of degree, between us and even our closest animal relatives.

There’s no contradiction here.  It doesn’t really matter whether we can think in abstractions–do musicology as well as music, aesthetics as well as art–because God gave us the ability or because that was the way the evolution cookie crumbled.  It only matters that we do it, and in fact can almost not help doing it.

It doesn’t matter if we need narratives to survive as an offshoot of the pressures of natural selection or because we were made in the image of God, it only matters that we need them.

One of the problems with scientism–as opposed to science, see previous posts–is that it thinks that when it says “you make art because your second tier neurons fire in response to an instinctive memory for landmarks that you needed when you were farther down the evolutionary tree,” it’s saying something useful about human being.

And yes, I know that was not science.  It was babble.  But you know the kind of thing I mean.  I truly love the books of Steven Pinker, but he’s constantly saying things like this, “explaining” love or art or whatever by describing the physical process of producing it.  And the physical process doesn’t get us anywhere.  Our ability to make art, and to make theories about art, and to anticipate death, and to need it all to “mean” something will not go away, or become less urgent, because we know how the neurons move around to produce the effect.

As for secular humanism–I’ve got a problem with terminology here that I don’t know how to solve.  Traditionally, a “humanist” is a scholar in the humanities.  He can believe in God or not, it really doesn’t matter.  In fact, the first humanists were definitely believers, and we usually call their movement The Renaissance. 

So I feel compelled to add something to the word “humanist” to indicate that I’m talking about people who do not believe in God but who are committed to one of the various non-theistic philosophical movements (rather than people who don’t believe and don’t think about it).

On the other hand, say Humanist these days and everybody thinks you’re talking about nonbelievers, and the American Humanist Association definitely calls its members Humanists without qualification.  And there’s another organization, called the Council on Secular Humanism, which advances similar but in some ways distinctly different ideas that they brand as “secular humanism.”  And then there are the US Christian organizations, who call everybody who isn’t praising Jesus in the middle of math class a “secular humanist.”

As for the philosophies underlying the two major “humanist organizations–the AHA and the CSH–my problem is twofold.

First, both of them are very trendy politically, well to the left of anything I want to be a part of, although CSH has a more wideranging membership and seems to be open to more dissenting voices. 

But the trendiness hurts them.  There’s a book out there, by Paul Kurtz–founder of CSH and the Centers for Inquiry, as well as Prometheus Books–called Forbidden Fruit:  The Ethics of Secularism that drove me nearly out of my mind for a while.  Kurtz started by saying that it would be possible to approach ethics by looking at the things almost all human societies have agreed on over time, what he called the “common human decency.”

And I think that’s a good idea.  For one thing, I think it would dispel, pretty quickly, the idea that morality is something we all just make up as we go along, completely subjective and without objectively grounded foundation, because it’s truly amazing how consistently human societies affirm a small core of moral values, over and over and over again.

In fact, what looks like differences in moral values from one society to the next often comes down to a difference in something else–in the people who are granted the deisgnation “human.”  All societies believe it is wrong to kill innocent human beings.  Not all societies agree that women, for instance, are human beings.  And most of them, in time, have not believed that outsiders were human beings. 

The progress of Western Civilization can be seen as the progressive extention of the deisgnation “human” to more and more people in more and more categories.  To restate something I said in the first couple of posts or so, that started with the Greeks,  who first came up with the idea that all people shared a common humanity, and was nailed into place in this culture by early Christianity. 

There’s a man named Nat Hentoff, a writer for The Nation, a secular Jew, an outspoken atheist, and a complete socialist, who opposes legal abortion for reasons based on this–because he sees it as a move backwards, a wthdrawing of the designation “human being” from a category of humans (fetuses) who have had it up until recently.

I’d say that most of the weird death obsession that seems to have erupted among a certain group of people in the West is in fact just this–an attempt to withdraw recognition as human from categories of people who have had it up to now:  the very old, the very sick, the very disabled. 

And I think that desire is inherent in all of us.  Because the other thing that is inherent in all of us–the other thing that all human beings share merely by the fact of being born human–is a kind of radical solipsism.  We’re all convinced that the world is really about ME.  One of the things morality is supposed to do is to knock this idea out of us.  We really do not–as a student of mine said yesterday–have the right “to do whatever we want.”

Paul Kurtz, however, having started with a good idea (common human decency) goes off the rail in no time at all, because actually acknowledging common moral values over time lands him in a place where he does not want to go:  the fact that all societies before the twentieth century West severely circumscribe sexual activity. 

And not only do they severely circumscribe sexual activity, they circumscribe the sexual activity of women moer than they do that of men.  Every literate society on the planet–every society that has developed and handed down writing–has insisted on the chastity of women, both inside and otuside of marriage.  Women have been more or less free in other ways–to own property, to practice a profession, to a place in the line of monarchical succession–but when it came to sex, there was no give and take.  Women were expected to be virgins until they were married and sexually monogamous afterwards.

Now, this is an interesting fact, and it would help us a lot if we could deal with it honestly, but instead of doing that Kurtz simply pretends it isn’t there, and declares as “common human decencies” equality of the sexes and even a right to abortion.  He does it because he believes in these things–well, so do I–and so he has to find a way to wedge them into the moral code he is attempting to construct. 

Sexuality is the most interesting aspect of human moral codes, and it goes to the heart of what every such code is really about–not “living with each other,” but being and becoming more fully human.  All such codes are heavy on self-control and self-restraint, on “not acting like an animal.”  They forbid gluttony as well as promiscuousness, but they definitely forbid promiscuousness. 

If human beings are going to revert to “acting like animals,” the two biggest arenas will definitely be sex and violence.

Both the present-day humanist organizations, though, have signed on to the idea that man is just another animal, and everything that comes with it.  They’ve also signed on to the idea that once we’ve described the evolutionary path of a trait or the physical process that produces it, you’ve said as much as can be said about it, and that what you’ve said is useful.

So even if it weren’t for the rather predictable politics, I probably wouldn’t be a fan.

I’m going to write a real post later today, really  I am, but for the moment, this

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_4_classical_education.html

is a link to  Victor  Davis Hanson’s essay on the future of the humanities from  City Journal.

I’ve been waiting for it to come online for months, and John has the print edition and has already read it, but–yes.  Very much part of what we’re talking about here, and part of why I don’t think we’re at the point Rome was before the fall.

So, now I know.

If I want to shut you up, all I have to do is start talking about saving your souls.

Ha.

Anyway, Cheryl said:

>>>So – if I’m following all this, there’s something especially difficult and
unique about being human, and it’s not something we do instinctively. We need
guidance, whether we create it for ourselves or have it revealed to us by God.
These guides are many and various, and the one our particular culture (or, I
suppose the culture that spawned the British, US, Canadian and Australian
sub-cultures, which traces its cultural roots right back to the ancient Greeks)
uses doesn’t seem to be working as well as it once did. At least, this is the
case according to some of us and some commentators we have read; others would
probably argue that we are getting closer to our ideals of liberty and the
rights of the individual.
>>>

So, let’s start with this.

I think there are a number of ways in which human beings are unique, so unique that it amounts to a difference in kind and not just in degree between ourselves and even very intelligent animals, like primates and dogs.

One of those areas of uniqueness is certainly in the feeling many of us have–maybe even most of us–that we are in some way failing to be what we were born to be.

I don’t want to go into the issue of whether or not this feeling reflects anything about reality–whether or not there really is a “better” we could be–but only to note its existence.  Lots of us feel this way.  Lots of us go through life feeling as if we don’t quite measure up, don’t reach all the potential we have in the various ways we have it.  The few of us who do not have this feeling are, I think, people we don’t really want to know.  I think that may be, in fact, the definition of a psychopath.

But this distinction is a distinction in degree, not a distinction in kind–that is, we don’t measure up to the ideal definition of “human,” but we’re still human in spite of our failures, and so are every single one of our fellow human beings, even the ones born or made so disabled as to be unable to think much at all. 

We’re handed our humanness, and then feel called to bring it to fruition, and we don’t really ever manage to do that.  We all have one chance to life this one life, and we always fail to live it fully.

It isn’t just religious people who feel this way.  The earliest forms of secular humanism called on much the same interior desire in nonbelievers, and earlier than that, secular philosophers for whom religion was not a viable place to work of these issues recognized it, too. 

That’s why there are so many guides.  There’s both the Old and New Testaments, of course, but there’s also Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Kant and even Nietzsche. 

I don’t know if the guides that have served us all this time have lost their force in the new millennium.  Certainly they haven’t lost it for everyone.  There’s a religious revival going on across the globe, not just in the US and the Muslim nations, but even in self-consciously post-Christian ones like England and Australia.  Australia is home to one of the world’s biggest Christian fundamentalist creationist organization, Answers in Genesis–and I do mean creationist, not intelligent design.  Attacks on the teaching of evolution have been appearing in Britain now for nearly two decades, along with lots of agitation to allow home schooling without being required to follow the national curriculum. 

I will say, though, that fora lot of people, the Christian narrative no longer sounds true.  And it is narratives we’re talking about.  All culture is transmitted in narratives, not in formal instruction, not in sermons, not in laws.  For someone like me, stories about virgin births and resurrections of the body sound self-evidently fictional–at best a metaphor for something sensible, but not sensible as told.

It doesn’t really matter, for the purposes of this discussion, whether Christianity is true or not, or God exists or not.  What does matter is that we live in a society where those narratives are no longer compelling for many people.  And if civilization is going to survive, we have to come up with narratives we can all sign on to, even if we disagree on whether or not God actually exists.

And such narratives are available.  The biggest problem here, however, comes with a group of people–a minority in the US, maybe less so in the EU–who have declared themselves free of all narratives altogether, because they have declare human beings to be nothing special, who deny there is a difference between our moral obligations to human beings and our moral obligations to dogs.  Or whales.  Or baby seals.  Or whatever.

Like I said yesterday, nobody who says this sort of thing actually means it.  Nobody is calling on cats to learn to be morally responsible around mice.  It’s certainly in the nature of human beings tokill other animals in the hunt, just as it is in the nature of cats to do the same, but it is only human beings who are asked to act contrary to their nature.

In other words, all the people making the argument that human beings should see themselves as just another animal, in the very act of making their demand, prove that human beings are not that.  Human beings are the only animals who can be approached on the basis of morality, or who understand the concept at all.

What makes me nervous about these people, though, is that so much of their argument seems to lead to the same place:  to a kind of lust for death.

Peter Singer is the most egregious and public example of this kind of thing, but he’s hardly the only one.  I find it extremely uncomfortable to realize how many of our organizations and individuals who are self-proclaimed defenders of “human rights” seem to define those rights as largely the license to kill other human beings or themselves. 

Abortion, “assisted suicide,” euthanasia–when did rights come to be equated with this limited list of things?  I’m the world’s biggest advocate of abortion on demand–all nine months, for any reason–but none of my reasons for taking that position have anything to do with thinking that the fetus in the womb is not really a human being, or that children born disabled would be better off dead.

The best book on abortion I ever read is by a pro-life Catholic priest named James Burtchaell, called Rachel Weeping, who pointed out the obvious–if it’s morally acceptable to kill a child in the womb because it is disabled and that disability means it would be better off dead, then there’s no reason why it would not be morally acceptable to kill a child already born for the same reason.

When I first read this book, in the early 1990s, I thought he was exaggerating.  Then along came Peter Singer to suggest just that.

I think there is something about lacking an overarching narrative of meaning, one that you can invest yourself in, that brings on an obsession with death.  This narrative does not have to be religious, and it does not have to be cosmic.  People have managed to build very decent lives and to live decently with people around them on very small narratives indeed–on love of the history of stamps as well as love of country, on dedication to the art of quilting as well as dedication to the monastic ideal.

But I don’t think people live without any narrative at all, and if they persist in declaring all the available narratives null and void, just illusions with no real force or meaning, entirely relative, etc–if they insist on declaring that human beings are “just another animal” who require no special moral obligation from their fellow human beings–I think where they end is with this fixation of death, and specifically on the death of human beings.

What’s more, I think they do it without realizing they’re doing it.  They’re not obsessed with death, they say.  They want to relieve suffering (so the doctor should be able to kill Aunt Mabel if she’s in pain), or to die with dignity, or a hundred other things, and it all comes down to the same place: 

First, a world in which they exist in a bubble, in which only they themselves are really real.

Second, with killing off whatever causes them pain or discomfort.

Third, with the felt wish to kill the very fact of being human.

And now I have to go teach something.

Cheryl worries that the Dalrymple is really on another topic, but I don’t.  I’ve got to admit I don’t think of myself as having topics here.  I’m just sort of going with whatever is in my head.

That said–Robert points out that the canon of the Old Testament has “changed,” but the fact is that Luther and company didn’t go through the OT and decide some things didn’t belong, and they really didn’t decide that some things that hadn’t been there should be there now.  Instead, they chose to use the then current Jewish canon of the OT, while the Catholics went on using the Septaguint.  You can certainly argue that Jewish scholars changed the OT either once or twice–once by adding what was in the Septaguint and once by taking it back out–but that only gets you as far as saying that the canon has fixed books which must be protected from new ones, or not. 

And I’m almost surely misspelling Septaguint.

Anyway, let’s try this, actually, this in two parts:

First, a canon is a set of books meant to help one save one’s soul. 

I’m an atheist, I know, and I don’t believe in souls, but it’s hard for me to think of another term for what I’m getting at.  The essential human-ness of the human being, maybe. 

And I do understand that, applied to secular literature, what we’re talking about here is some kind of metaphor.  But then, I’m convinced that even religiously, we’re talking about some kind of metaphor. 

The humanities deal in what is uniquely and irretrievably human.  Being human is a more complicated thing than being a cat.  Even the people who claim that that is not true proceed to act as if it was–it is only human beings Peter Singer expects to voluntarily go without food to feed hungry members of their species living a couple of continents away.  He does not, and would not, make such a demand of a cat.

One of the ways in which human beings are unlike anything else in known existence is in our felt need to get somewhere, to do something, to be something–we’re not sure what, but other than we are.  For many human beings, and maybe for most of them, something seems to be lacking, in the world around them, and in themselves.  We reflexively devise ideals that we will inevitably fail to live up to.  Like Paul and like Augustine, we spend a lot of our time bemoaning our inability to put those ideals into practice.  The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, Paul said, and all I have to do to know that’s true is think of chocolate cake.

In another part of the NT another Christian saint said, “[i]n the beginning, was the Word.”  I know that’s a reference to ideas in Greek philosophy, but I think it’s also true as mundane fact–our frustration with ourselves is grounded somehow in our ability to use language. 

A canon is a set of books meant to help us save our souls because we expect that help to come from words, from things that we and other people have said, from things that we and other people have written.

The danger, in religious canons and secular ones, is that people with tin ears for narrative (and Bible is narrative just as much as The Iliad is) will barge in and try to “fix” what’s there in order to better direct human beings in the ways he wants them to go.

But that’s not a viable enterprise most of the time, because canons being what they are, people resist having them manipulated.  The other way to “fix” a canon to make it say things you think will be better for people is to reinterpret it until it “says” what you want it to.  That’s why Bishop Spong and Tim LaHaye have such different “interpretations” of Genesis–and of Acts.

But here’s the thing.  We can subvert a canon without doing anything so deliberate as changing the books it contains or changing interpretations to fit our modern sensibilities and prejudices.  We can subver the canon just by talking about it endlessly.  When thousands of PhDs are required to “produce” “scholarship” on a regular basis in order to get hired and get tenured, there are suddenly hundreds of variant readings of Lear and dozens of variant readings of Faulker.  Read through them all, and the whole enterprise begins to seem like gibberish.

And that’s because a lot of it is.  I don’t disagree with Robert that good interpretations help understanding–they do.  But given this many interpretations, all of them  under the gun, so to speak, and I’ll guarantee you that the vast majority of them will not be good.  What they will be is increasingly difficult to understand, because if you don’t have substance, you can always cover your ass with “professional language.”  The heyday of deconstruction has come and gone, but it wasn’t popular because it was political and it wasn’t popular because it fit somebody’s agenda.  It was popular because it was literally incomprehensible–it was incomprehensible because very often there was nothing there to comprehend.  But nobody would say that out loud, and nobody would admit that phrases like “the transgressive hermeneutic” really didn’t mean anything but “an interpretation that is willfully wrong.”

But here’s the thing–if a canon is a set of books (works, whatever) meant to help us save out souls, then the contents of that canon say a lot more about us than they seem to on the surface.  If his book appears on the canon and yours does not, then it doesn’t just mean  you like one thing and he likes another, or even that he has good taste and you do not.  It means that he is blessed and you are damned.

I have absolutely no idea if I’m making any sense here.

I think that, for a lot of academics in humanities departments these days, the issue is self-regard–I think an awful lot of those academics are protecting themselves from what they know is a demand to be better than they are.  If we’re “just another animal,” then what we do is not important.  If we cheat on our spouses, eat ourselves into flabby unfitness, pinch a bit (not too much!) from the petty cash–well, it’s “only human” to be that way, and there’s no point in trying to be something else.  

This attitude is especially strong for those who have neither a philosophical nor religious commitment, who don’t worry about heaven or hell and don’t see any purpose to life except how much they enjoy it.  If pleasure is the only standard, then most systems of ideals, secular as well as religious, are worse than ridiculous.  They’re active impediments to getting the only “meaning” out of life that anybody can get. 

The academic deconstruction of the canon, like the academic trrivialization of it that came before and has now returned, is basically to this end:  all those “dead white males” expected you to be something, to give up your seat in the lifeboat on behalf of women and children, to deny yourself all kinds of neat and fun sexual experiences and be true to your spouse, to give up your “career goals” and your financial security in order to care for your sick and disabled child,  to practice self respect and self restraint, to “put yourself last.”  The Great Conversation is about just this:  about what we have to at least try to live up to if we are to deserve to be called human; about just how guilty and unworthy we should feel if we don’t make the most full-throttle of attempts at meeting the requirements.

The second thing a canon always is is a record of man’s relationship with God.  In religious canons, God is meant literally.  In secular canons, God is a metaphor for the single inescapable fact about every single human life:  that we each and every one of us has exactly one chance to live this life, and when it is over it is over.

Even people who believe in an afterlife or reincarnation have to acknowledge this–whatever other lives they may have, as incarnations or glorified bodies in the time of a New Heaven and New Earth, this particular life is one they only get a single shot at.

I think that practically all of morality, and civilization comes down to how human beings respond to that particular fact. 

Which may have something to do with why I tend to have more “respect” for literature, philoosophy, art, music and history than for the hard sciences as human endeavors.

The new essay is up at City Journal

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_4_otbie-british_character.html

on England, the law, civilization, public drunkenness and finally the superiority of the USA.

In the last set of comments,  Robert said that we come to literature and its interpretation through academics–so let’s start there.

When I said that I wasn’t talking about English departments, I meant it.  It’s not that I think we shouldn’t study literature at the university level.  I do.  It’s that I think almost all literature study in the universities for the last forty years has been just plain wrong, and that close to all of it was just plain wrong in the forty years before that.

The late Forties and early to mid Fifties include a number of figures who did serious and admirable work in literary studies, but I think they did it in spite of the university system, not because of it.  And when they were gone, they were gone.  There are a few people left with similar talents and inclinations–Steiner, again, and maybe Harold Bloom–but for the most part the study of literature in universities is counterproductive.

In the first place, the PhD is a research degree, not a degree in “interpretation.”  Let’s pass over the fact that it’s not “interpretation’ that has been the subject of debate here, but valuation (deciding which books are good and which are bad), the simple fact is that research is never about interpretation primarily. 

Honest research in the humanities concerns things like placing works historically, investigating language to improve the accuracy of translation, researching the lives and historical contexts of writers, even tracing allusions where possible.

But none of this has anything to do with papers like “Innocense and  Brutality in the Novels of Herman Melville”  or “The Concept of the Real in Three Jacobean Playwrights,”  which is what most English professors write about, when they aren’t writing about completely silly things (“Transgression and Tergiversation in The Color Purple”). 

The modern American university is a hybrid of the nineteenth century German research university with a lot of American notions about “pragmatism” and “equality” that nobody ever thought all the way through.  As a model for research in the sciences, it has a lot of merit.  As a model for research in the “social sciences,” it’s failed to keep them honest, never mind bring them up to the level of actual sciences.  But as a model for teaching the humanities, it’s mostly been a disaster.

For one thing, Robert is right in the allusion–the first canons were religious.   And the first exterprises in hermeneutics (interpretation by close reading) were also religious–Jewish commentary on the Torah, for instance, and the medieval  European attempt to come to some final, irrefutable, undeniable interpretation of the Bible in the effort we now know as Scholasticism. 

Robert points out that he comes from a  Protestant tradition that assumes that every man can interpret the work for himself, and that is, I think, the problem that has plagued the study of literature for over a century.

First, the obvious.  Protestantism may have assumed that every man could read and interpret the Bible for himself–it didn’t quite, because Calvin and  Zwingli were just as willing as any  Pope to execute people for heresy–but in no Protestant tradition I know of is it legitimate to add or subtract books from the canon of Scripture. 

In other words, the normative function of literary criticism–deciding which books are to be included in the canon–has been done for once and all in the  Christian tradition.   Luther desperately wanted to get rid of the Epistle to James and wrote reams of essays and sermons on what was wrong with it, but the  Epistle stayed in the New Testament in spite of that. 

So what Robert objects to most in the literary canon–its exclusion of works he thinks are worthy–would be exactly the same if the model of interpretation were closer to the Protestant one he suggests than the Catholic one he implies. 

But the Protestant model of interpretation isn’t exactly heaven on earth, either.  For one thing, it’s led to some rather odd readings over the course of time, right down to present day “mainstream” Protestant churches that see the recognition of gay marriages as a Christian mandate and modern theologians, like Bishop Spong, who think the resurrection is metaphorical, not actual, and that nobody comes back from the dead.

Faced with such variant interpretations, the Protestant tradition has not been one of simply saying, “well, all everybody has the right to interpret for himself.” In fact, quite the contrary.  Traditionalist believers have been adamant that the social gospel and “inclusive” readings of the New Testament are just plain wrong, and likely to end the interpreter in Hell for all eternity.

The fact is that if you get a bunch of people in  one place and tell them to interpret literature, sacred or profane,  what you get is a spiralling morass of variant “readings” that do nothing to advance understanding of the works involved and often retard such understanding.

What’s more, you inevitably end up in a place where the “interpreters” are desperate to add new books to the canon so that they’ll have something else to talk about.  That’s the real reason why so much time and space in English departments these days is taken up by contemporary literature–so much has already been written about Shakespeare and  Joyce and James that it’s hard to find something else to say.

What goes on in English departments in universities these days is not usually the study of literature, but the study of the study of literature.  And that’s in the best departments, with professors who actually understand the work.  In mediocre and bad English departments, what goes on is mostly self-important blather, the necessary foundations of which the professors involved are completely clueless.

Art–all art, painting and music as well as literature–is a separate language, and nobody ever completely understands it except the people who make it.   George  Steiner says that the best interpretations are imitation and performance–Ulysses is not only a modern novel but a reading of The  Odyssey, Yo Yo Ma performing a Bach concerto produces a reading of that concerto in his performance, as does a theater group presenting a new production of Hamlet.

The second best interpretation is the writing of artists themselves on art.  Van Gogh’s letters to his brother about the progress and intent of his painting, T.S. Eliot’s essays on everything from Greek epic to the Divinia Commedia. 

It’s not that nobody else ever writes well about interpretation.   It’s that people who can do that with any real insight who are not themselves artists are few and far between.  And that means that most English professors, being neither artists themselves nor particularly talented at interpretation, are mostly just churning out “productivity” to make their resumes look better.

What’s more, this careerism results inevitably in the canon being interpreted, in English departments, as “those books that are good to teach.’  And books that are good to teach are under no circumstances books that are the best written, or with the most impact on the culture.   Books that are good to teach tend to have lots and lots of allusions, whether these allusions are to any purpose or not.  They tend to be “ironic,” whether the irony serves any purpose or not.   They tend to be ambiguous, which gives rise to more need for interpretation.  And  English departments do not care if that ambiguity is necessarily inherent in the work or if it’s just bad writing indicative of authorial confusion.

But absolutely the worse thing about university English departments is what they have done to the wriing of contemporary fiction.  Well into the 1950s, American writers, no matter how “literary,” had to make their way in the world.  They wrote books that sold or not.  If the books didn’t sell, they got jobs on little magazines or in insurance offices.   What they didn’t do was become writers in residence at universities.

And it’s not hard to understand why they started to take up that kind of work–it paid better than most of the alternatives, it gave them more time to write, it even accorded them a respect they weren’t used to in the outside world.  The flip side was in the pressure, subtle and never stated outright, to write “teachable” books, that is, to muck up their work with the kinds of allusions and ambiguities teachers like to teach. 

The result has been a subgenre we now call “literary fiction,’ which is not particularly literary and is often barely fiction.   There are no tip sheets for literary fiction, but the form is rigid nonetheless:  characters drawn from the educated upper middle class; lots of angst and  living lives of quiet desperation;  the complete inability of people to connect with each other on an emotional level; end with alienation and meaninglessness.

Literary fiction is not literature.   What it is is teachable, which is why university English departments like to assign it to students.  It’s also contemporary, so in a university system that has become a business first and an arena for the life of the mind fifteenth or sixteenth, it’s easier to sell to students because it doesn’t require them to know anything to read it.   Give them the poetry of John Donne and you have to fill in all that stuff about Christianity and the Trinity.  Give them The Aneiad and you have to fill in lots of ancient history and explain the place of the epic in Greek culture and why the Romans wanted one of their own and…

You see what I mean.   You’re faced with classrooms full of students who are patholigically resistant to learning anything that “bores” them, and literary fiction is a lot less trouble than actually teaching them anything about literature.

I’m not talking about English professors when  I talk about the canon, and I’m not talking about the curricula of various academic departments.

In fact, if the humanities are going to survive at all, if we’re going to be able to hold on to Western civilization, doing an end run around the academic departments is imperative.