Hildegarde

I’m having one of those, you know, moments.

So I’ll just put in a couple of things, and go drink tea.

First, I didn’t say, yesterday, that students are not influenced by what they read.

I said they weren’t being influenced by what they haven’t read.

The rise of modernism in literature may or may not be the cause of all kinds of things, but it isn’t going to cause them in anybody who hasn’t read it.

Yes, Robert is out of date.  The vast majority of college students get through school these days reading no fiction at all.

None.  Zip.  Zero.  Not so much as a single short story or poem.

As for grades 7 to 12, the trend is to go to nonfiction “life stories,” like Into the Void and My Sister’s Keeper, not fiction of any sort, never mind things like Silas Marner or even Catcher in the Rye.

Next time you hear a conflict about something like Catcher, by the way, pay attention to the details–the book was almost always assigned in an “honours” course or “gifted student” program.

Second, yes, I do think that what happens is that what begins in high culture trickles down to more popular forms over time.

But I wasn’t thinking of “stories about depressed women in suburbia” as I was thinking about approaches and techniques.

Stream of consciousness, which was an outrageous inovation when Joyce did it, is now standard throughout popular literature, as is the untrustworthy narrator, which made it from Ford Maddox Ford to Agatha Christie in just about ten years.

Third, yes, it was once the job of universities to introduce young people to ideas–and if you go to Harvard or Duke or Johns Hopkins, that just might happen.

But over two thirds of all college students in the US go to third and fourth tier institutions, and those don’t bother with ideas of any kind if they can help it.

Distribution requirements are thin on the ground, and generally consist of enough “English” courses to make the university feel it’s taught its students how to write, and math through “college algebra,” which is just algebra as we knew it in high school.

There’s no fiction, no philosophy, no political science, very little history–and these colleges don’t usually offer majors in this kind of thing, either.   The “English” courses either offer no fiction and poetry at all, or stick in a single short story and a single poem at the end to teach “the reader response essay.”

These days, the three most likely short stories to be the only ones students read are Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (where the title character kills her lover and sleeps next to his corpse for twenty years), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” and Poe’s “The Telltale Heart.”  The poem tends to be something by Robert Frost.

Fourth, I think you can blame English teachers for a lot and get away with it, but I balk at blaming them for Homer Simpson.

Personally, if I had to blame the “there’s nothing I’d be willing to die for” crowd on something or somebody, I’d lean toward the money.

Because although some of us are richer than others, even the poorest of us live better than the middle classes did fifty years ago.  And what look like the people who do not–the homeless on the streets–turn out, on investigation, to be more complicated cases than you’d think.

Sometimes I wonder if human being evolved to live by strife–not warfare but hardship.  I wonder if we’re wired to contend with hardship, and if, when we have nothing to contend with, something goes wrong in our heads.

But I’ve got harpsichords as well as tea, and I’m out of here.

So, I keep running into weird things that make it hard for me to post, which is interesting in itself.  The latest is a pulled muscle in my top left thigh, which I apparently did while falling off the porch.

Long story.

Really long story.

The thing is that it doesn’t hurt when I’m sitting down, and it doesn’t hurt when I’m standing up, but going from one to the other is a bitch.

Which brings me here–no, really, it does.

I’ve looked at all the comments from the last post, and I’ve got a couple of things to point out.

First, I do get out–I get out a lot.  I probably have a wider field of human contact than the vast majority of people in the country, for a lot of reasons that amount to how complicated I’ve made myown life, added to the accident of being related to just such a range.

And I do know that there are other people out there than the people like those I described the last time.

For one thing, this term I took one “regular” section of Composition to teach, just to see if I’d like it better.

And I do like it, a lot.

The point, though, is that in that class I’ve got (among the eighteen or so students):  two ex-military (both combat vets, one Army and one Marine); one working firefighter; one present member of the National Guard due to be deployed; one girl whose fiance is also due to be deployed; one eighteen year old who goes out on the Internet to argue everything from evolution to a kind of Ayn Randian near-anarchic government model. 

What’s more, of the two ex-military guys, the Marine was an MP and the Army guy joined the cops after he was discharged and spent nine years working at that until he got hit by a car and was rendered physically incapable of going on with it.

The two ex-military guys and the firefighter are all grown up.  They take responsibility for what’s going on around the as a matter of course. 

The other three are all about eighteen or nineteen, but they’re getting there.  The National Guard guy is probably going to get there fastest, but I would have to say none of these three is going to turn into one of the people I was talking about before.

About the rest of the class, I’m not sure–let’s face it, these guys intimidate the hell out of their fellow classmates, and for good reason.  So they do a lot of talking and the rest of the class does less.

They’re an interesting class, the most fun I’ve had in years–and that’s causing its own problems, but that’s a story for another time.

The final research project for this class is to research and then write a policy prescription–legal arguments only–for what the law should say about faith healing and children (that is, whether parents should be allowed to choose faith healing over standard medicine for their children).

When the class gets into discussions of this stuff, we get not just the usual opinion bullshitting but at information from at least two people who have dealt directly with similar cases and with the local agencies charged with handling them.

Last class, though, we got to talking about the entire concept of taking responsibility, about how some people will take it at great (potential) cost to themselves and how others won’t do a thing that might inconvenience them in any way. 

One of these guys–the firefighter–thought that such an orientation to life was inborn–you’re either naturally one of those guys, or you’re not.  Other people disagreed, and I pointed out that if the answer to this particular riddle was innate, then there was no such thing as morality.  Morality requires agency and at least partial freedom of the will.

And then, in the middle of all the talk, something struck me.  I do know what I can see has changed dramatically between, say, WWII and now–even between the early days of my childhood and now. 

It’s not, as Robert wants it to be, that we’ve all decided to teach Ann Beattie and John Updike stories in schools.

I doubt if what  literature is taught in schools has any effect at all on most kids growing up.  They get very little of it–especially these days–they don’t bother to read half of what they’re assigned, and they forget what they do read in no time flat.

If people these days are affected by narrative at all, they’re affected by the narratives they see on television and in the movies–and what do they get from that?  Star Wars.  Harry Potter.  Lord of the Rings.

If the key turning out a nation of guys like my six was narrative, we’d be the most responsible, adult, upright nation in the history of the planet.

Here’s the thing, though:  I think my firefighter was mostly wrong. I think that the ability to take responsibility for the world around you–to have things worth dying for when you don’t want to die–runs on a continuum in human personality.  On one side are people who just can’t develop it at all.  On the other are people who just seem to be born with it.

In the middle, though, I think there are a lot of people who can develop it–but in order to develop it they have to want to, and in order to want to they have to have an incentive.

Being the guy in the room who takes responsibility for the situation is difficult, and it’s often unpleasant.  It may mean that you don’t buy yourself pain medication in order that your children can have new winter jackets.  (That was Bill–when I found out he’d been lying about needing the stuff, I nearly killed him.)

It may mean you put yourself in harm’s way, as a soldier, as a cop, to try to rescue the woman drowning in the lake or to intervene when you see some kids trying to beat the hell out of a homeless man on the street.

For generations, there really was an incentive to go from dependent child who expected to be taken care of by everybody else to responsible adult ready to take care of other people.

We made childhood a very restricted experience.  Children had special clothes that looked “childish.”  They had to wear what their parents and schools told them to wear.  Their coming and going was restricted, too–I wasn’t allowed to date until I was sixteen, and then I had to be back by ten.  My brother, being a boy, got to stay out to twelve.  At my high school, girls could not wear stockings until senior year, and then, when my class got to senior year, they changed that to nobody wearing stockings at all at any time.  Knee socks, or nothing. That was it.

Even college didn’t provide much of an increase in personal freedom.  I’m old enough to remember parietal hours, the four or so hours every week-end when boys were allowed in girls’ dorm rooms–but only with the door open and three feet on the floor.  Forget birth control pills.  The housemother rousted you out of the bushes with a flashlight if you disappeared into the evergreens longer than about a minute and a half.  Curfew was at ten o’clock on weeknights and midnight on weekends.  The library closed in time to make sure everybody could make it back to their rooms.

These days there are almost no restrictions on the behavior of children at all–and what restrictions there are tend to be hysterical, overwrought and arbitrary.  My guy in the National Guard can vote for President and got shot at, but he can’t have a beer in the state of Connecticut.  What?

Then there are the endless complications of laws about “children” and sex that make no sense at all–it is illegal for anybody to have sex under the age of fifteen in CT, and illegal for somebody over eighteen to have sex with somebody under eighteen.  Try working this out in a world in which parents have no say at all about who their teenagers are dating, virtually no power to enforce curfew, and no knowledge of where their kids are going and what they’re doing when they’re there.

It’s no wonder that there are “sex offenders” on the registry who are just nineteen year old guys who had sixteen year old girlfriends who had parents willing to file charges for statutory rape.

If you can make all your own decisions by the time you’re twelve–if you can dress like Madonna whether your mother likes it or not, stay out all night, get your tongue pierced, and all the rest of it.

If you can do all these things, make all your own decisions, without ever having to earn any of it–what incentive do you have ever to cross over to that side where you’re the one taking the responsibility?

I feel like I’m putting this very badly, much more awkwardly than the way I thought it out in my head over the last couple of days.

But this is a start, and maybe I can go from here.

After I run out to Staples and do stuff.

Sigh.

So, for the past couple of days I’ve been reading through G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.  I suppose that partially explains the God post of the day before yesterday, although what it really brings to mind to me is the fact that I like well written prose, period.  I don’t really care what it says.  The music of the prose, if it’s good enough, is enough. 

But the chord the book has really been striking for me is something else.  To explain, I need to go back for a moment to Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, because there always was something about that book that I thought was vastly important and virtually never commented on.

Bloom does, of course, do the usual thing and complain endlessly that there’s no real college education any more and no respect for the classics, but he does something else.  About a third of the way through the book–I could probably find the quote, but I’m not at home at the moment–he complains that even when you do get college students to read the classics, they can’t understand them.  They’ve grown up in a world where sex is available pretty much everywhere.  They come from homes where the parents are likely to be divorced and sometimes more than once.  They therefore have no concept of marriage as an actual commitment.  Life has been fairly easy, even for those who come to college having experienced hardship.  There’s no sense of the tragic inevitability of hardship, or of anything.  Even death is mildly felt to be optional–and if it isn’t optional, then somebody must be oppressing you.

One of the things we do wrong–on this blog and elsewhere–when we discuss literature and the teaching of literature, is to assume that teaching somebody to read well and teaching somebody to read literature well are the same things.

The truth is that someone may read very well indeed, understand not just the newspaper but complicated books about macroeconomics and the relationship between the history of Christianity and the rise of modern warfare, without being able to read literature at all.  The two skills are related only at their very lowest levels.   We tend to think of them as related only because most of the people who are able to do one are also able to do the other.  That isn’t because the skills are the same, but because anybody able to do either of these things is likely to be intelligent, and therefore good at other things intelligence is good for.

What all this is leading up to is this:  if I had to borrow Robert’s Pessimism About Everything for a day, it would not be on the grounds he usually advances for the country and the civilization being doomed, but on the grounds that any civilization is doomed when its people are no longer capable of understanding literature.

I am NOT–note the bold, italicized and capitalized word–saying that civilization is doomed if we don’t put people into classrooms and force them to read a Required Reading List.

I’m saying that a civilization made up of people to whom both Lady McBeth and Medea are incomprehensible, for whom Hector is worse than incomprehensible, is a civilization that is not dying, but already dead.

Right here, I’d quote the lines of a Joni Mitchell song, except that I’m told she only lets you do that if you pay her a great deal of money.  So I’ll just say you should find the lyrics to “The Boho Dance” and read them.

Here’s what I find in common between my students, other people’s students, the people I see on television, the people I meet in the grocery store, and all the rest:

There is no sense, among the vast majority of them, that there is any kind of point to life at all, except to be comfortable, have fun, and collect stuff.

This is as true of most of the people I know who say they are religious as it is of the people who say they are not.  The Humanist and Free Inquiry may print article after article about the wonderful things that will happen to all of us if we just adopt an Epicurian philosophy of life, but the members of the local United Methodist Women have never heard of Epicurus, and they’re in the same ballpark.  In the end, they will do anything, and put up with anything, to stay comfortable in the moment. 

Marriage is not important in itself.  It is only important if it makes you happy.  If it doesn’t make you happy, you ditch it and find somebody else.  What’s more, marriage is about happiness–as is just about everything else in life.  If you’re not happy, what’s the point of what you’re doing?

Most people make an minor exception for deferred gratification–med school and internships may be miserable, but at the end of it you’ll be happier than you would have been if you hadn’t put yourself through it.  If it turns out that you put yourself through it and wind up unhappy as a doctor, you’ve wasted your time and there’s no way to get it back.

The side effect of all this is the insane stress we put, on every level of society and every action possible to every individual, on “safety.”  We must be safe, because all suffering, all failure, all defeat is worse than bad.  It’s pointless and can never be in any way compensated for, by anything.

Probably the silliest idea we’ve ever come up with is that of “safe sex,” which is kind of like saying “non-exploding nitroglycerin.” 

Sex is not safe, and protecting ourselves from syphilis, AIDS and pregnancy won’t make it so.  What’s more, we don’t want it to be.  Am I really the only person on the planet who has noticed that the push for “safe sex” has coincided with an exponential growth of interest in the practices of BDSM? 

Jason and Medea, Antony and Cleopatra, didn’t need BDSM because they weren’t deluded into thinking that sex could ever be made safe, by anything.  They knew that sex is scary and destructive as well as exhilirating.  They did not expect their indulgences to be without consequences, mental and emotional and spiritual as well as physical. 

My students, and most of their teachers, and all the “experts” on all the crime shows on television are different.  They expect sex to be “safe,” and rational to boot.   They think there is something called a “healthy relationship,” and then they’re shocked out of their gourds when a wife kills a husband or a boyfriend beats the hell out of a girlfriend, or the rage of jealously is not cured by couples therapy or a twelve step program.

It’s not just Medea and Antony and Cleopatra who knew better.  My grandmother knew better.  She could “take up” the classics in her forties, having never been to school beyond the fourth grade, and “get” Shakespeare and Sophocles in a way that seems impossible for most modern audiences.  She could “get” them because she lived in the same world they did.   She knew not only that sex was not safe, but that some things are worth the pain.

If there is a common theme in the people I see around me–religious and nonreligious, American and European, young and old–it is the inner conviction that nothing is ever worth the pain.  The point of life is to feel good and have nice things.  Anything we do that would make those difficult to attain, or negate them altogether, is indefensible. 

Along with this comes the conviction that what we want should be available without drawbacks–if we want sex, sex should give us pleasure and no pain, and if it gives us pain then something is “wrong.”  Either we have a disease–a “disorder”–or somebody is doing something to us that they have no right to do. 

Step back and look at the larger picture, and you get somewhat the same thing.  At least on the level of the kind of people I knew in, say, Westport, the problem with being a soldier, a police officer or a fire fighter is not that those kinds of jobs are “low rent,” but that those kinds of jobs are likely to get you hurt–and what’s the point in that?  I’d guess that at least half the “elitist” disdain for those kinds of jobs is not really disdain so much as it is self-protection.  Look too closely at yourself when you’re feeling like that, and you might begin to think you’re a coward.  Or worse.

How are these people to understand “no greater love hath any man than to give his life for his friends”?  Friends?  Really?  Hell, most of  them wouldn’t forbear to hit on their friends’ girlfriends, or their spouses.  They’ll take a sensitive job with a Presidential administration, pocket the six figure salary for three or four years, then resign and take a book deal for seven figures so that they can trash their old bosses in the most public way possible. 

So many of us write about the meaning and meaninglessness of life as if it were a great and terrible question–and it should be a great and terrible question.

But what I see around me are people for whom life “means” never thinking beyond next week, never caring for anything but  personal comfort, never even recognizing the nature of reality, because reality is not safe and never will be.  Reality is not happy.

I think a civilization can survive decadance if it knows that what it is doing is decadent.  I think it can survive social upheavals and the welfare state.  Read Augustine’s Civitas Dei: the Rome that fell around his ears was soft and corrupt and chaotic, but it knew that some things are worth dying for, some things are worth the pain, and nothing about living a human life ever is or will be or can be “safe.”

I think civilization can survive Nero.

I don’t know if it can survive this.