Hildegarde

It’s a little cold this morning.  I’ve got to get all my stuff done here and then head out to a local community college for a writer’s conference, where I’m supposed to be speaking–to classes, mostly–as their first mystery writer, ever.  I know there are people out there who get all huffy about the disdain with which academics greet genre fiction, but what strkes me about academic attitudes to the mystery novel is how thoroughly they’re based on hearsay.

By that I mean that very few academics ever seem to actually read mystery novels, and when they do the mystery novels they read tend to be Golden Age rather than recent.  This is even more interesting when you take into account the fact that most of them are also great fans of Mystery! and the A&E productions.  Those are Golden Age, too, but you’d think they’d at least generate some interest in seeing what’s out there on the shelves recently.

In general, the better the institution, the more likely the academic will be to have read Andrew Vachss, say, or Martha Grimes.  There used to be a guy at Yale who knew the field backwards and forwards and was a great champion of all modern mystery writing, pretty much inclusive.  (And–disclosure–wrote reviews, and gave my books very good ones.)

But the very worst of the academic approach to mystery writing does not come from professors who don’t read the stuff and just look down their noses at it.  It comes from the ones who have taken up the mystery as Art, and identified that Art squarely with Chandler, Hammett, and company, sunk deep in a well of Forties “noir” and endless hardboiled cliches.

When I was younger, I used to think that the reason for this was that the hard boiled school was so repetitive, so precious and so fake, there was no chance that it could ever be confused with real Literature, thereby giving the academics who took it up a chance both to indulge their guilty reading pleasures while posing no challenge to their professional commitments.

Now, I’m not so sure.  I wonder sometimes about people’s fantasies.  I’ve always had a very active fantasy life, a place where I sort of star in my own movie, but my fantasies tend to be practical.  Rather than a form of escape, I fantasize as a way to prepare for something I hope I’ll be able to do in the future.

And, me being me, I often do do it in the future.  It may take me longer to get there than I think it will, but if I really want it, I make it happen.  This may be due to the fact that I’m very unlikely to fantasize about things like having J.K. Rowling-sized best sellers or winning the lottery. 

I tend to think myself into places.  That almost always happens when the place I’m in has become too restrictive to me.  And I suppose that’s where I am now.  My phone is full of songs like “Ain’t Back Yet” and “Some Beach, Somewhere.”  That last one sums it up most of the winter these days.

But I wonder if the academics who are so drawn to Forties noir are the kind of people who fantasize about being somebody they are not, without any intention of becoming what they fantasize being.  It’s hard for me to understand what other fascination is to be had in the Golden Age hard boiled novel.  Hammett is at least a writer.  Chandler isn’t even that, and he’s so self-consciously, self-righteously “serious” he’s hard to take seriously.  Then there’s Ross McDonald, who wrote excellently well, but also just reproduced the same book over and over again, with the names changed to protect the overexposed.

I always thought that the choice of a genre was actually the choice of an audience.  When I was first working, my decision to write mysteries rather than go in for more “literary fiction” had nothing to do with liking to read mysteries more than literary fiction.  In those days, I liked quite a lot of what was coming out of the literary end of the business, and that was certainly the direciton I was encouraged to go in by everybody around me.

What pushed me into a different direction was the realization that I couldn’t write literary fiction without pretty much restricting my audience to people just like me–people who’d grown up upper middle class and gone to “name” colleges and worked in either academia or the arts. 

That wouldn’t have been true in the Thirties or Forties.  Hemingway sold to a wide audience.  Fitzgerald sold to a wider one.  Now literary writers not only don’t sell to wide audiences, they don’t even want to.  Witness Jonathan Franzen and that flap about the Oprah Book Club.

But although I sometimes use the books I read to fantasize about being in different places, I almost never use them to fantasize about being different people.

I don’t think I’m perfect, and even at my age, I think there’s a lot I could improve about myself–but I don’t actually want to be anybody else.  I don’t think I ever have.  Even in childhood, when being me was not a walk in the park, I didn’t want to be somebody else. 

And I don’t know why that is.  Certainly lots of people do want to be somebody other than who they are.  That’s why there are people in costume at science fiction and fantasy conventions and why Hogwarts uniforms and toy wands sell to adults as well as children. 

Maybe I’m just flabbergasted that anybody would want to be a Forties hard boiled detective.  Down these mean streets, yes, and with a bottle of Scotch, too, and a sex life that’s something out of a serial killer’s fantasy–if they sleep together, she’s either the murderer or she’s dead, and in either case the affair ends with a corpse instead of a commitment. 

The chances are good that the people I talk to today, unlike the ones I spoke in front of on Sunday, will never have read a modern mystery in their lives, and their teachers–in this case, there will be students from classes who are there as part of an assignment–will want to know if I’ve ever read Agatha Christie. 

So it ought to be interesting.

Every time this blog gets into one of these discussions about what it mean to be educated, somebody is sure to bring up “dance,” and to do it in a way that makes it clear (if only tacitly) that calling dance a major art we should all know about is just plain silly.

And here’s the thing–I mostly agree.

But I don’t agree because I think dance is in and of itself trivial, that is has nothing to add to the Great Conversation.  Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t.  What I do know is that it hasn’t YET added much to the Great Conversation, and I know why that is.

Dance is about performance.  And performance–until very recently–has been ephemeral.

It’s not just dance that falls into this category, of course.  Acting does also, and so do actual musical performances.  Before the advent of film, those of us not in the audience who saw the performance had no way to judge that performance.  And future generations–the jury for whether something does or does not enter our cultural history–couldn’t judge anything but the audience’s reaction, which would at least be written down.

We’re told that Mrs. Siddons, and Sarah Bernhardt, and Eleonora Duse were all great actresses.  We don’t any of us know what that means.  I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that we wouldn’t much like what we saw if we could see it. 

We therefore call the composition art, great or otherwise, but not the performance of it, except in the immediacy of the moment.  Bach and Beethoven are still with us, because their compositions were written down and could come down to us.  We’ve heard of various people who over the years performned those compositions well, but we can’t still hear them, and they pass out of the history.

The same is true of drama.  Shakespeare and Sophocles are down on the page.  The performances of the actors who performed them are not.

This is particularly true of dance, because–for whatever reason, over the years–choreography, although written down to some extent, has always been to some extent a matter of rehearsal.   Even if we could all read choreographic notation–and not even all choreographers can do that–we would still miss a great deal of what the choreographer taught his dancers to perform.  A lot of choreography is not down on the page.

So for dance, we have neither the performance itself, nor the schemata for the performance, left for even educated people to read.

But that was then, and this is now.  Now there is film, and recording, and even better, digital copying.

I can know what Itzhak Perelman sounded like when he played–I have a digitially remastered CD of at least one of those performances.  I can know what Clark Gable sounded like when he acted, too. 

With digital compying, performance can be preserved nearly forever.

Which makes me wonder a couple of things.

The first is what effect this is going to have on future performances.  Samuel Johnson wrote the first English dictionary and in the process standardized English spelling, something that changed the course of writing in English forever.  There’s a reason it’s difficult to read Shakespeare but not at all difficult to read Johnson himself, or Boswell, or any of the writers who came afterwards.  They all seem “modern” in a way that somebody like Edmund Spenser–or even John Donne–does not.

Maybe this is what will happen to performance–and especially to acting.  Maybe the wild swings of fashion will start to even out, so that the melodramatic emoting that was characteristic of the Jacobean theater and that wandered into the old silent movies will simply disappear.

Maybe we will begin to develop uniform standards for performance.  I would assume that such standards would differ across the different arts.  That is, there would be a set of standards for acting which would not be the set of standards for dance.

But until very recently, we were nowhere near establishing standards for acting.  Acting was “good” if the people of the time liked it.  Since it disappeared as soon as it was seen, there was nothing much else to  go on.

But the bigger issue for me is this–will the ability to  preserve performance lead to a situation in which we see the history of performance the way we see the history of the up to now more permanent arts?  Will people begin to approach performance the way they now approach, say, Michaelangelo’s David, as a permanent and timeless example of human excellence?

We go to the Winged Victory of Samathrace and the David, to the Mona Lisa and Vermeer’s interiors, to Mozart and Beethoven and Bach, and one of the reason we teach them to students or expose schoolchildren to them is so that we can say:  Look at that.  This is something actual people can do.  They can do something as amazing and unbelievable as that.

I’ve always thought that that was a major part of what should be going on in elementary and secondary schools–introducing children and teenagers to what Arnold would have called “the best that has been thought and said,” and to which I would add painted and composed, because such things represent a way of life almost entirely unknown in most people’s lives.

No, really, making more money and getting more stuff is not the only possible goal in life.  Making more money to get bigger credit card lines to buy more stuff and then end up so far into debt you can’t breathe really isn’t.

In other words, part of the purpose of art in this world is aspirational–it gives us a picture of the best we can be. 

Maybe performance will end up being more like literature–there will be so much of it, that we will find ourselves with an Official Canon, plus Genre Canons, plus obscure items that leave ordinary audiences cold but fire up the guts of the people who hope to be or already are performers themselves. 

The one thing I am sure of is that permanance will change the history of the art–the fact that we have access to prior performances will change both the audiences and the performers themselves. 

Whether this means dance will finally be a major and not a minor art–I just don’t know.

I don’t really have the time to write a real blog entry today.  I’ve got to go running all over creation, and it’s one of those days where it starts cold and ends hot and nothing makes sense.   I did a talk at the public library in Glastonbury yesterday.  The audience was wonderful and the library was spectacular.   I’ve got to do another one on Wednesday, this time at a local community college, so I’m feeling a little rushed.

But I thought I’d try to make clear what I’ve been getting at once and for all, by providing this link

http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/

That’s St. John’s College in Aannapolis, Maryland–they have a branch in the Southwest somewhere, too–and although their program isn’t perfect, it’s the right kind of thing.

If you look through the site, you’ll see that they’re not expecting students to memorize long lists of intellectual facts the way students of history were sometimes asked to memorize long list of dates–the program is nothing like that.

And since they restrict themselves to only 100 books over the four years, their list (their de facto canon) is not exhaustive, and it does change at the edges sometimes. 

But this is what education is, and the “courses” we all took in “disciplines” in college was not. 

Now I’m going to go off and berate students, and then run around to banks and gas stations and places like that.

So, the first thing th is morning, I got up, logged on, and found Robert’s last comment on yesterday’s post–and I had an epiphany.

My real problem here–the point I keep failing to get across (and not just to Robert, although he’s the most articulate about this particular set of objections) is so basic, it never occurred to me that there was an issue on that level.

So let me try to restate the case a little better, and then I’ll see what I get from there.

The object of education is to know this civilization as completely and comprehensively as it is possible to know it.

That’s it.

It’s not to be a better person   It is not to be a better citizen.  It is not to be able to do the math on your tax returns or combine the proper chemicals to blow up your lab.

It’s to know. 

Period.

Robert complains that if I want to teach economics the way I teach physics and chemistry, then I have to “get rid of the dross.”

But he’s got it backwards.

I want to teach chemistry and physics the way I teach philosophy.

I want to teach the sciences as HISTORICAL disciplines, to teach the sequence and the history of scientific ideas, just as I want to teach the history of philosophical ideas.

And that especially goes for biology.  Biology taught as an historical discipline would most definitely contain an explanation of various forms of creationism over the centuries, as well as Aristotle’s works on natural history and everything in between. 

I’d be willing to be that at the end of such a sequence of study, you’d have far fewer creationists than you do know–and what’s more important, far fewer people who go to school board meetings going, “well, it’s all a matter of opinion, isn’t it?”

And I would have fewer such people precisely because I didn’t approach the teaching of biology as “this is right, this is wrong, that’s it.”

I’ll say it again–what you want is catechism, or Sunday school, a set of “right” answers that students are then drilled to accept and “wrong” ones they’re drilled to reject. 

But that isn’t education either.

And, in fact, it leaves out all understanding of how people can believe the wrong answers, what the history of the wrong answers was, why they were attractive and to whom.

It doesn’t matter a damn if you’re influenced by books on the “required reading list.”  It DOES matter that other people were–that the US Civil Wat would have been a different thing without Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that the Communist ferment of the Thirties would have been a different thing without hundreds of Workingman’s Clubs reading Les Miserable, that the present day tea party movement would be a different thing if it had not been for both the book and the movie of Gone With The Wind.

The issue is not whether or not narratives are historically accurate, but whether or not they have been socially compelling.  It would be really nice if we all knew the Historical Truth about the Civil War, but you ask then people on the street about the Confederacy and you’ll get Margaret Mitchell almost exclusively. 

Knowledge is indivisible.  And this civilization–more so than any other–is a process, and only by understanding the entire process can we understand it.

That won’t mean that we won’t decide to reject our understanding and run off after a fantasy.  It won’t mean we won’t ditch the obvious–that vaccinations are neither witchcraft nor the cause of autism–in favor of something that makes us feel better.  It won’t mean that we’ll be good people.

It will just mean that we know.

And I think knowing is valuable in and of itself.

In fact, I think it’s the most valuable thing.

And now I have to run off and get my hair cut, because I’m speaking at the public library in Glastonbury tomorrow afternoon.

And about murder mysteries, too.

So, a couple of things–first, as an aside, I want to point out that I’ve never suggested that we go about education as an exercise in making people memorize books.  I just want them to have read them.

And second, I don’t think you’re going to do much to change the incentive structure until you can get past that thing where a kid with first class skills in math can go to work for an investment bank and be drawing down six figures the day he walks through the entry level door, and seven by the time he’s forty.

Engineering pays…what?

But that isn’t what this post is about.  So let me get to it.

First, if I had to put a relative value on the subjects you study outside science, I’d put literature first, history second, and the history of ideas third.

I’d put literature first because people are in fact people.  Most of us think in narratives, automatically.  It’s the way we’re built.

Most people will never read Nietzsche or Freud, but they will imbibe and assimilate the ideas those men put into the world by reading narratives that assume them.  And that has plenty of real consequences in the real world–people now serve in the US Congress who would not have if Ayn Rand had never written Atlas Shrugged or Victor Hugo Le Miserables.

They way we understand ourselves as a people and as individuals is given to us almost entirely through narratives, and most of the ideas we have of morality come from narratives, too.  There’s a reason Jesus spoke in parables.  There’s a reason Plato contested, not the ethical ideas of earlier philosophers but the ethical ideas of the Iliad..

Dance doesn’t make the cut for me because it doesn’t seem to me to have had that kind of impact on the way we all live.  Music is somewhere in the middle–especially in the last fifty years, when it has become the vehicle for poetry, while standard poetry has fallen off the map as a literary form.

As for philosophy–you teach poisonous philosophy for the same reason you teach poisoning history, because it did in fact happen, and in happening it did in fact effect the way the world evolved. 

I am watching ideas culled from Nietzsche and the eugenicists being recycled under the guise of “bioethics,” and the reason that came happen is that nobody has read Nietzsche and the eugenicists and nobody knows how those ideas played out in the real world the last time. 

You won’t avoid another holocaust by writing history books that omit any mention of it, and you won’t avoid another holocaust by writing philosophy books where no mention is made of the ideas that led to it.

In fact, what you’ll get is replay after replay, because nobody will know what they should be looking out for, or why some ideas which sound sensible on the surface always seem to end badly.

The study of philosophy isn’t catechism or Sunday school.  It isn’t designed to teach people how to be good people or how to make a good government.  It’s supposed to show how ideas arose and played out over time, how one idea led to another, what ideas underlie what realities in the everyday world. 

We could really use people who knew this stuff.  We could especially use scientists and engineers who knew this stuff, and then we could use a lot of politicians who knew it.  Peter Singer has a chair in bioethics because even people who call themselves educated these days don’t know it. 

The history of this civilization is what it is.  There has been the good and the bad and the ugly.  The history of ideas is a history, and it needs to be taught as a history. 

Forming the moral character of people is the job for churches or ethical institutions.  It is not the point of an education.

So, you know, ack.

I refuse to do it.

I’m with Newman on this one–knowledge is not divisible.  If you only know the trunk, or the left foot, or the tail, you don’t know the elephant.

So, do I think “culture” can be taught?

Sure I do.  After all, they taught me mathematics, and I hated it.  I still do.

Mathematics is “culture.”   So is biology.  So is physics.  So is chemistry.  So is philosophy, history, intellectual history, painting, literature, and music.

You either know it all–or at least know enough to see the outlines of the whole–or you can’t really know anything. 

You may not like it, or any of it, but you can be taught to know it. I’m still of the opinion that it isn’t possible to teach people to like things.

And I agree, this is really the outline for what used to be called the “college track” high school program.  It’s largely a secondary school program in England, too.

By the time I got to high school, however, the teaching of this stuff was largely fragmented and disjuointed–there was no attempt to connect, say, Sophocles and Aristotle (if you got Aristotle at all) with Pythagoras and Euclid, or even Aristotle’s “natural philosophy” (the beginning of what would become botany) with his ethics.

And yet all those things are connected.   I would say that Aristotle’s ethics, and his politics, are inexplicable if you don’t know his “natural science,” because the same assumptions and observations of the world underllie both.

As for teaching about other civilizations, of course we should–I just think we need to teach about our own first.

The problem with the people who proclaimed that the West was an evil imperialist hegemon isn’t that the didn’t know about the way other societies behave, but the way they had been taught the history of the West.  England can be seen as an evil imperalist hegemon, or it can be seen as the country that brought the end of slavery and the end of suttee to the world.  The same with Rome and the rule of law.

Civilization follows conquest.  One of the things a thoroughgoing education in the Western tradition would have taught these people is precisely that–and why that happens and what it means.

You can look at the roaring success of Western Civilization over all others so far and blame it on imperialism–or on a superior cultural model that lots of other people want in on.

The choice between those two ways of viewing the spread of Western civilization throughout the world is just that–a choice.  And the people who were condemining the West for imperialism were, in my generation, people who had first been taught otherwise.

But I get back to the same place–the history of ideas would certainly have taught the people you are talking about that their attitudes are unusual, largely restricted to this time and place, and the result of a very particular sequence of ideas and philosophies over time. 

The decision to treat the history of the West as one of relentless imperialist oppressiveness is not made on the basis of anyhistory, either localized or international.  I know plenty of people who know quite a bit about the Muslim role in the slave trade who still blame slavery not just on the West but on the US.

And facts will not change their minds.

The endless silliness about how the West only got hold of “Greek Learning” because the far more tolerant Islamic culture preserved the works of Aristotle and Plato while the Christian West was burning them as heretical persists in spite of the fact that there is virtually no truth in it.

Let’s face it, if West-bashing is what you’re interested in, “Western Europeans lost contact with the works of ancient authors like Plato because they were invaded over and over again by Germanic tribes, and then regained their contact when Greek Christian scholars flooded in to Italy as refugees from a Muslim empire that was perseucting them” doesn’t sound half so impressive.

If there’s a real gap in even the traditional approach to teaching Western Civilization, it’s in the paucity of information available about the Byzantine empire, and Byzantine art, scholarship, and science. 

Most people know that there is something called the Greek Orthodox Church, but they don’t know that there are Greek Catholics, called “Eastern Rite,” who worship like the Orthodox but are “in communion” with the Pope. 

Most people know nothing about the fate of Greek Christian under Islamic rule–and that’s Western history, which in and of itself would go a long way towards dispelling the idea that the West is uniquely committed to “hegemony.”

As for practicalities–I’m all for being practical, I just also think that people should actually know what the choices are before they make them. 

Right now, we’re in a situation where the vast majority of students at colleges and universities around the country have no idea that there is any other way to conceive of a college education except as vocational training leading to a specific job or career.  They are, in that sense, much more ignorant, culturally, than their grandfathers who returned to take advantage of the GI Bill, and who largely explained what they expected to get as the first generation of their families to go to college as “a meaningful philosophy of life.”

As to the overlords of political correctness–they don’t exist at places like the University of Phoenix and the other for-profit places that now enroll an increasing number of college students every year, and they don’t exist at the third- and fourth-tier places that concentrate on getting students through degrees in nursing, teaching, social work and business–and whose English departments consist of nothing but composition and children’s literature courses, and whose philosophy, sociology, and classics departments are non existent.

I’ll go back to my old thing–I wish we would just CALL the two things different things.

Practical training is a good idea–but it’s not a college education.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t ignoring Jem’s questions.  I was just leaving them for this post.

And things being what they are–I’m in a noisy computer lab, and it’s easy to be distracted–I just want to outline my answers at first.

To begin with, there is the “what is culture?” question, and here I’m at a bit of a disadvantage.  I’m not sure where I used the word that made the question arise in the first place, because I use it in several different senses.  Sometimes I use it as a stand-in for “society.”  Sometimes I use it to mean the overarching assumptions of a social world.  Sometimes I use it when I should really use “civilization.”

That said, I’m going to assume that the issue here concerns what the content of the canon should be, or what the content of an education should be.

And if that’s the question, then my basic outline of what it would take to be completely educated would look like this:

            a) the history of event from Greece to the present

            b) the history of ideas from Greece to the present (philosophy in all its guises (political science, ethics,  Aristotle and Aquinas, Freud and Nietzsche and Marx, Adam Smith, Hume, Locke, etc)

            c) the history of art from Greece to the present

             d) mathematics through elementary calculus, and including statistics)

             e) the basics of biology, chemistry and physics, including an understanding of the standards of scientific evidence and some experience with constructing and carrying out empirical experiments.

So that’s what I want,generally. 

How to get other people to value it is a more complicated issue.

I really do not want to impose this on anybody who doesn’t want it.

What bothers me, at the moment, is that most of my students don’t even know it’s there to be wanted.  They aren’t aware that such a thing as a liberal education exists, never mind what it might do for them or what it is supposed to be for.

What’s more, they’re often woefully misinformed about what will, in fact, get them a job after college. Nearly all of them are concentrating on narrowly vocational degrees in a world in which entry level hires for those employment tracks that lead to significant promostions (say, getting to be a CEO someday) are almost all of students who major in NON vocational subjects but at higher-tier universities.  That holds for who gets admitted to the name law and business schools, too.

So what I want to do is just to get it out there, to make people aware of what exists.

Then, if they want to reject it, at least they’ll actually be rejecting it.

Right now, they’re not rejecting so much as they’re oblivious.

And, I’ll admit, the university departments aren’t helping. 

Although these days, the problem isn’t the politicization of them–most of them aren’t particularly–as it is the fact that the departments themselves have lost sight of what a liberal education is and what it is for.

Tomorrow, there will be more quiet and more ability to concentrate.

Yesterday, I had to take my older son to the train station so that he could get back to school, and I came home in the middle of the day bone tired and not much interested in doing anything that took effort.

The result is that I spent the late afternoon watching a little movie playing on my local cable station called The Laramie Project, a fictionalized examination of the aftermath of the Matthew Shepard case–well, sort of.

I’m not much for docudramas, but this was not actually a docudrama, and it was very well made.

The premise is that a group of people from a New York film project have decided to go out to Laramie and make a documentary about the Shepard case by talking to the people involved in it both about what happened and about how they feel–and how they think Laramie feels–about gay people.

Okay, it sounds awful.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t even particularly ham handed on the ideological front, although the underlying premise was indeed ideological.  There was also the fact that the talent was good, mostly a long list of second-tier actors and actresses who have been in everything are were easily recognizable:  Steve Buscemi, Janeane Garafolo, Christina Ricci, Peter Fonda, on and on.

The basic underlying idea here is that what happened to Matthew Shepard happened because although most people tolerate homosexuality, they do not accept it, and the lack of acceptance sends a message to the idiot wing of the population that it’s “all right” to commit violence against gay people.

I do get the argument, and it is not completely silly.  Black people in the South after Reconstruction and (especially) in the early to mid-twentieth century were in the same position.  It wasn’t that most people were violent towards them.  It was that, being despised, they were seen as fair game by thugs and lowlifes, and therefore in greater danger than they would have been if they had been accepted in the same way as any other citizen.

What bothered me as I watched this movie, though, was the thought that this particular approach to what happened misses the real issue, and I think the real issue will be with us long after the entire country has accepted homosexuality without prejudice.

The mistake is to think that Henderson and McKinney’s hatred of gay people was essential, rather than opportunistic.

In other words, these two men were going to end up killing somebody.  If they had lived in a society that was totally accepting of gay people, they would have killed a black guy.  If there were no black guys, they’d have picked on a little old lady.  The issue was not who, but that–and that was a structural social reality that isn’t going away any time soon.

The good news is that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced culture that requires more and more people who can do math and science and engineering and communications and–well, all that stuff.

The bad news is that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced culture that increasingly has no place for people who cannot do that kind of thing.

And let me be clear about the kind of thing I’m talking about.  Even working on an automobile assembly line requires at least some technological skills.  So does working as a receptionist in even a small company–you’ve got to know how to run the computer, how to use various business software programs, how to handle the digitalized phone system.

For people like Henderson and McKinney, for people who are not very bright at the best of times, there is not a lot of wriggle room–jobs for convenience store clerks and fast-food restaurant cashiers are there but not endlessly plentiful, and they don’t go anywhere in the long run.

The more complex and sophisticated a society becomes, the larger the group of people whose innate level of ability is just not good enough to function in it.  Every advance for the rest of us means that another layer of the least well endowed of us becomes superfluous to the functioning of society as a whole.

I am not trying to say here that Henderson and McKinney couldn’t help themselves.  Most people in their circumstances do help themselves, at least in the sense that they don’t go out and torture and murder somebody.  They do do a lot of drugs, and alcohol, and petty theft, but the scale is hardly the same.

I’m not trying to say that Henderson and McKinney couldn’t have gotten low level jobs and, by dint of hard work and self discipline, have survived as solid citizens.  They could have.

But they would always have been on the bottom.  And they knew it.  What’s more, they would know that the work they did was not important in any way, that they were always dispensible, that they had very little to be proud of.

The real work of their society was something they could not participate in.

Henderson and McKinney would have found somebody to beat the crap out of not because they hated gays or blacks or anybody else, but because they hated themselves for being utterly worthless on the only scale of worth this society has any use for.

And it’s not money.

Bleh.  I’m losing it here.

But I do think we should start thinking–as a society–about the people we leave behind, because we are inevitably going to leave some people behind.  And a lot of them are going to be furious about it.

This as an addendum:  John wants to know if we wouldn’t be better off if there was less emphasis on culture and more on training.

I’d say that there is NO emphasis on culture in the vast majority of American colleges and universities these days.

We are relentlessly focussed on training, and have been for over thirty years.

The result is not better scientists and engineers–it is, by and large, worse ones.  

Newman would say that knowledge is not divisible, and when you teach it as if you could learn a part and not the whole, you get people who don’t know the part all that well. 

I’d also point out that Newman’s idea of what would be taught in a university included mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology–which were then and are now part of the liberal arts. 

But it wouldn’t have included English literature, which was not part of the university curriculum until Newman had been dead for fifty years.

So, it’s the day after Easter, and I’m still on John Henry Newman’s book, and  notmuch farther in than I was on Saturday.  I had people over, and they took down part of a tree and an enormous parasitical vine that was eating half my house, so that was good.

But as to the book–

At the beginning, at least, it is not what I expected it to be.  I’ve spent so much of my life hearing about this thing that I assume that the things I’ve heard will come to fruition in the second half.

But the first half is a set of discourses in which Newman argues against what was then called “mixed education.”  This was not a matter of the mixing of races, and it wouldn’t have occured to anybody at the time to let women into a university, never mind to mix them in classes with men.

Newman is responding to a proposal to build a university in Ireland that would admit both Protestant and Catholic students.  This was an era in which Oxford and Cambridge did not admit Catholics, and Newman, who was a graduate and fellow of Oriel College at Oxford, was forced to resign when he converted to the Catholic Church.

What he wants for Ireland is a Catholic university, not a “non-sectarian” one, and the reason he doesn’t want a non-sectarian one is that he knows that there is only one way to get it–to take theology out of the core of the curriculum and treat it not as a science but as a mere matter of opinion.

And that, Newman believes, makes a mess of the entire university curriculum, because it leaves that curriculum without an organizing idea.

Give me a minute here.

First, you’ve got to understand that what Newman thought of as a university education is not what we’re used to.  It isn’t even what we were used to before this age of narrowly focused vocational training we’ve relabeled “college.”

Newman rejects the aims and organization of the German research university in their entirety.  He does not expect a university to train scholars in particular fields, or to become the home of “departments” which parcel out bits and pieces of knowledge into separate little classifications and areas.

“The view taken of a University in these discourses,” he says, “is the following:–That it is a place of teaching universal knowledge.  This implies that its object is one the one hand intellectual, not moral; and, on the other, that it is the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement.  If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students; if religious training, I do not see how it can be the seat of literature and science.”

In other words, when Newman talks of  “a University,” what he’s referring to is something closest to our great books colleges, like St. John’s in Maryland. 

And the way he formulates the problem–that he is talking about the necessity of theology having a central place in such an institution, and it therefore being a bad idea to teach Protestants and Catholics together (because they do not share such a theology)–is interesting, because he obviously isn’t using the word “theology” as a code word for teaching religion. 

That is, what Newman wants students to learn in theology is not how they should behave or worship. 

The question then arises, though–if this is not what Newman wants, why does he want theology at the center of a university’s curriculum?

The answer, I think, is that what he’s actually looking for is a single “subject” that provides the structural and intellectual framework for all the others, the eggshell into which the egg will fit. 

Newman was not only an academic and a convert to Catholicism, but eventually a Cardinal in the Catholic Church, and for him–as for a number of other people in his time–theology was the eggshell, not just for university education, but for virtually everything else.  Theology, by teaching us about the Creator of the Universe and the purpose for which He created, provided the franework through which all other ideas could be understood.

If you look at theology that way–as a framework, what I’d call a master narrative–not only the book, but a lot of modern academic life, makes a lot more sense.

I think Newman was right on at least one level:  we do need a master narrative which provides the interpretive framework for all the rest of what we study.  Without such a master narrative, what we have is just a lot of chaotic detail that doesn’t necessarily make sense and doesn’t necessarily make logic, either.

And I think that every individual person finds such a master narrative for himself, somewhere, because I don’t think that we are capable of functioning witout one.  We take the master narrative presented by our country or our religion or our politics, or we invent one for ourselves, but we all build prisms that separate and organize the light around us.

I think that a lot of the political silliness we see on college campuses these days–the speech codes that punish “inappropriate laughter,” the “diversity training” orientation seminars that resemble the more abusive forms of Eighties poppsych scams, the periodic hysterical paroxyms over deadly threats that don’t actually exist–is a symptom of a culture in search of a master narrative and an attempt to impose such a narrative by force.  For the American university of the twenty-first century–or at least a certain kind of American university–these things are its theology working itself out in day to day particulars.

I think the same is the case with our political discourse–everybody is hysterical all the time, because nobody has a master narrative that he can actually trust.  I think that’s true on the right and on the left, and more true the more stridently each side insists that it has The Answer without question. 

I will say that I don’t know, off the top of my head, whether this situation is a good thing or a bad one.

My instinct says that it’s a bad one–that no society in history has ever survived without a generally shared master narrative, and that the lack of such a narrative has had consequences for education that are–well, that make it not really education. 

A lot of my frustration with the “professional priniciples” some posters would like to substitute for such a narrative, and with things like Good Social Work Practice, are directly the result of people in various fields being unable to see how what they know is connected to everything else there is to know, or how what they know is challenged by everything else there is to know. 

The reason no one has noticed that rehab is a failure has less to do with entrenched interests than with the fact that most clinical psychologists and MSWs don’t understand the criteria for success as established by the hard sciences.   If they did understand that criteria, we might get past methods with 95% failure rates to look into new approaches to the problem of addiction. 

Instead, we start with our premises–addiction is a disease–and then just go with it, and the evidence of failure is explained away by saying  “addictions can’t be cured.”

Really?  Because I know of several people who do, in fact, seem to be “cured.”  I’m just not too sure if “cured” is the right word for it.

I’m still of the opinion that we’d all be better off if psychologists and social workers and teachers were required to read and understand a lot of Homer, Shakespeare and Dickens–although Freud was required to know the first two, and made a mess of them anyway–but in the end I understand Newman’s point. 

If we do not have a framework for understanding the whole as a whole,  then we’re like the guys in that story about the elephant.  Each of us thinks our own narrow area of expertise is the whole animal, and in the end we’re wrong not only about the whole animal, but about our narrow area of expertise.

And yet.

There’s a part of me that can see some good in all the contentiousness, maybe because I’m the kind of person who likes contentiousness for its own sake.  I hate the entire us-and-them nature of contemporary politics, which isn’t really about politics at all, but about our lack of a shared moral vision.  On the other hand, I think that lack keeps the culture from getting stale, and I fear staleness–and the stiffling strangulation of conformity (see half the EU)–more than I do all the yelling we do at each other.

And now I’m going to go get lunch.

So–the book on faith healing was short, and I finished it yesterday morning, which ended up giving me a sort of paralysis right before I had to go off and teach.  I had no idea what I wanted to read next, and I knew I was going to end up picking something in haste and then deciding–when I was stranded somewhere with nothing else to read–that it wasn’t what I wanted at all.

At any rate, I managed to negotiate all this, helped by the fact that my classes had almost no students in them–we were the only school in the area holding class on Good Friday–and I finally settled on John Henry Newman’s The Idea of the University.

It’s one of those things.  You’d have thought I’d have read it four times over by now, but I’ve never read it before at all, and it starts out distinguishing Education from Training, too.

I mean, really.

But for some reason, it got me going on something else.

I’ve spoken on this forum before of Plain Living and High Thinking, and I’ve done it with the automatic assumption that the phrase would be immediately familiar to almost everybody.  It is, after all, the epitome of New England-ness.  Okay, that’s not a word.  But you know what I mean.  It is, in my mind, a description of what it means to be a New Englander, and, maybe because I grew up around so many examples of the breed, I always thought its meaning was self evident.

Then Robert wrote me an e-mail saying that he had always assumed I meant people who worked at humble jobs in order to pursue the life of the life, but that he’d come across the phrase in Chesterton, and Chesterton used it to mean…well, I suppose you’d call them hippies, these days.

I’d never heard that particular use of the term at all, but I put it down to the fact that Chesterton was talking about England, not New England, and New England has had very distinct ideas about England ever since those first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.

Or maybe before.

But let me go back to Plain Living and High Thinking, New England version, because it’s something I’ve always found enormously attractive as a philosophy of life.

And yes, I do realize that its attraction to me is something of an accident.  I’m an upper middle class educated professional woman FROM New England, so of course this is the sort of thing I like.

But I do like it.  And I think it has intrinsic merit.

First, it’s not necessary to work humble jobs to engage in Plain Living and High Thinkng.  Most of the people I knew who lived that way when I was growing up were probably very well off.  It just wasn’t obvious that they were very well off.

The issue wasn’t money, but what you did–and didn’t–do with it.  You didn’t buy “designer” things, for instance.  You never bought anything with a visible label.  A PLHT rich person buys store brands and generic medicines and has no problem shopping in Wal-Mart–there’s something just wrong about spending more money for something than is absolutely needful.

They have Fords and not Mercedes, sweaters their grandmothers knitted, and underwear in some plain generic variety they picked up on a sale rack.

On the other hand, quality counts, so a PLHT person would have “good” things, the sort of things that last forever.  But never anything…obvious.

The great maxim for PLHT people was the little poem nearly every girl of my mother’s generation was required to embroider into the sampler her mother made her do to make sure she knew how to sew:

Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Or do without.

One of the reasons a lot of PLHT families had money in the bank is that they virtually never spent any of it.

Which brings us to point two–PLHT people do their own work, and they do it on a schedule that would make most people cry.  They get up early in the morning.  They sweep up, make breakfast, and pack the kids off to school.

If they do have help, it’s one woman who comes in to do heavy stuff like vacuuming or rugs.  They do not have the sort of help that serves at table, even if they’re very very rich–unless they’re also very, very old, and it’s assumed that they aren’t capable of getting up and doing for themselves. 

Of course, a lot of these women wouldn’t admit they were no longer able to do for themselves until they were so blind and feeble they started falling out of bed and not being able to find the bedroom door–but that was a cross for their children and grandchildren to bear, and they insist on being “independent” no matter what.

If there’s a young son in the house, he’ll be the one who does the lawn mowing, even if he’s got a trust fund somewhere worth $40 million.  Their daughters wash up after dinner.  They go out and walk their own walls in the spring and they shovel their own snow in the winter.  

The two biggest sins in the PLHT world are “laziness” and “display.”

Third, they’re connected to their place.  A lot of them have been connected for a couple of centuries, but there are PLHT people who are “new” from the last generation or two.  It’s a matter of commitment to the idea rather than longevity per se.

They go to their town meeting and they participate.  Sometimes, too much.  They run for local office.  They volunteer for the local food bank and at the local library.  They run food drives and fund raisers.  If there’s a local Meals on Wheels, they volunteer for it.  If there’s a local Literacy Volunteers of America, they work for that, too. 

Their children go to the local public schools at least through the eighth or ninth grade. Richer PLHT people, or PLHT people whose families go very far back in  America, sometimes send their children to boarding or prep schools, but if they do it tends to be a matter of tradition.  Great-great-grandfather started the place and grandmother gave the library, so it’s a matter of sticking with the family.

Richer PLHT people sometimes have daughters who have “debuts,” but they’re not the kind of “debuts” you’re used to hearing about.  A bunch of her parents friends invited to have lunch or tea on a Saturday afternoon–that kind of thing.  No getting in a band or having champagne or dancing or anything like that.

There’s a famous story about a PLHT Boston debutante from the Fifties who invited her best friend over to pick out her coming out dress–and the two girls sat down on the sofa and went through the Sears catalogue.

Fourth, they are intensely commited to Ideas.  Whether they’re good at them or not is a question for another time and place, but they are committed to them.  They read lots of history, and in the old days they used to read a lot of published sermons.  They’ve read the Bible, often several times, since in the old days it was a common practice for PLHT people to keep a copy of the Bible on their bedside table so that they could read a chapter every night before going to bed.

They were the stalwarts of the old Congregationalist Church, and some of them still go there.  But it’s become such a center for newfangledness these days, and newfangledness is a kind of “display,” so—.

They’ve read Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Tacitus, and the collected works of McCauley and Gibbon, but not much in the way of fiction, which they consider “frivolous.”   “Frivolousness” is the third of the deadly sins after “laziness” and “display.”   

They always vote, and they always know the issues and the candidates.  They make a point of it.

Every one of them now living has already returned his census form. 

They follow all the rules of the road when they drive.  They carefully insure their houses and cars.  If they don’t have health insurance, they still go to the doctor and pay him up front for everything. 

They may or may not have credit cards, but they never run a balance.  And if they have mortgages, they have the shortest term mortgages they can get and pay them off as soon as it’s feasible. 

They rarely eat out–it’s expensive, and the food isn’t good for you.  They don’t belong to country clubs–it’s expensive, and just a lot of people indulging in a lot of “display.”  If they own a television at all, they either don’t get cable, or they get the lowest tier.  Their television sets are never in their living rooms, and they only have one, tucked away in a back room somewhere. 

They eat dinner together every night, with no electronics blaring in the background. The dinner table talk runs to political issues, religious issues, or making sure the kids know something besides the names of the latest Pop Tarts.

They have gardens out back that they work religiously and in which they grow the most marvelous vegetables.  Then they pick the vegetables and boil them into mush.  You really do not want to eat their cooking.

These days, they tend to contrast their way of life with “New York,” but at the start of the country, the big comparison was with Virginia–and all those proflgate, slave-owning planters who liked to drink too much, gamble too much, and spend too much money.

They were the first people in America to oppose slavery, and many of them went to extraordinary lengths to cut their ties to it, often jettisoning significant amounts of money they felt was tainted by the practice. 

They were, in fact, very much like my father–who was the son of Greek immigrants–and very little like my mother, who has the kind of pedigree that would seem to make her heir to this kind of thing.

And, like I said, I find this kind of thing attractive–except for the cooking, which is deplorable.

But I do think it beats the buy-everything-designer-labeled, throw-cash-around-and-show-how-much-you-can-spend ethic of the present age. 

I’ve got to go buy chocolate bunnies.