[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Thomas F. Bertonneau
English
SUNY-Oswego
dactylic@earthlink.net
That modern people would rather do anything than pay attention to serious matters--to the often conflicted, historically complicated reality in which they live, or to their own limitations and mortality--is a truth taken for granted by the philosophers and the poets.
Friedrich Nietzsche notes presciently in his Twilight of the Idols (1888) that "people live for today, they live very quickly--they live very irresponsibly: and this is precisely what is called 'freedom.'" More particularly and acutely, as Nietzsche observes, modern people "think they are in danger of a new form of slavery whenever the word 'authority' is even uttered." The necessary attitude of all those who live for the moment towards what is ancient, serious, and authoritative is invariably one of scorn and resentment. Authority is real, part of the continuum of existence; "presentism" scorns what is real, just as it scoffs at continuity. In Burnt Norton (1943), seconding Blaise Pascal, T.S. Eliot says, "Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality." Others more recently have cocked an eye at this modern "flight from reality." Christopher Lasch remarked it famously in The Narcissistic Society (1981), as did Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1985). These two commentators note in parallel that the "flight" is both an avoidance of reality and an absorption in the self; it is an indulgence in immediate gratification on the inarticulate conviction that pleasure now and for me overrides any other prescriptive agenda.
The contemporary professorate, on the other hand, likes to quibble about phrase such as "serious matters" and "truth." The dominant Western intellectual of the 1980s, the late Jacques Derrida, attacked the concept of paying attention, arguing against selfhood and against the philosophical assumption that a stable comprehensible external exists to which an ego might, after some initial training, pay attention. Derrida had pitted himself against the founding insight of the literate Greek education that began in the Sixth Century B.C. Thus, central to the epistemology of Heraclitus, was the principle that one should obey the obligation to "separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is." Doing this, scrying the objects of the world for their intrinsic qualities and then arranging them hierarchically according to their importance, requires effort; one might even discover, in the effort of it, that certain objects that one has formerly prized rank lower in the hierarchy than one previously suspected. Science, jurisprudence, psychology, and ethics--every explicit discourse of western civilization springs from this fundamental imperative; so does everything that contributes to the decency of civilized existence. I would say that all pedagogical responsibility concerns, in one way or another, the preservation of these founding insights of the intellectual and moral continuum. As far as pedagogical responsibility concerns them, so too does professorial or "academic" responsibility.
Or again, in the attempt to create a rational hierarchy, one might confront one's limitations and have to yield at last to some prior authority, which could better see the relation of things to one another and to the world. In what else does higher instruction consist? Against what else does the spasm of antinomianism react? How much easier to adopt the anti-epistemology of the deconstructors--Derrideans, Foucaldians, whoever they might be--and to relinquish all hierarchies and arrangements as so much bourgeois illusion or repression! I believe that this type of adolescent antinomianism lies behind much of what has happened in the academy since the 1960s, including the delinquency of the professors and the corruption of academic responsibility.
Taken in this way, the disintegration of the humanities and of the pedagogical standards and practices associated with them belong, not to high culture, or even to an intellectual dispensation, but to the commercially mediated popular culture that the ex-humanities departments now celebrate over the best that the past has bequeathed us.
Popular culture, in the form of jejune television programming and simple but very loud music, panders to this conviction that the ego, or rather its unhindered appetitive demand, is paramount in existence and the most real thing; insofar as this ego is an adolescent, reactive, unformed ego challenged by adult authority, it happily endorses the notion that it does not exist. Reality, however, is everything that lies outside the ego and is what it is and how it is whether the ego consents to it or not. This would include the ego itself, especially in its adolescent reactive form. The "flight from reality" is thus tantamount to a withdrawal back to an infantile state from the perspective of which the world exists only to gratify the cravings of the physiological person.
The retreat into oneself--or into cozy notions of one's supposed creativity and uniqueness--can only entail a catastrophic disconnection from the great continuum of traditional wisdom./1/ Such wisdom tells us that the human being, left to its own devices, is always primitive and uncongenial, and that external principles alone can form him into a civilized participant in the common life. I believe that this is why political regimes that lean toward, or are in an outright way, totalitarian are just as happy with the deconstruction of traditional wisdom as is the adolescent reactive ego. Precisely because they respond so amenably to flattering propaganda, masses of people who have never advanced beyond the adolescent reactive state provide the optimal constituency for authoritarianism, whether of the soft or hard variety. Not surprisingly, a Greek writer, Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 46 to 120 A.D.), came to these same conclusions nearly two thousand years ago, just as the Roman monarchy and the Roman decadence, those conjoint lapses of Late Antique humanity, were beginning to assert themselves.
Plutarch trained in philosophy and rhetoric and he earned his living as an independent professor and teacher, much in demand for his lectures. He wrote extensively. Posterity remembers him particularly for his Parallel Lives of the important Greeks and Romans. Plutarch's "Moral Essays" are less current than, but quite as fascinating as, his Lives; one of them, the disquisition On Listening, seems prophetically apposite to the modern condition, as I have described (accurately, I insist) above. Ostensibly a letter-of-advice to a young man pursuing higher education, On Listening is actually a scientifically precise elucidation of the conditions, internal and external, necessary for the maturation of the mind. Plutarch is an apostle of reason, a term that occurs many times in his essay. The first demand of reason is that an individual should acknowledge his ignorance, not only about the larger world, but also about himself.
"Know thyself," the Delphic motto, is an imperative because most people never, in fact, come to know themselves; in modern life especially people come to know a prefabricated version of a generic self devised by advertisers to be highly suggestible and extremely uncritical. This grappling with what is in the domain of reality, including what I am generically, is precisely what the self-absorbed ego cannot do. Since the self-absorbed ego never comes to know reality, including his personal reality, for what it is, reality inevitably undoes and thwarts him. He lapses into the petulant unhappiness characteristic of today's Representative Man, as seen in any prime-time television-drama.
Plutarch emphasizes that people need to listen, to pay attention closely, because no other avenue of intellectual or moral improvement stands open to them:
It goes without saying that a young man who is denied all instruction and never tastes any rational discourse not only remains barren and unproductive of virtue, but might also become marred and perverted towards vice, producing plentiful mental weeds from his unturned and un-worked soil, as it were. The reason for this lies in the tendency towards pleasure and the tendency to have reservations about hard work, which are not external tendencies implanted by words, but are (so to speak) native sources of countless pathological conditions: if these tendencies are allowed to roam free along the paths they naturally take, if their nature is not disciplined by using good arguments to eradicate or divert them, then there is no wild beast which would not appear tame compared to a human being. (Italics added)
Let us add, rather, that these things formerly went "without saying." According to Plutarch, human beings have a native capacity for paying attention which is, however, originally undeveloped. Not only "the tendency towards pleasure and the tendency to have reservations about hard work," but also pride and self-centeredness obstruct moral and intellectual growth and sustain the childish person in his childishness. Thus conceit often combines with ignorance, Plutarch says, to make a callow person counterproductively impervious to constructive criticism. "People should not turn a deaf ear to criticism and disapproval, or run away from it." Those who would respond to well-intentioned chastisement with "nonchalance or indifference," Plutarch avers, mistake "effrontery" for "courage."
Anyone who has attended the annual conference of the Modern Language Association will recognize the phenomenon. Those who hear legitimate reproof sans "embarrassment" are, meanwhile, "terrifyingly crass and deaf to conscience." Those who hear criticism and run away, says Plutarch, resemble a patient who, submitting to surgery, flees the physician before being bandaged and so misses the real cure.
Even a cursory survey of contemporary culture will suggest how rightly Plutarch understood the requirements for intellectual and moral edification and how disastrous it is for a people to ignore his fundamental observations. Modern life abounds with distractions unknown and unimaginable in Plutarch's time. Nicander, the young chap off to college to whom Plutarch addresses On Listening, had only to deal with the allurement of the tavern and crude company; modern college students, to limit the discussion to them, face a welter of temptations and traps whose effect, if not purpose, is to prevent the young from concentrating on serious intellectual work.
Take television: should a contemporary twenty-year-old have been watching it since infancy in the typical dosage (five or six hours a day on weekdays), it is likely that he has developed exactly the wrong mental habits for the sustained reading and cogitation demanded by genuine higher studies. The quick cutting from one disconnected scene to another, which is standard television style, inculcates impatience with the continuous and fosters a craving for the novel and the ephemeral. Possibly he has earlier been diagnosed as suffering from "Attention Deficit Syndrome" and has been drugged according to a legal mandate in schools. As to popular music: while useful for bacchanalian Terpsichore, it sacrifices melody to rhythm and serves itself up in two- or three-minute bites, a style which again badly subverts the habit of sustained attention.
The musical issue is worth pursuing. The ancients, most notably Plato, argued that music constituted the essence of education and that it therefore belonged at the very center of the curriculum. In his provocative All Shook Up (2001), Carson Holloway remarks that, for the ancients, "the aim of moral education [was] to teach [young people] to enjoy virtue" and that the best way of doing this lay "in the use of music in...character formation.... The charm that accompanies rhythm and harmony, it seems, renders the subordination of the passions palatable to the young and thus enables them to endure the habituation that will enable them later to experience the natural pleasure of virtuous action." Holloway quickly adds that the ancients thought some music, especially the rhythmically surcharged kind, inappropriate to serious instruction. It is melody, rather than rhythm, that teaches a sustained attention.
"Rap" and "Hip-Hop" sacrifice melody altogether and substitute infantile rhymes, often on four-letter obscenities, for real lyric. Another distracting element of popular song is its adolescent hostility to adult concerns: its standard pose is a crass and arbitrary rejection of norms, as though a deliberate irresponsibility were not entirely parasitical on the actual responsibility of those under denunciation in the raucous performance. Thus, while contemporary college students can never define satire, they always know what sarcasm is--from constant immersion. Again, an overemphasis of social life ("partying"), at the cost of privacy, removes the best opportunity for quiet contemplation of serious matters, as do dorm-like living arrangements either on or off campus. To judge by their addiction to cell phones, solitude terrifies contemporary college students; they cannot withstand aloneness even while walking between classes, surrounded by hundreds of others doing the same. But this does not exhaust the long list of divertissements and delinquencies available to modern people, some of which are far more insidious than these.
Monitors of American education have complained for years about the phenomenon known as grade-inflation. Grade-inflation entails the false judgment of student work by praising it artificially and beyond what it deserves on the theory that the self-esteem of persons so rewarded will increase and that this augmentation (somehow, in a manner never explained) will stimulate improvement in later work. Another version of the same practice consists in making work less difficult than it should be to give students the impression that they are operating on a higher level than they really are. Heather Mac Donald notes in a widely published essay about college writing programs that there is even "a growing movement to abolish the distinction between remedial writing and reading courses, on the ground that placing students in remedial courses injures their self-esteem." Where distinct remedial courses still exist, they now ubiquitously bear the name developmental, as though to describe accurately the condition in which students genuinely need help would be a scandal.
The ultimate logical extension of this reactionary trend would be to abolish the words education and student altogether because one implies a state of not-yet-educated as opposed to educated and the other makes a distinction between learners, who are in need of knowledge, and teachers, who already possess it. Indeed, many "cutting edge" pedagogical theorists now refer to teachers as facilitators; and they prattle inveterately about how much these facilitators can learn from their unlettered charges. "I learned so much this semester from my students" is a mandatory teacher-trainee cliché. The self-esteem movement disapproves in advance of all epistemological differences, as between ignorance and knowledge, regarding them as essentially arbitrary and invidious comparisons. Of course, it is the self-esteem movement that is invidious.
Grade-inflation and related practices egregiously violate the human truth, so poignantly formulated by Plutarch in his essay, that while "a person who is at the receiving end of criticism ought to feel some discomfort and pain," he should nevertheless "not be depressed or downhearted," but rather "should treat it as if philosophy had ritually initiated him, and endure preliminary purifications and disturbances, anticipating that his present discomfort and distress will lead to a delightful and lucid state." The whole trend in modern society--no longer to confine the discussion to education alone--is to abolish the idea of what Plutarch calls initiation and to pretend that everyone is always and already a perfect master of any and every discipline. To do this is also to substitute a thoroughly insipid present pleasure for those difficult present pains ineradicably prerequisite to the genuine sweetness of "a delightful and lucid state." Plutarch means that mastery is difficult, so that those who shy from arduous preliminaries will remain like children, callow in their deeds and cut off from the consummation of their native talents.
"No pain, no gain," the physical education teachers used to say. Nowadays people seem no longer to recognize this principle. Yet not to recognize it is, precisely, not to recognize reality: "Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality," in Eliot's phrase. The self-satisfied all too swiftly react to authority as though it were a curtailment of freedom, quite as Nietzsche put it.
The writer remembers the experience of studying Euripides' tragic drama The Bacchae for performance in an outdoor theater in the Santa Monica Mountains in the mid-1980s under the direction of a remarkable man, Herbert Stothart Jr. The dramaturgically authoritative Mr. Stothart, a respected teacher of art history at Santa Monica College, bore his father's name and was the son of the famous film-composer. (See The Wizard of Oz.) Of the three tragedians whose work has survived from classical antiquity, Euripides is the most intellectually challenging and difficult for modern audiences (or players) to understand. The characteristics of the locale--mountainous and remote--conduced mightily to the calmness prerequisite to understanding. Cut off from the clamorous city, the actors found themselves able to concentrate in a new way on the ancient drama; working together so that everyone understood not only his own, but also everyone else's part, constituted a model of studious and artistic discipline. The leisure of it was inseparable from the mental concentration and effort; the success of it was inseparable from a suppression of egos under the erudition of a scholarly master. This was, blessedly, long before the advent of the cell phone.
There is much left to say: that in rejecting external authority, and the criticism that it implies of our egocentric habits and fetishes, we turn our back on a hard-won wisdom bequeathed us by our predecessors; that in cultivating flattery we make ourselves mentally flabby and morally obtuse; that in insisting on present pleasure to the exclusion of all else, we sacrifice our best possibilities and make inevitable a great range of future pains. Can the ugly mess of it be put right? Perhaps pessimism ought to be reserved. The old wisdom is still there. If provision were made for people to encounter it at the right time in their lives, the tradition might well survive, and lives might well reach a higher potential than they do.
And this, I might say, is the irreducible kernel of academic responsibility....
Notes
[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]