One result of the university's widening elective leeway is to give students more power over teachers. Those who don't like you can simply avoid you. If the students dislike you en masse, you can be left with an empty classroom. I've seen other professors, especially older ones, often those with the most to teach, suffer real grief at not having enough students sign up for their courses: their grading was too tough; they demanded too much; their beliefs were too far out of line with the existing dispensation. It takes only a few such incidents to draw other professors into line.
Before students arrive, universities ply them with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get to campus, flattery, entertainment, and prepro-fessional training are theirs, if that's what they want. The world we present them is not a world elsewhere, an ivory tower world, but one that's fully continuous with the American entertainment and consumer culture they've been living in. They hardly know they've left home. Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students—steeped in consumer culture before they go off to school; treated as potent customers by the university well before they arrive, then pandered to from day one—are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be enjoyed without effort or languidly cast aside?
So I had my answer. The university had merged almost seamlessly with the consumer culture that exists beyond its gates. Universities were running like businesses, and very effective businesses at that. Now I knew why my students were greeting great works of mind and heart as consumer goods. They came looking for what they'd had in the past, Total Entertainment All the Time, and the university at large did all it could to maintain the flow. (Though where this allegiance to the Entertainment-Consumer Complex itself came from—that is a much larger question. It would take us into politics and economics, becoming, in time, a treatise in itself.)
But what about me? Now I had to look at my own place in the culture of training and entertainment. Those course evaluations made it clear enough. I was providing diversion. To some students I was offering an intellectualized midday variant of Letterman and Leno. They got good times from my classes, and maybe a few negotiable skills, because that's what I was offering. But what was I going to do about it? I had diagnosed the problem, all right, but as yet I had nothing approaching a plan for action.
I'd like to say that I arrived at something like a breakthrough simply by delving into my own past. In my life I've had a string of marvelous teachers, and thinking back on them was surely a help. But some minds—mine, at times, I confess—tend to function best in opposition. So it was looking not just to the great and good whom I've known, but to something like an arch-antagonist, that got me thinking in fresh ways about how to teach and why.
The World According to Falwell
I TEACH AT the University of Virginia, and not far from me, down Route 29 in Lynchburg—whence the practice of lynching, some claim, gets its name—is the church of Jerry Falwell. Falwell teaches "the word of God," the literal, unarguable truth as it's revealed to him in the Bible and as it must be understood by all heaven-bound Christians.
For some time, I thought that we at the University of Virginia had nothing consequential to do with the Reverend Falwell. Occasionally, I'd get a book through interlibrary loan from Falwell's Liberty University; sometimes the inside cover contained a warning to the pious suggesting that though this volume might be the property of the Liberty University library, its contents, insofar as they contradict the Bible (which means the Bible according to Falwell) were of no particular value.
It's said that when a certain caliph was on the verge of burning the great library at Alexandria, scholars fell on their knees in front of him and begged him to relent. "There are two kinds of books here," the caliph purportedly said. "There are those that contradict the Koran—they are blasphemous. There are those that corroborate the Koran—they are superfluous." So: "Burn the library." Given the possibilities for fundamentalist literary criticism that the caliph opened up, it's a good thing that Liberty has a library at all.
Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia's founder, was a deist, maybe something more scandalous than that, the orthodox of Virginia used to whisper. The architecture of my university's central grounds, all designed by Jefferson, is emphatically secular, based on Greek and Roman models. In fact, the Rotunda, once the university's library, is designed in homage to the Roman Pantheon, a temple to the twelve chief pagan gods. Where the statues of those gods stand in the Pantheon, there, in the Rotunda library, were books. Books were Jefferson's deities, invested with powers of transport and transformation equal to anything the ancient gods possessed. As soon as they saw the new university, local divines went apoplectic. Where was the church? Unlike Princeton and Harvard, the state university didn't have a Christian house of worship at its center. From pulpits all over Virginia, ministers threatened the pagan enclave with ruin from above. In 1829, the Episcopal bishop William Meade predicted the university's ruin, because, as he put it, the "Almighty is angry" about the Rotunda. (It's probably only fair to report that in 1895 the Rotunda did burn down.)
Jefferson—deist (maybe worse), scientist, cosmopolitan—seems to have believed that the best way to deal with religion was to banish it, formally, from the university, and instead to teach the useful arts of medicine, commerce, law, and the rest. The design of my university declares victory over what the radicals of the Enlightenment would have called superstition, and what most Americans currently call faith or spirituality. And we honor Jefferson now by, in effect, rendering unto Falwell that which is Falwell's.
In fact, we—and I don't mean only at the University of Virginia; I mean humanists in general—have entered into an implied bargain with Falwell and other American promulgators of faith, most of whom have much more to recommend them than the Prophet of Lynchburg. They do the soul-crafting. They administer the spiritual education. They address the hearts of our students, and in some measure of the nation at large. We preside over the minds. We shape intelligences; we train the faculties (and throw in more than a little entertainment on the side).
In other words, we teachers strike an unspoken agreement with religion and its dispensers. They do their work, we do ours.
But isn't that the way it should be? Isn't religion private? Spirituality, after all, is everyone's personal affair; it shouldn't be the substance of college education; it should be passed over in silence. What professor would have the bad taste to puncture the walls of his students' privacy, to invade their inner lives, by asking them uncomfortable questions about ultimate values?
Well, it turned out, me. I decided that I was, in a certain sense, going to take my cue from religion. After all, I got into teaching for the same reason, I suspect, that many people did: because I thought it was a high-stakes affair, a pursuit in which souls are won and lost.
"How do you imagine God?" If you are going to indulge in embarrassing behavior, if you're going to make your students "uncomfortable," why not go all the way? This question has moved to the center of many of my classes—not classes in religion, but classes in Shakespeare, in Romantic poetry, in major nineteenth-century novels. That is, the embarrassing question begins courses with which, according to Jefferson, according to Falwell and other, more tempered advocates of faith, and according to the great majority of my colleagues in the humanities, it has absolutely nothing to do.
What kind of answers do I get? Often marvelous ones. After the students who are disposed to walk out have, sometimes leaving an editorial sigh hanging in the air, and after there's been a weekend for reflection, answers come forth.
Some of the accounts are on the fluffy side. I've learned that God is love and only love; I've heard that God is Nature; that God is light; that God is all the goodness in the universe. I hear tales about God's interventions into the lives of my students, interventions that save them from accidents, deliver them from sickness while others fall by the wayside. There's a whole set of accounts that are on
the all-benevolent side—smiling, kindly, but also underramified, insufficiently thought-out. If God is all things, or abides in all things, then what is the source of evil? (By now, it's clear to the students that bad taste is my game; already I'm getting a little by way of indulgence.) A pause, then an answer, sometimes not a bad one. The most memorable exponent of smiling faith was a woman named Catherine, who called her blend of creamy benevolence—what else?—Catherin-ism.
But I respected Catherine for speaking as she did, for unfolding herself bravely. In general, humanities classes, where questions of ultimate belief should be asked and answered all the time, have nothing to do with those questions. It takes courage to make this first step, and to speak candidly about yourself.
Some of the responses are anything but underelaborated. These tend to come from my orthodoxly religious students, many of whom are well trained, maybe overtrained, in the finer points of doctrine. I get some hardcore believers. But in general it wouldn't be fair to call them Falwell's children, because they're often among the most thoughtful students in the class. They, unlike the proponents of the idea that God is light and that's all you need to know in life, are interested in delving into major questions. They care about understanding the source of evil. They want to know what it means to live a good life. And though they're rammed with doctrine, they're not always addicted to dogma. There's often more than a little room for doubt. Even if their views are sometimes rock solid, they don't mind seeing them besieged. Because given their interests, they're glad that "this discussion is not about any chance question, but about the way one should live."
Final Narratives
RELIGION IS THE right place to start a humanities course, for a number of reasons, even if what we're going on to do is to read the novels of Henry James. One of them is that religion is likely to be a major element in my students' Final Narratives, a term I adapt from Richard Rorty. A Final Narrative (Rorty actually says Final Vocabulary; I modify him slightly) involves the ultimate set of terms that we use to confer value on experience. It's where our principles are manifest. When someone talks feelingly about the Ten Commandments, or the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, or the innate goodness of human beings, or about all human history being the history of class conflict, then, in all likelihood, she has revealed something close to the core of her being. She's touched on her ultimate terms of commitment, the point beyond which argument and analysis are unlikely to go, at least very quickly. Rorty puts it this way: "All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives."
Rorty's word "final" is ironic, or potentially so. His sense is that a "final" language ought to be anything but final. He believes that we ought to be constantly challenging, testing, refining, and if need be overthrowing our ultimate terms and stories, replacing them with others that serve us better. Certain people, says Rorty, are "always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves." But Rorty believes that most people never stray far from their initial narratives, the values that they're imprinted with while they're growing up. Most of us stay at home.
Rorty calls people capable of adopting new languages "ironists," because they inflect even their most fervent commitments with doubt. It's possible, they know, that what today they hold most intimately true will be replaced tomorrow by other, better ways of seeing and saying things. They comprehend what Rorty likes to call the contingency of their own current state.
Appreciating this contingency is very close to appreciating one's own mortality. That is, Rorty's ironists are people who know that they exist in time because it is time and the changes it brings that can make their former terminologies and their former selves obsolete. Terms that serve your purposes one day will not necessarily do so the next. The ironists' willingness to change narratives, expand their circles of self, is something of a brave act, in part because all awareness of existence in time is awareness of death. To follow the ironists' path is to admit to mortality.
In trying to make contact with my students' Final Narratives, I ask about more than religion. I ask about how they imagine the good life. I ask, sometimes, how they picture their lives in ten years if all turns out for the best. I want to know what they hope to achieve in politics, in their professions, in family life, in love. Occasionally, I ask how they conceive of Utopia, the best of all possible worlds, or of Dystopia, the worst. But usually, for me, the matter of religion is present, a central part of the question.
There is nothing new about beginning a humanistic inquiry in this way. At the start of The Republic, Socrates asks his friends what they think justice is. And for Socrates, justice is the public and private state conducive to the good life. The just state and the just soul are mirror images of each other, comparably balanced. Socrates is quickly answered. Thrasymachus, aggressively, sometimes boorishly, insists that justice is the interest of the stronger. Socrates isn't put off by Thrasymachus, not at all. For Socrates recognizes that getting his students to reveal themselves as they are, or appear to themselves to be, is the first step in giving them the chance to change.
Posing the question of religion and the good life allows students to become articulate about who and what they are. They often react not with embarrassment or anxiety, but with surprise and pleasure, as if no one has ever thought to ask them such a question and they've never posed it to themselves.
But beginning here, with religion, also implies a value judgment on my part—the judgment that the most consequential questions for an individual life (even if one is, as I am, a longtime agnostic) are related to questions of faith. I also believe, for reasons I will get to later, that at this historical juncture, the matter of belief is crucial to our common future.
Most professors of the humanities have little interest in religion as a field of live options. Most of us have had our crises of faith early, if we've had them at all, and have adopted, almost as second nature, a secular vision of life. Others keep their religious commitments separate from their pedagogy, and have for so long that they're are hardly aware of it. But what is old to the teacher is new to the student. This question of belief matters greatly to the young, or at least it does in my experience. Asking it can break through the ideologies of training and entertaining. Beneath that veneer of cool, students are full of potent questions; they want to know how to navigate life, what to be, what to do. Matters of faith and worldliness are of great import to our students and by turning away from them, by continuing our treaty with the dispensers of faith where we tutor the mind and they take the heart and spirit, we do our students injustice.
We secular professors often forget that America is a religion-drenched nation. Ninety percent of us believe that God knows and loves us personally, as individuals. More than the citizens of any other postindustrial nation, we Americans attend church—and synagogue, and mosque. We affirm faith. We elect devout, or ostensibly devout, believers to the White House; recent presidents have been born-again Christians. Probably one cannot be elected president of the United States—cannot be our Representative Man—without professing strong religious faith. The struggle over whether America's future will be sacred or secular, or a mix of the two, is critical to our common future.
Some may well disagree with me about the centrality of religious matters, matters of ultimate belief, in shaping a true literary education. I teach in the South, one of the more religiously engaged parts of the nation, after all. Fine. But I think the point stands nonetheless. Get to your students' Final Narratives, and your own; seek out the defining beliefs. Uncover central convictions about politics, love, money, the good life. It's there that
, as Socrates knew, real thinking starts.
Circles
RORTY IS A pragmatic philosopher, and like his pragmatic forebears Dewey and James, his preeminent task is to translate the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson into the present. Behind Rorty's reflections on Final Vocabularies, there lies one of the most profound passages that Emerson wrote. The passage is from the essay "Circles," and it stands at the core of the kind of literary education that I endorse.
In it Emerson brings forward a marvelous image for the way growth takes place in human beings, and perhaps, too, in society. The image he summons is that of the circle, the circle understood as an image of both expansion and confinement. "The life of man," he writes, "is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end."
So far Emerson has made the process of human expansion seem almost automatic, as though it were a matter of natural evolutionary force. But, as is his habit, Emerson goes on to revise himself, expand himself through refinement. "The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,—as, for instance, an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify and hem in the life."
Emerson's insight is dialectical. Whatever gains we make in our knowledge of the self and the world, however liberating and energizing our advances may be, they will eventually become standardized and dull. What once was the key to life will become deadening ritual, common practice, a tired and tiresome Final Narrative. The critic Kenneth Burke is thinking of something similar when he talks about "the bureaucratizing of the imaginative"; Robert Frost touches on the point when he observes that a truth ceases to be entirely true when it's uttered even for the second time.
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