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(02/19/15 12:37am)
Not so long ago, colleges made a promise that sounds a bit strange today. Administrators and faculty promised not just to teach students knowledge and skills, but to make them better people. Our communications department might like to highlight the good Middlebury students do, but few students enter Middlebury thinking they will leave with better values.
Part of this shift is the result of Middlebury’s secularization. We are no longer a religious institution with a clear moral purpose. Students and teachers surely seek to learn about issues related to social justice, but we rarely think about our time at college as focused on moral betterment.
What if we did? I have been asking myself that question recently, trying to figure out if I am a better person than I was when I arrived. Do I care more about the Good than I did freshman fall? Has my understanding of the Good deepened since I arrived at college? Am I a better person? In order, my answers to these questions are 1) no, 2) maybe and 3) yes, I think so. I have always cared deeply about the Good, but my understanding of it (and of the best means of pursuing it) has changed since I arrived here.
In 2011, I would have translated questions about the Good into an important but simplistic political question: Do I care about helping the downtrodden?
I am no longer sure that answers to this question necessarily indicate everything about one’s moral character. You see, when I arrived at Middlebury, I was a staunch leftist. Marxist, very nearly. I cared almost exclusively about helping the oppressed. But I was not a particularly pleasant person. My characteristic intolerance and obnoxiousness had, I submit, roots in my purely political view of morality. I do not mean to suggest a link between any political position and ungraciousness, but if one sees morality as mere ideology, that will affect how one treats people. Primarily, this is a matter of open-mindedness. Let your political assumptions become totalizing, and you will unfairly dismiss thoughtful classmates simply because they do not share your worldview. Strictly adhere to an unaccommodating ethical code, and you will find it difficult to make friends.
It does not so much matter if this code is liberal or conservative. Before the question of what one believes comes the question of how one thinks, and how one thinks is reflected in one’s relationships with others. I am more moral today because I am more open to the idea that I may be wrong. Recognizing my own fallibility makes me more accepting of others’ faults.
I should reassure you that I do believe there are moral positions and immoral positions. The belief that it is right to execute rape victims is an immoral position. If a student at Middlebury justified such a punishment, he would be deservedly ostracized. But I’d venture to guess that most of us are not stoning advocates. Most of the moral disputes at Middlebury are rather more complicated. Thus, they deserve a more generous treatment.
A primary indicator of one’s character is the way one thinks about other people. Are you better at developing and maintaining meaningful relationships than you were when you got here? Are you better at listening to opinions that make you want to punch something? Do you find that new information sometimes causes you to relinquish opinions you had previously considered unimpeachable?
If so, then you are probably a more moral person now than you were then. An affirmative answer to those questions means that you take other people, and their ideas, very seriously. It means you treat others as full human beings.
There is an important corollary point to be made here. Recognizing each other as full human beings means weighing and responding to each other’s opinions. It means challenging each other. It means calling each other out. It means forthright displays of emotions and intellect. It means not deferring to another’s argument for the sake of comity. Respect is ensured by intense argument. A more moral campus is a friendlier campus, but also a more demanding campus.
Those old religious founders of liberal arts institutions were onto something. An academic community which is more interested in the moral character, not the ideological bent, of its members turns out to be a much better place to learn. Something, perhaps, to keep in mind as the dark clouds of political correctness continue to condense overhead.
(12/05/13 1:50am)
Too often, our politics is corrupted by advocacy, leaving no time for reflection or critical thought. Every new piece of information serves only to bolster or refute an argument we were already trying to make. The danger of such an approach to politics is evident: it is close-minded and simplistic. Literature, when it is read honestly, forces us to think more carefully. Like any literary work with racial overtones (and, alas, many other books too), Othello is often politicized. Too many high school classes are wasted talking about whether Shakespeare is racist. We should not, however, let the inanity of this question and its attendant conversations dissuade us from considering whether the play might have something to say about how societies and individuals treat race. Although it provides no definitive answer, Othello questions the extent to which race matters. As it does so, it reveals that questions about race are hardly particular. They involve something much greater, something universal.
For Othello himself, race is of utmost importance. He believes himself shackled by his race, interpreting everything through the prism of his otherness. Indeed, Othello does suffer the injustice of racism. But the central tragedy of Othello results from his misinterpretation of the significance of visual stimuli, from the famous handkerchief to his own skin color. There are racists in Othello, but they do not bring about our protagonist’s downfall. His death is the culmination of a series of communication and comprehension failures committed by Othello himself. Of course, we sympathize with Othello. We recognize that his predicament reflects our own. He must take responsibility for his actions on the basis of imperfect information and flawed understanding. Yet as much as we wish to put full blame on Othello’s nemesis, Iago, we are compelled to condemn Othello as well.
What to make of Iago? He frustrates our progressive sensibility because his is a pure and incomprehensible evil, and the progressive does not want to believe in pure evil. Every action has a cause. Evil comes from somewhere. It can be explained. Or so we tell ourselves. Iago’s realness – his completeness as a character — challenges the progressive, who cannot discard him no matter how hard she tries. Surely Iago must have just cause. So, without making a serious attempt to solve Iago, we call him a racist and leave it at that. If he has no clear personal motive for bringing down Othello, then he must just hate the Moor for his skin color and allegedly crude speech.
There is the rub. In an attempt to fit Iago to our conception of what it means to be rational animal, we write off his central human element. Inexplicable evil is as much a part of man as rational thought is. Our insistence on asking “why?” until an answer presents itself is as childish as it is noble.
Iago introduces metaphors — about race, falconry, and more — which come to form the basis of Othello’s understanding of events. Othello thinks his skin color is more important than it is, and thus makes it as important as Iago wants it to be. He regards race as though it were more than an observation. Thus, even in a fictional Renaissance-era Venice we can see echoes of contemporary American society. Race can and will only matter as much as we think it does. Until we understand this truth, we can never be “post-racial.”
When liberals talk about race, we often overlook the problems Othello reveals. Ascribing conditions solely to structural issues, we eliminate the possibility of individual agency. Even racism — which is, of course, cultural — is traced to economics and politics. Wealth disparities and rights disparities cause hatred and bigotry, we aver. Just as we seek to deny Iago’s humanity, we deny the psychological roots of racism.
Most of us do not really believe these things. Most of us acknowledge the reality of human error. A materialist — effectively Marxist — account of human affairs is intellectually unsatisfying. We would do well to explore this discomfort. We desperately need a smarter liberalism, one that accounts for human freedom and responsibility, is not afraid to acknowledge that culture matters, and can articulate an understanding of human nature which retains a sense of wonder, humility, and compassion. Luckily for us, an intellectual tradition which includes these elements already exists. It can be found in books like Othello. For the sake of the future, we should spend more time reading them.
(10/30/13 6:04pm)
Books teach us that culture matters. This truth, as the late Democratic New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, is fundamentally conservative. But liberals would also do well to take account of it. Any attempt to improve society through political means must recognize the limits and restraints cultural traditions and mores place on change. Writers have been exploring the relationship between individual and collective claims of right and cultural mores since Homer. Nowhere is the tension more directly confronted, however, than in “The Misanthrope” by French playwright Moliere. In this influential seventeenth century play, the main character, Alceste, seeks to do away with the ridiculous social customs which defined French upper-class society. Alceste refuses to play the traditional social games in his attempts to woo the woman he desires. He gives none of the requisite superficial compliments that would ensure his love’s requital because he views them as stupid and insincere. His holier-than-thou attitude earns him no friends.
Yet what frustrates the audience of “The Misanthrope” so much is that Alceste is perceptive. The moneyed classes of Renaissance France had absolutely ridiculous customs. Alceste anticipates the erosion of French high society that would come in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. That it would take another 250 years for the culture to change is instructive, however, because what Alceste fails to recognize is that for all his awareness of the superficiality of courtship, he is as much subject to the same social conventions as everyone else. Everyone else in the play is, as Alceste comments, ignorant of the pettiness of the society they perpetuate. In Alceste’s view, nothing they say is true or real. But the only person foolish enough to attempt to bypass society is Alceste. By the end of the play, Alceste has completely alienated himself from his society and has lost his lover to a less self-righteous man. Alceste thus ends up being more unaware of the demands and structure of culture than anyone else.
One can find a similar exploration of the individual’s relation to society in Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” In that novel, the heroine seeks to overcome the social constraints which bind her to a man she does not love and to a life she does not wish to lead. Although she views herself less as a crusader for truth than Alceste does, Anna has a desire to escape or, indeed, overcome society. Her desire to change her circumstances pits her individual happiness and condition against the oppressive and tumultuous nineteenth-century Russian culture. As with Alceste, we sympathize with Anna. Unlike Alceste — and this is a tribute to Tolstoy’s genius as a writer more than to anything else — we do so until the end. We fall in love with Anna and take her struggles on as our own. Her feminism becomes ours and her unhappiness makes our faces red. We are as conflicted about her lover, Vronsky, as she is. Yet, we also see the futility of her attempts. The recklessness of her decisions is laid bare for us. We know that she cannot live the life she desires, in part because she does not always know what she desires. As with Alceste, Anna seems driven by a dissatisfaction that is always shifting, never clearly defined.
It is in the complexity of Anna’s and Alceste’s situations and tragedies that we can learn something of our own predicaments. Moliere and Tolstoy give accounts that call into question the possibility and reality of progress. They challenge the ways we seek to change the world. But they also tell compelling stories about people who seek to make society better. Anna and Alceste are constrained by their cultures. Always seeking to escape or improve society, they fail to recognize the inevitability of their complicity in its foibles. In Alceste and Anna, we see the feminist who seeks to end the objectification of her friends and the environmentalist who asks us to stop driving so much. Books warn us not to be too arrogant or ignorant in our progressive campaigns. But they also affirm the enduring appeal of such campaigns.
Contrary to what many ideologically-driven readers assert, the political lessons found in literature cannot be easily categorized. Moliere neither supports Obamacare nor condemns it. What reading Tolstoy and Moliere does is reveal the limits of our liberalism and pave the way for it to become smarter. Reading does this because, in the words of literary critic Lionel Trilling, “Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”
We should read books not because they will tell us how to draft immigration legislation but because our political sensibilities could use an infusion of the qualities Trilling identifies. We should read books because they force us to consider the limits and abilities of human efforts to change the world.
(09/26/13 12:37am)
An increasingly dominant strain of thought at American universities and colleges embraces a certain materialism. Materialism here refers not to a consumerist urge or to a Marxist ethic, although neither is wholly unrelated, but rather to a worldview that treats reality as no more than what can be observed through science. The Academy is filled with very smart students who flock to physical and social sciences. These students will learn important things. They will learn to apply statistical models to human behavior and natural phenomena, and they will learn how to use genetic modeling to study character. But they will not do—at least not very much—what students at liberal arts schools used to do. They will probably not read Plato or Shakespeare. And they will not learn about the dominant modes of religious and secular thought which define Western Civilization.
The so-called decline of the humanities is hardly a new phenomenon. It began in the 1980s with the advent of postmodernism, which replaced thought with ideology and thus obscured or outright denied the deeper meanings of literature. The irony that postmodernist interpretations were supposed to make literature more popular is rich. By reducing the human experience to a series of simplistic identity markers – race, gender, class, etc. – the movement limited the true power of literature: its ability to transcend identity politics and give a more complex account of the world.
Yet what the humanities face now is not merely confused attempts to limit the value of books, but an outright denial of their ability to teach us the most important things. This latest challenge does not claim, as postmodernist theorists did, that truth is a fiction. Rather, it claims that the way to finding truth is through science, both natural and social. Neuroscience and economics can teach us more about how we make decisions than can “Hamlet”. Biology teaches us more about happiness than do Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” or contemporary American fiction like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” or Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”.
In the face of such delegitimization, several notable commentators have stood up to defend the humanities. Responding to an article by Steven Pinker in The New Republic, literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, “The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question.”
The philosopher Thomas Nagel, formally a leading materialist, has been lambasted by several high-profile academics for going to the dark side. “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection,” Nagel writes in “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” There is more to the world than what science can observe and study, Nagel argues. Religious readers will likely consider Nagel’s claims obvious. Nagel is not religious, but he is finding that there are certain things, like love and death, that science and materialism cannot explain. Scientists will claim that these things are not real, but are in fact what has been termed a “manifest image.” Nagel is unsatisfied with this answer.
The question before us, as an academic community, is whether we too are unsatisfied. The danger is that we will accept the materialist account without actually considering it. Judging by the popularity of biology, economics and political science, it may be too late. Political science is an excellent example because it traditionally has been taught as both philosophy and a glorified sort of applied statistics. The trend in political science is away from the philosophy – away from debating what governments should look like – and towards statistics. To be sure, the methods of natural science are being applied to social sciences with great success. But is there no room for normative thinking? Is political science or economics merely a study of what is? Or should it also consider what should be? Furthermore, can statistical analyses alone tell us how to organize the best governments or markets? Does an exploration of justice require what used to be called pure reason?
In the next few months, I intend on making a case for books. My columns will not always directly relate to this defense of the humanities but they will proceed from the contention that literature can teach us about things over which science has no jurisdiction. This is not to say that scientific methods have no value. They surely do. Indeed, science is quite helpful when addressing certain problems introduced by postmodernism. For instance, the popular claim that gender distinctions bear no relation to sex is demonstrably, scientifically false. But science has limits, and we ignore them at our peril. A brain scan can show a father’s brain light up when he gets excited, but it tells us nothing of the deep joy he feels when he sees his newborn daughter.
In a world where meaning and truth are elusive, to the extent students even believe in such notions at all, it is imperative that we read more literature. Ours is a generation without faith in everything from God to capitalism and democracy. Literature reminds us of our traditions and natures so as to restrain and thus enable progress. It is an exploration of who we are that allows for irony and humility. To subordinate it to science or ideology is to subordinate ourselves.
