With the approach of 2012, apocalyptic thoughts are in order, not just because of the passing of the old year but also because the next winter solstice will, according to some, bring the end of the world. Throughout history--at least throughout Western history--there has been no shortage of those who propound eschataological theories, and this matter of the Mayan calendar is simply the latest in a very long line which includes the Anglo-Saxon Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, Joachim de Fiore, Karl Marx, and Oswald Spengler, to site some of the more impressive. (One might also name Al Gore, though perhaps he is not quite in Spengler's league.)
I recently came across a very different apocalyptic statement, one which took me quite by surprise because of the the way in which it differs not only from the more sensational predictions found here and there in our culture but also for the way in which its content differs from its title. The title is "A Song on the End of the World," and the whole is a poem by Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. It is found in his volume Ocalenie (Rescue--aptly named, since it was published in 1945), and it runs as follows:
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspouts young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy near the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightening and thunder
Are diasppointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
This poem struck me as a revelation and that for various reasons. First is the drama of the poem itself. On my first reading, I was pruriently drawn in by the title, hoping to find, if not some certain secret gnosis about the end of the world, then at least some information about the eschatological views of a poet I admire. But as one reads through the poem, hoping to find some portentious significance in the bee circling the clover or the yellow-sailed boat approaching the island, one feels growing disappointment and doubt. Both disappointment and doubt are confirmed at the beginning of the third section, in which the poet confesses that you will find no traditional apocalyptic here: in the poet's view, the end of the world consists only of ordinary things, though it is well to note that these ordinary occurrences are all of them suffused with a joy--explicitly in the case of the porpoises and young sparrows and infants being born, more implictly in the glimmering of the net which is growing better under the careful hand of the fisherman.
But the poet goes further still. The final section of the poem gives us a pointed assertion that the traditional accounts of the end of the world are wrong: the end of the world will not come as one grand, climactic event, though such events as the sack of Rome or WWI do indeed occur in human history. No, the summation of all history, the thing that in the end brings clarity and a sense of order to experience is nothing less than existence itself, which, according to the white-haired prophet at the end of the poem, is the most important thing itself. Those philosophical malcontents who wish to see the end of the present order because for them human history is a series of miserable failures better blotted from all consciousness desire a final accounting, in which they, the virtuous, will be recognized by all as having been right all along, while their foes will finally understand in a stunning epiphany that they have lived in darkness and error. For Miłosz, however, the point of human existence is apparently not a matter of meting out justice to the rest of mankind; human existence is something far more wonderful, something that surpasses the ability of any human intelligence to lay hold of, sum up in a phrase or a system, and thus possess (with self-satisfaction) more than can some rival thinker or actor upon this stage of life.
But the poem is not simply a debunking of an overly-dramatic reading of human history. It is also the most wonderful of affirmations. One might expect that a writer who had lived through the Nazi occupation of his beloved homeland and the subsequent invasion by the Soviet Union, one who had by the time he wrote this song expressed himself in an unforgettable poem on the slaughter of the Jews in Poland, one might expect such a writer to long for a final accounting that would bring to book all those perpetrators of titanic evil that flourished in Europe during the middle third of the twentieth century. Instead, however, he delivers a quiet, joyful affirmation of the most common and, dare one say, banal events.
Such an affirmation might well be a puzzle until one reflects again on the title. Our hunger for sensationalism blinds us to the other meaning of the eponymous phrase: "the end of the world," i.e., the purpose of the world, the reason for the world. Here the poet of Catholic sensibilities, one who perhaps heard less at Mass about the final moments in history when Christ will come back to judge the world than about the coming of Christ every day in the bread and wine, seems to point out that the world is indeed instinct at every moment with divine significance. Every event he describes, every happening is a celebration of something that is, a recognition that the Divine Existence has called all things into being and that they are good. In such a view, the myriad, countless beings now on earth and all their riot of vitality serve as evidence of the sheer goodness of God's creation. The purpose of the world, then, its end, is to hold brimful God's creation in all of its magnificent particularity.
In an introduction he wrote many years later to an anthology of poetry that he edited, Miłosz casts the same ideas in prose: "When W.H. Auden says that the poetry 'must praise all it can for being and happening,' he is expressing a theological belief. Affirmation of life has a long, distinguished past in Western thought. Thomas Aquinas' placing of an equal sign between God and pure being belongs here, as does the constant identification of evil with insufficiency of being, by means of which the Devil acts as the power of nothingness. Also in this history is the song of wonder at Nature conceived as the work of the Creator's hands, work which inspired countless painters and supplied a powerful impetus to scholars, at least in the first phase of victoriously ascendant science. 'The Metaphysical Sense of the Wondrousness of Being' means, above all, that contemplating a tree or a rock or a man, we suddenly comprehend that it is, even though it might not have been." ("Against Incomprehensible Poetry" in To Begin Where I Am.)
That calling attention to what is, says Miłosz, is one of the characteristics of good poetry. Homer, I think, would agree, for he is above all the poet of wonderfully specific physical detail, and so would Shakespeare. Anna Akhmatova, who like Miłosz suffered as a poet under a Communist regime, says in a famous line that poetry arises precisely from a jumble of trash. One man's trash, says the old apothegm, is another man's treasure, and thus what Akhmatova surely must mean is that poetry begins in specific experience. On this even the poets of classical China and Japan agree. This affirmation underwrites Miłosz's very fine "Song on the End of the World."
Showing posts with label Homer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Homer. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Rationalism and Peace
A friend sent me yesterday a link to the current issue of Nature, in which the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker presents the central argument of his new book--that violence has declined over the last decades (or centuries) because human beings fall ever more under the sway of reason, and reason teaches us that we should not be as casually violent as we were throughout much of human history. Although Pinker has a large reputation as a philosopher of mind and language, his thesis, at least as presented in the short space of this article, is not at all persuasive. Why it should have received the honor of a guest opinion prominently displayed in one of the nation's premier journals of science is beyond me, except that the man is one of those growing number of celebrity intellectuals, like Stanley Fish, Richard Dawkins, and others, who have stepped out of the lecture hall in order to address an audience much larger than those who ordinarily listen to them because of a shared interest in a narrow field or because of the requirements of their college curriculum. (That the present writer is also an academic scribbling just now for a general audience is by no means the same thing: the present author is neither a celebrity nor, judging from the number of hits on this blog, is his audience quite general.) Their status, however, as celebrities in one field does not make them experts in another, and therefore they ought not to command special attention simply because of who they are. For a person to be accorded that type of respect, he must have a much larger reputation for wisdom generally. I am prepared to listen with rapt attention to Jesus, Socrates, and Confucius because their words are true, and their words are true because of who they are. Our current crop of celebrity intellectuals aren't anywhere near that league, so we ought to be as skeptical of them as we are of anyone who addresses general topics on life and humanity. One suspects that the real reason Pinker gets so much space in such prestigious places is that he sells. Maybe having him inside the pages of Science expounding on history and human nature is perhaps a little like having Elle McPherson on the cover of Glamour. They both sell copy.
Pinker begins with an a claim that produces almost as much astonishment as his byline: that the twentieth century was not the bloodiest period in human history. The assertion must be astonishing to command our attention--if he simply says the uncontroversial thing, then no one will read him. On the other hand, the truly controversial statement about matters so well studied as the twentieth century or historical atrocity is likely to be wrong precisely because with so much knowledge generally accepted about these topics, telling us something explosive about them is more interesting than enlightening. The truly astounding thing to say about the shape of the earth--as Tom Friedman has shown, if only rhetorically--is that it is flat. In these matters one gets no points for originality if one merely states the truth. So the problem with his opening is that in any significant sense it is untrue. After grabbing our attention with the flashy headline, Pinker begins, as he must, to backpedal: he means, it turns out, that the twentieth century was not the bloodiest if we look per capita--other centuries, in which human population was much smaller, were perhaps as, if not more, bloody. But this is a trivial point. When historians speak of the twentieth century as the bloodiest in history, they have in mind the industrial-strength genocide of Nazi Germany or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, the willed starvation of the Ukraine in the 1930s or the millions who died in Mao's China. The fact that at the time of these enterprises the population of the world happened to be much larger than it had been at the time of the Antonines is meaningless--a mathematician's point (or debater's trick), not a substantive revaluation that changes the character of the age. Pinker himself seems to forget this point later in the essay when he says "Indeed, because morality furnishes people with motives for violent acts that bring them no tangible benefit, it is more often the problem than the solution. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of rough justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and the eggs broken in genocides to make utopian omelettes, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest." What he seems to describe here when he needs a club with which to beat true believers seems precisely (as the reference to Lenin's metaphor makes clear) to be a description of the twentieth century. He also makes the rather smug point that because the second half of the twentieth century has been relatively peaceful, but this is also beside the point. When a historian calls the twentieth century the bloodiest in history, he does not by "century" mean the years 1900 (or 1901, if one wishes to be as precise as Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower) to 1999; rather he means precisely that very nightmare time of phantasmagoric brutality from about 1915 until 1945--rather as a scholar in English literature defines "the Seventeenth Century" as the period from 1603 until 1660.
The more serious flaw with Pinker's argument, however, lies in his double assertion that the world becomes more reasonable over time and that such reason is responsible for a general decline in violence in the contemporary world. To make the latter assertion, of course, Pinker has to ignore or explain away the inconvenient history of twentieth century (i.e., as defined above), which stands as an unanswerable counterargument to his thesis--hence his eccentric musings on twentieth-century history. But even if we granted his claim that the world grows more reasonable over time, it by no means follows that that reasonableness produces peace. It has, for example, haunted George Steiner for all his career that perhaps the best educated society in all of history--Germany of the early twentieth century--could have furnished us with the one of the most grotesquely violent regimes ever seen. The paradox is there, and if an explanation is to be had, it will require thinking of a deeper level, as Theodor Adorno or Paul Celan indicate, than Pinker's implication that comparatively speaking Nazi Germany wasn't so bad. Indeed, if this is what Pinker is asserting, then he reminds one of nothing so much as the naive optimists of the full flush of the Enlightenment, who were certain that human reason would bring about universal brotherhood and tranquillity, a belief finally shattered by the mindless and unproductive violence of World War I.
And there is, finally, the highly problematic thesis that human beings are indeed growing more enlightened over time. Pinker adduces interesting evidence from IQ tests taken over the course of (once again!) the twentieth century. But this is again to confuse matters. What Pinker discusses is raw intelligence, but it is precisely something along the lines of emotional intelligence, or empathy (a category which, to fair, Pinker discusses) that produces the type of peaceful society that Pinker believes he finds slowly materializing around us. But there is little evidence that such a trait of character is increasing over time. Homer for example wrote almost 3,000 years ago with plaintive eloquence of the senselessness of violence--what is the Iliad but a meditation on precisely that theme? And while Homer was a singular genius, his singularity consisted not in his message, which after all has found a very receptive audience through the ages, but in his ability to compose great poetry. What's more, Homer--and his first, responsive audience lived not in a period of civilization, to which Pinker attributes the rise of an enlightened world view, but in a period of barbarism and violence--seems near the beginning of recorded history to arrive at the type of vision that Pinker implies is a product of modern society. Throughout time, we have had those few who espouse the concern with others lauded by Pinker and those many who do not. It is man's constant nature to be complex, driven primarily not by reason but by passion but to have as examples those who exemplify the possibility that man can live the life of higher reason. This is why the young Jonathan Swift could while a student at Trinity College mark through the definition given in his logic textbook of man as "animal rationale" and substitute his own description of humanity: "animal capax rationis." Moreover, it was a mature Jonathan Swift who shows us in the final part of Gulliver's Travels the problems with a life lived purely according to reason: Houyhnhnmland is so reasonable, so entirely devoid of those Burkean ties of tradition and affection, that for all their peaceful reasonableness, it is a cold and bloodless place perhaps not very far from the totalitarian Utopias that in the past have produced so much misery for so many.
Perhaps the main problem is that Pinker confuses intelligence with enlightenment. Raw intelligence is good for helping to produce the comforts of the technological world we inhabit, but it can be misdirected and is therefore a dangerous substitute for enlightenment. Enlightenment in its truest sense is a type of love--a concern for others deep enough that one respects their freedom as human beings made in the image of God. Such enlightenment does not come easily--certainly it is no mere adornment of nature. It is won by a solid education in the great works of the past, pursued in humility, with an eye toward what we can learn about human nature (for good and ill). Perhaps most of all such an education leaves one impervious to all the various determinisms that would render us less than human by trying to convince us that gender, evolution, economics, biochemistry, society, or the forces of history determine our nature and destiny. Pinker is a good man but ultimately another in a long line of self-regarding thinkers who redefine human nature downward. The easiest thing in the world is to succumb to the spirit of the age and swallow Pinker's nostrum. It is much harder to do the human thing--to subject his thesis to a rigorous analysis made possible by a broadly humanist education and then freely to accept or reject what he says, swayed not by who he is but by whether what he says is true.
Pinker begins with an a claim that produces almost as much astonishment as his byline: that the twentieth century was not the bloodiest period in human history. The assertion must be astonishing to command our attention--if he simply says the uncontroversial thing, then no one will read him. On the other hand, the truly controversial statement about matters so well studied as the twentieth century or historical atrocity is likely to be wrong precisely because with so much knowledge generally accepted about these topics, telling us something explosive about them is more interesting than enlightening. The truly astounding thing to say about the shape of the earth--as Tom Friedman has shown, if only rhetorically--is that it is flat. In these matters one gets no points for originality if one merely states the truth. So the problem with his opening is that in any significant sense it is untrue. After grabbing our attention with the flashy headline, Pinker begins, as he must, to backpedal: he means, it turns out, that the twentieth century was not the bloodiest if we look per capita--other centuries, in which human population was much smaller, were perhaps as, if not more, bloody. But this is a trivial point. When historians speak of the twentieth century as the bloodiest in history, they have in mind the industrial-strength genocide of Nazi Germany or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, the willed starvation of the Ukraine in the 1930s or the millions who died in Mao's China. The fact that at the time of these enterprises the population of the world happened to be much larger than it had been at the time of the Antonines is meaningless--a mathematician's point (or debater's trick), not a substantive revaluation that changes the character of the age. Pinker himself seems to forget this point later in the essay when he says "Indeed, because morality furnishes people with motives for violent acts that bring them no tangible benefit, it is more often the problem than the solution. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of rough justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and the eggs broken in genocides to make utopian omelettes, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest." What he seems to describe here when he needs a club with which to beat true believers seems precisely (as the reference to Lenin's metaphor makes clear) to be a description of the twentieth century. He also makes the rather smug point that because the second half of the twentieth century has been relatively peaceful, but this is also beside the point. When a historian calls the twentieth century the bloodiest in history, he does not by "century" mean the years 1900 (or 1901, if one wishes to be as precise as Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower) to 1999; rather he means precisely that very nightmare time of phantasmagoric brutality from about 1915 until 1945--rather as a scholar in English literature defines "the Seventeenth Century" as the period from 1603 until 1660.
The more serious flaw with Pinker's argument, however, lies in his double assertion that the world becomes more reasonable over time and that such reason is responsible for a general decline in violence in the contemporary world. To make the latter assertion, of course, Pinker has to ignore or explain away the inconvenient history of twentieth century (i.e., as defined above), which stands as an unanswerable counterargument to his thesis--hence his eccentric musings on twentieth-century history. But even if we granted his claim that the world grows more reasonable over time, it by no means follows that that reasonableness produces peace. It has, for example, haunted George Steiner for all his career that perhaps the best educated society in all of history--Germany of the early twentieth century--could have furnished us with the one of the most grotesquely violent regimes ever seen. The paradox is there, and if an explanation is to be had, it will require thinking of a deeper level, as Theodor Adorno or Paul Celan indicate, than Pinker's implication that comparatively speaking Nazi Germany wasn't so bad. Indeed, if this is what Pinker is asserting, then he reminds one of nothing so much as the naive optimists of the full flush of the Enlightenment, who were certain that human reason would bring about universal brotherhood and tranquillity, a belief finally shattered by the mindless and unproductive violence of World War I.
And there is, finally, the highly problematic thesis that human beings are indeed growing more enlightened over time. Pinker adduces interesting evidence from IQ tests taken over the course of (once again!) the twentieth century. But this is again to confuse matters. What Pinker discusses is raw intelligence, but it is precisely something along the lines of emotional intelligence, or empathy (a category which, to fair, Pinker discusses) that produces the type of peaceful society that Pinker believes he finds slowly materializing around us. But there is little evidence that such a trait of character is increasing over time. Homer for example wrote almost 3,000 years ago with plaintive eloquence of the senselessness of violence--what is the Iliad but a meditation on precisely that theme? And while Homer was a singular genius, his singularity consisted not in his message, which after all has found a very receptive audience through the ages, but in his ability to compose great poetry. What's more, Homer--and his first, responsive audience lived not in a period of civilization, to which Pinker attributes the rise of an enlightened world view, but in a period of barbarism and violence--seems near the beginning of recorded history to arrive at the type of vision that Pinker implies is a product of modern society. Throughout time, we have had those few who espouse the concern with others lauded by Pinker and those many who do not. It is man's constant nature to be complex, driven primarily not by reason but by passion but to have as examples those who exemplify the possibility that man can live the life of higher reason. This is why the young Jonathan Swift could while a student at Trinity College mark through the definition given in his logic textbook of man as "animal rationale" and substitute his own description of humanity: "animal capax rationis." Moreover, it was a mature Jonathan Swift who shows us in the final part of Gulliver's Travels the problems with a life lived purely according to reason: Houyhnhnmland is so reasonable, so entirely devoid of those Burkean ties of tradition and affection, that for all their peaceful reasonableness, it is a cold and bloodless place perhaps not very far from the totalitarian Utopias that in the past have produced so much misery for so many.
Perhaps the main problem is that Pinker confuses intelligence with enlightenment. Raw intelligence is good for helping to produce the comforts of the technological world we inhabit, but it can be misdirected and is therefore a dangerous substitute for enlightenment. Enlightenment in its truest sense is a type of love--a concern for others deep enough that one respects their freedom as human beings made in the image of God. Such enlightenment does not come easily--certainly it is no mere adornment of nature. It is won by a solid education in the great works of the past, pursued in humility, with an eye toward what we can learn about human nature (for good and ill). Perhaps most of all such an education leaves one impervious to all the various determinisms that would render us less than human by trying to convince us that gender, evolution, economics, biochemistry, society, or the forces of history determine our nature and destiny. Pinker is a good man but ultimately another in a long line of self-regarding thinkers who redefine human nature downward. The easiest thing in the world is to succumb to the spirit of the age and swallow Pinker's nostrum. It is much harder to do the human thing--to subject his thesis to a rigorous analysis made possible by a broadly humanist education and then freely to accept or reject what he says, swayed not by who he is but by whether what he says is true.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Social Constructs?
Surely we live in an age of meaningless celebration. Not of meaningless celebrities, mind you, since even the most apparently trivial of these--Lady Gaga, for instance, or Lindsay Lohan--offer meaning at least as cautionary tales for personal behavior or as markers of what our society seems to value. No: by meaningless celebration one has in mind Mardi Gras, for example, which will soon be upon us, enacted with fervor on the street of New Orleans. Yet one finds it hard to believe that most of the revellers there really will be engaged in saying farewell to the flesh in preparation for a Lent devoted to intense spiritual exercise, which is the original purpose of the festival. Another example is the celebrations everywhere around us of the life of Ronald Reagan, which began 100 years ago. So many of the people now celbrating his existence--PBS, for instance, on The American Experience--surely don't believe that his life is worth celebrating. Very many of the people now extolling his greatness are the very people who told us when he was alive that he was a doddering old fool who fell asleep in Cabinet meetings and had far too simple a view of economics, Communism, and human nature generally. (To show just how sophisticated is their own understanding of these issues by comparison, they sometimes reply, when asked why he managed so successfully to govern this nation and simutaneously to defeat the Soviet Union, by saying that he was just a very lucky man.)
But it's an empty celebration in another, deeper, sense because while we simultaneously celebrate the life of the man who preeminently in our time believed in human freedom, we are told on every side that there is no such thing. When Clifford Geertz said in the late 1960s that human beings are social constructs, he surprised us all with his bold assertion that human life is not so much a matter of choices made by individuals but that our choices are conditioned and made for us by the larger society. So pervasive has this idea become in our culture that one hardly notices when yet another writer makes the assertion--by now so common as pennies in a parking lot--that gender is also a social construct, an argument made popular, again in the 1960s and 70s by the French theorist Michele Foucault. So it comes as little surprise that in the January 2 edition of the New York Times Book Review no fewer than two important cultural spokesmen (of six polled) make the same point. Pankaj Mishra, for example, asserts that "a writer's individual self-awareness is always historically determined" (10), while Elif Batuman approvingly says that in Marxist criticism "Literature becomes a multifarious dream produced by a historical moment" (11). And, as if uncounsciously to prove their point, these writers, trying so hard to find a unique voice, to express an identity distinct from the others, ends up repeating what--dare we say it?--society has conditioned them to say: that human identity is not a matter of personal choice but of historic inevitability. One is the way one is because one's culture is the way it is.
But it was Reagan's genius--so unsophisticated that he was not bemused by the categories of Continental philosophy--that saw through these assertions to the shimmering truth behind, that human beings are, or, more accurately, can be, free at every moment of their lives. Unlike some who write in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, human beings need not be told what to think and how to act by the society around them: they possess a radical freedom of the will that allows them to chart their own course, no matter how that course runs counter to the culture of the time.
Asserting such freedom may well be painful. It is usually easier to conform to the spirit of the age--to adopt the assumptions made current by the popular media, for instance, or to possess all the material that the current culture deems indispensible for the good life. Nevertheless, though it may prove difficult, one is not required to mimic the behavior one is surrounded with, one need not adopt the assumptions taken as the conventional wisdom. This assertion of human freedom is precisely what the old humanists had in mind when they insisted on a rigorous education to train both mind and spirit. The liberal arts are liberal not because they have been coopted (as they certainly have) in most of our major universities by left-leaning Democrats: originally they were liberal because they were devised for the "liberi," for the free men (as opposed to slaves), who would need the education of the liberal arts in order to be able to make informed, wise decisions about how to act in life. In short, the liberal arts helped people to become free.
And then, as now, they helped people become free and act freely in large part because they helped the individual escape the surroundings of his own culture. Not, to be sure, because one's own culture is uniformly bad but because one's own culture is necessarily limited, while by the study of other cultures, their history, literature, music, art, and languages, one comes to learn about possibilities beyond what one is cheaply fed on a daily basis simply by living in his own society. It is a difficult process gaining another language and struggling through important texts in that other language, but to know what the ancient Chinese said about love in a world in which the present moment is always slipping away, or to know that in a world gone mad, marching in lockstep in a movie by Riefenstahl, Sophie and Hans Scholl gave their lives quietly distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets in Munich, such things tell us that human beings can be other than they are and that the joys of one's contemporary culture are often very shallow indeed.
Paradoxically, what an education in other cultures conveys to the lifelong student is that fundamentally the best of humanity is always the same. The great books, like all great art, tell us that across cultures and across times, human beings are at their core much the same: souls placed in a moment of time, people bathing in Heraclitus' river of endless change, while we long for the permanent, the eternal. That runs counter to the currently received wisdom that human beings are social constructs, for if they are, they will differ radically from one another and they will comprehend only with very great difficulty what another person from another time and place is trying to say. But the fact that we can listen to others from places so far away from times so long ago and can talk to others who will come decades if not centuries after us shows that humans at their core are not merely the products of their time and place but that they have, even if they do not avail themselves of it, an essential, unchanging core.
And these great works to which the liberal arts call our attention point to something still more precise. Essential to that core of identity is human freedom. Whether one is reading Homer's great poems or Vergil's, one finds in them that human beings have the capacity to flee their culture to create others, to stand against what most think of as the inevitability of history and voice objection. To read Don Quixote is to know that the visionary and romantic can exist in a world in which most are devoted to material acquisition; to read Hugo is to know that love can motivate a human being to feats thought impossible by all around him or freely to live by a code of generosity and love in the face of a withering mechanical justice; to read Lady Murasaki is to follow the life of one who, while recognizing the elaborate conventions of his time, shines in part by not being constrained by them. The very project of genuine education--as opposed to indoctrination--is itself an assertion that the human mind is capable of rising above the weak demands of contemporary culture and summoning the freedom to learn that in other times and places those restless beings who have achieved the greatest immortality are precisely those who transcended the limitations of their own time to assert that at his core man is more than a plastic doll molded by the pressures of his time but a being who is, and always longs to be, free.
But it's an empty celebration in another, deeper, sense because while we simultaneously celebrate the life of the man who preeminently in our time believed in human freedom, we are told on every side that there is no such thing. When Clifford Geertz said in the late 1960s that human beings are social constructs, he surprised us all with his bold assertion that human life is not so much a matter of choices made by individuals but that our choices are conditioned and made for us by the larger society. So pervasive has this idea become in our culture that one hardly notices when yet another writer makes the assertion--by now so common as pennies in a parking lot--that gender is also a social construct, an argument made popular, again in the 1960s and 70s by the French theorist Michele Foucault. So it comes as little surprise that in the January 2 edition of the New York Times Book Review no fewer than two important cultural spokesmen (of six polled) make the same point. Pankaj Mishra, for example, asserts that "a writer's individual self-awareness is always historically determined" (10), while Elif Batuman approvingly says that in Marxist criticism "Literature becomes a multifarious dream produced by a historical moment" (11). And, as if uncounsciously to prove their point, these writers, trying so hard to find a unique voice, to express an identity distinct from the others, ends up repeating what--dare we say it?--society has conditioned them to say: that human identity is not a matter of personal choice but of historic inevitability. One is the way one is because one's culture is the way it is.
But it was Reagan's genius--so unsophisticated that he was not bemused by the categories of Continental philosophy--that saw through these assertions to the shimmering truth behind, that human beings are, or, more accurately, can be, free at every moment of their lives. Unlike some who write in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, human beings need not be told what to think and how to act by the society around them: they possess a radical freedom of the will that allows them to chart their own course, no matter how that course runs counter to the culture of the time.
Asserting such freedom may well be painful. It is usually easier to conform to the spirit of the age--to adopt the assumptions made current by the popular media, for instance, or to possess all the material that the current culture deems indispensible for the good life. Nevertheless, though it may prove difficult, one is not required to mimic the behavior one is surrounded with, one need not adopt the assumptions taken as the conventional wisdom. This assertion of human freedom is precisely what the old humanists had in mind when they insisted on a rigorous education to train both mind and spirit. The liberal arts are liberal not because they have been coopted (as they certainly have) in most of our major universities by left-leaning Democrats: originally they were liberal because they were devised for the "liberi," for the free men (as opposed to slaves), who would need the education of the liberal arts in order to be able to make informed, wise decisions about how to act in life. In short, the liberal arts helped people to become free.
And then, as now, they helped people become free and act freely in large part because they helped the individual escape the surroundings of his own culture. Not, to be sure, because one's own culture is uniformly bad but because one's own culture is necessarily limited, while by the study of other cultures, their history, literature, music, art, and languages, one comes to learn about possibilities beyond what one is cheaply fed on a daily basis simply by living in his own society. It is a difficult process gaining another language and struggling through important texts in that other language, but to know what the ancient Chinese said about love in a world in which the present moment is always slipping away, or to know that in a world gone mad, marching in lockstep in a movie by Riefenstahl, Sophie and Hans Scholl gave their lives quietly distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets in Munich, such things tell us that human beings can be other than they are and that the joys of one's contemporary culture are often very shallow indeed.
Paradoxically, what an education in other cultures conveys to the lifelong student is that fundamentally the best of humanity is always the same. The great books, like all great art, tell us that across cultures and across times, human beings are at their core much the same: souls placed in a moment of time, people bathing in Heraclitus' river of endless change, while we long for the permanent, the eternal. That runs counter to the currently received wisdom that human beings are social constructs, for if they are, they will differ radically from one another and they will comprehend only with very great difficulty what another person from another time and place is trying to say. But the fact that we can listen to others from places so far away from times so long ago and can talk to others who will come decades if not centuries after us shows that humans at their core are not merely the products of their time and place but that they have, even if they do not avail themselves of it, an essential, unchanging core.
And these great works to which the liberal arts call our attention point to something still more precise. Essential to that core of identity is human freedom. Whether one is reading Homer's great poems or Vergil's, one finds in them that human beings have the capacity to flee their culture to create others, to stand against what most think of as the inevitability of history and voice objection. To read Don Quixote is to know that the visionary and romantic can exist in a world in which most are devoted to material acquisition; to read Hugo is to know that love can motivate a human being to feats thought impossible by all around him or freely to live by a code of generosity and love in the face of a withering mechanical justice; to read Lady Murasaki is to follow the life of one who, while recognizing the elaborate conventions of his time, shines in part by not being constrained by them. The very project of genuine education--as opposed to indoctrination--is itself an assertion that the human mind is capable of rising above the weak demands of contemporary culture and summoning the freedom to learn that in other times and places those restless beings who have achieved the greatest immortality are precisely those who transcended the limitations of their own time to assert that at his core man is more than a plastic doll molded by the pressures of his time but a being who is, and always longs to be, free.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)