The Givenness of Things

DECLINE

A number of years ago a reporter from a prominent New York magazine was sent to interview the faculty and students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She came with a premise — that literacy was ebbing away, and that we Iowans were soon to be stranded on the shoals of time. She posed the question this way: Don’t you feel that you are training auto mechanics, when soon there will be no autos? (She was British.) It is interesting that she couldn’t produce a more telling vision of cultural atrophy than this, but never mind. We, faculty and students, were so unanimous in assuring her we felt no anxiety on this point that she was convinced we had colluded. This was during those years when the death of literacy was a dominant thought fad. Clearly we seemed to her to be in profound denial at best. She could not take into account the fact that she was speaking with people for whom writing is an art, not simply a commercial product in the early stages of manufacture, or that these were people who would still be writing, in their minds, at least, if they were crouched and hiding in a dystopian cellar while platoons of zombies plodded past. So it is with humankind. The siege of Paris did not suppress this impulse, this need to write, and neither did the siege of Stalingrad. Literacy came late into the world, but it spread as fast as resources and official tolerance would allow, and by now it is a sort of second nature for most of us. We translate arbitrary signs into language so instantly that we are not even aware of doing it. True, e-books are encroaching on the printed kind, but this has nothing to do with literacy. People are simply finding more ways and occasions to read. But putting the darkest construction on whatever people in general are doing or failing to do is not so much an impulse as a reflex.

The literacy-is-ebbing-away fad had an ugly cousin, the dumbing-down fad. The assumption was that the prototroglodytes of this reverse evolution would be offended and alienated by anything not already familiar to them, not expressed in the most elementary language. Nothing that mattered could be conveyed in prose forced into these constraints, but when one is sacrificing everything else to the contortions involved in lowering oneself to the level of dumbness then thought necessary, one has already abandoned all that nonsense about maintaining an informed citizenry. So the language-generating industries set about producing a more and more defective product. And their market shrank, confirming their darkest assumptions. Since the only solution seemed to be to make the product more defective still, this downward spiral might have continued, taking us finally to the printed versions of grunts and moans, I suppose. But this fad has also passed. I credit the Internet for our rescue. It turns out that there are audiences for science and economics and political history — wonkish, unembarrassed discussions of complex issues in complex language. This is not typical, of course. I grant the legitimacy of much criticism of the Internet. It is certainly open to abuse. Nevertheless, the information revolution did come along to save us from the assumption that the masses are uniformly hostile to information, and that fad passed.

I mention all this because on my next birthday I will be seventy. Having experienced what is, by historical and global standards, a long life, I want to garner some of the benefits of it. I am seventy and the United States of America is two hundred thirty-seven. This means that I have lived through, witnessed, something between a quarter and a third of our national life. There are problems with my calculations — I should have allowed for my own infancy and early childhood, and also allowed for the fact that America had incubated for centuries before the Revolution. Still it is a striking thing to consider that my life spans so large a portion of the life of the country. What do I have to report from my decades of observation? All sorts of things. But today I will address our extraordinary proneness to thought fads and to what are called trends.

This should be diverting, a mere sidebar, since a great civilization ought to be navigating by the stars, shall we say. It should have its gaze fixed on higher things. If wisdom fails, then simple dignity should prevent it from losing itself in crazes that, in retrospect, when there is a moment of retrospect, seem baffling, even ridiculous. This is only truer because these trends and fads often have an edge, and more than an edge, of panic. Like an elephant balked by a mouse, we can persuade ourselves that our best option might be to stampede. I remember the Red Scare, Sputnik. But these moments of geopolitical alarm, full of consequence as they were, are like eruptions on the surface of the sun, startling displays of the substance of which they are made.

To consider the phenomenon in a relatively innocuous form: I have been involved in one way or another in higher education for most of my adult life. I have seen any number of scholarly fads come and go. A new approach can refresh a field of study, and when this happens it is an excellent thing. A new approach can have the relationship to its field of study that a very small lifeboat has to a large and sinking ship. Ill-advised crowding, unwholesome proximity, uncivil exclusion. And who knows for sure that the ship was really sinking after all. As a professor of literature, more or less, I have seen scholarly criticism given over to quasi-sociology, or — psychology, or — economic theory, or — anthropology, taking some sort of authority from the imposition of jargon that is either dubious in itself, wholly inappropriate to its subject, or both. This looks to me like the abandonment of literature as such, its reduction to data to be fed into theories. It is only logical in the circumstances that the individual student’s encounter with a book should be marginalized in favor of a more knowing construction of its meaning. Nothing is lost except everything that makes literature the preeminent art. The music of it would clog the conceptual machinery. I have had students at the Workshop tell me that until they came there they had never heard the word “beautiful” applied to a literary text. Beside the great interest this phenomenon has always had in itself, beauty is a strategy of emphasis. If it is not recognized, the text is not understood.

I won’t pause here to grumble over the critical assumption that the writer cannot intend anything more or other than his or her culture, class, gender, and so on would permit — as these are understood by critics with extraordinarily narrow definitions of all such terms. (I must say there are advantages in being a self-declared Calvinist from northern Idaho, from the point of view of evading easy categories.) It doesn’t really matter what the writer, I in this case, thinks she means. The critic knows better than I do. That’s just insulting. I freely grant, I preach, that the origins of a fiction in the writer’s mind are mysterious. So are the origins of all complex thought, of dreams. Mysteries seem in their nature to invite remarkably convenient solutions, especially as they pertain to human nature or behavior. But some of us are closer to the phenomenon than others. We’re in a position to say, no, that isn’t it at all.

I may be blind to the virtues of theory. Some of my most interesting students would go to graduate school if they did not have to study theory. A loss to the profession. Nevertheless, if it were treated as an approach that for the moment is influential in certain circles, a recent phase in a project that began with Aristotle and has taken any number of forms since then, I would withdraw some of my objections. But it is above all an American thought fad, which means that its exponents feel that scales have fallen from their eyes. Why talk of the divagations of other decades? Context cannot catch revelation in its snares.

We know that somewhere a great conceptual wrecking ball is following its arc, and the immortals of theory and their pedestals and their shrines will go the way of Monsieur Mesmer and Madame Blavatsky and theirs, to be replaced by who knows what. And the exponents of who-knows-what will, in turn, be sure that scales have fallen from their eyes. I am not speaking here of anything as coherent as a dialectic. I am talking about a cultural habit of picking up the latest thing and discarding the second-latest thing without a thought or a backward glance. There is a great deal in our culture that encourages us to do this. The academy should not reinforce the habit. In this case, the conversation that should be carried on within the culture is in some degree impeded.

I mentioned the trend as a phenomenon. Obviously trends and fads are closely related, almost synonymous. The difference is that fads actually materialize. They have their effect and run their course. Trends are projections or speculations that are meant to anticipate events or conditions which may or may not materialize. If a trend is a projection of any desirable quality or tendency in American life, its direction is always alarmingly downward. If it is a projection of any negative quality, the arrow tips sharply upward. I became aware of this when I spent a year teaching in France. The French professors in whose house I lived were Americanists, and they had towering stacks of American news magazines. So I read backward through what was then our recent history, if history can be said to be composed primarily of things that never happen. Perhaps in our case it is appropriate to define it this way. The magazines were largely chronicles of dread and alarm. Some country somewhere had enjoyed an economic surge, which could only mean that our status was threatened and our schools were failing and we were losing the qualities that had made us great.

This narrative was recycled endlessly. What to do about those tiger economies? Well, we’ve forgotten now that there ever were tiger economies. Including that Celtic tiger. The projecting of trends never takes account of the endless variables involved. Remember when Japan seemed bent on buying every stick and stone of this perishing republic? At least so far as our journalism was concerned. Remember when they were instinctive mathematicians because of some association of numbers with their alphabet?

None of these things were the fault of the Japanese. They were simply the screen on which, for the moment, we projected our anxieties. It wasn’t so long ago, in the era of the Japanese juggernaut, that we actually once more fell to ranking races by intelligence — Asians first, Europeans, i.e., white people, second. I will not go on with the list. It was such a heartbreaking lapse into the kind of thinking we might have hoped we had outgrown. Now Japan seems to have drifted away from its obsession with economic productivity, and it has had the terrible misfortune of Fukushima to deal with. So we have more or less forgotten it, too, together with the nonsense about racial intelligence. Now China looms. If it should prove unstable, if it should falter, India is waiting in the wings, and after India, Brazil. Russia might well make an appearance.

I distinctly remember when the flourishing of another country was considered a good thing. We did not need to be in competition with every patch of earth that happened to have a name and a flag. Competition is a questionable value, especially when it pits the very great power we are against countries that are small and fragile. I have my doubts about “creative destruction” under the best circumstances. But where whole populations and cultures are affected to their harm, it should in fact be called destructive destruction. As a matter of fact, this would also describe the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, which left waste and warheads on earth and plutonium in the upper atmosphere. Since we are so fond of projecting, it might be interesting to estimate the number of casualties the Cold War, which might better be called the 25,000 Years War, will ultimately claim.

Be that as it may. Since it is so entrenched a habit with us to live in a state of alarmed anticipation, gearing up for things that do not happen, non-events have important real-world consequences. In recent years we have heard endlessly about our need to be competitive in the world economy. On these grounds we have been ransacking our public school system, and we have been turning a coldly utilitarian eye on our great universities. Meanwhile the world economy has more or less fallen into shambles. We had our crisis, too, and by the standards of the world at large we weathered it. This might be taken to imply that our society and economy are relatively stable and strong. But no, we are on the verge of becoming Greece. If that threat seems to have lost a little of its potency, we were staring into that potential abyss for months, some people absolutely mesmerized by it. It was an important pseudodatum that has influenced important social and government policy in this country. I am not optimist enough to suppose someone noticed that Greece has about the population of New York City and its environs, with far fewer economic resources. If only in the name of dignity and reasonableness, we really ought not to be comparing ourselves to countries one thirtieth our size.

While “Greece” was still the monosyllable that triggered in our minds the threat of precipitous downward slide, a woman remarked in my hearing that of course their economic situation was deplorable. She said, “Their malls aren’t even open on Sunday.” It is apparently to be assumed that economics, as the word is presently understood, not only can but should regiment national culture. Why might the Greeks choose to remember the Sabbath? Possibly because their country and language sustain an ancient religious tradition. A vast and absolute loss would be entailed in their abandonment of it. Then, too, the day of rest has other benefits. If there is any truth in relevant statistics — I doubt them all — perhaps health and longevity are not the effects of diet, of fish, vegetables, and olive oil, but of having a little time to oneself, with family and friends.

Research along these lines may well be underfunded. The Sabbath has a way of doing just what it was meant to do, sheltering one day in seven from the demands of economics. Its benefits cannot be commercialized. Leisure, by way of contrast, is highly commercialized. But leisure is seldom more than a bit of time ransomed from habitual stress. Sabbath is a way of life, one long since gone from this country, of course, due to secularizing trends, which are really economic pressures that have excluded rest as an option, first of all from those most in need of it.

* * *

I come at last to my main question. Has Greece somehow lost the right to be Greece? Granted, some individuals or interests there entangled the country in financial thickets and labyrinths that were meant to be impenetrable, harbored and sponsored by Britain, Germany, and the United States, whose regulators themselves claim not to understand them. Granted, Greece involved itself with the euro and has been whipsawed by the larger economies in that supposed union. Have we come to a place where essential elements of national life should be stripped away to conform every population to the disciplines of productivity, when earth itself is being worked to death? The rationale for this is competition, a notion that is symbiotic with our thinking in terms of trends. We are moving ahead in the race, or we are falling behind. There is no finish line, and there are most certainly no prizes for having led most of the way, or for leading now, when some potential competitor appears to be gaining on us. What is the nature of the race, the object of it? This changes from moment to moment. Just now it seems to involve making our children into maximally efficient workers. Whose idea was it to have them studying art and music, anyway? For a little while we were pretty serious about teaching them Japanese — why should they bother with French or Latin? — but it is clearly Chinese they should be learning, as a matter of urgency. Tomorrow it might be Hindi or Portuguese. Never mind. Trend thinking yields tunnel vision, which desperation reinforces. And the belief that is constantly urged on us is that if we are not desperate we are not paying attention.

* * *

As I have said on many occasions, I am a Calvinist. A bookish woman like myself, with a long, quiet life behind her, has few opportunities to shock, even scandalize, and that is part of the appeal of making this claim, I admit. But a disappearingly small part. I really am a Calvinist. And one aspect of Calvin’s thought that appeals to me mightily is the famous work ethic. I work more or less constantly. Leisure bores me to death. But — this is the crucial thing — I have found my calling. Difficult as it is, my work is my pleasure and recreation. Calvin taught that all work was of equal dignity, and that one is called to a secular vocation just as one might be called to a religious vocation. Excellent. But this ideal is dependent on certain conditions. There must be an awareness of options to choose among and reasonable access to whatever tools or learning are required to make the choice. Historically, American education has provided an array of experience to allow students to discover their talents, their gifts. This practice is ending.

Our imagined future economy will supposedly require workers trained in math and science. So traditional options are falling away, denied to our children. Certainly students with a gift for math and science should be stimulated and encouraged. But the fact is that those workers who are our competitors are “efficient” because their labor is cheap. Their poverty and their defenseless environment are sold into the world market. They, and the poor who really do compete with them, will lose their terrible advantage the minute they begin to prosper a little. In any case, a factory that required its workers to be doing higher math would obviously not be efficient. The genius of mass production systems is what used to be called de-skilling, making every step in the process as simple and routine, as automatic, as possible. Those robots who will replace human labor are not mathematicians, and the technicians who design them are not working on the factory floor. But this association of math and science with efficiency is stuck so solidly in the American brain that it is never questioned, and we are stripping down our educational system in deference to it.

Historically, our ways of doing things have worked rather well. Maybe we need to reflect on this. I know, there aren’t any prizes for not having lost yet. But what if there is not, need not be, should not be, a race to begin with? What if, ideally, Greece is a place for Greeks to be Greek, and — what a concept! — America is a place for Americans to be American? What would this mean for us, diverse as we are? Well, there is one thing it had better mean — that as a society we prepare ourselves and one another to be competent citizens of a democracy. One consequence of the obsession with competition, with all its attendant fears and anxieties, is that we are encouraged to forget that we are, in fact, a very great power. Account for this however we might, at this moment and into any foreseeable future it will be a fact, an important reality in the life of the whole world. Suppose we do by some calculus slide into second place, or third place. We will still be a very great power, with all the responsibilities that come with power. The world is volatile and fragile, as we all know. Too often we feel we are a blundering giant, invading countries of which we know nothing — which, as we are oddly fond of saying, most of us could not find on a map. Neither science nor math will help us to have an appropriately humane, a civilized, interest in the world, a respectful awareness of lives lived otherwise that might stay our hand, militarily and economically.

I hope I will not seem eccentric when I say that God’s love for the world is something it is also useful to ponder. Imagine humankind acting freely within the very broad limits of its gifts, its capacity for discerning the good and just and shaping the beautiful. If God has taken pleasure in his creation, there is every reason to assume that some part of his pleasure is in your best idea, your most generous impulse, your most disciplined thinking on whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, excellent, and worthy of praise. I am paraphrasing Paul, of course, but if you have read Cicero or The Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, you know that pre-Christians and pagans made art and literature and philosophy, excellent and worthy of praise, out of love for the thought of all these things. When Solomon set about creating the temple where God would put his name, he went to the Tyreans, pagans with an established history of temple building. The houses they built were for Baal and El and Ishtar, true, but clearly in Solomon’s eyes the Tyreans had developed an architecture entirely suitable for expressing the idea of the holy. My point is simply that, from the time the first hominid looked up at the stars and was amazed by them, a sweet savor has been rising from this earth, every part of it — a silent music worthy of God’s pleasure. What we have expressed, compared with what we have found no way to express, is overwhelmingly the lesser part. Loyalties and tendernesses that we are scarcely aware of might seem, from a divine perspective, the most beautiful things in creation, even in their evanescence. Such things are universally human. They forbid the distinctions “us” and “them.” We do not know what we obliterate when we drop a bomb. And neither math nor science can begin to make us realize.

So. If we are to be competent citizens of a powerful democracy, we must encourage the study of the aptly named humanities. The cultures of the world’s people are complex and diverse, but they are manifestations of one phenomenon, the uniqueness of the human presence on earth. A student of the French Enlightenment knows at least something about the profound particularities of history and circumstance that invest any place and period. A student of Greek or German begins to understand that languages both constrain and enable the thought of those who speak them. Touch a limit of your understanding and it falls away, to reveal mystery upon mystery. The one great lesson we can take from the study of any civilization is the appropriateness of reverence, of awe, and of pity, too. This would be a good thing for the citizens of a powerful democracy to remember.

Are we, indeed, a democracy? Yes, relatively speaking, we are. Despite slovenliness and mendacity, which are usual in governments of every kind, and despite the predisposition to fads and trends that seems to characterize us more than others, we do have a very broad franchise and a demonstrated openness to suasion. That we are a democracy in this degree means that we have the option of making ourselves a much better democracy. This brings me back to the matter of fads and trends, especially as they affect higher education.

For many years the dominant thought fad was something called Marxism. This fad was basically coterminous with the Cold War. With the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Friedman-ism it folded like a cheap tent. But when the fad was at its height, when people swept along in it felt bold and even dangerous, I began to learn that in the overwhelming percentage of cases, these Marxists had not read Marx. I assume some must have, but I never found a single one. The confession did not embarrass them. Of course anyone can call himself a Marxist, on the same grounds that I can call myself a Plantagenet if I want to. Absent the intent to defraud, which is possibly an issue in the case of those who pose as experts in and converts to a highly readable and available body of thought with which they have in fact no familiarity whatever. They were a voluble lot and seemed to be mutually intelligible in a through-the-looking-glass language that yielded, for example, preposterous misstatements about such things as Marx’s view of the American Civil War — about which Marx wrote extensively. No doubt some part of their once great influence lingers. I was recently at a meeting of international scholars who were as one in resenting, rather in the manner of a classe dangereuse, their economic enslavement. So Marx is still unread. Perhaps the Marxist influence lingers in the principled neglect of primary texts and the principled reliance on esoteric language, which certainly contribute to the growing sense that higher education in general and the humanities in particular have nothing to do with anything.

Serious as all this is, it is trivial beside the fact that this self-declared Marxism did flourish in American universities during the Cold War. It is appropriate to wonder what Marx’s thought ever had to do with the Soviet economic and social order. But they claimed him, and we in America used Marxism as a synonym for their ideology and their political system. Therefore, as a courtesy to the larger world, which has inevitably been deeply affected by the nuclear testing and the proxy wars and the defensive imperialism both sides engaged in, wouldn’t it have been the proper thing, true, honorable, and just, to acquire some meaningful grasp of the nature of the argument? Was it not a disservice to humankind to provide instead tomes and decades of arcane nonsense?

This episode in the life of American higher education epitomizes for me the failure to live up to the standard of competency democracy requires. We depend on one another to deal truly, to provide one another with a basis for understanding and judgment. Anyone with higher education is likely to have an area or a role for which he or she is responsible in some degree. This is true very obviously for writers, scholars, teachers, journalists, lawyers. And it is true of scientists and mathematicians, whose work may contribute to the horrors of war, or to catastrophic failures in the global economy.

Lately I have been reading things written around the time of the Civil War by both Unionists and secessionists, most recently the memoirs of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It is lodged immovably in the academic mind that Higginson undervalued and discouraged Emily Dickinson, though in fact he was in awe of her and wrote about her brilliantly. He was also a strong early feminist and a great abolitionist. The literary figures of the age who were committed to the abolition of slavery are often treated as so many fastidious and distant onlookers, but in fact many of them were in the thick of the fray. Higginson, for example, has good claim to having been the commander of the first black regiment to see combat in the Civil War. In the essay “Army Life in a Black Regiment,” Higginson quotes from a report made by the army surgeon after an early skirmish. The surgeon wrote,

Braver men never lived. One man with two bullet-holes through the large muscles of the shoulders and neck brought off from the scene of action, two miles distant, two muskets; and not a murmur has escaped his lips. Another, Robert Sutton, with three wounds — one of which, being on the skull, may cost him his life — would not report himself till compelled to do so by his officers. While dressing his wounds, he quietly talked of what they had done, and of what they yet could do … He is perfectly quiet and cool, but takes this whole affair with the religious bearing of a man who realizes that freedom is sweeter than life. Yet another soldier did not report himself at all, but remained all night on guard, and possibly I should not have known of his having had a buck-shot in his shoulder, if some duty requiring a sound shoulder had not been required of him.

Higginson says, “This last, it may be added, had persuaded a comrade to dig out the buck-shot, for fear of being ordered on the sick-list … An officer may be pardoned some enthusiasm for such men as these.” Higginson is very insistent on the courage and discipline of his soldiers, his recording them being important, as he believed, to “the fortunes of a race.” The book was published in 1869, four years after the war. William Dean Howells, reviewing it for The Atlantic, remarked rather dismissively that the country was tired of the Negro.

I have often wondered what abyss it was that opened and swallowed so much that was good and enlightened in the social thought and the many important experiments and reforms that emerged from the abolitionist movement before the Civil War. Perhaps this gives me an answer. We simply tired of justice and equality. They were out of fashion in the new era of eugenics and social Darwinism and their ugly brother, racial science. These new enthusiasms were considered highly intellectual for just a little less than a century, not least because they were so European. They were centered in our great universities. Only relatively recent scholarship has recovered the history of these black regiments. The Civil War and the decades that preceded it called up so much courage and intelligence and sacrifice, such an outpouring of lives, and it bought us a decade or two of sanity between chattel slavery and Jim Crow. What in God’s name might we not tire of?

It is no small matter, how we conduct our intellectual lives, we who populate universities. We are used to the idea that sellers of tulip bulbs or lanolin or bad mortgages try to catch the nearest way to profit, which is after all the difference between the actual worth of a thing and what someone can be induced to pay for it. None of us is surprised if this reality is one in which demand is artificially stimulated in order to enhance the exchange value of some item of commerce that might be a drug on the market in sixty days. The wisdom-of-the-market fad, which survives though global markets have been dragging the world economy into the abyss for a number of years now, was and is embraced by the universities. The universities now seem obsessed with marketing themselves and ensuring the marketability of their product, which will make the institution itself more marketable — a loop of mutual reinforcement of the kind that sets in when thinking becomes pathologically narrow. Somehow, in a society that is extraordinarily rich by world standards, largely on the basis of wealth created by earlier generations, and one that is capable, if it or any other society ever has been, of giving its people the means to consider and appreciate their moment on this earth, we are panicked into reducing ourselves and others into potential units of economic production — assuming, as we never should, that we know what future circumstances will demand of us. The humanities teach us respect for what we are — we, in the largest sense. Or they should. Because there is another reality, greater than the markets, and that is the reality in which the planet is fragile, and peace among nations, where it exists, is also fragile. The greatest tests ever made of human wisdom and decency may very well come to this generation or the next one. We must teach and learn broadly and seriously, dealing with one another with deep respect and in the best good faith.