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Author’s Note: Several tutors of Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts asked me as the former Academic Dean to assess Patrick J. Deneen’s Res Idiotica, an article on the state of liberal education in America. As a result, I address my assessment to the Tutors of Magdalen College.
Dear Tutors—
I enjoyed the paper Res Idiotica that several of you directed me to. As you read my remarks, please keep in mind that I probably have been too long in the wilds of New Mexico, where my nearest neighbors are coyotes and bobcats.
I found Deenen’s description of present-day college students accurate, although pedestrian — “they build superb résumés;” suffer from “cultural amnesia;” will become “perfect company men and women;” and understand “themselves to be radically autonomous selves.”[1]
Students Shaped by Democracy and Capitalism
What Deenen seems to miss is that students matriculate at colleges and universities with ideas absorbed from American culture, and worst yet with habits of thinking and feeling instilled by democracy and capitalism. Even a cursory reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America explains why students understand themselves as isolated, autonomous individuals: Citizens of a democracy “form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation . . . Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart. ”[2] The 2000 U.S. census uncovered that one out of every four households consists of only one person;[3] the median length for a marriage in America today is eleven years.[4]
In my experience, because of social equality virtually every American, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, bristles when under authority: “Who in the hell are you to tell me what to do?” Justice Kennedy succinctly captured American Nihilism in one of his Supreme Court rulings: “At the heart of freedom is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life,”[5] a ruling in keeping with the widespread opinion that everyone has his or her own personal belief system — even the right to one’s own concept of the universe!
In a coffee shop I frequent, the young barista told me that “we are more connected than ever and yet more lonely,” and then she said, seemingly out of nowhere, “Everyone has her own belief system.” I surmised that she could not see any objective reality beyond herself.
Tocqueville, in 1840, captured the essence of American Nihilism: In America, “there is a general distaste for accepting any man’s word as proof of anything,”[6] a sentiment that follows directly from democratic equality. As a result, the three great teachers of humankind — the Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus — are just three voices in a crowded room, and each individual American see himself as King of the Castle, deciding what is true and false, what is morally good and bad, what is beautiful and ugly.
Writer David Foster Wallace, in his Kenyon College Commencement Address, in 2005, warned the graduates, “Our own present culture has harnessed these forces [‘fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self’] in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.”[7]
Students build superb résumés because they believe in the American Dream — work hard, become a success, make money, and live a happy life. In Modernity, much of education from first grade through graduate school is designed to serve the Nation-State and the free market economy. As a result, asking certain fundamental questions is forbidden: Is creating television advertising aimed at children, or manufacturing junk food, or developing thermonuclear weapons right livelihood? To ask these questions is to subject the free market to moral constraints. What capitalism demands is “perfect company men and women,” who will never subject the corporation to moral questioning.
At the University of Michigan, I studied Newtonian mechanics, Maxwellian electrodynamics, and quantum physics in the absence of any moral context. My education prepared me to be a new barbarian, who sells the fruits of science to the highest bidder, no questions asked. Keep in mind, no theoretical physicists, no nuclear weapons.
As an aside, I hope that I haven’t given the impression that I am anti-democratic or opposed to free markets. My position adheres to the wisdom articulated by Sophocles 2,500 years ago: “Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.”[8]
To me, and I may be wildly wrong, what is lurking in the shadows of Deneen’s paper is the conservative view that higher education was ruined, or if you like misdirected, by the liberals in elite universities.
No one can deny that Sixties radically changed higher education and much of American life. When I enrolled at the University of Michigan in the mid-Fifties, there were formal sit-down dinners, where I learned what fork to use, not to reach across the table to eat off another person’s plate as we Eastern Europeans do, and that Middle Americans at that time did not drink wine with their meals. My freshmen English teacher told me that one goal of the University was to take uncouth ruffians like me and polish them up. He also told me the University hoped to show me another way of living, besides money-making.
When I left Michigan in 1964 the sit-down dinners were gone as were single-sex dorms. This change was the result of the social upheaval of the Sixties, a period when the underlying principles of America, equality and individualism, were greatly intensified, in contrast to the World War II years, when those principles were greatly muted. Gone was the cultural stability of the Fifties, the Golden Age of the Middle Class.
I suspect that what Deenen means by “real education” is two years of Western Civ, so that students will be able to recite “two of the arguments made in Federalist 10,” among many other cultural facts. While there is nothing wrong with this education, I suspect it will not stop “a world without inheritance, without past, future, or deepest cares . . . [from] tumbling down.”
A Loftier View of Liberal Education
I have a loftier view of liberal education, one presented forcefully by Peter Kalkavage, a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, who years ago visited Magdalen College. Kalkavage recognizes that “in a culture like ours” students are steeped “in self-indulgence and vulgarity.” To combat this cultural malformation, Kalkavage proposes that students sing: “In singing great choral works, however imperfectly, students get to experience one of life’s most humanizing pleasures: that of cooperating with others in the attempt to form a beautiful whole that is more than the sum of its parts.”[9]
An essential element of the Magdalen College Program of Studies is music. In the science tutorials, especially in those classes whose theme was whole and part, my co-tutor John Klucinec and I contrasted the experience of music-making that Kalkavage describes with the Cartesian reductionism of Newtonian physics. In the Junior Physics Tutorial, students reread Descartes’ dictum to commence “with objects that were the most simple and easy to understand, in order to rise little by little, or by degrees, to a knowledge of the most complex”[10] and Tocqueville’s observation that Americans are Cartesians because “in most mental operations each American relies on individual effort and judgment.”[11] Students learned that in Newtonian physics the fundamental constituents of the cosmos are massy, “moveable particles” of various sizes and shapes with the properties “extension, hardness, impenetrability, and inertia.”[12]
By contrasting modern biology with Newtonian physics, students discovered that there are two kinds of wholes, organic and composite, that differ radically in how a part is related to the whole. An open encounter with any living organism reveals that each part, in some way, always contains the whole. Consequently, a part is not separable from the whole, for if it could be separated, the part would no longer exist. For example, consider a jack rabbit in the desert Southwest. The DNA in every cell of its body is unique to this individual jack rabbit. The entire body of the rabbit is contained in every cell of its body; in a liver cell, for instance, is the information to build a pancreas, an eye, a brain, and every other part of the rabbit. If the whole were removed from a cell, it would be destroyed; no rabbit cell can exist without its DNA. The rabbit cannot be explained solely by its organs or by its cells, because each of these parts contains the whole.
Similarly, the world the rabbit lives in is present in some way in its parts. The coyote is present in the rabbit’s powerful back legs, desert plants in its sharp teeth, the earth’s gravitational pull in its bones, an oxygen-rich atmosphere in its lungs. Even the history of the universe is present in the rabbit. The calcium atoms in its bones, the iron atoms in its red blood cells, indeed, every chemical element in its body came from stars that exploded billions of years ago. The matter of the rabbit is literally star stuff, and therefore the Big Bang, galaxies, and stars are present in the rabbit. Take all traces of the atmosphere out of the rabbit, then its ears, lungs, and blood would no longer exist. Remove the earth’s gravity from the rabbit, then its bones would vanish. Remove the Big Bang, and nothing exists.
Students easily see that unlike the organic wholes of biology, the wholes of Newtonian physics are composite in that they can be separated into parts without destroying or altering the part. In Newtonian physics, the motion of a whole body is determined by the motion of its parts. The gravitational attraction of the Sun on each part of the Earth causes the entire Earth to move in an elliptical orbit around the Sun. Planets, clouds, oceans, and manmade objects do not possess the unity that organisms have. A lug nut from a 2003 Toyota Land Cruiser does not uniquely determine the individual vehicle it came from. For lifeless matter, the part is separable from the whole, and in this very limited region of nature, the whole is the sum of the parts.
In the Junior Physics Tutorial, a lengthy, careful argument reveals the relationship between a whole and its parts. In the music tutorials, the students, through singing great choral works, experience that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Choral members are not isolated singers performing in their own performance space. Every singer must listen to every other member of the chorus and adjust their voice to render a harmonious, beautiful whole.
Singing great choral works helps students to overcome cultural amnesia, or more accurately the cultural lie, that they are isolated, autonomous beings. With such experience of the whole and part, Aristotle’s observation that “man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis”[13] is no longer an idea in a book. Eventually, through reading classic texts, reflection, and yes, through cutting the grass, shoveling the heavy New Hampshire snow, preparing food for others, through what we call happy labor required of all students, they will grasp intellectually and experientially that they, as well as everything in the universe, exist only in relationship. Without the appropriate experience, a Great Books program runs the danger of becoming an extensive history of ideas course.
Reading classic texts on biology, accompanied by experimentation without observation, separates students rather than connects them to nature. Consequently, Tutor David Hayes insisted that students in the Senior Biology Tutorial spend at least one hour of private observation of nature each week, one half of which had to be at the same location throughout each semester; of course, they had to record in detail their observations in their Biology Journal. In this way, students discovered a person in direct contact with nature looks for the principles behind the beauty and purpose in nature.
The experience of beauty also links the mathematics, physics, and music tutorials. Tutor Neil Gillis pointed out to me that Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity and Beethoven’s music share a rarely discussed element of beauty, a fitting surprise. Music conductor Leonard Bernstein’s comments on Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony apply equally well to Einstein’s 1905 paper: “The element of unexpected is so often associated with Beethoven. But surprise is not enough; what makes it so great is that no matter how shocking and unexpected the surprise is, it always somehow gives the impression — as soon as it has happened — that it is the only thing that could have happened at that moment. Inevitability is the keynote. It is as though Beethoven had an inside track to truth and rightness, so that he could say the most amazing and sudden things with complete authority and cogency.”[14]
Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity is a series of fitting surprises. From the principle that the velocity of light is the same for all inertial (non-accelerating) observers, the surprises of relativity — time dilation, length contraction, and the equivalence of inertial mass and energy — follow as inevitable consequences.
Great mathematics, too, possesses a “high degree of unexpectedness combined with inevitability,” according to mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy.[15]The truths of relativity, or quantum physics for that matter, are stranger than we imagined, but their inevitability convinces us that nature is that way. Strip away fitting surprises and beauty is reduced to monotonous unity, mechanical symmetry, and uninteresting predictability.
Beauty Can Strike, Pierce, and Transform Us
Kalkavage points out that what is objectively beautiful is intelligible, and, of course, he gives music and Pythagorean tuning as an example, but he could have given all theoretical physics. For me and for Kalkavage, beauty is an essential element of education: “Beauty can take us by surprise. It strikes, pierces, even transforms us.”
In the tenth grade, I was transformed by Euclid’s demonstration that the prime numbers are infinite, an elegant proof that surprisingly showed in six lines of text an eternal truth. Until that point in my life, I thought truth did not exist; everything about me changed, the seasons, my body, and people. My experience of the human world was that everything was in flux, sometimes bordering on the absurd. Suddenly, mathematics presented me with one thing that was unchanging, a timeless truth; the 2,500 years between Euclid and me disappeared. My encounter with Euclid was not unique. Bertrand Russell described his first encounter with serious mathematics: “At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world.”[16]
For me and for Kalkavage, the goal of liberal education is to strike, to pierce, and to transform us, and that can happen in many ways other than encountering the beauty of music or mathematics, say by grasping the significance of Achilles’ smile at the funeral games in The Iliad, or by apprehending the underlying view of human nature in Federalist 10, or by following C. S. Lewis’ reflection on the difference between agápē and erōs in his The Four Loves.
I propose that the highest standard for the outcome of tutorials and for the educational program as a whole is that the students are struck, pierced, and transformed; this highest standard conforms to the nature of the human soul, and thus is attainable by every student.
I realize the highest standard that I am suggesting would not fly with accreditation agencies for two reasons: 1) probably, the guardians of higher education have no idea what this standard means; and 2) the proposed standard is not quantifiable, and thus according to accreditation agencies depends upon a subjective assessment by tutors that is not reliable. But contrary to the prevailing opinion in our culture that science is the only path to truth, the most important aspects of human life cannot be measured. Love and hate, hope and despair, freedom and enslavement fall outside the realm of experimental science.
As always, in friendship,
George
Endnotes
[1] Patrick J. Deneen, all quotations from Res Idiotica, Front Porch Republic (Feb. 23, 2016),.
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966 [1835, 1840]), p. 508.
[3] John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 5.
[4] “Divorce in the United States,” Wikipedia.
[5] Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Hackett Souter, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania versus Casey in Constitutional Law: 1995 Supplement, ed. Geoffrey R. Stone, et al. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 955.
[6] Tocqueville, p. 430.
[7] David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College Commencement Address, 2005.
[8] Sophocles, Antigone, trans. R. C. Jebb, line 614.
[9] Peter Kalkavage, all quotations are from The Neglected Muse: Why Music Is An Essential Liberal Art, The Imaginative Conservative (Feb. 21, 2016).
[10] René Descartes, Discourse on Method in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. I, p. 92.
[11] Tocqueville, p. 429.
[12]Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York: Dover, 1952), p. 400. Isaac Newton, Principia, trans. Florian Cajori (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California, 1934), p. 399.
[13] Aristotle, Politics, 1253a.
[14] Leonard Bernstein, The Infinite Variety of Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 198. Italics in the original.
[15] G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1941), p. 113. Italics in the original.
[16] Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1967), pp. 37-38.
One Response
Prof. As always I appreciate your valuable insights on life and the nature of things. Your articles invariably leave me with much to consider – and that is good. Blessings to you. Ron <