“At times I doubt, Excellency. But years ago I reached this conclusion. There is no alternative. It is necessary to believe. It is not possible to be an atheist. Not in a world like ours. Not if one has a vocation for public service and engages in politics.”
I have long been fascinated by Mario Vargas Llosa novels, and at long last I have read one I can recommend as a starting place. The Feast of the Goat. A brilliant novel. (But, I hasten to add, not for the squeamish. Llosa is all too masterful at convincing the Reader that some of the characters in the novel are truly evil.) (See here for a discussion of his other novels.)
It is the tale of Trujillo, the longtime strongman dictator
of the Dominican Republic. The novel has
shifting perspectives, Trujillo himself, the set of people who assassinate
Trujillo (don’t worry, that is not a spoiler), the daughter of one of Trujillo’s
cronies returning to the country decades after leaving it, and the people who
managed the government in the aftermath of Trujillo’s death. Expertly done.
The quotation at the outset is a government official responding
to Trujillo’s question. Why is it not
possible to be an atheist in a world like theirs?
Trujillo was, like many another Latin American dictator, a
hard, vicious ruler, maintaining order in the country with the fear arising
from an extensive police network and well-used torture chambers. In the chapters examining Trujillo’s interior
world, we find a man who seriously believes that what is good for him is good
for the country, that his own enemies are enemies of the state, and that his
own pleasures are benefits to the state.
We get glimpses of a past when he had not confused matters to this
extent, hints that maybe once upon a time, Trujillo really did care more about
the actual country than himself, but those days are long gone.
Everyone else in the novel lives in the shadow of Trujillo,
for good or ill. Therein lies the moral quandary.
If you are in a state dominated by a vicious ruler, how do
you craft a good life? Obviously being
complicit at the highest level of an evil regime is evil. But, what about being a soldier in the
army? What about working in one of the dictator’s
personal businesses? If your only
choices are work in some way to support the dictator or watch your family be
murdered, what do you do? Obviously not
the sort of thing you ever want to have to figure out. So, set that question aside.
Returning to the question at the outset, the official who
makes the remark above is onto something which generalizes. The reason he has to have a religion is that
it is the only thing that can possibly check the descent into evil while
working in Trujillo’s government. “Without
the Catholic faith, the country would fall into chaos and barbarism.”
How? Without the
Catholic faith, then everyone would end up like Trujillo, there would be no
check to the evil impulses within.
Catholicism is “the social restraint of the human animal’s irrational
passions and appetites.”
Whenever the question of human nature arises in
conversations with my students, I am always struck by their genuine belief in
the fundamental goodness of humans.
Sure, bad people exist, but in their view of the world, everyone is
basically good. Indeed, if explicitly
asked to name someone who is evil, there is invariably just one name
mentioned. (Zero points for guessing
which name.)
All of this makes me wonder: how do people who believe in
the inherent goodness of humans explain Trujillo or the head of Trujillo’s
secret police or the soldiers who derive great pleasure from torturing
others? Good people gone bad? But why did they go so bad? Why was their no check on their descent into
evil?
Another way of wondering the same thing: given these two
options, which would be harder to explain?
1) People are basically good, but sometimes people do very evil
things.
2) People are basically evil, but sometimes people do very
good things.
The second seems easy to explain: a benevolent God extends
his grace to allow evil people to refrain from evil. The first?
It isn’t obvious to me how that would make sense.
“O my friends, he said, if the soul is really immortal, what care should be taken of her, not only in respect of the portion of time which is called life, but of eternity! And the danger of neglecting her from this point of view does indeed appear to be awful.”
That is Socrates talking in Phaedo, Plato’s account of the last conversation of Socrates’ life.
If the soul is immortal, then surely Socrates is right. Indeed, if the soul is immortal, it is hard
to imagine how that could be wrong.
In the phrase “if the soul is immortal,” one might think
that it is the “if” which is the point of discussion. But, as it turns out, the “if” isn’t the problem
at all. The problem these days is the
word “soul.”
We talked about this book in one of my reading groups (The Grecian
Urn Seminar). The room was sharply divided on whether there is such a thing as
a soul. Socrates spends a lot of time in
the dialogue proving that your soul existed before you were born and will continue
to exist after you are dead. But, in order
to figure out the life-span of the soul, it is obviously first necessary to believe
in the existence of the thing itself.
The soul is not much in fashion in intellectual circles
these days. What is the soul?
To hear the chatter in the academic world, the soul is
dead. With the extraordinary advances in
brain imaging, people have become quite confident that our brains are making decisions
before we are even conscious that these decisions are being made. There is incredible confidence that the day
is not far off when we will have cracked the code and we will be able to predict
what you will think by watching your brain at work. Note: that is not “predict
what you will do,” but “predict what you will think.” Free will has died. Your thoughts are just neuro-physical-chemical
reactions in the lump of cells we call your brain.
Having shown that there is no free will, that you are just a
lump of flesh falsely thinking it is making decisions, there is no need for and
no room for the soul anymore. Once we can observe your thoughts as if a magic
lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen, what is left for the soul to
do?
Ah, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than
are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The strange thing about the soul which has been destroyed by
modern research is that it bears almost zero resemblance to the soul as discussed
by Paul or Augustine or Aquinas or…well, by anyone who ever took the soul seriously. Nobody who ever believed the soul was real
and important would be the least bit troubled by all that research on the brain.
Now I understand that modern scientists and philosophers are
all far too cool and hip to actually go read a theology book and take the argument
seriously and think about it for five minutes before they rush out to declare the
soul is done and gone. But, surely all
the cool kids could at least read Plato.
Right?
And, further, is not one part of us body, and the rest of us soul? To be sure. And to which class may we say that the body is more alike and akin? Clearly to the seen: no one can doubt that. And is the soul seen or not seen? Not by man, Socrates. And by “seen” and “not seen” is meant by us that which is or is not visible to the eye of man? Yes, to the eye of man. And what do we say of the soul? is that seen or not seen? Not seen. Unseen then? Yes. Then the soul is more like to the unseen, and the body to the seen? That is most certain, Socrates. And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)—were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard when under their influence? Very true. But when returning into herself she reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom? That is well and truly said, Socrates, he replied.
The soul is by definition
the part of man which is unseen. By definition. So, if someone wants to come along as talk about
all the things we can now see, that discussion is by definition not about the
soul at all.
To repeat what should have been obvious: by definition, the existence
of the soul cannot be disproven by any physical means.
The mistake being made here is, to be honest, a bit shocking. Consider the argument: “we cannot prove the
existence of the soul, therefore the soul does not exist.” Obviously faulty logic. How about “I cannot reason out why the soul
needs to exist, therefore the soul doesn’t exist”? Or, “I cannot provide a precise definition of
the soul, therefore there is no such thing”?
Or…well, you get the idea. These are
all just variations on a theme.
Imagine we define the soul as the unseen and unseeable part
of a human, the divine spark in the image of God, that part of a human which longs
for God or Heaven or immortality or truth.
The soul is, in other words, the essence of the person, the immortal part
of the person, the only part of the person that really makes a person a person
instead of merely a hunk of decaying flesh.
Such a soul would not even be fully describable in human language; it is
something that transcends the physical realm that we can sense.
Now, defining the soul that way does not prove that it exists. But, if that is what a soul is, then it
cannot be proven to exist. It would only be discoverable by faith.
And recall, the argument “If something can only be discoverable
by faith, then it does not exist” is not a reasonable or logical argument.
Incredibly, Socrates provided a description of all those in the
modern age convinced that they have proven the soul does not exist:
the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth only exists in a bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste and use for the purposes of his lusts—the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy
That passage is pretty funny when you think about it. Feel free to use it the next time someone tells
you that all truth exists only in a bodily form in the realm of things we can
observe.
Who is the greatest villain in the Comic Book World? That sounds like one of those debates you can merrily have with your friends.
But, truth be told, while it easy to imagine debating who is the second greatest villain, the top spot is obvious.
The Joker.
A few years back, in honor of its 75th
anniversary, DC comics released a series of retrospectives of its greatest
heroes and villains. The Joker: A Celebration
of 75 Years is an interesting history, not just of the character but of the
course of comic books in that time.
(Yes, I know what you are thinking, “Surely you are not
about to write a whole post about comic books.” Ah, ye of little faith. There
are more things in comic books than are dreamt of in your philosophy.)
The Joker started out in 1940 as a very nasty criminal. The
first image of him is as a clown with an evil glare peering over his shoulder
at the reader. His first crime culminates in the corpse undergoing a change,
“Slowly the facial muscles pull the dead man’s mouth into a repellant, ghastly
grin, the sign of death from The Joker.”
During the Comic Code era, the crimes become less horrific
and more playful. The Joker merrily devises clever traps for Batman. And then, at
the end of the Comic Code era in the 1970s the ingeniously gruesome murders
return. When the infamous “Should Robin Die?” vote was conducted, there was no
doubt who the killer would be. He did it in the shack with a crowbar. Of late,
the crimes are even more viscerally gruesome.
You can see the transformation of the Joker perfectly reflected
in the movies. The Joker in the campy Adam West version was a giggling bad guy.
Jack Nicholson brought back the calculated sense of evil. Heath Ledger went
over the top. (It is incredible that Nicholson and Ledger pulled off incredible
performances with noticeably different personalities.)
After skipping through the history of comic books featuring
The Joker, what can we learn? Two things, one about comic books and one about
humans.
First, the comic books: if you read comic books from the last
75 years, it is readily obvious that the Joker is much more gruesome of late
than he ever has been before. But, when you look at the stories themselves,
they haven’t really changed all that much. Take away all the art, and just
print out the words, and there really is not a tremendous difference between
1940 and today. During the Comic Code years, nobody ever died, so you would
notice that difference. But the nature of the Joker has changed very little.
What has changed in the quality of the art, which is entirely
a technical innovation. Take any of the latest stories and recreate them using
the technology of yesteryear, and they would be much less visceral.
This is a perfect example of my constant complaint that
comic books are not taken more seriously by the Arbiters of High Taste. No
comic book I have ever read is Shakespeare or Dante or Eliot. No other writers
of literature of any genre are in that league either.
But, if we are willing to say that the written word can
produce great stories and that drawings and paintings can be great art, then
why is it impossible to conclude that a comic book, which is nothing more than
words married to art, could also be great?
Don’t get me wrong: nothing in the present collection rises
to the level of Great Books. But, some of the stories herein are as good as many
other books I read that nobody would ever think to disparage.
The moral: Just because there is art along with the words
does not make it low-brow schlock.
The second lesson from this book. What exactly motivates the
Joker?
Unlike your garden variety criminal, the Joker is not
interested in wealth or power. At times, it is obvious, he isn’t even really
all that interested in winning. He constantly battles his nemesis, Batman, but
it is very clear at many points that if he had the ability to kill off Batman,
the Joker would refrain from doing so. He needs Batman. He needs a worthy
opponent. Why? What does he hope to attain?
That’s just it. He isn’t trying to attain anything at all. He
just does horrible, gruesome, evil things because…it is fun.
Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.
Augustine wrote that to show how wicked he was, and by implication
how wicked we all are, so that he could tell us all how joyful we should be
that God rescued us from ourselves.
But, read that passage again. Stripped of the surrounding
narrative in Confessions, that passage
could easily be labeled The Joker’s Creed. While Augustine says all that in
lament and repentance, the Joker would utter those exact same words with pride
and glee.
Why read The Joker: A
Celebration of 75 Years? Because in a very worrisome way, it is an
autobiography. My autobiography. Your autobiography. The Joker is a truly great
villain, the greatest villain of all, because he is us.
“Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”
That is Gandalf talking to Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit.
First things first, if you don’t know about Gandalf or Bilbo
or Hobbits, then…well I have no idea what to say to you. How is that possible?
The immediate problem in discussing The Hobbit is not that nobody knows the book. Tolkien’s books are
right there with Rowling’s in being cultural landmarks.
The problem is that many people do not take The Hobbit seriously as literature. On
the other hand, some people take Tolkien as the be-all, end-all of literature. Tolkien
Studies is a genre unto itself.
How big is Tolkien Studies? Consider this: Touchstone Magazine has a section on their
website describing the process of submitting a book review. At the end of the discussion,
there is this paragraph:
On Lewis and Tolkien:Touchstone has a special interest in the work of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, but the massive proliferation of secondary literature on these authors, including submissions to this journal, has made it necessary that we only accept the especially interesting or illuminating. As their lives and writings are parsed ever finer we find less of what we receive passing these tests. This being said, we will be glad to read over what we are sent, but ask the author not to be excessively disappointed if even a well-written manuscript is turned down.
Here is the challenge, Dear Reader. Find something interesting
to say about The Hobbit that a) has
not already been said before and b) will be of interest to the entire range of
people between those who have never read the book and those who have read all
those books about Tolkien that Touchstone
is no longer reviewing.
Having stated the challenge I herewith ignore it. I’m not
even going to try to be original here.
To return the Gandalf’s statement at the outset. (Just to be
clear: the outset of this blog post; it is at the end of the novel.) We have
here a novel, a famous novel, a great novel, a wonderful, beloved and charming
novel, in which the protagonist is merely “quite a little fellow” in the big
world.
Part of us wants to reject that description of Bilbo
Baggins. He is a hero, right? He has a book detailing his adventures and he is
the starting place for the even grander, truly epic, story of The Lord of the
Rings. We very much want to think of Bilbo as larger than life.
But, when you look at the story, Gandalf is exactly right. Bilbo
is not larger than life. He is a little fellow, both in stature and in his
place in society. He muddles through the tale of this novel, and seemingly through
blind chance and a whole lot of luck, he ends up doing all sorts of important
things. But, it is all just chance.
Think about it: what does he actually do? (If you do not know the story, the following paragraph will
make zero sense.) Gandalf arranges to have Bilbo on the quest. Gandalf saves
everyone from the trolls. Bilbo finds the ring by chance (or as we find out in
The Lord of the Rings, the ring actually finds Bilbo). He is daring in the spider
episode, but doesn’t actually succeed in much; the elves are the ones who save
the dwarves. He rescues the dwarves only by the mere luck of everyone in the castle
getting drunk on the same night they ship out the barrels. He finds the secret
tunnel only by the complete luck of literally and accidentally being in the
right place on the right day at the right time. He does cleverly get Smaug to
reveal the chink in his armor (we can give him that). But, others kill Smaug. He
does beat the dwarves in his game with the Arkenstone—but it isn’t clear that
this helps matters. And since he accidentally gets knocked out while invisible
in the final war, he survives it.
And now you, Dear Reader, want to object that this is all
just belittling Bilbo. Ah, but it isn’t. The fact that Bilbo is not classically
Heroic or Great is exactly what makes him so Amazing. He is just a Little Fellow
in the Wide World. Yet, he is important. He is important because he is quite a little fellow in a wide world.
Consider his journey. He joins up with the dwarves on what
can only be described as a whim. But, then he keeps going. There is a constant
refrain in the book:
“Bother burgling and everything to do with it! I wish I was at home in my nice hall by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing!” It was not the last time that he wished that!
Not for the last time indeed. Bilbo has this wish through the
entire story. Bilbo would vastly prefer his quiet life in his little hole, but
he agrees to do something without having any idea at all what he was agreeing
to do. When the road gets rough, Bilbo just keeps going. He doesn’t keep going
because he sees himself as a Hero. He doesn’t keep going because he wants to
change the world. He doesn’t keep going because he has no fondness for a return
to his old life. He just keeps going because the future beckons and Bilbo wants
to see what is ahead.
Life is like that.
You and I, Dear Reader, are just like Bilbo Baggins. Quite a little fellow in a wide world. The choice before us is whether to just keep trudging along the path even when we want to retreat to our comfortable little hole in the ground. Just keep trudging. There is a nobility in that. Indeed, as The Hobbit teaches us, it is the most noble life of all.
In the genre of books which we can call “Triumph of the Human Will in the Face of Evil,” Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is a classic.
It is in the same class as Solzhenitsyn, which is extremely high praise.
But some books transcend their genre. This is one of those
books.
Douglass’ narrative is more than a story of the escape from
slavery. It stands as a metaphor for the liberation of the human mind.
Consider first Douglass Himself. Beginning in slavery in the
American South, Douglass realizes the necessary mental state to exist in that
condition:
I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.
Akin to Dante beginning in the Dark Wood, Douglass begins in
that thoughtless state. He is not a man. He has ceased to be a man and he is
merely a thoughtless beast.
Then, Douglass learns to read. And when he learns to read,
he learns to think. At this point, we want to rejoice that the thoughtless
beast has become a thinking man. But, for Douglass, that transition is painful,
very painful.
I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate.
Pause for a moment and ask: Why is this transition from
thoughtlessness to thoughtfulness so painful? If you were given the choice
between going through life as a thoughtless beast or as a thoughtful person,
which would you prefer? That seems obvious. But, consider: when you become thoughtful,
what will you think? You don’t know. So, why are you so certain you will be
happier?
For Douglass, the thoughts turn to freedom. And that tortures
him because he is not free.
In coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.
Patrick Henry thundered “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.”
That is one of those stirring phrases you hear in elementary school and you
cheer. But, could you say that? Would you rather have death than a lack of
liberty?
Hold that thought.
This is not just Douglass’ story. Think about the other side
of the story.
My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another. In entering up on the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me
Slavery proved as injurious to the slaveholders as to the
slaves? Really? Do you believe that? It takes about two seconds of reflection
to realize that the physical life of the slave is much worse than that of the
slaveholder. So, why would Douglass make this seemingly absurd claim?
Douglass is not talking about physical conditions. He is
concerned with the life of the mind. The slaves are thoughtless beasts. The
slaveholders?
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.
And there is the insight that is key to the whole narrative.
The slave holders are every bit as much thoughtless beasts as the slaves they
own. The slave owners think of themselves as educated and thoughtful and wise,
but they are viciously trapped in a mindset that denies the humanity of the
people around them, that brutalizes their fellow humans, that thinks it is
praising God when it is torturing the image of God.
As Douglass realizes, the move from becoming a thoughtless
slave to a thinking man is no different than the move from becoming the
thoughtless slave-owner to a thinking person. Both journeys are hard.
And us? Oh sure, none of us are slaves or slave owners. But
are our minds free? This is the question Douglass is asking the reader. It is
the same question Thoreau asks;
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him — my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.
We often talk as if the ability to read is the same thing as
the benefit of being able to read. But, it isn’t. Reading can liberate the
mind, but only if we read deeply and widely. To do so, however is not natural for
us. We, like the slaves and the slave-owners, have developed patterns of
thought which ossify. We get stuck in mental ruts. And to break those ruts is
terrifying.
What happens, for example, if your reading leads you to
wonder if it really true that if you cannot have liberty, you would rather die?
If you became convinced this was true, deeply convinced that this was true,
would your life be different?
Douglass learned to read. But he did not learn the burden of
slavery from reading an American abolitionist tract. He read a book of oratory
and found an Irish argument for Catholic emancipation.
Imagine assigning a tract about Catholic emancipation to
someone in an American high school, not as a historical work, but as a work
which might bring meaning to a 21st century high school student. The
first question that would be asked, “How is this relevant to me? I am not an
Irish Catholic living in 1795.” Since very few teachers would be able to give a
decent answer to that question, very few teachers would ever think to assign
it, or anything else remotely old and seemingly irrelevant. (The exceptions,
the high school teachers who would have an answer, are the Great Teachers.)
It is not an opaque answer. It is the same reason you should
read Douglass. It is the reason Douglass wrote his book. It is what he wants to
convince you.
It is relevant because
it has nothing to do with your immediate life. It is relevant because you are stuck in the rut of your
life and reading this thing that seems totally irrelevant to you might just
break you out of the mental slavery in which you find yourself, might just
induce a thought different than you have ever had before, might just convince
you to shake off your chains and be free.
In the realm of catchy titles and subtitles, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have hit pay dirt.
The Coddling of the American Mind. Immediately memorable with its riff on Allan Bloom’s book. “Coddling” is a word which is just unusual enough, just vivid enough, to be memorable.
Then the subtitle: How
Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. You
read that and are instantly agreeing or outraged. Home run.
Their thesis? Well, you just read it in the subtitle.
Their argument? Beginning with the set of students arriving
at college in 2013, there has been a generational shift. These new students are
crippled by three things.
First, they are fragile. The have grown up in a world in which
the adults around them constantly tried to remove all obstacles. They are used
to getting their way. If you say “No” to them, they crumble. They avoid risky
endeavors. They want everything to be safe and certain.
Second, the new generation of students firmly believes that their emotional reaction is a sure guide to truth. “This makes me angry or sad or uncomfortable” means the same thing as “This is wrong.” There are no unpleasant truths in their world. “I feel this should be so, therefore it must be so.”
Third, they divide the world into good (people who agree with
me) and evil (people who disagree with me). Since Nazis are in the second
category, everyone else who disagrees with me is equivalent to a Nazi. Thus,
“You disagree with me” is quite literally the same things as “You deny my right
to exist.”
Combine those three things and what do you get when the
students enter college? You get the constant stream of stories of campus
protest we have seen in the past few years. From Yale exploding about Halloween
costumes to a mob at Middlebury sending a professor to the hospital to Oberlin
losing a $44 million lawsuit, colleges are full of outraged students protesting
nonstop. “Crybullies,” as Roger Kimball memorably labeled the protesters.
Lukianoff and Haidt argue that the characteristics of the students,
coupled with the nature of school administrators has led straight to his mess. There
are lots of people to blame for the fact that students have become this way: parents,
lower levels of schools, the political climate, and the colleges themselves.
While reading the book, it was very hard not to immediately
realize the authors were describing the type of college at which I work and the
type of students at this college.
In other
words, this is the best book I have read describing the current generation of
college students.
Or so I thought.
I read this book with one of my reading groups this semester. (If you want to know more about the assorted reading groups, subscribe to the Newsletter!) The discussion with the students was fascinating and rather encouraging.
Students split on whether they liked the book. The
difference was illuminating. None of the students in this reading group fits
the description above of “coddled.” The difference in their reactions to the
book turned out to be who the student thought the book was describing. The
students who thought the book was describing the other students in the college
liked it; it struck them as an accurate portrayal. The students who did not
like it read it as a personal attack, and since it was not an accurate portrayal,
they disliked the book…intensely.
In the discussion, however, both the students who did and
did not like the book agreed very strongly on one thing: their generation is no
different than any previous generation. When I say they were adamant on this
point, it is an understatement. I tried very hard for a long time to make the
argument that their generation was indeed different, that they were more
fragile, more inclined to say “I feel therefore it is true,” more likely to divide
the world into good and evil. I did not even make a dent in their absolute
assurance that their generation was not different.
How did they deflect all the counter-arguments? They simply accepted that, yes, in fact, a set of students in their generation is, for example, incredibly fragile. They all have stories of classes in which other students used “I am uncomfortable with what you are saying” as a counterargument. The have all seen, and many have actually been victims of, the “If you don’t agree with me, you are evil like the Nazis” argument. But, they do not think it is accurate to impute those behaviors to the entire generation.
Which leads to the hopeful note. It is obviously true that any
characterization of a generation does not mean that every single member of that
generation fits the description. So, while some students do match Lukianoff and
Haidt’s definition of coddled, some students do not. What percentage of students
fit into which camp?
When you see what is happening on colleges, and even more so
when you work in one of these colleges, there is no doubt that there are almost
daily examples of the sort of behavior described in this book. It is everywhere.
But, and this is the fascinating thing, what percent of the student body is responsible
for all this activity?
What if, for example, only 30% of the student body fit
Lukianoff and Haidt’s characterization? What would happen? Well that would be
more than enough students to generate all the endless stories. That means, however
that 70% of the students are not like that at all.
Then when we look at college students in previous generations,
there was always a set of students who fit the “coddled” description. I was in
college in the 1980s, and I knew students who were fragile, I knew students who
were certain that their emotions were a good guide to truth, and I knew
students who hurled the label of Nazi at anyone with whom they disagreed.
Consider, for example, these song lyrics:
Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don’t criticize What you can’t understand Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly agin’ Please get out of the new one If you can’t lend your hand For the times they are a-changin’
Isn’t it obvious that this in the anthem of the modern college student? That song was written, by the way, before I was born.
So what has changed? What if it isn’t really a change in the
students at all? What if the change is
simply in the College Bureaucrats?
As I have thought about this idea, it does not seem all that far-fetched. Take a college-bound kid from any era. What is constant? The desire to grow-up and become an independent person. College is the first time in life when a child becomes an adult and gets to decide how to spend the day.
So, college students are naturally trying to create the adult world the way they want it to be. Once upon a time, a college set rules. Lots of rules. There were not just graduation requirements, but professors set their own rules on how classes would be structured and students would be evaluated. Dormitories had all sorts of rules on what you could or could not do. Colleges held out the threat of expulsion if you crossed too many lines.
Now, a new set of bureaucrats is in town. And these bureaucrats enable the worst student behaviors. A student complains about something, it doesn’t matter what. The initial bureaucratic response is now: how do we eliminate whatever it is the student is complaining about? There is not an evaluation of whether the complaint is justified or whether the complaint is about something inherent to the structure of college or even whether there are other students who share the complaint. Instead, the problem must be fixed. Instantly.
Students figured this out. The also realized that some complaints jump to the top of the priority lists of school bureaucrats.
An example: microaggressions. How did this become a thing? It was not the students who invented the idea of microaggressions and introduced them to college campuses. It was the administrative apparatus, abetted by sympathetic faculty, who introduced the idea of microaggressions. Students figured out that if they complain about a microaggression, there are large numbers of college bureaucrats who leap into action.
Microaggressions are a fantastic means of making sure there is always something to protest. There are virtually no macroaggressions on college campuses anymore. So, can we declare victory? Can we be proud of that fact? Of course not. You see, there are endless microaggressions. What constitutes a microaggression? Well, for example, asking what constitutes a microaggression is itself a microaggression because someone could construe the question in a negative manner.
If this argument is right, then Lukianoff and Haidt are casting their net too widely; the solution here is not at all about changing the way children are raised. (It is desirable to change the way children are currently being raised for other reasons, just not this one.) The solution is simply to get a better set of college bureaucrats. Indeed, as the authors note, the problem has crept downward, so we will need a better set of high school bureaucrats too.
But, is their subtitle right that this is a generation doomed to failure? Well, I am absolutely certain that none of the students with whom I discussed this book are doomed to failure. Indeed, if you are looking to hire someone, you really want to hire one of these students. (Convincing them to work for you, however, may be tough—they will all have many options.) And while this subset of students is unusual (after all, they are willing to spend a couple of hours multiple times a semester reading and arguing about books with me), maybe the majority of college students today are also not doomed to failure.
Then, after I had written all this, one of the students in this reading group forwarded an announcement about an activity which the College organized for the college students yesterday:
What does $70,000 a year buy? A blow-up T-rex sprinkler meeting a blow-up unicorn sprinkler!
