Somewhere in his book Shifting Involvements, I think it is, Albert Hirschman mentions the deterioration in service that may follow the political expansion of a beneficial program — and the ensuing general disappointment. If you take a system designed for small elites and stretch it to universal scale, as was done in many fields after World War II — medicine in Britain, education in the United States — you will quickly develop a deficit of professionals capable of delivering the service at anything like the original level of quality. (This is just one thing that can go wrong with a massive program.) Looking back, I don’t think that I ever experienced either the deficit or the disappointment, and that may well be because I grew up in what would have to be called privileged circumstances. Another explanation comes to mind, however, now that I’ve been prodded by a passage in David Priestland’s Merchant, Warrior, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes.

It’s not a key passage; it’s certainly not a sharp one. It’s actually a rather damp gob of abstract generalizations. But here it is:

The 1960’s and ’70s activists targeted all hierarchies — whether technocratic, corporate, ethnic, sexual, military, or aristocratic — but the university became a particularly fraught battleground. The vast expansions in higher education after the war brought an explosive clash between student expectations and the reality of university life: self-confident students demanding individual attention and intellectual fulfillment were herded into overcrowded classes taught by aloof academics. One American student remembered: “We really did speak of Berkeley as a factory. Classes were immense, and you didn’t feel that you could get near professors, because they were this presence way up in the front of the lectern.”

Berkeley, I thought. That was supposed to be a good school. You’d think that a good school, any good school, would aim for a small teacher-student ratio, simply because nothing else has been shown to be nearly as effective a way of ensuring that students learn. But, no. The big universities were larded with lecture courses, often conducted by star lecturers who shared the knack of a good entertainer for holding the audience’s attention. I took one such course, the art history survey that all freshmen in the humanities were obliged to take at Notre Dame, and I remember the lecturer, Robert Leader, very well. The course did me no harm, beyond reinforcing the already widespread misconception that images constitute reality. (That, in other words, looking at a slide of Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral is tantamount to looking at the original painting.) It may well be that certain kinds of knowledge are best imparted in such general, roughly comprehensive survey courses. Beyond making very broad introductions, however, lectures are probably useless.

I did take another lecture course, later, as an elective. Seventeenth-Century Europe. The professor lectured. The students wrote papers. The professor liked my papers, but I stopped writing them when we got to the English Civil War, which I already knew a lot about and in which his lectures did nothing to rekindle an interest. I stopped going to class, and failed the course for the usual reason: I didn’t take the final exam. That was my brand of student activism.

My core courses, the classes that I had to take for my major, which was in Great Books, were quite different, and I never failed any of them, doing poorly only in History of Science, because it was so much more difficult than anything I had encountered before. Our Great Books classes were small, and they were entirely devoted to discussing what we read. There was very little room for bullshit, and our teachers were especially good at catching us out when we tried to substitute it for actual knowledge or clear thinking. I don’t recall that there was anything extraordinary about the Great Books program; on the contrary, I thought that it was normal. It was what you went to college to learn, I thought. We read all the important books and we learned how to talk about them intelligently. There was nothing flashy or brilliant about it — we were kids! But it wasn’t boring, either. I couldn’t understand why anybody would study anything else at the undergraduate level. I still can’t.

In any case, my self-confident demands for individual attention and intellectual fulfillment were more than satisfied. Indeed, I was more or less required to increase them — especially to get through History of Science. I could thank the Great Books program (developed at the University of Chicago), or I could thank Notre Dame and the very persistent faculty members who prodded me to think, or I could thank myself for following a genuinely conservative instinct that protected me from the Cultural Revolution that then raged through universities around the world and that afflicted so many of my more intelligent contemporaries with an unattractive and unhelpful cynicism. I’m just Greatful.

As the Great Books seminars progressed, I realized that we were not, in fact, reading all the important books — there were lots of others, off our list. Which was fine, not a problem, no reason for activist protest. Because, somewhere along the line, I learned what I have come to regard as the most important thing that any undergraduate can learn: college is itself an introduction, a beginning. I have been reading and writing ever since.

***

The notion that there were other important books, books not on our reading list, was not stressed by exponents of the Great Books program. It was tacitly understood that Great Books was a haven from the stormy arguments about relevance that meaninglessly sprouted like weeds in the other branches of the humanities. It was even more tacitly understood that the Great Books program, as tailored by the Notre Dame faculty, was an immersion — more than an introduction but less than an indoctrination — in the wellsprings of the philosophy and theology of the Roman Catholic Church. (Gee! What a surprise.) I was already a firm agnostic, so I had no trouble with this at all. The question of the existence vel non of God took a completely different shape in my mind; it was immediately translated into another language — another way of thinking, really. When faced with the question, Is there a God?, I replied with different question, Why do some people believe that there is a God? I still do. This is the only question that I am able to entertain. When I was a student, it made Plato, Aristotle, Dante and the others relevant in a way that was probably not intended by my teachers.

As a child, I worried about being sent to Hell for my failure to believe in God, and worried even more about being unable to resolve this paradox. For who was going to send me to Hell if not God? My parents? (Could they? I really did wonder.) I wished that I could believe, because I wanted to be a good boy, and I wanted to do the right things. But I was much, much too stubborn, much too much myself. Lack of faith was as manifest and undeniable as height. But unlike height, it was Wrong, and, also unlike height, it was something that I could keep to myself. At every stage of my slide toward adulthood, I learned how much observance I could slip out of without getting into trouble.

I continued going to Mass, however, and would probably still be going to Mass if it were not for the terrible swerve taken by John Paul II. This arguably great man but certainly lamentable pope would have made a protestant out of me if I had believed in God in the first place. “Reactionary” is not strong enough a word to describe the offensiveness of current “Church teaching” on issues of sexuality and ordination — issues laughably irrelevant to the message of Christ (about whose existence there is no question). I was thinking of all this baggage yesterday, reading an essay-review by John Connelly on the Polish intellectual Leszek KoÅ‚akowski, in The Nation. KoÅ‚akowski was one of those Marxists who “saw the light” and switched teams. He became a stout defender of his countryman’s religious conservatism. “For all his youthful anti-clericalism,” Connelly writes, “it seems that KoÅ‚akowski could never escape the gravitational hold of traditional Polish culture.”

What he abhorred about secularism was not so much its negation as its universalization of the sacred, a development that affected even the church. Liberal Catholics blessed all forms of worldly life, creating a mode of Christian belief lacking a concept of evil—that is, the understanding that evil is not the absence or subversion of virtue but an irredeemable fact—and leaving the church no reason or means to stand against the secular. The dissolution of the sacred from within and without had observable effects on the culture as a whole, contributing to a growing amorphousness and laxity in making distinctions. This was dangerous, Kołakowski argued, because the sacred gave to social structure its “forms and systems of divisions,” whether between death and life, man and woman, work and art, youth and age. He advocated no mythology in particular, and would admit only that a tension between development and structure was inherent in all human societies. Yet it was clear that certain developments troubled him deeply, and if the liberation movements unleashed in the 1960s continued, he feared the outcome would be “mass suicide.”

Connelly’s piece made me wonder if the question of good and evil isn’t simply another question about the existence of God. The questions appear to be equally propped up by an emotional dread of “nihilism” — the belief that there is nothing to believe in, that nothing matters. Is belief the issue, perhaps? What is belief? Could it be a kind of oxygen that some, but not all, minds require in order to function? Can I say that I believe in anything? I think that I believe a lot of things — but not in anything. I take a lot of things to be the case. But I don’t need them to be the case — I don’t get that far. Murder is wrong. Is there anything more to be said? Why do I believe that murder is wrong? Because I believe that we are all human beings and that none of us is sufficiently superior to the rest of us to have the right to take a life, except in self-defense. If there is more to that train of thought, I can’t imagine it. I don’t believe that Americans are better than Chinese. I can imagine believing such a thing, but there mere imagining it makes me feel foul.

If only I could believe in evil! Then I could really do something, really have some fun with my distaste for television, spectator sports, and automobiles.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 10th, 2013 at 9:29 am.