When we lived in traditional communities, we had responsibilities, duties, obligations and debts. Whether we were thought a good person or an inadequate one was arrived at mostly by comparing our conduct to a community standard of doing our part. We thought of ourselves as having parts, because we assumed there was a whole we shared-whether this whole was the family, the town, the nation or all of humanity. This whole provided the context for judgement.

I don’t want to romanticize traditional communities. Sometimes those communities were stifling and blinded by obsolete or superstitious traditions, and sometimes they were cold and inhospitable to people who were different. Sometimes their understanding of both what was possible and what was desirable was narrow and rigid. Sometimes they were governed by petty tyrants.

Today, with ready access to information from around the world and the means to move away from places that are not congenial to us, most of us have an unprecedented freedom from local control. And so we find ourselves facing different problems. Many of them flow from thinking all those contexts of family and neighborhood are mere resources for individuals in pursuit of gratification. It appears that many of us have come to feel a stronger sense of duty to our own fulfillment than to our families or our communities.

This is partly an effect of the rise of therapeutic culture.

As modernity increased our choices and our sense of liberation, all the usual ways of finding unhappiness were widely tried, including experiments with addictive substances, inattention to the well-being of others, uncontrolled sexual practices and ethical shortcuts in business and in personal affairs. Once troubled people might have gone to churches to examine the stories of their lives, perhaps revising their personal narratives through repentance. But science had undermined the authority of religion, so unfulfilled, angry and numb people looked for other places to talk about what had gone wrong.

A class of nonjudgmental technicians of the psyche arose, turning on the meter and speaking the modern dialect with a slightly scientific inflection. They offered hope to people overwhelmed by confusion after following thousands of paths that had turned out not to be paths at all but mere openings in the jungle that led nowhere.

The scientific study of the human mind is a vast endeavor that can’t be accurately characterized by any brief summary. Sincere and talented people have advanced our knowledge on hundreds of fronts, and what we have learned about organic irregularities in the brain, the causes of depression, the chemical mechanisms of insanity, the catalysts for criminality, the ways we miscommunicate and all the other issues that attract the attention of psychologists have brought us many blessings.

But it’s also true that we have developed a thriving market for therapies, and that new therapies are spread and advanced by inventing catchy names for new maladies and costly promises of relief. In fact, descriptions of maladies and cures have become a major genre of imaginative literature consumed by the middle class.

Miserable people are vulnerable to promises of help, and such promises have proliferated like diet plans and get rich schemes, and for similar reasons. The most notorious in the realm of education might be the self-esteem movement. This was the topic of a 1996 cover story in the American Educator, the official publication of the American Federation of Teachers. Psychologist Barbara Lerner argued that the “post-modern psychology” that “swallowed up modern psychology and most of education too” in the 1970s, “reduced every problem in life to question of self-esteem or the lack of it, blurring the boundaries between therapy and school, diluting both, and making education a subservient profession.” In doing so, “it made a relentless focus on the self the order of the day in classrooms across the land.”

Psychology professor Roy E. Baumeister, in the same issue insisted that in spite of all the passionate rhetoric about the positive effects of high self- esteem, the evidence that has been mustered indicates that “self-esteem doesn’t have much impact” on all the personal and social ills that believers have associated with it. Nevertheless, making schools responsible for improving student self-esteem had far-reaching consequences. “The results,” according to Lerner, “were dismal–kids learned less, respect for teachers declined, disorder and violence and unhappiness increased, and a lot of Americans lost faith in schools and respect for teachers.”

The self-esteem movement has now lost its momentum, persisting as network of conventions and unexamined pieties, but new therapies arrive with the regularity of the seasons. In schools, the language of therapy has all but driven out the language of education. By translating personal difficulties into language that sounds impersonal, objective, and rational, therapists project a welcome appearance of competence, a sense that someone understands what is happening and that therefore things are under control. They offer administratively simple solutions to vexing problems. Administrators can “address” even the most tangled messes by recommending that someone get counseling. It is seldom necessary to discuss what, exactly, a counselor might do or whether it will actually work. All that usually needs to be said is something about “servicing needs.”

Many students have learned that they do not have to submit to the demands of schooling, because they can blame their failure on a system that has not provided the right service. Many parents are coached by an expanding corps of nonteaching service professionals, who have to a large extent won control of the public discourse of education, to think of every misbehavior as a sign of an “unmet need.”

A few years ago, while teaching at a psychiatric hospital for troubled adolescents-nearly all were diagnosed as “oppositional-defiant”–I made a routine classroom request, “Take out your work from yesterday.”

A 15-year-old boy exploded with anger and began shouting obscenities. He threw his desk at me, screaming violent threats. To protect myself and other kids, I restrained him and dragged him from the class, where several other staff members rapidly came to help. Later, other staff members and I met with him. He had stopped swearing and begun crying.

“It’s your fault,” he said. “You’re supposed to fix me-” he pushed out his lower lip-”and I’m still like this.”

No doubt the kid had problems. “Needs,” he’d been taught to call them. He was searching, albeit ineffectively, for something beyond the self. He covered his notebooks and forearms with gang insignia, dreaming of belonging to a group that would provide an identity. I wish the sort of problems he faced were rare, but the truth is that most teachers face at least some young people like him. Some teachers face a great many of them every day–kids who demand that we cater to them and blame us for all their failures. We only exist, in the story we have told them, to provide services to meet their needs. But try teaching someone who has been systematically taught to blame you for his poor conduct.

One of the greatest popularizers of the therapeutic view was Abraham Maslow, and the general tone he helped create is still a powerful presence in many schools. Though he is now widely criticized his language is ubiquitous in schools. Nearly every teacher in America has been taught his “hierarchy of needs.” He promised to provide a “scientific” basis for the study of motivation (though his method was closer to a cocktail party than a laboratory) and at the same time promised welcome liberation from what many felt were stifling orthodoxies. Maslow argued that the old “regime” with its concern for “discipline” should be replaced with a new therapeutic regime: “If therapy means a pressure toward breaking controls and inhibitions, then our new key words must be spontaneity, release, naturalness, self-acceptance, impulse awareness, gratification, permissiveness.”

He described an ideal “self-actualizing” person as the superior human that the new therapeutic regime would foster. This new type would be “healthy.” People with “unmet needs” were “unhealthy.” He used “needs” to refer to everything from the body’s dependence on oxygen, to the soul’s desire for a mate, to the addict’s desire for a cigarette. In his thought, anything that anyone might desire became a need.

With this value system in place, all religious or moral disciplines could be dismissed as “sick-man-created” gratuities. If a person was truly superior, i.e., healthy, doing what he wanted made all the sense that needed to be made. “Education, civilization, rationality, religion, law, government, have all been interpreted by most as being primarily instinct-restraining and suppressing forces. But if our contention is correct that instincts have more to fear from civilization than civilization from instincts, perhaps it ought to be the other way about …… perhaps it should be at least one function of education, law, religion, etc., to safeguard, foster, and encourage the expression and gratification of the instinctoid needs.”

The tale Maslow told was little more than the dream of self, a theory of selfishness packaged with a smattering of jargon. For him, the “self-actualizing human” was at the apex of creation, and love was a mid-level appetite. He seemed puzzled by what other writers said about love. He mocked Erich Fromm for saying that love implies “responsibility, care, respect, and knowledge,” because “this sounds more like a pact or a partnership of some kind rather than a spontaneous sportiveness.” Healthy lovers, he urged us to believe, “can be extremely close together and yet go apart quite easily.”

Civilization should exist to encourage the gratification of instincts. Education should serve the appetite. Healthy people are “lusty animals” who don’t make commitments. It was a small step from such beliefs to the faith that all social and personal problems stemmed from insufficient catering to the desires of the self, and to the resulting self-esteem movement, that attributed all social ills to people not feeling good about themselves.

The ecologist Aldo Leopold taught us that living systems are full of laws that begin working at some lower limit and stop working at some upper limit. In education, many questions are not so much about what is right or wrong, as about how far a good approach stays good. Building students’ sense of self-worth is a good thing. But making the enhancement of self-esteem the main focus of schooling is as harmful as eating too much healthy food.

Freed by therapeutic culture from inhibitions once implanted by education, civilization, rationality, religion and law, many young people find little that is binding. They tend to be nonjudgmental, as they have been taught, but this is linked to the daily challenges of indifference and disengagement which they handle by sending a text, or finding a new game, seeing more and more surely that nothing is sacred and that life is absurd. The killers at Columbine High laughed uproariously as they went about their latest game. “Nobody else is like us,” they had written. “We’re the only two people who seem to understand the meaning of life.”

So the self ends, with nothing to interdict its fantasy. Not long before the shootings at Columbine High, Anthony Kennedy, writing the Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), had confused the dream of self with the law of the land. The Court proclaimed in its notorious “mystery passage” that “the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

We are truly in strange times when the highest court seems to agree that education, civilization, rationality, religion, government and apparently even the rule of law should not impinge on one’s personal concept of things.

“The image of ourselves as center of the world is fantasy-” says theology professor Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. “perhaps, in its sheer detachment from reality, even a form of madness.” One would like to hear how Justice Kennedy would explain to the Columbine duo, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, why their concept of existence and meaning of the universe should not stand, assuming he believes it should not.

Some years ago Philip Rief in Fellow Teachers said of “therapeutics” that “their final know-how will be to. . .play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modesty, therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth.” Violence, he said, is the final therapy of therapies.

Nietzsche had warned us that as the authority of religion receded, it took with it the rationale for any authority. Each person became a law and a kingdom unto himself. Every obligation began to feel like an infringement. Those with will and commitment would do what they would do. Power would heed only power. “If you will not have God,” T. S. Eliot wrote, seeing that Nietzsche was right, “you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

My troubled student had been in therapy nearly his entire life and was literally screaming that he felt enslaved to moods and appetites, and that he needed to escape from the prison of self. His normal adolescent egocentricism, which a sensible family or school would once have contradicted as a matter of course, had instead been nurtured. We were supposed to care about him, but now we were confronting him about his bad behavior. We were supposed to improve his self-esteem, but he still didn’t feel good about himself. We were supposed to make school fun, but he still felt miserable. What could he possibly think? He had heard all his life about our responsibilities toward him, but he had heard little about his responsibilities to the other students, to the teacher who had come prepared to teach, or to the community that surrounded him.

He understood no adequate rules of conduct, no power to constrain his passions, no understanding of the linkage between action and consequence. He had no sense of the future because he had not glimpsed how steady, long-term work comes to fruition. He knew nothing of the sacred or of devotion realities beyond himself. He knew something was wrong, and he was begging us to fix it.

The psychiatric hospital where I worked illustrated a likely future for much of public education. The medicalization of education is a huge and growing business. The hospital was a for-profit operation. Most of the money came from Medicaid and other government programs. Staff meetings focused on which services were billable and which were not. Counseling and drugs were billable. Teaching was not. The explicitly stated goal was to provide as many billable services as possible while keeping nonbillable services to the legal minimum. People would be foolish to expect anything different from corporations that proclaim their goal is profit.

Each of the kids saw a doctor a couple times a month, because his signature on a diagnosis authorized sending bills to the government. Even in less drastic environments, many kids today are dependent on their counselors and their medications to get through the day, and new problems are identified every year. As Ivan Illich pointed out years ago, the problem industries thrive by creating problems and providing services, and there so far seem to be few limits to growth in this direction. Already estimates say that half of Americans suffer from some form of “mental illness” sometime during their lifetimes. The other half are being studied.

Education and therapy are polar opposites with a continuum between them, so one can’t draw a clear line between them. In a nutshell, education aims at replacing solipsism with information, knowledge and wisdom. It looks outward, to the world. Therapy aims at justifying the self’s desires. To teach is to assume authority, and the therapeutic approach is to dissolve authority. In therapy, the self is the final authority. In education, truth is the final authority.

A kind of self-forgetfulness is necessary to become educated. It’s necessary to obey some authority, even it’s only the authority of a text or of an unbending reality. The path to mastery, as every master knows, is through obedience. We learn what is necessary and those relatively few ways that will work. A person preoccupied with his or her needs will have trouble paying much attention to multiplication tables, the periodic chart, Shakespeare, the governing of the Roman Empire, Boyle’s gas laws, or even theories of patriarchal oppression.

Self-forgetfulness, a merging of one’s mind and will with issues beyond the self, is one of the great pleasures of learning. It’s sad to think of young people not being taught how to put their suffering in perspective by visiting stories in history or literature or scripture, not learning the instant release from many depressions that follows serving someone else, not being helped through personal tragedy by being drawn into meaningful work and not being shown how to get out of predicaments by studying the mechanism of the trap.

As community disintegrates, the demand for therapy grows.

These stories are strengthened by the spread of an unconstrained global economy that dislocates and dissolves traditional communities. Frightened people seek shelter in all manner of religious, ethnic and racial identities. People who are making lots of money tend to develop a loyalty to the machinery of wealth, but most people are not making lots of money. Instead, they see that the new economy does not need them, and they know what happens to people who are not needed. They are susceptible to the story of tribal zealotry, which is just as simple as that of market zealotry.

Of course, the tendency to rally together with others like ourselves and to distrust outsiders doesn’t really need to be taught. It comes to us easily, and there are always historical evidences to bolster it. One day I was walking down the hall in the school where I was principal and two scuffling boys didn’t notice me until they bumped into me. I put my hand on one of the boy’s shoulders as I passed and said, “Calm down.” It was a nonevent of the sort that people who work with young people handle without much thought every day.

But this day one of the boys whirled around and glared at me. “You’re just picking on me because you’re a racist,” he said.

I knew the boy’s family, so I knew that his family included Indians, but like many of the families on the Flathead Reservation, including my own, his had intermarried extensively and few people would identify him as Indian based on his physical characteristics. He had sandy hair, green eyes, and fair skin. His family was not poor, and I doubted he had experienced much prejudice because of his race.

Clearly though he had been taught to see white authorities through the lense of racial distrust, if not outright hostility. I think he had also been taught that it’s fun to challenge authority with power words.

I related this story to a school administrator, an African American, from Milwaukee and he shook his head and grinned. “Whooee!” he said, “I’m glad I’m not a white man!”

He was making a joke, of course, the humor of which lay in the role reversal. Role reversals are so common in history that they are one of the basic patterns of the human condition. They are part of how we learn. A good education would help people see the world through the eyes of both kings and beggars, victors and victims, oppressors and the oppressed, and all these experiences exist in the stories of most families, somewhere in their history. It is often the case that we learn the harm we do by the harm we suffer. If we are wise, we can learn this vicariously by reading history and literature, experiencing what our fellows, of all races and nationalities, have experienced. Stories easily cross racial and national boundaries, affirming the essential kinship of all of humanity.

Cultural pluralists believe that the heritage of all peoples can be accessible to all other peoples. One needn’t be Nez Perce to claim Chief Joseph as a cultural ancestor, or Jewish to include Isaiah among one’s spiritual fathers. Cultural pluralists believe that various cultures can work together in some ways to build a larger culture, of which all are a part. Pluralists work toward a future in which many cultures find ways to balance the preservation of what is unique and cherished in each with finding common ground with others on public issues. Cultural pluralists recognize that American culture is a tapestry of many cultures, and they understand that we are free to seek insight, nobility, clarity, wisdom, wit and beauty wherever it may be found, among all religious and ethnic traditions. One might think that America’s wide-ranging success at building a pluralistic society would be a source of tremendous encouragement.

This sort of cultural pluralism is poorly served by ethnic pride that sees history only as a contest between fixed categories of people: Catholic and Protestant, black and white, Muslim and Christian. What are we to make of American history? Many of us want America’s failures to be the important story. They want stories of slavery, of religious persecution and of forceful exclusions of Native Americans to be the main truth about our history.

Of course, such stories are not new. They come close to being business-as-usual in world history. It seems to me that the important story of America is that through all these troubles Americans have built cities where Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and atheists go about their business without pogroms or identification badges or papers, though we need to remain forever vigilant. The hopeful story is that America abolished slavery, and that America extended full citizenship to Native Americans, and enforced at great cost treaty rights negotiated with their ancestors. Though cultural warriors like to focus on the failures of the government to honor treaties, that is far from the entire story. It would have been easy for the powerful to deconstruct the treaties, which were often poorly wrought agreements negotiated under tents in the wilderness between mid-level bureaucrats and small bands of powerless nomads. But the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld many treaty provisions. The only reason for doing so is a sense of honor and justice.

The impulse behind ethnic pride is to define one’s identity by one’s enemies. As Neil Postman points out, “To promote the understanding of diversity is, in fact, the opposite of promoting ethnic pride. Whereas ethnic pride wants one to turn inward, toward the talents and accomplishments of one’s own group, diversity wants one to turn outward, toward the talents and accomplishments of all groups.” Skinheads and white militiamen are strikingly similar in important ways to advocates of Afrocentrism and Native Pride. The impulse to circle the wagons is the same.

One can’t understand moves made by white supremists without understanding moves made by their opponents any more than one can make sense of a chess game if only the white pieces are visible. Extremists of the left and the right inhabit the same story and have become characters in each others’ nightmares. Their enemies are their reality.

Powerlessness and hardship and fear are not the exclusive possessions of any ethnic group. Poorly educated and financially strapped whites who are not powerful people, and there are many of them, are deeply threatened by the political success of groups organized around hostility to whites. In turn, people of color are threatened by skinheads and white militias. As either group advances, it frightens its opposition, leading them to gain recruits and to strengthen their commitments. This is one of the oldest patterns in human affairs, and the stories the different sides tell themselves guarantee the conflict between them will intensify. This plot has no ending except for one group to destroy the other.

We can learn to see a world teeming with varied cultural ways of taking advantage of nature’s offerings and of exploring possibilities for agriculture, government, cuisine, music, dance and worship. But when we focus on a narrow tale of raw power, we are easily intoxicated by self-righteousness and rage. We can believe that weak people are always oppressed by powerful people, which leaves us no choice between being oppressed or being the oppressor. We can study the many forms of oppression and begin to understand all narratives–indeed all discourse–as disguised power stratagems. We can think that everything is political. We can even believe that the collapse of existing power structures will empower the weak.

But this isn’t what happens. The collapse of governments empowers criminals. The plight of the weak gets even worse. Nonetheless, to militants rage is intoxicating, forgiveness is weak and forgetting is an act of disloyalty.

We can become quite emotionally attached to our anger, our most meaningful relationships with others premised on a shared sense of embattlement. We may say we want peace, and even believe it, without quite seeing how we have thought ourselves into a reality in which to lose our enemy or our hatred would be to lose the meaning of our lives along with membership in our community. People who meet for intense sessions to plot strategies against their enemies don’t doubt that their lives have meaning and purpose. To the ideologue, ordinary people are small-minded pawns who don’t see the grand scheme of things. In our desire for a better world, it’s easy to transform our resentment into a moral program, our self-hatred into nobility, our extremism into heroism, our quest for power into a zeal for utopian justice, and our emptiness into a new morality. True believers, Eric Hoffer called such victims of bad stories.

The best that can be hoped for is separatism, often described as “self-determination.”

The desire for separatism, however, is not sated by its victories. It isn’t a principle that leads to any sustainable state of affairs. Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs. McWorld makes the point by focusing on Canada. “If Quebec leaves Canada, why should not the Cree leave Quebec? And why then should not anglophone villages leave Quebec or opt out of a self-determining Cree nation if it is such that they find themselves inhabiting? And if a few francophones reside in the predominantly Cree region of a predominantly French Quebec, what about their status?” The separatist desire leads to Balkanization and strife.

There are several reasons the story of ethnic pride doesn’t motivate students to do well in school.

The main one is that this story teaches that the route to feeling good about oneself is a matter of being part of the “good” group. No authority outside the group, which will likely include not only teachers but most of the voices in a good library, is granted much authority. Militants on the left and on the right are both hostile to school authorities who, they feel, are hostile to their essential identity. Both are indifferent or hostile to what outsiders (such as scientists and historians) have to say. When these attitudes become habit, teaching authority is likely to be felt as dictatorial, as an act of dominance. But without authority there is no teaching.

All this undermines liberal education’s central tenet–that we should seek evidence and follow it–and the ethnic pride folks have little use for liberal education’s caveat to consider questions from many points of view and to ask rigorous questions. When the right answer is already known, or deeply felt, questions may be threats rather than tools. When the right answer is the one that makes us feel most proud, we can believe anything, and we parody the pursuit of knowledge. At the extremes of Afrocentrism, the claim is made that good and evil have biological roots, and that the more skin pigmentation a person has, the more goodness she has. Perhaps this illustrates a common historical pattern: oppressed people imitating their oppressors.

The ethnic pride story retreats from the historical difficulty we now face, abandoning the work of forming common ideals and principles from which we might yet build a world-wide civilization–a true family of all humanity.

As gods go, money is one of the worst.

Like most myths that have staying power, this one has some truth. It’s true that work–effort toward a goal–is the foundation of most people’s lives. How large and how good the order we build for ourselves has much to do with the wisdom and persistence of our effort. The young seldom realize how true this is, so guidance into wise and persistent work should be a foundation of the education we offer them. And, yes, it is a truism that we need things–food, clothing and shelter.

But from this truth it’s a small step into an old error: seeing the economy, which is a means of providing the materials of a good life, as an end in itself, and seeing the jobs it offers as the only work in town. Neil Postman notes that this story “is rarely believed by students and has almost no power to inspire them.” Besides, he says, “any education that is mainly about economic utility is far too limited to be useful, and, in any case, so diminishes the world that it mocks one’s humanity.”

He is correct that this story doesn’t motivate most high school students. After all, competition only motivates those who think they might win. How hard would you practice your basketball skills if someone told you next week you would play Kevin Durant one-on-one and the winner would receive a thousand dollars? You’d have to be a far better player than I am to break a sweat over your chances with that.

By the time they get to high school, students who are below average at schoolish skills know who they are. They know someone else will always have the answer more quickly or in a form the teacher likes better. A cliché among experienced teachers is that threatening such kids with bad grades is like beating a dead horse.

A first-year teacher told me a few weeks ago that she was frustrated with some students in her class who simply refuse to read or write anything. One young man was daydreaming through a test, not bothering to write answers on his paper. “This test is going to have a big impact on your grade,” she told him helpfully. “I know,” he said more in defeat than rebellion. “I never pass English.”

The life-is-a-market-economy story also fails to motivate other kids: those whose families are well off and who expect things to come naturally, those whose parents have never organized their lives around jobs and who have only a vague sense of what that means, and those who see that this story simply has poor answers to the questions that actually drive them-questions about who will love them, how they will matter, and where joy might lie.

I should make it clear that I’m not criticizing capitalism as an economic system. Poor people do better under capitalism than under other socialism, communism and various other economic forms we have tried. Capitalism has increased our wealth, leading to better food, better health and more educational opportunities. I have no desire to see people lose the freedom to start enterprises, to buy and sell or to own property, and I see economic equality arrived at by any means other than the freely given gifts of the wealthy as a mischievous chimera.

What I am criticizing is the belief that profitability provides an adequate guide to how we conduct our lives. Most of us have passed up opportunities to make money that would have required us to do things we thought were wrong. Most of us hold some things too dear to sell-our relationships to loved ones, our honest opinion, our vote. Capitalism does not require that everything be for sale, and it does not require us to allow the love of profit to overcome other values.

As we begin to lose such restraints, the life-is-a-market-economy story encourages people to suppress and sometimes extinguish their concern for what happens to others. The unconstrained pursuit of profit unleashes the demons of history. If the political disquiets that plague the world today are traced back in history, we inevitably find someone placing the acquisition of wealth above the welfare of their neighbors.

To pick one example from thousands, a hundred and fifty years ago, British government policy removed from Ireland millions of dollars worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs and poultry-enough to feed twice the Irish population-while nearly a half million Irish citizens were dying of starvation or famine-related disease. A family with a barrel of grain could not eat it because it was marked for the rent. Tenant farmers were evicted and their thatched huts pulled down as they watched, with no means of survival, so that the absentee owners could use the land to grow food for Englishmen at a profit.

In Skibbereen, monstrous graves called “the pits” were dug in the churchyard of Abbeystrowry, and the dead were dropped in without funeral or ceremony. In more remote areas, bodies ravaged by starving dogs and rats were dragged into ditches and covered with rocks and brambles. People were found dead beside the road with pieces of grass and leaves in their mouths. A traveler in Kenmore, County Kerry, one day met a dog traveling with a child’s head in its mouth.

As this went on British lawmakers continued to argue against any policy that would interfere with the rights of those in power to make a profit, and those in power continued to make money. Irish starved in a bountiful country while land went to weeds because they had no money to rent it. The Irish were victims not of the potato blight so much as of their lords’ love of profit. The needs of profit seem so absolute to believers that to ignore them is to ensure the destruction of society.

What on earth might have happened if poor people were allowed to farm land they did not own and had no legal right to?

People have always sensed that the real powers of the earth are, like gravity, invisible. We see their effects but we do not see them. The earth has never known a people who did not believe in the invisible powers, who did tell stories that promised insight into how to manipulate, appease, or extort power from them. Small societies tend to remember they are never far from starvation, so fear leads readily to attempts to control the world through rituals-ensuring good crops by, for example, slicing the jugulars of young girls.

All societies are religious, worshiping what they understand of power. Stockbrokers are as enamored of invisible forces as any other pagan tribe. In binges of “downsizing”–firing thousands of workers-corporate spokesmen utter the words of their faith with the same cold-blooded certainty that must have accompanied the incantations of Aztec priests performing human sacrifices. What was being done was ordained and required by higher powers: “We need to remain competitive; if we are not competitive the gods of the economy will devour us. Therefore, to save ourselves we need to devour each other.”

People whose first motivation is to grasp the world’s power learn to bow to the dictates of global financial markets, the sanctity of unconstrained competition, and the glory of quarterly profits. Profit is sacred, and what it demands cannot be ignored.

Many people, and not just students, understand quite accurately that the market story is an attack upon them rather than a communal narrative they can join. Many people recognize it as the political ideology of activists whose agenda, if successful, will strip them of dignity and more. In many cities and villages and hamlets around the planet, winners who expect to make a killing-the common slang is revealing-by what’s happening around them are easy to find. But the others are more numerous, trying to stay out of the way, maybe hoping like the D student at the back of the room that they won’t be noticed.

Today millions live in poverty and in the wastelands left behind as an “invisible hand” rakes unimaginably vast treasures into the coffers of the more fortunate. Meanwhile, our children are taught a faith that is much the same as that held by the British during the potato famine. They too worshiped an economy built on certainty that the need for profit comes first. The misery of the underclass created no obligation on the part of traders, speculators and agents whose first duty was to increase their wealth.

Most societies have taught their young to resist the profit-as-religion story, teaching that greed and unbalanced self-interest are bad. Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, resorted to using iron rather than gold and silver for money to put an impediment in the path of those seeking gain. Accumulating vast stores of iron made one a laughingstock in other cities, and transporting enough of the money to make much difference was so difficult that even thieves tended not to bother. Lycurgus did this so that people wouldn’t be distracted by their financial prospects from the pursuit of virtue-as he understood virtue, of course.

If we conduct an education that pushes back against the notion that the main reason for learning is to make money, we needn’t worry that people will suddenly become careless about prosperity. Our concern with money is nothing so flimsy as that. Education has always been concerned with the inculcation of virtues precisely because the vices are so powerfully ingrained in our nature. We do not teach chastity out of hope that people will no longer procreate-there’s scant danger of that-and we do not teach thrift out of hope that people will become misers. Rather, we seek to balance strong natural tendencies with prudent forethought.

The economy is real and those who completely turn their backs on it are punished, as every unmarketable artist learns. Money originated in temples, one of the power strategies of the priestly class. People have always granted it sacred powers. “Like spellbound savages in the presence of the holy,” William H. Desmonde tells us, we endure rituals of high finance, watching “in wonder the solemn proceedings, feeling in a vague, somewhat fearful way that our lives and the happiness of our children are at the mercy of mysterious forces beyond our control.” The wealthy know that money is not primarily about buying things. It is primarily about power. With money we can bend the forces of the earth to serve us. Disease, social turbulence and disaster are held at bay for those with financial might, and those without it are vulnerable and naked.

When we seem to say that winning the money competition is the main project in life, a teenager who knows that within school he will never finish ahead can make only dim sense of his prospects. One intelligent response is to withdraw, disengage, find other stories.

At school, our emphasis on grades and test scores-the coin of the educational realm we have created-leads us to neglect other motivators, some of which have extraordinary power. The desire to join is far stronger in most people than is the desire to win, and teachers doing legacy projects with students have shown that cooperative approaches supported by community recognition for high quality work can energize “at risk” students as well as “honor students.” We live most fully in our attachments to others, and service is the way we express those attachments.

If we were wise, our young people would hear from us often that good food, good housing, comfortable clothing, well-made tools, quality productions of the intellect, moments of ease brought about by work well-done can be sought in a spirit that does not invite selfishness.

And we would show them what we mean. To oppose selfishness is not to choose poverty but to choose relationship. The work we share is not simply making money, which often isolates us from one another. It is Civilization–in the singular–not as an existing state so much as an idea that can be progressively realized. America and what we have called the West is one civilization among perhaps ten in the modern world, and its history and ideals will play a significant role in any universal civilization we might yet construct, but for that to happen we need to believe that America is more than an economy.

We don’t need to believe that America has found the complete or the only truth to believe that its lessons have permanent worth. Serious discussion of such lessons should play a central role in education. For example, one of the ironies of the faith in markets is that markets don’t necessarily create the conditions markets need to thrive. Merchants as a group do best in systems of stable laws, but when the law is for sale in competitive markets, as is increasingly the case as the free market ideology overwhelms those who would moderate and balance it against other goods such as community stability, no one can be sure who will prevail on the morrow. The law becomes more volatile, like the markets, and though some businesses cash in, business in general suffers.

Also, though marketers praise competition, they generally do what they can to eliminate competitors. That’s what competition means. When markets rule, someone eventually wins and monopolies form that undermine the markets. The competitive spirit remains, but new competitors need harder tactics than good ideas and hard work to encroach upon the established merchant kings.

It would be sensible, I think, to deliberately teach and demonstrate to our young people that lasting prosperity is related to good character-the most basic meaning of which is that people hold some values too dear to offer them for sale. We might examine the way people have met hard times in the past, seeing how often the community rather than the individual has been the unit of survival, providing for members through shared action and generosity, doing as a group what no one could do alone. We might suggest that living in an altruistic community is the best security available in this life.

We could also talk about the economy as something that we make to serve purposes we have chosen. We could consider how a well-made economy might help us against our oldest and deadliest enemies: poverty, hunger, superstition, greed, ignorance, pride, selfishness and fear. All these have developed virulent strains that are barely slowed or deterred by the paltry education we now throw against them. As we have abandoned morality to the markets, a world has been forming within which fewer and fewer young people can make sense of old arguments against prostitution, drug deals or pornography. It’s all just business. And beyond these old-fashioned prohibitions lie whole realms of the forbidden that we have barely begun to transgress.

We might talk about the complex ecology of interacting forces that make the global economy the way it is, driving corporate leaders to believe that if they don’t do what is most profitable, their competitors will, and money will flow away from them leaving them unable to survive let alone to accomplish good works. This might lead us to wonder how much of the pressure they feel is not caused by the amorality of their competitors, but by millions of individuals buying goods and services and stocks without wanting to know more than where the best deal is to be found. What if people quit exporting from themselves the blame for greed and began wanting to know more about the ethical practices of the companies they traded with? What institutions to provide that information, which already exist, might grow and flourish?

That so many corporations today invest great sums of money to persuade people that they are good citizens and stewards suggests the power that lies with ordinary people. The great powers of the earth care deeply what you and I think. It has never mattered more what ordinary people think. Because of this, education has never before had the potential to make such dramatic changes to human life.

And the corollary is also true: the disasters that will follow mistakes have never been greater.

adapted from The Power of Community-Centered Education

It seems simple enough. But of course, not everyone thought so.

There’s a guy in the crowd—maybe a student of Socrates’—we’re not told much about him except that he’s a lawyer. He wants things more precise. When should I love my neighbor? And exactly how much? There are dozens or hundreds of more or less unanswered questions we can ask about the teacher’s rule. Without more precision, how will I ever be certain where my neighbor ends and I begin?

This is the question the lawyer asks: “And who is my neighbor?”

Words can evoke realities that we can understand.

He wants a definition. Once he gets it, he can wrangle with it forever.

But the teacher knows all about that sort of thing, and he doesn’t answer with a definition. That way of knowing, he knows, can slip into the sophisticated form of ignorance common among lawyers. We can glimpse it in the story told about a lawyer riding through the country with a friend. They pass a herd of Holsteins. “Look at the spotted cows,” the friend comments. The lawyer looks. “Yes, ” he says. “They appear to be. On this side, at least.”

…When can we say we know, and how many ways can appearances lead us to wrong conclusions? There are always those who see that dark region as an opportunity. It’s no accident that the rise of the lawyerly class criminalizes society. The fact that proof is difficult works to the advantage of criminals. We make laws to constrain bad behavior, but we can always quibble over what the words mean, turning the law away from public meanings that citizens can discuss into scholarly disputations in which any understanding is tenuous and ephemeral enough for aggressors against the public good to inch forward, dissolving whatever obstructs their own will. In such a society, criminals prosper and piety dissolves, along with respect for authority, commitment to morality, and the struggle to reach high ideals.

If we are to be the sort of teachers our children need, we need to cultivate a simplicity in our stories and in our conduct that can only be achieved by people whose primary interest is to be good. We need to surround our young people with communities that care about one another and about fundamental human truths. We need to protect them from being too influenced by the lessons that bureaucracies sometimes teach, as when they reward self-interest, attention to appearances, and avoidance of risk.

When it comes to what to believe, we often make two opposite errors. First, we believe things without evidence. From malicious gossip to false history to pseudoscience, the willingness to believe and act on ideas without evidence is the source of endless misery and countless tragic wrecks in personal and national history.

But the opposite problem is just as dangerous: refusing to believe anything not yet proved, in spite of good evidence. Proof is frequently not available even though the need to act remains. The demand for proof is often a method of blocking the very demands that our sense of goodness places upon us. Questioning things can prevent some mistakes, but it can also interfere with grasping what is plain and simple.

So the teacher who knows that loving our neighbors would be a good thing deflects the lawyer’s question and instead of getting lost in wrangling tells a story. “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves . . .” he begins.

When he finishes his story about a Samaritan and about several people who would not help him and about one who did, the teacher turns the question back to the lawyer. “Which of these,” he asks, “do you think was the man’s neighbor.”

“The one who helped,” the lawyer answers. He knows. If he did not want to know at least weakly he could have avoided the knowledge by the simplest act of will, but it is nonetheless encoded in the story in a way that any normal human can understand.

from Community-Centered Education: Teaching as a Craft of Place

We are created by what we desire.

Eros as the ancients understood it initiates our every act. Both our heroic sacrifices as well as our selfish degradations are undertaken out of desire, and the wisdom and quality of such responses become the main determinants of both our joy and our misery.

Eros is not a physical object, known with the five senses; it is more like gravity–a presence that can be detected by the effects it causes. We can detect it in our consciousness as a movement in the soul, some attraction in the mortal to something beyond. Though Socrates’ teaching dealt mainly with reason, at key moments he augmented reason with consultations with his daimon–his channel of communication with the divine.

To take sensory impressions as the most important news about reality is like being trapped in a cave. Aristotle called the faculty we use to detect such invisible realities as gravity or eros the “intellect.” It was the intellect that, Socrates taught, the philosopher must cultivate to escape the cave of sensory impressions, where people relied on shadows to orient themselves not to reality but to their perception of objects. Beyond the cave we can learn to perceive with the intellect the invisible world. It is comprised of increasingly large and important ideas. Socrates told Glaucon, his young follower, that “the idea of the good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort.”

Odysseus may linger in his own cave, but he does not forget transcendent reality. He remembers from his youth the vision that stirs his eros. Neither the spiritual wasteland nor the natural wilderness is his true home. He was made for a place where the promise of his youth might be commpleted, where he might live in marriage to his beloved, enjoying good food and drink amid friends and kin, and where none could make him afraid. It was the vision of his youth that evoked his soul’s full assent, and now, lost and far from home, his spiritual longing will not be satisfied with lesser things. Near the end of his Allegory of the Cave, Plato quotes Homer on the ignoble life of those who live amid a false reality: “Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than to think as they do and live after their manner.” His desire defines him.

It impels him toward action. He’s eager at every moment to back it up with effort and courage, and it moves the cosmos, eliciting support from the slow and mysterious workings of justice. Odysseus chose the hero’s way, drawn forward by inextinguishable desire for home. He was, as Robert Frost put it, undergoing a “trial by existence.”

Frost held on to something vital in the intellectual heritage of the New England Puritans. For them, making sense of daily life was inseparable from regular reflection on the stories in the Old Testament. They saw the Bible as not merely or even mainly a collection of rules. Rather, it was a web of stories which reveals the transcendent patterns through which we can know things as they really are.

When Frost held that “a poem is metaphor or it is nothing,” he put understanding metaphor at the heart of literature. He also put literature at the heart of education. We could not understand what thinking was, he asserted, without understanding metaphor–all the ways we see one thing in terms of another. Such thinking was fundamental to the Puritans. They read the Bible typologically, seeing in the Old Testament a collection of types, or patterns, that prefigured the New Testament. Moses led the Hebrews out of bondage, through the Red Sea, and toward the Promised Land, which was a type for Christ leading sinners out of the bondage of sin, through the waters of baptism, toward the Kingdom of Heaven. This typological mode of thought was extended so that Christians could read all the Biblical stories as types for understanding their own lives and what was expected of them. The Puritans understood their own experience by finding in it a familiar pattern: they understood themselves as being led out of slavery in England, on a perilous journey across the Atlantic Ocean and into the wilderness, on their way to a Promised Land. Mary Rowlandson found the meaning of her afflictions with the Wampanoags in the stories of Daniel in the lions’ den and in the Psalms of the Babylonian Captivity. They recognized the divine order amid the multiplicity of variations they experienced in the lived Creation.

As Puritanism waned their long and highly sophisticated habit of seeing in events patterns of meaning that were portable, and that could be used to understand other events, lost some of its relationship to Creation as Divinely Authored and thus ordered with meanings, but powerfully metaphorical thought persisted in the symbolism of New England literature of such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville–the sense that images and events signified greater and more universal meanings.

They weren’t the only thinkers who understood that events in the physical universe can be understood by human consciousness when they are given form in stories or theories. When Robert Frost encountered Einstein’s theory, he was struck by how similar Einstein’s thought was to his own. Frost incorporated Einstein’s thinking into his conception  ways the natural order is related to the mind of man. Harvard physicist Harvey Brooks said that the poet understood Einstein better than many of his colleagues in physics–specifically because they lacked the poet’s grasp of natural dualism led him to understand that  metaphorical thinking was the way to make nature intelligible. Frost referred to Einstein as a philosopher among scientists who trusted intuited perceptions which transcended the rational-empirical assumptions passed on by Galileo and Newton. Einstein was able to leap from sight to insight, using intuition in the way that an artist uses imagination. He was a convinced theist whose “cosmic religious feeling” was his “strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”

After spending much time with Madame Curie, Einstein explained her inability to rise above the mechanistic determinism that followed seeing reality as pure matter by noting “Madame Curie never heard the birds sing.” For Einstein, the pursuit of a simplified view of the world as simply matter which could be understood by science was a catastrophic illusion.

Both Einstein and Frost were dualists who believed that human knowledge of nature was indirect, conveyed through metaphors and symbols, rather than direct, conveyed through empirical experience brought into focus by logic. For Einstein,  metaphors in science reveal “the unknown in terms of the known.” Frost saw that Einstein did for matter the same thing poetry did for spirit. Frost used Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory to deepen his thought about metaphor.  He noted the metaphor involved in describing a thing as being an event. Frost quoted him, saying, “in the neighborhood of matter space is something like curved.” This delighted him. “ Isn’t that a good one!”

Einstein’s theory rejects the monism of matter alone that has become widespread among contemporary scientists. By arguing that moving bodies are perceived “relative to the standpoint of observers,” he made the observer essential to the perception of all reality.

Einstein held that there was no such thing as an objective physical universe as recorded through sensory experience; there was only a conceptual mental world perceived through the “free play” of the mind through conceptual ideas working upon the raw materials provided by the senses. (Robert Frost, The Poet as Philosopher, 166)

In other words, an age’s scientific theories provide the metaphors by which that age perceives itself in relation to the universe. This is analogous to some postmodern writers who eschew metaphor. If the universe lacks a transcendent realm and we do not live in Creation but merely in a material universe governed by chance, then typology is not a true way to grasp reality, for reality does not really have any meaning beyond those we construct for ourselves for our own purposes. When postmodernists see the use of symbols and metaphors as a way of being false to reality–imbuing it with meanings and qualities that it does not possess–they are asserting, in essence, that reality has no meaning. The loss of faith or interest in symbols and metaphors is one consequence of a loss of faith generally.

Walker Percy saw an intimate linkage between Christianity and the main metaphor of most novels–that of a human character acting in time. He suggested that it was Christianity, mainly, with its view of reality as a meaningful story within which each person could find a meaningful life that accounted for the reality of narrative and the idea of the novel. “There is a special kinship between the novel as an art form and Christianity as an ethos…. It is no accident, I think, that the novel is a creature of the Christian West and is virtually nonexistent in the Buddhist, Taoist and Brahmin East, to say nothing of Marxist countries.” Further, he says “Though most current novelists may not be believing Christians or Jews, they are still living in a Judeo-Christian ethos. If, in fact, they are living on the fat of that faith, so to speak, one can’t help but wonder what happens when the fat is consumed. Perhaps there are already signs. Witness the current loss of narrative of character and events in the post-modern novel.”

Does the novel itself survive in the disenchanted world without metanarratives that postmodernists are urging on society? Joseph Epstein has observed that “literature itself has become unimportant: what is being created in contemporary novels, poems, and plays no longer speaks to the heart or mind.” He points out that “greatness of literature cannot be determined, solely by literary standards.” We also bring our “ethical, theological, and moral standards” to bear on such judgments. “Criticism can only be effective where there is agreement on these other standards.” Unfortunately, as Eliot said decades ago, “‘there is no common agreement.’” Certainly, one can see the declining importance of literature in schools, along with a declining ability to say what literature is good for–except reading for reading’s sake. This loss of a trandscendant reality so far as education is concerned may be epitomized by the spread of John Dewey’s ideas.

Dewey was a dedicated monist. He hated talk about transcendence–metaphysics and religion. Science and sensory experience and a social process, he believed, would supercede the authority of the past, including religion but also to a great extent books. As Dewey’s pragmatism metastasized through schools–spreading the supposition that the cave from which Plato and others tried to liberate us, the cave of nontranscendant sensory experience and information, was all that we knew and all that we would ever know.

In Deweyan schools, we do not pass on the great insights of the past so much as we collaborate to resolve “felt difficulties”, with the collaboration very near an end in itself. It’s “social” and “democratic.” It “empowers” people by giving them a “voice.” “Constructed knowledge” is all the knowledge there is. A collaborating group is the purpose of the ideology. There is no truth that we can access ourselves, and there is no order to perceive in the transcendent.

We had little need for the noble intellect. What we needed were endless iterations of experiment and innovation. Ideas of good and evil–evil mainly–interfered with constant experimentation aimed at social redemption which could be ours within the cave. There is only now and our groups and our impulses. We can innovate and choose, and democracy empowered by science would replace noble old ideals concocted by philosophers and prophets.

Though being “student centered” was a useful slogan to shift the emphasis away from teaching the knowledge acquired by traditional academic disciplines, there’s precious little interest in individual students in Dewey. They are but abstractions in the social processes that were his real interest. Dewey sought a social process rather than individual virtue, imagining schools as a means of reconstructing society. The old ideals interfered with people accepting the ideology of social redemption. “Intelligence” and “growth”–never defined or explained clearly–should replace reason and tradition. “The point is that the purpose grow and take shape through the process of social intelligence.” Selves moved by impulse toward an ever receding horizon, unbothered by teachers, who had been replaced by guides and facilitators.

So like the denizens of Plato’s Cave we are governed by debating societies wherein members give each other degrees and awards to make it all seem real. We are slaves to laws promulgated by little emperors to make a name for themselves. What has happened in our progressive liberation from transcendental ideals has been a proliferation of moralistic substitutes. For cave dwellers, the coin of the realm is data.

What advice might Dewey give to Odysseus? The question brings to mind a comic picture. They would have little use for each other. Heros didn’t count for much in Dewey’s universe. For him, democracy was an end in itself, and he had nothing to say about the personal quest that, I think, should lie at the center of the educational journey of every student.

Great literature was long understood as the most important secular resource for awakening young people to who they are, where they are, how things work, and what is necessary for them to be and do. The old questions–Odysseus’s questions and Socrates’–are their questions: What is worth believing? What is worth approving? What is worth choosing?

What we mean by truth, beauty, and justice comprise the traditional answers to those questions, as well as we have for far been able thus far to form them. Such questions lay at the center of education for centuries, until the rise of modernity not long ago. Such questions will survive modernity, which will fail, as did Epicureanism and Hedonism and Stoicism because like them it can construct no satisfying solutions to the problem of despair.

What will also survive is the story that dominates the human past–that of the heroic quest. It’s true in ways we can’t exactly say, but we sense at its core that this is the way reality is structured. To be human is to be on a heroic quest. This is why Odysseus cannot linger on any enchanted isle. He needs to turn his life into a story, which means he needs desire and action even at the cost of death.

Joseph Campbell found versions of this story in human cultures throughout time. It isn’t necessary to understand this pattern, this type, in quite the way Campbell explicated it, as entangled in the Freudian and Jungian concepts that were familiar to him. The pattern doesn’t depend on Freud–it has emerged and been attractive to people throughout human history because of its essential human truth. We needn’t think the caves in which we find ourselves from time to time, even the enchanted ones, are our true home. As long as we are longing our journey is unfulfilled. We may need heroic endurance and courage–often in the form of remembering what we are after and learning better what that means–and we may find ourselves quite hapless without occasional cosmic intervention on our behalf.

What Homer saw was that it was possible to step forward boldly to string one’s own bow, relying on some cosmic justice that might impel the gods to take our side. The pragmatic revolution was premised on giving up that culture–turning from history and philosophy, turning from literature and books–in homage to the quite groundless faith that experience and science would get us, if not to the promised land, then at least to a reasonable adjustment to our plight.

That’s not what Odysseus wants, and it’s not what the best of our students want. His driving desire was to be free to live a fully human life–which meant getting home from the disorders of war and wilderness to a clearing in the light. It was to return to his marriage.

He knew the value of home because he could only have it only by choosing it, and the choice involved the loss of everlasting life with a forever young goddess. To make that choice he needed to desire marriage and home more than pleasure or ease. To speak as those who created this civilization often spoke, he needed to elevate his thoughts from the base to the sublime. The greatness of Homer is glimpsed in those moments when human characters experience, with assistance from the gods, an opening of the soul, a perception that the order in the world has its source in a transcendent order, the order of being.

These decisive realizations in Homer–that we are surrounded by an order that favors some sorts of actions and disfavors others–led to generations of discussion and questioning that formed a culture that, in time, formed the philosophers. Justice was an emotional response echoing the cosmos before it was a philosophical ideal. Existence has an order that extends beyond the senses–that transcends the cave and reaches to the divine.

To desire the higher things, we need to hear something of that. To claim his place and to fulfill the vision of his youth, Odysseus needed to liberate home from those who offended justice. Suitors had moved in, trying to claim his place–trying to steal his world. They abused the claims of hospitality, devouring what was not rightfully theirs. Odysseus purged his home of those who had chosen their doggie little lives–trying to win by deception and threat and flattery the world that Odysseus and Penelope had made.

Odysseus was sustained by memory and vision. Each day he left the cave of Calypso’s delights and stood at shore and gazing beyond the sea toward home. What was he thinking, lost on a somewhat enchanted isle with his back turned on delights that might titillate but could never satisfy him to the depths of his being in ways that he knew were right? Surrounded by a wilderness of wonders and terrors, he knows that the way forward, the direction of hope, is a return, a homecoming. The hero’s journey ends with a return home.

Students have an innate sense of justice, which is an innate sense of universal justice, of cosmic order. “That’s not fair!” is a thought expressed in every language in every culture. What they need, in much the way they need food for their bodies, are the old stories of the births and kings and the coming into the world of justice. What they need are the stories of the virtues we need to move toward our true home–courage, diligence, endurance, patience.

What they need are the compelling visions of who they are, where they, what is worth believing, what is worth admiring, and what is worth choosing. They need an education in desire. Even John Dewey understood that much: “The highest outcome of a sound education is intelligent desire.” It is desire that drives choice, and there a real sense in which every student at every moment exists on the verge of the transcendent moment–the moment of decision when one is “all in”–like a hero. Or not–like a captive.

Moments, though, are not moments until we see them.

However, we now live amid something of an anti-culture–which is what sociologist Philip Rieff called the society that developed through our release of desire from sacred interdictions or prohibitions. Those interdictions once guided human desire–educated it. However, champions of a therapeutic view have argued that human happiness lies in the liberation of desire from precisely such prohibitions.

One of the noisiest popularizers of the therapeutic was Abraham Maslow. With his “hierarchy of needs,” he promised to provide a “scientific” basis for the study of motivation–though his method was closer to cocktail party musings than to scientific research, consisting of hanging out with people in his social milieu and contemplating how much superior they were to the masses. Maslow argued that the old “regime” with its concern for “discipline” should be replaced with a new therapeutic regime: “If therapy means a pressure toward breaking controls and inhibitions, then our new key words must be spontaneity, release, naturalness, self-acceptance, impulse awareness, gratification, permissiveness.” He promised liberation from what many felt were stifling orthodoxies.

He suggested a new type of human, which he called “healthy.” People with “unmet needs” were “unhealthy.” He used “needs” to refer to everything from the body’s dependence on oxygen, to the soul’s desire for a mate, to the addict’s desire for a cigarette. In his thought, anything that anyone might desire became a need. Once a therapeutic regime was in place, he said, all religious or moral disciplines could be dismissed as “sick-man-created” gratuities.

For the superior persons–i.e. Maslow and his liberated friends–were truly superior, i.e., healthy, and doing what they wanted to do made all the sense that needed to be made. “Education, civilization, rationality, religion, law, government, have all been interpreted by most as being primarily instinct-restraining and suppressing forces. But if our contention is correct that instincts have more to fear from civilization than civilization from instincts, perhaps it ought to be the other way about–perhaps it should be at least one function of education, law, religion, etc., to safeguard, foster, and encourage the expression and gratification of the instinctoid needs.”

The tale Maslow told was the dream of self–indeed, it’s a theory of selfishness packaged with a smattering of jargon. For him, the “self-actualizing human” was at the apex of creation, which left love of others as a mid-level appetite. He seemed genuinely puzzled by what other writers said about love. For example, he mocked Erich Fromm for saying that love implies “responsibility, care, respect, and knowledge.” This annoyed Maslow. It “sounds more like a pact or a partnership of some kind rather than a spontaneous sportiveness,” he said. Healthy lovers, he urged us to believe, “can be extremely close together and yet go apart quite easily.” “Healthy” people are “lusty animals” who don’t make commitments.

If Maslow is right, it may be that Odysseus on the enchanted island might need therapy more than he needs to return to Penelope. But if Homer was right, then a good life is not simply one’s own. Humans have responsibilities, duties, obligations, and debts.

When the “New Left” made the “sexual revolution” a mainstream phenomenon in the sixties, they believed that releasing eros from capitalism was key to “the revolution.” Without sexual repression, guilt and the work ethic would melt away, and individual satisfaction of instincts and desires could become the proper goal of the collective. The sixties, to those who defended the cultural revolution, represented a “widespread shared feeling” that a new world was dawning. The pursuit of individual virtue gave way to a euphoric emotion of virtue, fed by mass meetings, marches and street protests. Individual development of character mattered less than social development of policies to support the liberated individual.

The psychological release of the individual from the sacred didn’t destroy capitalism, but it has succeeded at creating a deeply divided nation, with the social cleavage fundamentally organized around ideas of religion and sex–on one side, people who believe the old understanding of the sacred helped form character and encouraged commitments necessary to family and community, and on the other people who see them as superstitious sources of guilt and judgment.

David Lapp recently made a quite old-fashioned observation about shifts in America’s moral vision. He had been visiting a small Ohio town, which include attending an ice cream social. His comments and the responses on his blog illustrate the rift that characterizes America today:

An elderly married couple sat across from us at the ice cream social, and they described to us how, like many of their neighbors, they moved up from Kentucky when they were young, in search of better jobs (we’ll call them Bob and Kathy). Bob grew up on a small dairy farm—“we milked the cows by hand”—and his family didn’t even have electricity until he was a teenager.

The elderly married couple sitting to our right were self-described “hillbillies” from the coal mines of West Virginia (we’ll call them Ernie and Wanda). Wanda’s family in West Virginia was dirt poor: they didn’t even have a car, and her father, a coal miner, would arrive home caked in coal and take a bath in the kitchen tub (“I don’t know how he ever got clean!”).

Their humble origins notwithstanding, both couples insisted that life today is worse than it was when they were growing up. “I feel sorry for you kids, ‘cuz you don’t get to live in those good ‘ole days,” Wanda remarked.

“What were the ‘good ‘ole days like?’” I asked.

“Families were close,” Wanda remarked without a moment’s hesitation.

Kathy elaborated that “People had more time for each other,” and described how people would leave their doors unlocked and neighbors would come over to visit unannounced. Families had regular meals with each other, she said, and they sat on their front porches and visited with other families.

Lapp mused on the fact that although times had been harder economically, lives had been better. There was more happiness, and this happiness was related to morality. “How do we square that [economic] explanation with Wanda and Kathy’s insistence that family life was better for dirt-poor Kentuckians and West Virginians than it is for today’s relatively better-off working class men and women?” he asked.

This reminded him of an earlier conversation, when he asked an old woman to describe marriage and family life in her childhood compared to now. The woman said life used to be better. “They don’t marry today,” the sixty year old woman answered. “They just live together…. You didn’t live with someone back then—it was disgraceful. They had morals.”

They had morals. If that sounds like old-fashioned morality from a hillbilly in Middle America, well, I say, chalk one up to hillbilly wisdom. It seems to me like a fairly succinct explanation of why, a couple generations ago, families could thrive in poverty-stricken communities of Appalachia and why they’re falling apart in a time of relative abundance. I don’t mean at all to minimize the seriousness of the Great Recession, and how it is no doubt putting a strain on working class marriages. However, at least today even many unemployed working class men have big-screen TVs with a Dish Network attached to their house—the point being, most of us aren’t living in the kind of poverty that Wanda and Kathy’s parents experienced in Appalachia. However, what many working class folks don’t have today are norms against easy divorce and having children outside of marriage. So I think my elderly friends are on to something: marriage and family life is not necessarily always at the mercy of “economic forces”—norms make a difference.

Such an observation of course provoked the usual anger from people who hate the old morality. These are some of the comments the post triggered:

“My experience growing up as a Southern Baptist in Louisiana is that these people have very narrow ideas of morality. . .There is a lot of social pathology that informs ‘hillbilly wisdom.’”

“I rather doubt these norms produced much happiness, at least not for many people. The stultifying effects of small town ‘morality’ is an abiding theme of American literature, as is the need to escape small towns and provincial attitudes in order to discover happiness. You don’t have to be Richard Florida to know that the brightest young people feel stifled and trapped in cultural backwaters.”

“My objection to this kind of nostalgic vision of the past, especially when it is coupled with such a subjective and nebulous concept as ‘morals,’ is that it tends to reify some of the worst aspects of American life and history. In general whenever people start talking about their superior morals, I begin watching my wallet because I suspect that they are either hypocrites or hucksters or both.”

“I don’t think the ‘hillbilly wisdom’ version of morality was actually very moral. I’m pretty sure it involved ostracizing everyone who didn’t conform to unsophisticated people’s notions of sexual morality. . . I suspect this ‘hillbilly wisdom’ contributed to a lot more unhappiness than happiness.”

“One problem is that the ‘norms’ you are celebrating, even the ones I agree with, are so tied up with ignorance, hypocrisy, and hatred, that it is hard to take them seriously. They have been besmirched by being captured by right-wing ideologues who are more interested in manipulating people than improving the lives of even those they manipulate.”

Most adults are well aware of the cleavage that now runs through American life, that is quickly visible if the topic of morality comes up. We do not inhabit a shared sacred order, and no one has authority to sustain any rival order. We maintain an illusion of serene harmony by avoiding, in mixed company as it were, the discussion of moral questions. That might work for many social situations, but how does it work as the educational philosophy of a people? The apostles of sexual liberation, such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, were clear that such a liberation would have profound consequences.

Marcuse contended that relaxing sexual morality would lead to a relaxing of social morality generally. Without psychological moral inhibitions, the individual would enjoy a “loss of conscience,” becoming less able to make moral judgments about political and social functioning. “Marcuse refers to this ‘loss of conscience’ as a ‘happy consciousness,’ meaning that since the individual is ostensibly incapable or differentiating between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, good and evil, his ignorance is a passive contentment” (Bernstein, Frankfurt School: critical assessments, Volume 5). The pacified consciousness is content with its material and social situation.

For a teacher still concerned with justice and injustice, this pacified consciousness appears as little more than moral stupefaction. According to the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, moral stupefaction is an accurate description of many of today’s young people. Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. What they found was that when “asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life, many young people grope “to say anything sensible on these matters.” They lack the mental categories, the vocabulary, and the inclination to engage in moral thought.

Here’s a typical exchange between the interviewer and a young respondent:

I: Do you think people have any moral responsibility or duty to help others or not?

R: Um, if others are your family and you see someone in danger, yeah. But I don’t ever stop when I see somebody on the side of the road, so I guess somewhat sometimes. Maybe if someone is burning in the car, you should try and pull them out, but, no, not really.

I: Are there some other examples of ways we’re obligated to help other people?

R: I mean, I really don’t donate money, and even if I had money I don’t know if I would, so.

I: What about helping people in general? Are we as a society obligated to do something?

R: I really don’t think there’re any good reasons, nope, nothing.

I: What if someone just wasn’t interested in helping others? Would that be a problem or not?

R: No, I don’t see why that would be a problem.

I: And why is that?

R: Because I mean is that really our duty, to help others? Is that what we’re here for? I mean, they can help [themselves], if they’re just getting by, doing what they do by themselves, then do they really need anyone else? So if they don’t need help from anyone else, if somebody’s asking for some other people all the time then they’re not giving in return.

I: So if someone asks for help, we don’t have an obligation to them?

R: Yeah, it’s up to each individual, of course.

According to Smith, to understand these young people it’s necessary to understand that they “do not appeal to a moral philosophy, tradition, or ethic as an external guide by which to think and live in moral terms.” They see the world as consisting of individuals, each of whom comprises his or her own moral universe. This makes it impossible for them “to rationally evaluate or criticize any moral wrong, including the horrific destruction and violence that helped drive them to this tolerant position in the first place.” Even when the topic is murder done by terrorists, they cannot form a moral judgment: “I don’t know that people, like terrorists, what they do? It’s not wrong to them. They’re doing the ultimate good. They’re just like, they’re doing the thing that they think is the best thing they could possibly do and so they’re doing good. I had this discussion with a friend recently and she’s like, ‘But they’re still murdering tons of people, that just has to be wrong.’ And I was like, ‘But do we have any idea if it is actually wrong to murder tons of ‘people?’ Like what does that even mean?” Fully of third of the young people interviewed said that “they simply did not know what makes anything morally right or wrong.”

Even more sobering, many of them could not make sense of the questions–could not understand what a moral question was. They did, however, have a social sense, and they vaguely felt that what others thought of them was the basis of what was right or wrong. “About four out of ten (40 percent) of the emerging adults we interviewed referred to how other people would think of them as (at least partly) defining what for them would be morally right and wrong. To the extent that emerging adults feel morally lost in their own minds, looking to the reaction of others (who they presumably trust) may provide what they consider to be mostly reliable guides to determine right from wrong.” Thinking about right and wrong, for them means “how you want yourself to be known, to be looked at.”

Smith says “we are letting them down, sending many, and probably most, of them out into the world without the basic intellectual tools and basic personal formation needed to think and express even the most elementary of reasonably defensible moral thoughts and claims. And that itself, we think, is morally wrong.” Though the blame for the moral stupefaction of young Americans is widespread, the researchers believe schools in particular should think about what they are doing:

Schools are one of the most powerful socializing institutions of youth in American society today, along with families and the mass media. . . . One big theme that stuck out. . .was the fact that the schools, especially public schools, that our younger respondents attended studiously avoided talking about potentially controversial moral issues. Over and over again, these teenagers we interviewed reported that their teachers always sidestepped and evaded questions and problems that might generate disagreement or conflict in the classroom. “No, my teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague,” they would typically say. “Anytime anything that might make trouble or hurt someone’s feelings come up, they say we aren’t going there,” others confirmed. “Nope, we can’t talk about religion or them hot-button moral issues in school, ’cause they don’t want to open up that can of worms” was a typical report. In short, it appears that most schools, especially public schools, are not teaching students how to constructively engage moral issues about which people disagree. Quite the contrary, schools are teaching students that the best way to deal with difficult moral problems and questions is to ignore them. The moral pedagogy of most middle and high schools clearly seems to be: avoid, ignore, and pretend the issues will go away. Needless to say, that is naive and impossible. It actually resembles highly dysfunctional families that have sets of issues that nobody is allowed to bring up or discuss and that are instead carefully tiptoed around.

The sociologists suggest that young Americans “are a people deprived, a generation that has been failed, when it comes to moral formation.” They point out that the young people are pleasant and that their desire to please and to go along probably masks the extent to which they do not think of themselves as moral beings. ” They have had withheld from them something that every person deserves to have a chance to learn: how to think, speak, and act well on matters of good and bad, right and wrong.”

Such is the social context in which many of us teach today. The intentional corruption of eros was at the heart of modern ideology’s assault on capitalism. The stated goal was to undermine capitalist society by dissolving the psychological orientation our which traditional society had flowed. Sexual liberation was always a liberation from tradition, including from family–-from husbands, from children. It was a liberation from shame and guilt, from the expectations of others. Its success was enough that we are now in position to see that in myriad ways, some unintended, it was also a liberation from right and wrong in general, leaving the self to operate alone in a cosmos of desire.

In Symposium, Diotima told Socrates that eros is “desire of all good things and of being happy.” It is a divine force that permeates all of being. It is vast–much more than genital sexuality–and it initiates every action we take. Socrates understood that it is eros, James Rhodes tells us, that lies “at the heart of who we become–how we use food and drink; how we love spouses, children, friends, and sexually attractive beauties; how well we perform our jobs; and how much we involve ourselves in the great scramble to gratify the acquisitive instinct.”

The sexual revolution was never mainly about sex. It was about burning an ancient bridge from individual desire to realities beyond the self.

Odysseus spent his days staring at the sea toward home.

We see our educational crisis most clearly when we turn our attention to desire. We can’t miss the dispiriting reality that many young people don’t desire what we offer. We talk about disengagement and lack of motivation. We discern even among those who do their assignments what seem to be unintelligent or even ignoble desires. We talk about narcissism, cheating and consumerism.

Though our lives have something of the enchanted about them–-at the flick of an Ipod high tech speakers body forth the best music ever made, exotic fruits from every clime are piled high in brightly lit markets, family members across the globe arrive in our chambers via Skype, the best words ever written can be summoned from online archives for free, and the most beautiful people on the planet compete for our approval from screens in every building–-we are not satisfied. We think we want more. Probably we want something different.

Listening to contemporary arguments about education, carried on for the most part with no mention of anything very important, I find myself thinking about Odysseus, stranded on Calypso’s Isle, who knew he was wasting his life in spite of the goddess’s quite compelling distractions. Every morning he left the enchanted cave and climbed down to the beach to gaze out to sea in the direction of Ithaca where his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus waited. It was, he knew, a somewhat doggie little life he was living with the nymph. It was not what he was made for.

He was born to make worlds. That’s what his place, Ithaca, meant to him–-his fields and flocks and herds, his friends and family, including ancestors gone to the underworld and posterity not yet born, and, most important, the kingdom that had emerged through his marriage to Penelope.

Odysseus’s marriage was more than a legal bond or even a sacred bond. Wendell Berry notes that “it was part of a complex practical circumstance involving, in addition to husband and wife, their family of both descendants and forebears, their household, their community, and the sources of all these lives in memory and tradition, in the countryside, and in the earth” (The Unsettling of America, 127). He had carved their marriage bed from an olive tree rooted in the soil of Ithaca. “That marriage bed, and what it symbolized of both his love for Penelope and his practical, human rootedness in an actual place,” which is necessary if love is to be enacted and embodied, was the goal of his long voyage of homecoming. His quest, his purpose, the telos of his heroism was a home that could only be had by making the world which situated it. “These things, wedded together in his marriage, he thought of as his home.” He understood that in spite of the pleasures his time with the goddess was a captivity, keeping him from a stronger desire. It was a vacation from the things he felt seriously.

Calypso’s island is a familiar place to most people. Many of us reached some island of relative peace and pleasure, compared to other places we’ve experienced. It isn’t what we set out for, but it’s better than it might have been, and who knows if there can be any more? One could settle.

Last week one of my better students stayed after class to talk a little about Jane Eyre–-the novel the class had chosen to read, mainly because she talked them into it. She was in a desultory mood, and the novel was tied up with her vision of how she wished the world might be. She was trying to bring into focus career plans for after high school. “There are no Rochesters,” she said.

“What you really want is to marry Rochester and live happily ever after,” I said teasingly.

“Yes,” she said, without smiling. “But boys are not like that anymore.”

It’s certainly true that they are less “like that” than they used to be. A recent report on marriage, “The State of Our Unions,” found that “both boys and girls have become more accepting of lifestyles that are considered alternatives to marriage, including nonmarital childbearing and unmarried cohabitation” in spite of the fact that for both boys and girls desire for “a good marriage and family life” remains high.

Increasingly, young people feel trapped in a world where they do not know how to get to where they truly want to be. Philosopher Allan Bloom suggested in his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, that an “unproven and dogmatically asserted” cultural relativism had sabotaged the “real motive of education, the search for the good life.” He said that modern students were “flat-souled,” having lost the sense of the transcendent, they had succumbed to the primal seductions of rock music in a culture obsessed with sex:

“Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”

Though the book provoked a storm of controversy, today such a description seems almost quaint–-a vision of American adolescence before the immersive stories of digital games such as “Grand Theft Auto,” which thrives on murder, theft and destruction along with virtual visits to a prostitute who can be subsequently mugged or “25 to Life” which features bloody gangs taking hostages and killing cops. Researchers at Boston University’s School of Public Health found in a 2011 study that one in 13 teenage girls reported having a ‘multi-person sex’ (MPS) experience, often initiated by boyfriends who had been watching pornography. More than half the girls “were pressured or coerced into a gang rape,” said the researcher. The population of the study was poor, urban kids, so the middle class suburbs need pay to great notice yet.

Reality and art mirror each other, or become each other. In her NPR music blog, Ann Powers observed that “pop music is very dirty.” Reviewing 2011, she noted that “there were several underground rap hits unabashedly celebrating oral pleasures; Top 10 songs about sex addiction, the cowgirl position and extraterrestrial booty; country music’s embrace of the stripper pole and a holiday performance from Lady Gaga in which she did a bump and grind while performing ‘White Christmas.’” At this point, such reports fill volumes.

A typical response to them is to affect a world-weary wisdom and intone that people have been complaining of bad youth since time immemorial. Some people are fond of a quote from Socrates: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Leaving aside that there’s no direct evidence that Socrates ever said that, the more interesting point might be that Socrates in actual fact lived at the end of Athenian democracy and the beginning of rule by tyrants. He was quite aware of a general dissolution–cultural suicide really–of Greek society. In fact, the moral corruption of society was his major theme, and the historical reality is that his Athens did not survive. Quoting him for reassurance seems a bit like quoting the captain of the Titanic, with water to his chin, chuckling because people have been warning of icebergs for years.

But what’s a teacher to do? Our work is difficult enough, amid such distractions as percussion lines marching in the halls to celebrate spirit week, phone logs to document calls home, emails with deadlines for curriculum maps to show compliance, PA announcements about photo retakes, staff meetings to discuss yet again the tardies, the dress code, and PDAs. All this can make it hard to wonder whether what Homer saw is still real, and therefore still relevant to that boy with the sly grin in the second row–to wonder what, precisely, such a kid might need to hear  from a man who rejected hanging out in a place where he could stay forever young, with no hassles, on an island with a goddess who shared her “perfect bed”?

Based on the best available evidence, we are doomed. And yet freedom persists, if we choose it.

Thus, as we tumble further into the post-literate era, we can expect to witness ever more hideous alterations in our society. Mass conformity must increase, as the examples of past lives, imparted by a knowledge of history, fades from men’s minds; the average life of our fellow citizens must become ever more confined, ever more directed towards trivial goals, ever more consumed with petty concerns. Magnanimity, in policy and personal choice, must evaporate, as the ideals of our ancestors fall into quiescence; vulgarity will become ubiquitous, and manifest itself in our arts, our laws, and our manners. Fraudulent movements of every stripe will proliferate, as even the most credentialed persons – for educated we can hardly call them – will lack the rational capacity to detect their fraudulence. Our politics will become a chaos, as public discourse transforms into rancorous and fruitless abuse, the arts of government grow identical with the arts of deceit, and arbitrary will increasingly usurps the place of reason. Freedom, which has no other arms than the truth, will disappear entirely.  Mark Signorelli

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

“The Second Coming” William Butler Yeats

It doesn’t seem a small matter that modern education has turned away from the past–and the standards set by the past–in its student-centered quest to appease the self’s desires through endless innovation and experiment (science and experience). The use of history and philosophy to understand truth recedes, and we use social science (surveys and polls) to measure effectiveness.

Democracy itself was greatly feared by some of its greatest advocates, including Dewey, because they could see the danger that it might dissolve all standards, since it does not itself contain or suggest any.

In our increasingly democratized society, there are those among us who still vaguely suspect that some books are better than others, but the educational “standards” that are being imposed upon us don’t quite say that and certainly don’t offer any list of what books might be important enough to be suggested to teachers. Those who are imposing the standards make no credible argument that they have any authority to do such a thing. Indeed, they go to great lengths to pretend they are not doing such a thing, creating a theatrical pretense that the standards are voluntary.

So we face mere power imposing standards, but when it comes specifically to literature the standards are not standards at all. Who would dare suggest that all students should have an acquaintance with, say,  Homer or Shakespeare? In an age when democracy (choice) trumps everything, doesn’t belief in any standard come to be a mere superstition?

Truth is problematized away, which leaves power. In a democracy, power flows from numbers, and so the lowest common denominator leads the processes of decadence. What is easy, base, and cheap outsells what is difficult, sublime and costly. Dewey drives out Socrates, Glee replaces Shakespeare, and our positivist measures distract from what has been lost.

The favoring of “evidence-based” this or “research-based” that derives in part from Dewey’s emphasis on “science” and “experiment” as the basis of educational practice. “Evidence” in these cases nearly always refers to measurements, although other forms of evidence are often reasonable–such as logical deduction or even common sense. Much of common sense lacks an empirical data base simply because nobody has thought to make a study. Did an education based on studying a thousand years of Greek and Roman culture and politics through what were once understood as “the classics” lead to citizens with a better understanding of human nature and politics? Reading Jefferson, Adams, and Madison might lead one to suspect that it did, but I’ve not been able to find any studies supporting that thesis.

That emphasis on positivist data is a turn away from the attempt to understand humane values through historical and philosophical methods.

When education was based on philosophy it made perfect sense, for example, to continue teaching the ideal of nobility even if positivist research showed that many people were not particularly noble. Ideals, it was understood, were precisely what needed to be taught because they were, to some extent, contrary to much of human nature. Virtues–generosity, sexual discipline, thrift–were the focus of education not because surveys provided data confirming this was what students wanted but because philosophy argued that these were important to creating a society more “humane” than society often appeared in practice to be.

If it is true that paper and pencil tests along with common educational research methods leave out much that should concern us because many important things are difficult to measure simply and efficiently and with high levels of validity and reliability, and if it is further true that our choices of what is in the curriculum are driven by what we test and measure, then it follows logically that the schools we are building will ignore much that should concern us.

This includes nearly everything that was once the heart of a humane education.

gateway

Occasionally I come across an essay that’s useful in my personal project of rethinking the curriculum by rethinking the Canon–to the extent I can with my limited time and abilities. Such is Cicero Bruce’s review of Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation by Glenn C. Arbery.

Arbery makes the by now familiar arguments about the “decimation of the humanities in the culture wars,” and he links this to the undermining of the discipline of literary studies in the pursuit of reputation by modern professors. “Unless literature itself, not the academic industry around it, not the competition for tenured positions or endowed chairs, is the central concern, then perhaps the academy deserves to fall,” he says.

Often, he claims, the meaning of great works is distorted to make some point related to a professors’ own agenda.

That interests me, but only in passing. Perhaps the academy will fail–such are the passing affairs of the world. What interests me more is what Arbery says about The Illiad: “Of all the poems in the history of the West, actual Scripture aside, but including the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and all the devotional lyrics ever written, God loves the Iliad most.”

This did not seem like a strange claim to me. Bruce summarizes what this means:

That Homer’s epic would be pleasing to God is not surprising, at least not to Arbery. For it depicts “the broken world as it is, fallen and savage, but capable of noble formality and tender mercies; groaning ceaselessly for redemption but without undue self-pity; conscious of being kingly, masterful, and godlike, yet also mortally aware of being subject to every loss and humiliation, including the ultimate form, mortality itself.”

Finding nobility and tenderness amid mortality by achieving form. It’s something I learned, in part, from Keats’ “When I Have Fears.” Why would one compose a lament of absolute despair in an intricate sonnet form?

Literature functions as a mode of knowledge that finds its completion in the achievement of form. It follows that a story, poem, or play is excellent to the degree that it is well wrought. Yet, to infer from what Arbery posits between the lines, it should be said that the test of enduring literary merit begins and ends with abiding questions something like these: Does the given work look from the standpoint of eternity at material things and transitory wants? Does it function as a medium for apprehending unchanging truths? Does it plumb the depths of being “with an intelligence,” as Arbery puts it in his final paragraph, “that increases in power the more it explores the most unbearable dimensions of joy and suffering”?

Our “momentary stays against confusion” achieved by creating form are always metaphors–things of this world that give us glimpses of the transcendent, an order beyond us which we realize. Our despair has its origins in a world we know by sensing our lostness from it. The poem may be about despair, but the existence of the poem is an argument of hope. Great literature reveals to us more than it can say.

Evil often presents itself as a parody of goodness. Though it's tempting to wash our hands of the confusion this causes, we must judge. The truth is the only defense good people have against bad people.

A young woman–a former student–told me recently she does not like to pay attention to politics because she feels helpless to affect what is going to happen. Who doesn’t know that feeling?

Educators once understood that their work was of a piece with the ongoing work of establishing justice in the world, and that the means to do this was to pursue the truth. It’s worth asking why we now live in an age of such moral confusion and who this benefits.

One of the realities of American public education today is that if one attempts to talk among teachers about truth as though it matters one will be quickly assailed by versions of Pilate’s question, “what is truth?”  Whose truth? It’s become something of an intellectual habit to balk at the very mention of truth, and to feel that warmth of being among the right sort of people–the righteous–to talk of nonjudgmentalism and tolerance.

It remains an inconvenient truth, nonetheless, that the work of judging is fundamental to preserving justice. Justice is inseparable from truth. We can’t see that the right things are done if we don’t know the truth about what happened. The primary defense good people have against bad people is the truth. One could hope that a profession that has made The Crucible part of its canon would understand and teach such things. Alas, that story seems more often used as a parable about distrust of the wrong sort of people–Puritans and anticommunists. Ironic.

I think an important question for teachers today is why intellectuals from the mid-twentieth century on have labored so hard to mystify and problematize truth. It’s a real question and I think there are true answers that are worth understanding. The answers are not immediately obvious though to those who have been subjected to years of ideological indoctrination.

The trouble is that the confusion–intentionally sewn and cultivated, I think–is quite genuine. Consider Alexander Solzhenitisyn’s passionate naming of ideology in Gulag Archipelago as the source of so much modern evil:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

We all recognize, at this stage in history, that true believers with their self-righteous finger pointing have done tremendous harm–that Eric Hoffer is correct when he asserts that most of the world’s evil is done by those who feel they are righteously engaged in crusades to destroy evil. The trickiness of recent decades can be glimpsed in the way that this truth has been distorted into ideological slogans that encourage a hatred of those who speak of truth as though it could be known. The cure for true believers, it is widely believed, is to disbelief assertions of truth, to say that there is no truth beyond “your truth” and “my truth” and to feel revulsion–hatred even–toward those who insist on talking about goodness and evil as if they exist out there in ways that demand that we take sides.

Still, it remains an inconvenient truth that the work of judging is fundamental to preserving justice. Most of our confusion is created by evil’s penchant for parodying goodness. Evil needs to work this way because it is absolutely uncreative. It only destroys.

Evil has no telos–purpose or goal–of its own. It is, at bottom, nothing–except opposition to goodness. Goodness is the only true game in the Cosmos–it is, in fact, our name for that true game. We can see evil’s agenda in the way that those who do evil are virtually required to pretend, even to themselves, that they are doing good. Rotten dictators do not usually say they are seeking power because they enjoy power, and that power is felt most keenly when we are harming or destroying another. When we harm a fellow we provoke the most pure and primal opposition and in overcoming that fully focused will of another we achieve the purest sense of our self’s will.  But the evil rarely admit this. What they say, generally, is that they are seeking some version of equality, fraternity, and liberty–because that is the true game.

In practice, it can be hard to tell who is telling the truth and who is lying. It’s so hard, sometimes, to tell what’s true that we are tempted to feel impotent and helpless, to wash our hands of the question. We note that partisans come to resemble each other, with each side making the same accusations of the other: they are lying, they have a hidden agenda of self-aggrandizement, etc. etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum till the end of time.

And yet, it remains an inconvenient truth that the work of judging is fundamental to preserving justice.

One ancient text that focuses on the problem is the story of the judgment of Solomon, from  1 Kings 3:16-28. In this story, two young women who both had an infant son came to Solomon for a judgment. One woman claimed that the other had rolled over on her own son while sleeping, smothering him, and had then switched the two babies to make it appear that the living child was hers. The other woman denied this and so both women claimed to be the mother of the living son and said that the dead boy belonged to the other. Each accused the other of lying. At a glance, they appear indistinguishable.

But who would therefore conclude that there is no difference between them? Who would be content to say that there is no truth or that we cannot learn what it is? Who would that benefit?

King Solomon called for a sword. He declared that the live son must be split in two, each woman receiving half of the child. The true mother cried, “Please, My Lord, give her the live child—do not kill him!” However, the liar, a bitter and jealous being, agreed with the judgment, “It shall be neither mine nor yours—divide it!”

Solomon thus brought to light the critical difference between the two women who superficially appeared the same. He gave the live baby to the real mother, who was motivated by love, and he revealed the false desire of the liar. She did not love the baby. She perhaps envied the baby’s mother, and so her desire was a form of imitation rather than something authentic. Her borrowed desire for the baby, which she may at some level have believed, stemmed from envy of someone possessed of a fulfilling desire. No doubt part of her wished she could feel the way she imagined the real mother must feel. So the empty woman acted in ways that inevitably transformed the one she envied into a rival. Her dishonest desire led her inexorably toward hate.

We can see this disturbing pattern at every level in our society, from high school drama between jealous girls or boys fighting over the same girl, to intense political contests,  to international war. It’s a grave mistake to underestimate the power of envy or to remain oblivious to the ways it destroys worlds. Part of the learning we have in store for ourselves in the present age is the wisdom that lies behind the tenth commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour’s.

This story of Solomon’s Judgment should resonate strongly in an age when, for many, the dominant political passions are envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred. For those wanting a better understanding of where the truth lies, attention to desire remains the key. What do they seek? What will satisfy them? Could anything satisfy them?

For an excellent study of what great literature (Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Flaubert, Proust)  can teach us about good desire and its false parodies, read Rene Girard’s Deceit, Desire & the Novel.