Tag: narrative story

The enchanted cave, part 1

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Odysseus with Calypso

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”?

Why literature matters

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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.

Truth and its envious imitators

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Judgement of Solomon

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.

On “reading” the great books

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One reason I don’t whole-heartedly believe a return to a great books curriculum would “fix” education is that people bring the same ideas and mental filters to literature that they bring to the world. In a Marxist reading of Hamlet, the good prince’s spiritual awakening is invisible, and in a Freudian reading, the urgency of his advice to the queen is lost in psychosexual musings.

Shakespeare wrote within a Christian culture. Strangers to that culture read something quite other than he wrote.

I believe there can be great value in trying to understand old texts as their authors understood them, and since I also believe in an actual reality to which words refer, I also believe in the possibility of genuine understanding. The currently fashionable pedagogy of teaching students to “read” texts through various lenses, such as a “Marxist lens” or a “feminist lens” in practice sometimes amounts to no more than a willful subversion of those texts–an intentional avoidance of drawing near to what the author knew and attempted to communicate.

A new counterculture: beyond the dead zone

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I read D. G. Meyers’ blog long before he became the “literature guy” at Commentary. It was refreshing to find a voice writing about literature that was not part of what David Mamet calls “the herd” and Anne Coulter calls “the mob.” His recent post about the “dead zone at the core of American life” deals in a more explicitly political way than most of his writing with the corruption and decadence at the heart of American education–including the creation and study of literature:

Even if the “best and brightest” in academe were not so keen to throw off the burden of the liberal arts — which were once the zone of strong moral codes in American life — the university has irretrievably lost its position as the training ground of personal character.

Nearly everyone has abandoned what was once understood–and had been so since Socrates–to be a core mission of education. William James put it thus:

The purpose of a university education, everyone now agrees, is to help you get ahead; not, as once said, underlining every word, to “help you to know a good man when you see him.”

About contemporary fiction, Meyers cites Joseph Hynes (“Morality and Fiction) to the effect that Henry James is a “highly sensitive moralist trying to find some roots for his conviction that responsible choices require attention to how we ought to live our lives,” but then he goes on to suggest that “James was one of the last American novelists with any such conviction.” Modern fiction-writers “have written more and more painstakingly about less and less,” Hynes observes. At present we see “the determined refusal, on display in contemporary fiction, to enter into conscious moral debate. . . .”

Humanists once sought asylum, to a degree, from a world consumed by “business ethics” and money values, and the  major institutions in which such fugitives could “earn a living — the mainline churches, the research universities, the publishing trade” — have mostly imitated and come to share the values of the mercantile world they once critiqued. Meyers concludes that “if a new zone of personal character and strong moral codes is to be created in American life, it will have to be the work of a counterculture.”

It’s been disheartening to watch the humanities, which one could easily imagine would have been home to those least easily fooled by the deadening dissolutions of all the twentieth century’s ideologies, to witness it becoming so badly confused and self-contradictory, following a dead end road of modernity and post-modernity, a way marred with thousands of road signs bearing only slogans and pointing nowhere real.

It appears that Christian humanists are the group who are most diligently reading the great old masterpieces, including those of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Those books, along with those of the ancient Hebrews, do model habits of thought and reason that have repeatedly set people free in the past and will do so again. The forces of greed and nihilism and hedonism are hardly new. They are the perennial enemy of the good life.

And it is the good life, finally, that is becoming a real counterculture.

The moral confusion of young people

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Vico. I haven’t thought about him since I was an undergraduate. One of my philosophy profs in a “great books” program was writing a book on Vico, who he believed was hugely underappreciated, and so Vico seemed to creep into everything we read, from Homer to James Joyce, though I would be exaggerating if I suggested I understood the prof well enough to agree or disagree.

Now here comes Mark Signorelli at the invaluable Front Page web site talking about Vico’s argument about “the inescapably probable nature of our knowledge concerning human affairs, and the importance of educating youth in a way that prepares them to accept verisimilitude as a proper standard for political and ethical debate.” Maybe now I’m ready to understand what he was talking about.

Homecoming

We have allowed the success of science to forget older understandings of truth and knowledge that are more fitting the needs of our lives as persons among other persons. Over time, this has made life in relationships, including in civil communities, difficult for us: “Our young men, because of their training, which is focused on these studies, are unable to engage in the life of the community, to conduct themselves with sufficient wisdom and prudence; nor can they infuse into their speech a familiarity with human psychology of permeate their utterances with passion.”

Signorelli says that “by exalting the Cartesian standard of truthfulness into a universal standard, teachers were effectively undermining their students’ ability to reason on matters of an ethical or political nature, where the neatness and conclusiveness of science can never be reproduced.” He sees our current “imbecility” about political and moral matters as a consequence of applying the wrong standard of truth to such matters:

Exactly as Vico feared, we take the scientific standard of truth to be the sole and universal standard of truth; whatever is not scientifically verified, we assume, is not really true.  One symptom of this intellectual disease is that the modern mind indulges in the recurrent fantasy – played out every day in Psychology and Sociology Departments across the land – that an application of scientific methodology to human experience will somehow provide us with conclusive and substantive knowledge about ourselves.  And when this delusion falls apart, as it inevitably does, we swing just as wildly to the opposite extreme and declare that nothing true can be asserted regarding ethical or political topics.  Thus we oscillate endlessly between positivism and relativism – between sociobiology on the one hand, and post-modernism on the other – without ever discovering the grounds on which to establish some form of civil agreement.

The moral confusion that results has been incorporated into our teaching. Schools, governed more by fashion and politics than by philosophy, have responded to the age’s lack of moral clarity by abdicating moral education, except for slogans amenable to the diversity regime or those aimed at eliciting compliance with various school rules. “Respect” at school means complying with rules about wearing hats, and “responsibility” mean turning in homework on time.

This doesn’t seem to be working very well. Lost in Transition : The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Hilary Davidson, Kari Christoffersen, Christian Smith, Patricia Snell Herzog explores in some detail the moral confusion of young Americans. This sociological study from Oxford University Press is based on “in-depth interviews with a broad cross-section of emerging adults (ages 18-23) to investigate the difficulties young people face today, the underlying causes of those difficulties, and the consequences both for individuals and for American society as a whole.”

The findings that have gotten most attention are the author’s claims about the vacuity of moral reasoning among today’s young people:

We asked emerging adults to tell us about any experiences they have had facing moral dilemmas recently and how they went about resolving them. In the context of a larger discussion about moral rights and wrongs, goods and bads, we asked this question: “Can you tell me about a specific situation you’ve been in recently where you were unsure of what was right and wrong?” Their answers were revealing. First, one-third of the emerging adults who we interviewed (33 percent) simply could not think of any moral dilemmas or difficult situations that they had personally confronted in recent years. . . .Two-thirds of the emerging adults we interviewed (about 66 percent) proved simply unable to engage our questions about moral dilemmas in their lives. . . .The rest either think they do not face any moral conflicts or uncertainties, think that they do when in fact they really do not, or do not understand what “moral” means.

. . . the adult world that has socialized these youth for 18 to 23 years has done an awful job when it comes to moral education and formation. Moral individualism and relativism are simply intellectually impossible and socially unsustainable positions. Any college sophomore philosophy major should be able to handily deconstruct them both. Yet the majority of American youth have entered emerging adulthood committed to moral individualism. And a substantial minority of them have done the same with moral relativism. On these two elementary points, these emerging adults are simply lost. They are morally at sea in boats that leak water badly. That is not an acceptable situation. . . .

Schools are one of the most powerful socializing institutions of youth in American society today, along with families and the mass media. Public schools are the dominant institution among all school types. Before we interviewed our respondents as emerging adults, we had previously interviewed them twice, when they were still teenagers, some of them when they were as young as 13 years old. So we know a great deal about their lives before they entered emerging adulthood. One big theme that stuck out in our previous interviews 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.

So, should we do something? According to Signorelli, we need to regain the standards of truth that are embodied in the great works of our own tradition. “Our task,” he says, “is simply the revival of humanist scholarship, in the schools especially, but in the broader culture also.  We must become regular readers again of Sophocles, Thucydides, Petrarch, Cervantes, Racine, Johnson, and Tolstoy, because a mind that is acquainted with their works will find it absolutely ridiculous to suppose that such authors do not state truth.”

My own reading has tended heavily toward such old authors in recent years, and the claims that Signorelli makes for such reading ring true for me. However, I don’t imagine any of this will have the slightest effect on public schools, if things are left to them.

Losing the story

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey

I have not been doing “place-conscious” teaching to a great extent the past few years. The failure is not with the kids but with the adults, who do not see building a community and living through it as a task central to education. So, there is little in the way of conversation at the community level for kids to join.

The heart of the problem is that people have escaped community and do not want to re-create it, and certainly not in the unpromising context of a due-process bureaucracy that treats everyone–staff and clients–without care. Place-based teaching could make more sense in a private school organized around a shared purpose and a shared understanding of what practices best serve that purpose. But public schools serve mainly careerist and consumerist passions.

I’ve tried to get more clear about a kind of knowing has been handed down to me through an American culture where it was understood that the material world related to the spiritual world in such a way that any moment correctly observed could express an eternal truth–provide a visible type by which the invisible world could be apprehended.

When, as Puritans, early Americans encountered the New England coast, they did not see stones shaped by geologic forces over millions of years or waves rising and falling according to laws of physics that stretched backward and forward through infinity without change. What they did see was a stage upon which a cosmic drama of sin and redemption was enacted in every moment. They saw in all of it a provident God whose story gave time a beginning and an end, extending moment by moment in unimaginably vast patterns that both repeated and unfolded more fully.

In learning to see their own lives as stories, types within the unfolding plan, they became skilled metaphorical thinkers, adept at seeing in quite different details the same patterns, which were revelatory of the underlying truth from which existence unfolded. Their own grand errand to the wilderness could be understood through the Israelites’ journey through wilderness toward the promised land.

Every event and aspect of nature was at once itself and a remembrancer of more. History was not merely chronology but also an intelligible order in which prophets had discerned and described both past and future. History was not one damn thing after another but a way of seeing things as they really are and really will be. The smallest of stories resonated without end.

Later, such ones as Thoreau, Emerson, Melville and Hawthorne separated the Puritan’s metaphorical facility from faith in the God of the Bible, making symbols that suggested transcendence. It was still known among people in general that every time and place was somehow an instance of the universal. One could still see eternity in a grain of sand.

For a while it seemed that little had changed. But for some, a separation of metaphor and faith was not enough. It was necessary that there be no gods. It remains something of a mystery to me why, seeing a cosmos ordered by goodness, some souls turn away, preferring a cosmos that they themselves construct–the fall from an uncertain truth to a certain untruth, as Voegelin said.

But they did construct a cosmos full of emptiness and death. In “The Snow Man” Wallace Stevens said that to face the meaningless arrangements and rearrangements of patterns that make up modernity, “one must have a mind of winter.” Only then can one behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

It’s true that few of us really do have minds of winter. The covers of best sellers are graced with images of Egyptian pyramids or South American temples or Stonehenge. People keep looking beyond cold nothing.

Still, an awareness of nothing has creeped into our schools and offices. What does it matter which building in which edge city reached by which highway one goes to through morning gridlock to ride the same elevator to the same hallway to the same room filled with purplish gray fabric-covered cubicles, personalized with photocopied jokes?

In such places, the contemporary concern with “sense of place” emerged.

I think that the longing for a sense of place has grown from a longing for meaning, which is in part a longing for a way of being understood and loved, as a way of being together. Many of us no longer have a sense of living among all our grandmothers and grandfathers and all our children and grandchildren, some not yet born–and yet we are not ready to completely inhabit the cold empty sense that all we have been amounts to only the melting and shattering of vibrating bits.

The longing for a sense of place is, I think, a longing for the cosmos at the scale of home. It’s a longing for meaning and connections that prove that we are alive and that we matter. It’s a powerful longing. It leads people to crave drugs, to join gangs, to get pregnant, to prepare speeches and workshops. . .

Outside my office window, I hear thunder but it’s too dark still to see weather. I know fires are burning in the Mission Mountains, and my sons will be heading there at dawn. When it gets light, I will drive north for the first day of a new school year. I know that the empty spaces between protons and electrons that comprise my desk are a million billion times larger than the particles themselves, and I know that the solidity of the birch window sill where I lean, searching the breeze for scent of smoke, is an illusion created by force fields within which electrons and protons dance, and I know that nobody knows what the forces fields are, and that the electrons themselves are made of even smaller particles, emerging from waves of a not-nothing that are prior to energy and flooding the universe with being.

But I do not know what stories to tell at work.

I could not have imagined this

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey

Cranesbill and peonies

Cranesbill and Peonies--Umphrey's gardens

A garden is an epiphany, at least for the gardener. The orchestration of visible beauty, according to invisible processes in time, gives us the metaphors to think about the order of being. The astonishing thing is not merely how life is, but that it is capable of, indeed prone to, such beauty.

I take that to be the most important truth of many truths one can know only by experience. No philosopher confined to his study would have imagined anything so wondrous as even my little garden. The great philosophers all know this–their work is full of nature and of history, taking its bearings from the real world that they have opened themselves to knowing.

Since ancient days, one of the uses of gardens has been a refuge from worlds gone awry. I’ve used gardening this summer to reorient myself to teaching, after an unusually discouraging year. This is an unpromising time to be a teacher dedicated to passing on some understanding of the order of being discovered and explored through the great classic literature of the West.

The enemies of such as Homer, Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Shakespeare et al have always been here. In recent decades, they have been triumphant at the level of pop culture, which, regrettably, includes public education, and many young people have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the “isms” of ersatz religion before they reach high school or college, with results described memorably by philosopher Allan Bloom in his controversial best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind and summarized by James M Rhodes in Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues:

American students believe that truth is relative. They are astonished by anyone who does not accept this proposition as self-evident. Consequently, they lack intellectual seriousness and learn little. Their relativistic families are also spiritually dreary, colorless, devoid of inspiring visions of mankind’s meaning and good, intellectually moribund, bourgeois, and incapable of transmitting ethical principles effectively because their relativism has robbed them of moral authority. The students do not read great books anymore, thanks to relativism and the successful feminist assault on the Western canon. Instead, they are addicted to rock music. This music has “one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire–not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored….

Like severe drug addiction, he says, this “gutter phenomenon … ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.” The sexual frenzy of the music is part of a broader phenomenon. Sex has become “the national project.” The students have joined this enterprise. They have abolished sexual limits and modesty and now engage in multiple “relationships, ” not promiscuously, but serially. The sex is easy and it has become “no big deal.” The result is that “sexual passion no longer includes the illusion of eternity.”

Young people, and not only they, “have studied and practiced a crippled eros that can no longer take wing, and does not contain within it the longing for eternity and the divination of one’s relatedness to being.” This eroticism is sated, sterile, lame, and “is not the divine madness that Socrates praised.” Casual relationships have also fostered the habit of approaching marriage with egocentric attitudes that lack constancy. This has contributed to the runaway divorce rate that “is surely America’s most urgent social problem.” The children of divorced parents are irreparably harmed. It does not matter that armies of psychologists are hired to persuade them that their parents love them and will spend “quality time” with them. The children feel grievously wronged, come to mistrust love, and develop a slight deformity of the spirit that closes them to the serious study of philosophy and literature. In addition to all this, the students are self-centered, that is, more interested in their careers and enjoyments than in other human beings or in great spiritual or political issues. In the vast majority of cases, they arrive at their universities seeking vocational training, without the sense that they are embarking upon grand intellectual adventures that might yield answers to the question, “What is man?” Thus, a defective American eros, not only in its sexual forms but also in all its branches, has prevented our students from waxing in wisdom and grace. By and large, American students become “flat souled.”

“Flat souled” would seem a precise name of the affliction. Rhodes in main agrees with Bloom, though he thinks the situation may not always be as grim as Bloom states it. What he does agree with, though, is that youth today are taught to understand their sexuality in ways that are quite destructive to the higher learning–knowledge of the transcendent order of being. Though Rhodes is talking about undergraduates, the same dynamic is increasingly present in high school:

It [many] cases, the students’ sex has really become so easy that it is “no big deal.” In these instances, the eros has surely become sterile, devoid of Socratic divine madness, and incapable of taking wing into eternity, as Bloom contends. Also, there is usually exploitation in these kinds of relationships. Almost invariably, somebody gets hurt. Undoubtedly, there are exceptions. There must be a number of cases in which there is perfect mutual giving of self to other and a firm intention of permanence. These instances are marriage in all but name and can be expected to eventuate in the Socratic winged flights. The normal result, though, is heartbreak. Socratic teachers cannot save students from these mistakes by prying into their private lives or policing bedrooms. Neither can they prevent the errors by preaching religious morality or the lessons of Plato’s dialogues from their bully classroom pulpits; words are mere abstractions to the young until the realities of their self-inflicted injuries become manifest as pain. All the Socratic professors can do is to wait for the heartbroken students to crash-land in tears in their offices and classrooms. When this occurs, the youths do not need pinch-faced authorities in tall, pointy hats to inform them that something has gone badly wrong with their love affairs. Rather, they need advice on how to heal their wounds and fulfill their erotic natures in true love. Here, Bloom seems mistaken if he supposes that the eros of the damaged souls can never take wing. Sometimes, it is disaster that opens unhappy souls to philosophy. The teacher must be prepared to lead the students to a more philosophic eros when it is needed and wanted. In this role, the Socratic professor can help some of the sorrowing youngsters.

I have no faith in the profession of teachers–they are part of the pop culture that has become the problem, but I do wish more parents understood that what young people are being taught by pop culture is not some accidental cultural evolution. It has been planned, and the planning has not been a secret conspiracy so much as an out loud and in your face revolutionary movment that can be clearly traced in history.

The way of faith has always been too demanding for some, and intellectuals have from the beginning offered alternatives to it, all having to do with the idea that humans direct history and can make of the world what they want. These are false prophets in the sense that what they promise does not happen, but false prophets have been plentiful, offering escape from what Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquistor in The Brothers Karamazov called “the terrible freedom” brought into the world by Christianity.

Eric Voegelin is one major philosopher who traces such false prophets through history, detailing the murder of God and the establishment of ersatz religion. He focuses on the major philosophers–Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Heidegger–and he includes in his list of false teachings “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.” The way these movements have influenced pop culture has been detailed in dozens of books that are less dense and easier to grasp than most of Voegelin. They aren’t hard to find. It’s only necessary to desire.

The main thing about truth–the true order of being–is that it is hidden just enough that it’s necessary to desire it to find it. To one who desires it and is opened by love to it, it reveals itself. But it’s hidden by design from others, so that we can be free to choose what we really do desire.

Years ago, I reached the conclusion that the goal of teaching is simply to make a case for the order of being–to put before young people the record in literature of those moments, such as when Achilles learns of Patrocles’ death, when Moses knows that he will confront Pharaoh armed only with faith and that Pharoah is powerless, when Hamlet reaches the divine present and knows finally that he need only respond in that presence–“the readiness is all”–in short, all those moments when great souls break through mundane reality into the presence of transcendent being and glimpse its order.

It is not, as a student said  last year, that we are telling them how to live. It is that we are pointing them toward witnesses of how things are, so that they are more free to choose wisely.

On those few occasions when I have suggested to individual young people that there is a force in the cosmos with us that wants us to act in some ways and not in others, and sensing this is the beginning of communication with deity, the idea has not been rejected outright. So the game continues and hope remains.

What I know as a gardener is that the force before which Odysseus and Hamlet found themselves present is the same  force “that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It is the force that creates and sustains moment by moment the order of being. To be a gardener is to know that it is a force that can be known, that it reveals itself bit by bit as we ask and listen.

I am asking, and I am learning to listen.

Toward a New Story for Schooling

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey1 Comment

Saul O. Sidore Distinguished Lecture
University of New Hampshire

My topic is “Toward a New Story for Schooling,” but I’m really telling an old story: we can’t separate education from community and we can’t understand communities without understanding them as a web of stories. To improve our schools, we need to pay attention to the stories our communities tell themselves about what they face, what is worth wanting, and where to go next. A new story can suddenly change us–as individuals, communities, or nations.

In 1849 Kit Carson set off in pursuit of a band of Apaches who had captured a white woman. The anecdote, related by Carson himself, sounds like the beginning of a movie. However, Carson had to ride his sweating horse not through the West of some scriptwriter’s imagination, but through a world more like the one we experience every day. A world where we lose the trail, move too slowly, lose our nerve, take the wrong turn, arrive too late or in the wrong place. By the time Carson caught up with the Indians, the woman was dead.

In the abandoned Apache camp he found something else though. A book about a largely fictional character named “Kit Carson” who was a great Indian-slaying hero. It was a shock to him. According to historian Richard White, “Carson’s reaction to finding the book . . . was to lament his failure to live up to his fictional reputation.” The actual Kit Carson was something less than god-like. He couldn’t tuck his pants into a pair of colorful boots, swoop into the scene amid a glittering whirl of rhinestones and leather fringe to perform six-gun magic against the doomed forces of evil. Compared to pulp fiction, real life seemed a bit dismal. And so “the fictional Carson became the standard for the real Carson.”

His life began trying to imitate the story. And who can blame him? We all have within us the heroic impulse. We want lives of meaning, of purpose, of significance and so do our students. If our schools don’t allow young people to feel themselves heroically engaged in something that matters, if we don’t organize them into stories that capture their imagination, filling them with visions of how they want to be, they will fall easy prey to other storytellers, which are all around us.

It has always been that way. There are stories and images loose in the world that capture us and drive our destiny. Such stories rival geography and economics as forces that shape the history both of individuals and nations.

The trouble in schools today can best be understood as a crisis in the narrative environment.

Full Text PDF: “A New Story for Schooling”