May 16, 2007
Wiki Mitchell
've been working on the write-up for Richard Mitchell's entry in Wikipedia. If you happen to have some good info on him that I don't know about, or suggestions for more content, please let me know. You can check out what I've done so far by going here.
Posted by witnit at 5:39 PM | Comments (2)
March 27, 2007
The Political Worth of Ignorance
or your edification, from our resident philosopher, Richard Mitchell. Enjoy at your leasure.
The Answering of Kautski
Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.
Nikolai Lenin
TYRANNY is always and everywhere the same, while freedom is always various. The well and truly enslaved are dependable; we know what they will say and think and do. The free are quirky. Tyrannies may be overt and violent or covert and insidious, but they all require the same thing, a subject population in which the power of the word is dulled and, thus, the power of thought occluded and the power of deed brought low. That's why Lenin's bolshevism and American educationism have so much in common.
"Give me four years to teach the children,'' said Lenin, "and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.'' He wasn't talking about reading, writing, and arithmetic. He wanted only enough of such skills so that the workers could puzzle out their quotas and so that a housebroken bureaucracy could get on with the business of rural electrification. Our educationists call it basic minimum competency, and they hope that we'll settle for it as soon as they can cook up some way of convincing us that they can provide it. For Lenin, as for our educationists, to "teach the children'' is to "adjust'' them into some ideology.
Lenin understood the power of that ready refuge from logical thought that is called in our schools the "affective domain,'' the amiable Never-never Land of the half-baked, to whom anything they name "humanistic'' is permitted, and of whom skillful scholarship and large knowledge are not required. Lenin approved of the "teaching'' of values and the display, with appropriate captions, of socially acceptable "role models.'' He knew all too well the worth of behavior modification. He knew that indoctrination in "citizenship'' is safer than the study of history, and that a familiarity with literature is not conducive to the wholehearted pursuit of career objectives in the real-life situation, or arena.
On the other hand, Lenin knew that there was little risk that coherent thought could erupt in minds besieged by endless prattle about the clarification of values. He knew that reiterated slogans can dull even a good mind into a stupor out of which it will never arise to overthrow the slogan-makers. In this, our educationists have followed him assiduously, justifying every new crime against freedom of language and thought by mouthing empty slogans about "quality education.''
"Most of the people,'' Lenin wrote, not in public, of course, but in a letter, "just aren't capable of thinking. The best they can do is learn the words.'' If that reminds you of those bleating sheep in Animal Farm, try to forget them, and think instead of the lowing herds of pitiable teacher-trainees, many of whom began with good intentions and even with brains, singing for their certificates dull dirges of interpersonal interaction outcomes enhancement and of change-agent skills developed in time-action line. Lenin's contempt was reserved for the masses. These educationists, pretenders to egalitarianism, hold even their own students in contempt, offering them nothing but words.
If you think it too rash to charge our educationists even as unwitting agents of tyranny and thought control, consider these lines from a recent proclamation of the Association of California School Administrators:
"Parent choice'' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. "Family choice'' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the "wants'' of a single family rather than the "needs'' of society.
So what do you think? Would it suit Lenin?
And if you'd like to object, you'll see that these people also know how to answer Kautski. They'll just pronounce you an elitist, and everybody will understand everything.
The Necks and Minds of the People
THIS month in Belgrade, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization will meet to blather about the report of its commission on "the news media." That report suggests, among other outrages, that the press ought to promote, and perhaps ought to be required to promote, the "social, cultural, economic and political goals set by governments." We're not the least bit surprised. That's exactly the kind of idea you can expect from an outfit calling itself "educational."
"Education" once meant liberation, a condition available to those led forth (educati) out of some restraint or captivity. We once assumed that ignorance and unreason, although natural, were fetters that might be broken through the accumulation of knowledge and the practice of logical thought. We imagined that this trap of reflexive twitches might be transformed into the examined life.
Now it is otherwise, and "education" can be best understood as an inoculation, which, if it takes, will protect you from something much worse: reeducation. But it usually takes. Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to "educate the people" so that they will have but one common mind to delude.
Even in its less malevolent forms, education has become a process intended not to increase knowledge and foster thought but to engender feelings. Sellers see no absurdity in claiming to "educate" buyers. Politicians are eager to "educate" voters. And our schools have taken up institutionalized apologetics in the cause of values clarification and social adjustment through consciousness raising. In short, American public education is exactly what UNESCO wants us to promote, one of those "social, cultural, economic and political goals set by government." We will decline.
We hear noises from educationists, and especially from unionists in education, about the "duty" of the press to stop knocking and start boosting, by running, perhaps, some cheery articles about boldly innovative (relevant) bulletin boards and the latest test scores, which may suggest that many eleventh graders are now only three years behind in reading. Now is the time, we hear, to "restore public confidence in the schools." That invitation is the same as UNESCO's, and, considering its source, nakedly self-serving as well as ominous. Again, we decline.
Public education, no less than the Marine Corps or the Internal Revenue Service, is a creature of government and an instrument of its policies. Its meager remnant of "civilian control," the elected school board, has been effectively disenfranchised by the mandates of government, which leave little uncontrolled. Public education serves one master, and that master is rich and powerful. Those who clamor for the restoration of confidence in the public schools can, with the mighty resources at their disposal, and not money alone, but the power and prestige of officialdom, easily provide that for themselves. They can easily "educate the public" into warm feelings of respect for the schools, especially since those whose values stand in need of clarification are mostly victims of the schools, unskilled in thought and poor in knowledge.
When they do that--indeed, as they do that, for they are always at it in one way or another--it is only the press that can put weights in the other pan of the scale, citing facts and exploring meanings.
"The functionaries of every government," wrote Jefferson, "have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents." Is that any less true when the "functionaries of government" just happen to be bureaucrats in some department of "education"? Have they not commanded our property, in countless billions, only to squander it on fads and gimmicks and nonsensical "research" and lucrative consultancies for others of their tribe? Have they not commanded our liberty and our very persons in the cause of ideological adjustment? How long would we bear such intrusive and manipulative behavior in other functionaries of government, in the Coast Guard, for example, or the Motor Vehicle Bureau?
How long? Only so long as we remain ignorant of what they are doing and thoughtlessly uncritical about its meaning. Jefferson went on:
There is no safe deposit for them [liberty and property] but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is secure.
It is noteworthy that the people who want the press to promote the schools, thus mitigating the first of Jefferson's conditions for the security of all, are the very ones who have so egregiously failed to provide the second: universal literacy.
On the other hand, of course, Lenin opposed freedom of the press. Why, he asked, should government that is "doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized?" His values were clarified.
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Nox quondam, nox futura?
Students do not read, write and do arithmetic as well as they used to because they can get along quite nicely without these skills. . . . Americans are finding that they need to rely less and less on "basic skills" to find out what they want to know and what they want to do. Our basic skills are declining precisely because we need them less.
[Peter Wagschal, Futurist, University of Massachusetts]
YEAH. And that's not all! Just you take a good look at the standard American dogs and cats. They live pretty damn well, tolling not, neither spinning, and they've never even heard of stuff like reading, writing, and arithmetic. They "do quite nicely without those skills," and so do tropical fish and baboons. And so, too, did black slaves and Russian serfs, and all those marvelously skillful and industrious ancestors of us all who gathered nuts and roots and killed small rodents with sticks. They all knew everything they needed to know.
We would probably never have heard of Peter Wagschal, or of his neato Ouija Board Studies Program, if it hadn't been for one Larry Zenke, a pretty neato guy himself. Zenke is Superintendent of Schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where men are still men. Did he quail when the national achievement test scores, which used to be quite good in that prosperous and orderly city, hit new lows last fall? Nosirree. When taxpayers grumbled, did he ignominiously promise to do better? And when the Tulsa Tribune started shooting off its editorial mouth about "fads" and "anti-academic garbage," did Zenke tiptoe away into the piloting of experiential remediation enhancement parameters?
No way. Not in Oklahoma. In the finest frontier fashion, he stood up tall in the middle of Main Street at high noon and told the unruly rabble that maybe they'd like to talk it over, before doing anything hasty, with his pal, Pete (The Persuader) Wagschal, who somehow just happened to drift into town. True grit.
Then, having (by proxy) brought light to the benighted fuddy-duddies of Tulsa, Zenke, who obviously knows more than he lets on, laid a little groundwork for the defense of next year's test scores: "Wagschal even suggests that 50 years from now we could be the smartest, most knowledgeable society that has ever existed, and yet be largely illiterate."
The italics are Zenke's, not ours, and we're grateful for them. We have often wondered what kind of an idea it would take to make a school superintendent excited about the life of the intellect.
And a dandy idea it is, especially for all those much misunderstood "educators," saddled (for now) with the thankless (and difficult) task of teaching what no one will need to know when the bright age dawns. All that burnout and stress! And for what? For nothing more than an arcane and elitist social grace no more necessary in a truly "knowledgeable society" than the ability to play polo, or the lute.
And how, you ask, will people who are "largely illiterate" come to amass all that knowledge? Well, don't you worry, bless your heart. Someone will probably be quite willing to tell them what to know, even if it means all the trouble and expense of attaching loudspeakers to every lamp-post in America.
The teachers, then, will be liberated to do what the teacher academies train them to do. Zenke foretells:
Teachers, for example, will no longer be disseminators of cognitive information--machines will do that. Teachers will be program developers and/or facilitators of group membership, helping students develop interaction skills. Some educators, of course, will be found too rigid to survive this metamorphosis, but those who do will find excitement and fulfillment in their new "teaching roles."
And that will be just dandy too. Happy, happy, the teachers of tomorrow, at long last fulfilled and excited! Freed forever from the stern constraints of the tiny smatterings of mere information still incongruously expected of teachers, the facilitator-trainees of the future won't have to take any of those dull and irrelevant "subjects" that now impede their growth as professionals and their group membership development. They'll be able to spend all their time in the enhancement of their interaction skills, so that they can go forth and facilitate the same for little children. (Those cunning tots, of course, do have to be educated, you know, so that they will sit quietly in organized groups when it's time to hear some knowledge from the loudspeaker.) And the training program for superintendents of schools will be even more exciting and fulfilling. There's just no counting the skills that they can get along nicely without.
Which is it you've lost, Tulsans, your spirit or your minds? Could it be both? Do you lie awake in the still watches of the night worrying about those godless communists who are panting to nationalize oil? Do you fear that bleeding hearts will take away the guns by which you fancy that you won and may yet preserve your liberty? Pooh, Tulsans, pooh.
The most dangerous threat to your liberty, the one that has by far the best chance of turning you all into docile clods, is right there in Tulsa. Think, dammit! Do you imagine that foreign enemies of this nation could devise for your children a more hideous and revolting destiny than the one so blithely envisioned--and as an exoneration, no less--by the superintendent of schools? Do you yawn and turn to the sports section, citizens of Tulsa, when the man whom you have hired to oversee the growth of understanding and judgment in your children airily tells you that in a palmier day they will have no need of the literacy that alone can give those powers? Do you shrug when he tells you that the children will be spared the burden of whatever "cognitive information" they don't actually need, which must obviously, since the children will have no powers of judgment, be chosen by someone like Zenke? Do you, like Zenke, dream of the day when no one will be able to read our Constitution, but it won't matter, because the machines provided by the government schools will tell us all we really need to know about it? Can you think of something to say to those teachers, and superintendents, who are not excited and fulfilled with leading young minds into the ways of understanding and thoughtful discretion, and who arc unrigid enough, flaccid and limp enough, not only to survive but to hail as liberation their metamorphosis into developers and facilitators? Does it not occur to you that the inculcation of "interaction skills" for the purpose of "group development" is exactly the opposite of an education, by which a mind can find its way out of group-think and the pet promulgations of collectivisms? And in short, Tulsans, what are those strange black boxes we see on your lamp-posts? What soothing message have they recited, even as you slept? How is it, O Pioneers, that you are not mad as hell?
Oklahoma is much changed, but the descendants of the settlers still like to watch the hawk making lazy circles in the sky. Their bird-lore, however, is not what it was. In fact, there's hardly a damn one of them that can tell a hawk from a vulture nowadays.
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Children of Perez
WE were sitting around minding our own business, thinking of bilingual education and the perpetual preservation of absolutely everyone's cultural heritage, however loathsome, when the New York Times suddenly told us about Demetrio Perez, Jr., a Cuban émigré who has become a City Commissioner in Miami.
Perez is mad as hell because Martin Bregman, who produced Serpico, intends to make a movie about a Cuban émigré who makes it big in Miami as a drug peddler. From one side of his mouth, Perez says that this will "reflect badly" on Cubans, but the other side is not interested in Cubanity; it says that the movie would be dandy if the drug peddler were a communist Cuban. (Perez would also settle for a Jewish drug peddler, since he makes no objection to the fact that there are many such in the same movie.) And furthermore, Perez didn't like Serpico either. He says that "it tried to affect the credibility of the New York City Police Department." Accordingly, he has drawn up a draft resolution that would keep Bregman from filming his movie in sun-drenched Miami.
This is what we wonder: Does the political philosophy of Demetrio Perez, Jr., flow from the values inherent in a "cultural heritage" that our own government is busily doing all that it can to preserve in the schools, or is the man just some kind of a fool who has not thought about what he said? We had better hope the latter; the former promises the death of the Republic.
In either case, we'd like to send a message to Perez. Here it is:
Remember always, Perez, that it was from that land to this that you fled, whatever your reasons. And that you found this land worth fleeing to tells us something about that cultural heritage and this one. Few flee from this to that, Perez. Few flee into societies built on long ages of obedience to traditional orthodoxy and humble respect for authority, societies where some factions are not subject to being "badly reflected" upon, where no one would even try--for it is the very trying, successful or not, that you have condemned--to fool around with the credibility of the police, and where movie-makers do exactly as they are told by City Commissioners.
In the cultural heritage that you chose not to leave behind at the border, it has indeed always been true that some people are protected, and by law as well as by custom, not only from injury but even offense. So it is that you seek for some people, policemen and non-communist Cubans, special protection, which must place special restrictions on all other people. That arrangement is abhorrent to our cultural heritage, in which "it is our Right, it is our Duty" to oppose with measures far sterner than offense any who would institute it among us.
And that means you.
The founders of this Republic, one of whom wrote the words you didn't recognize, were not ignorant of the political theories implicit in your cultural heritage. They knew them well, all too well. And they despised them and rejected them utterly. And they gave us, confirmed us in, a heritage that flows not, like yours, from Canossa, but from Runnymede. And that was damned lucky for you, Perez.
You are probably not vicious, but only ignorant, to propose for us the very political principles by which one gang of tyrants came to oust another in Cuba. The perpetual recurrence of usurpation and counter-usurpation does seem embedded in that cultural heritage of yours, doesn't it? And if it is not embedded in ours, if we have not suffered the bloody grand right-and-left of princes, priests, and proles panting after privilege, there must be a reason. You could come to know and understand that reason, Perez, and you should. It is your Duty.
We welcome you to this land, but you can't bring Cuba, neither your Cuba nor anyone else's. Now that you are one of us, and by choice, it is our cultural heritage, in which the preservation of a movie-maker's Right is a city commissioner's Duty, that you must struggle to defend.
Frankly, Perez, we do not expect you to understand this message. But we hope you'll try, if only for the sake of your children, and their children. For the day may well come, through the sheer force of numbers combined with the corrosive labors of our sycophantic educationists, when your cultural heritage will outweigh ours. In that happy day, your dreams will be fulfilled. No one will try to "affect the credibility" of the police. Movie-makers will obey city commissioners.
And in that day, Perez, to what new land will your children flee?
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And furthermore
WE had fewer testy responses than expected to "The Children of Perez." Two readers wrote to say that such matters were beyond the scope (and they may have meant beyond the understanding as well) of this journal.
But the dangerous doctrines of a Perez, and the ideology out of which they flow, are protected from critical analysis in our schools, which think it good to persuade all the children into an undiscriminating "appreciation" of all known cultural heritages and "alternative lifestyles," without consideration of their implicit principles or lack of them. We approach that time when the educationists' already traditional neglect of "mere facts" like the provisions of our Constitution will be justified anew by the fact--which they won't call "mere"--that somebody might be offended by those provisions. As Perez now is.
Such a concern is not "beyond our scope," whatever that may be. Nor is it beyond anyone's scope. And that brings us to "understanding."
The search for understanding is the purpose of the critical examination of language. A scrupulous attention to mechanics and convention is only a paltry fussiness unless it reveals how and why those who seek admission to the greater mysteries will advance all the better through practice in the lesser. We want the schools to teach the skills of language not because that will make the students more genteel, but because it just might make them more thoughtful, and thus more likely to recognize and repudiate public displays of ignorance and unreason. Such displays, often further tainted by pandering mendacity, are the very substance of our politics and the chief agents of mindless factionalism. We are not going to wait until our Perezes dangle their participles. Their words are enough. To inquire into them is our right and duty.
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Joanne the Jack-Killer
or, the Giant's Jolly Christmas
WE really wanted, at this festive time of year, to don our gay apparel; but it turns out that you can't do that anymore without being mistaken for a consciousness-raising band of role-players cheerily relating to an alternative lifestyle. So we decided simply to wish for peace on earth to men of good will. That proved wrong too, so we changed it to persons of good will. And even that proved wrong, for it was sure to offend a substantial and much maligned minority which should be appreciated and related to rather than demeaned by exclusion from our prayers.
It was a certain Joanne Greenberg who reminded us, and just in time, that persons of ill will have feelings too, you know. And rights.
Greenberg seems to be, a bit to our surprise, we must admit, the author of Jack and the Beanstalk. Really. It says so right here in this nifty brochure from West Publishing Company Inc., in Mineola, New York. It says, too, that Greenberg has written thirty other "instructional materials." This, her latest material, is not actually called a book in the brochure, but it is obviously meant to look like one, and it costs $5.75, a bit steep for a material. But it surely is "instructional."
It's not easy to make children hate reading stories, but this Greenberg is a professional. Here's how she does it:
Jack and the Beanstalk, by Joanne Greenberg, provides a familiar framework which allows elementary students to practice decision making while learning the basic principles of our legal system relating to fairness and honesty. The suggested activities encourage students to explore their own opinions about fairness.
Doesn't that sound like fun? How many "opinions about fairness" do the cunning little tykes have? Are many against it? Will they be set right by a merry bout of decision making? Will the teachers' manual that comes with this material teach the teachers those "basic principles of our legal system relating to fairness and honesty"?
But this is more than a pre-pre-law material. It is "relevant and motivating reading matter":
The activities in each chapter not only motivate the students to think critically, view situations from various perspectives, and form conclusions, but also apply language art skills such as spelling, handwriting, and creative writing.
Just imagine. There you sit, reading a book, dwelling awhile in a world strangely truer than the world, and at the end of every chapter, along comes this meddlesome schoolteacher who makes you practice decision making and "learn" legal principles. You have just watched Huck hastily covering the dead face of his friend, and this busybody, whose own "opinions" are slogans left over from teacher-school courses in interpersonal relating and values clarification workshops, calls a rap-session to help you explore your opinions. Emma is stuffing her mouth with the poisonous powder, and some officious employee of the state, whose mouth drips the cant of life adjustment and behavior modification in the affective domain, "motivates" you to view situations from various perspectives," and then to "apply" spelling.
And when Jack lays his axe to the root of the beanstalk, will this Joanne Greenberg come barging in with her explorations and activities and maybe a neat ecological-awareness message from Smoky the Bear? Well, no. She comes up with something worse:
One major change has been made: the Giant is not killed in the end, to avoid a violent act which would have no bearing on the issues being examined.
These school people hate literature. It stands for everything that they stand against. A work of literature comes from one, solitary mind, not from the consensus of a collective. It is an unequivocal assertion that this is so. It abides, or it dies, but it will not negotiate. It comes before us neither as a supplicant nor a defendant, but as a judge. It cares nothing for our favorite notions or our self-esteem. And it offends in us what most deserves offense--petulant sectarian touchiness, facile social supposition, and especially smug self-righteousness. Thus it is that the educationists' literature is not the real thing. They must abbreviate it, or amend it, or--and this is their usual practice--elucidate it, lest their students fail to appreciate correctly its relevance to "the issues being examined." And should the work at hand have nothing to do with the issues they want to examine, they must concoct an "instructional material" and call it Jack and the Beanstalk.
Little children know, even blithering idiots know--except for one tribe--that the Giant must die. The story is about the Good and the Bad, which, in the outer world of the social order, must be always cutting deals. That sad necessity is sad; it is not to our credit. When we forget to be ashamed of that compromise, when we ordain it as a principle of the inner life of the mind, when we learn to flatter ourselves for the "liberality" out of which we tolerate the intolerable, and the "flexibility" with which we gladly bend to every gust of popular novelty, then we aren't even cutting any deals. We are simply capitulating.
Jack does not capitulate. Nor does he cut a deal by accepting, instead of justice, an "enhanced interpersonal relationship" with brutal greed. He does not "view the situation from various perspectives," but seizes what is truly his, not by "the basic principles of our legal system relating to fairness and honesty," whatever the murky notions intended by that awkward phrasing, but by the one deepest principle of Lawfulness itself. And it is Unlawfulness that dies with the Giant.
And Tyranny, too, dies with the Giant, for that is another of the many names of Unlawfulness. That is why children are not frightened by the death of a brutal monster. They know Tyranny when they see it, for they see it regularly. It is the continued life of the monster, watching and waiting, that frightens them.
Children are little, and cannot live by their own efforts. They need order and principle in the world, lest they perish, in one way or another. When they find their destinies in the hands of unruly and self-indulgent parents, and teachers so unprincipled that they think it "humanistic" to "view" greed and force "from various perspectives" they recognize the Giant. While the Tyrant lives, how can they live? Must they always cut the same old deal, remake themselves after the Giant's image and likeness, lest he sniff out foreign blood in them? Will no one save them? Who can stand, when even the grown-ups prissily reject a violent act which would have no bearing on the issues," against strong tyranny?
Jack--that's who.
"One cannot understand the least thing about modern civilization," said George Bernanos, "if one does not first realize that it is a universal conspiracy to destroy the inner life." Greenberg's revision is surely one of those least things, although probably an involuntary ideological twitch rather than a deliberately conspiratorial deed. She is simply "staying in line," which is the first and great commandment of all collectivisms. And the second is like unto it: Keep thy neighbor in line.
And if we send the Giant to the head of the line, maybe he'll be nice to us.
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The Mouths of Babes
"Everybody thinks that Russia is the bad guy. We found out that the U. S. A. is just as bad because we're doing a lot of things like they are, like making nuclear weapons, like we dropped the first bomb... We got the whole thing started."
"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child."
The second quotation is from Cicero. It is one of those sayings that lodge themselves securely in a quiet corner of the mind, only now and then nagging for attention and elucidation. The words seem to have the ring of truth, but what, exactly and in detail, do they mean?
Our ruminations on that question have been helped along prodigiously by the first quotation. It is the "work" of a thirteen-year-old schoolboy somewhere in Wisconsin. A child. A child whose teachers have apparently been admitted to the greater mysteries without having to pass through the tedious apprenticeship of the lesser. They have not taught this child much about the natural form of the sentence, but they have told him who "got the whole thing started.'
We found this schoolboy's understanding of what happened before he was born (which must be rigorously distinguished from his knowledge of what happened before he was born) in a column in the Times & World News of Roanoke, Va., July 11, 1983.
The author, Harold Sugg, a journalist, suggests that the child might have been given some knowledge before he was handed an "understanding"--knowledge about the progress and intentions of German scientists, about the well-founded fears of Einstein and other refugees, Roosevelt's perfectly prudent reaction to Einstein's letter, and Truman's dilemma, unresolved to this day, and, like any of history's "what if's," unresolvable by anything less than the mind of God.
Regular readers will easily sniff out the source of the schoolboy's "understanding." It is, of course, the "packet of materials" put out by a teachers' union, the National "Education" Association. That handy-dandy guidebook for teachers who are ignorant of what occurred before they were born was "to dispel misconceptions [specifically in junior high school children] about nuclear war and the buildup of nuclear arms." When we discussed this project last December, we wondered whether that teachers' union had come up with some new and hitherto unsuspected knowledge, or whether they would dispel misconceptions in their usual way, i.e., by modifying children into some new feelings without bothering about mere knowledge. But, of course, we didn't really wonder.
Now that we have some evidence as to their methods, we want to consider their enterprise from another point of view.
They did indeed proclaim that their program of megadeath education was meant to "dispel misconceptions" in teenagers. What can be the meaning of that curious qualification? If there were some line of argument or collection of knowledge that would in fact dispel misconceptions about nuclear war in teenagers, why on earth would it not have precisely the same effect on anyone of any age?
Surely, knowledge is knowledge, and reason, reason. There can hardly be several of each, severally suitable to different ages. Some persons, to be sure, and no matter what their age, still have minds so credulous and unpracticed that knowledge and reason do not touch them, but if the NEA does in fact command the knowledge and reason that would dispel misconceptions in teenagers, then it must be able to do the same for many of the rest of us.
So why are we left in darkness? Why hasn't this union, ordinarily loud in protesting its devotion to the common good, dispelled all our misconceptions and brought us, in this most critical issue, to a national consensus? Why are some of us still in confusion as to who the good and the bad guys are and who started it all?
Or, to put it in a more useful way, do you imagine that those "teachers" would dare to do in public, before an audience of educated adults, whatever it was they did to bring that little boy to his shallow and altogether pitiable "understanding" of history?
Do you suppose that the little boy's teacher shares his belief? If so, how does such a gullible and uninformed person get to be a teacher? And if not, how is such a teacher anything other than a hypocrite and a molester of children? How else are we to describe one who would take advantage of a child's natural ignorance and pliability in order to arouse in him certain feelings and beliefs that will suit the manipulator's purpose?
Perhaps, however, there is a third possibility that seems, at first, slightly less horrendous. It may well be, for such is the standard practice of those educationists, that the devisers of holocaust education actually admitted (to themselves, but certainly not to the rest of us) that such a study might prove, well, just a bit "advanced" for the juvenile mind to understand "correctly," and thus in need of some judicious and pedagogically practicable adjustment. After all, to bring a child of thirteen to a mature and thoughtful understanding of so large and vexed an issue might take years and years! There just isn't going to be all that time in our nifty little mini-course. We'll have to leave something out, all that science and history and politics stuff, maybe, all those confusing mere facts.
Years and years. Yes, that is what it takes even to begin to form a mature and thoughtful understanding of any serious human issue, years and years of finding and ordering knowledge, and rational inquiry, and living, and paying attention to living, and always, always, living under the decent government of vigilant doubt.
The whole story of our educationists can be told in miniature by the example of this "course" in the dispelling of misconceptions about a stupendously complicated issue. They are reluctant to teach those things that can and should be taught to children. They do not find that a sufficiently professional calling. They dream of being priests and prophets, lofty enlighteners, healers of disordered young psyches, beneficent agents of social change. Scorning skill and knowledge as "minimum," "basic," and "mere," they hustle their charges into "awarenesses," "perceptions," and "appreciations" of the Great Issues, as though such sentiments were ways of understanding. Even when they have faint inklings of the fact that it does take years and years to seek out mature and thoughtful understandings, they decide that children are children, after all, and that for them a childish and simplified "understanding" will be quite good enough, and surely better than none at all.
So it was, for instance, that the boy who was brought to "understand," all about nuclear war was not burdened with the study of history, which could take up a lot of time and would just confuse him. And that much is true; there is a lot of history, of which we can never know more than a little. "The well of history," Thomas Mann put it, "is very deep. Shall we not say that it is bottomless?" And so it is, as anyone who has actually studied history can testify. And that is precisely why we must study it.
The study of history is an antidote to arrogance and dogmatism, because it reminds us that even those who have great knowledge, especially those who have great knowledge, can not agree. It shows us that the "good guys and bad guys" theory of history is puerile nonsense, and that we can no more understand "who started it all" than we can know what "it all" is.
But our little boy did not read history. He was instead, as educationists say, "exposed to social studies."
The hokey cant of the educationists has at least this virtue through it they reveal, however unintentionally, what is really in their minds. Their routine admission of wanting to "expose" students to this or that is a way of saying that they want the children to "catch" something--an "appreciation," or an "awareness," or the most virulent infection of all, a "right response."
(A "right response," in pedagogical theory, has nothing to do with a "correct answer." The latter exists only in the merely cognitive domain, while the former floats in the affective. The correct answer, in fact, may actually prevent the right response, just as that little boy's right response might have been prevented had Harold Sugg been sitting in the back of the class and obstructing the dispelling of misconceptions with a few correct answers.)
The swamp of social studies is not deep. It is shallow, very shallow, fetid and septic. Shall we not expect that he who drinks of it will catch some thing? And that little boy in Wisconsin has indeed caught a "right response," for his meager understanding is dearly the understanding that was intended by those who "instructed" him.
So the third possibility turns out to be not less but more horrendous than the other two. The claim that some inquiries that are just too "advanced" for children to understand can be simplified or abbreviated so that children can understand what they can not understand is arrant nonsense and rank hypocrisy. In this program of nuclear warfare education, no inquiry at all was ever intended, no search for understanding through knowledge, but only the implanting of a certain belief in the uninformed and acquiescent minds of children. In Albania, too, the educationists call that "education."
If there are issues that children can not understand because their minds are insufficiently practiced and informed, and because they have little experience of living, then they can not understand them. Nor have they come to understand them when they have learned to recite the opinions of redactors and simplifiers claiming to be teachers.
And when they have learned that kind of lesson often enough--how often is that?--they will slip easily into the condition that Cicero had in mind: lifelong childhood. Childhood is not best understood as a time of life, for its time is variable and indeterminate. Childhood is better understood as a kind of life, the kind that is simply natural to those in whom the mind is still credulous and unpracticed. Such a mind can not seek understanding by knowledge and rational inquiry, but will readily accept and recite opinions delivered by anyone to whom credulousness grants authority. There is no point in asking, of the boy in Wisconsin, What did he know and how did he reason? The useful question would be: Whom did he heed? He heeded certain other children, who learned the same lesson in the same way.
This is the fact that lies at the heart of all of our troubles in "education," the fact that must ultimately defeat all attempts at reform. The children in the schools are just children, who might someday, if left unmolested, put away childish things. But the other people in the schools, the teachers and teacher trainers, the educrats and theory mongers, are confirmed children. They are, indeed and alas, exactly what they claim to be--"role models." And they represent the end of that process to which schooling is the means: the subversion of knowledge and reason, stern governors, by bands of cunning babies, feelings and beliefs.
If we can escape a nuclear calamity only through some brand of ideological indoctrination in all our children, then we might inquire as to whether we should escape it. But thus we will not escape; we rather make it all the more possible. Violence is an extremity of unreason, and we do not escape either unreason or violence by calling the one to save us from the other.
Nor can we hope that little children who have been dosed with unreason and praised for swallowing it will one day, by magic or luck, put on thoughtfulness and require, of any who would persuade them, knowledge and reason. If that is a part of the natural process of growing up, which is at least questionable, it can obviously be prevented, and by nothing more than a little modification in the affective domain and the relentless display of role models who have already been suitably modified.
And it is a great pity, for children can learn from other children. The very teachers that we now have could easily teach the younger children things like the skills of language and number, upon which all mature and thoughtful understanding must ultimately be founded. They could lead them into reading the words of the thoughtful, words to be stored up against need, for need will surely come. They could treat the younger children like what they truly are, inheritors of wealth beyond counting, the great record of our long struggle to understand "it all," which permits no shortcuts.
But that is to say that the smaller children might someday grow up if the bigger were to grow up today. What do you suppose the chances are?
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As Maine Goes...
The South Portland Board of Education voted April 11 to introduce a new high school course. Low Level American History, starting in September 1984.
The course would be aimed at the "slow readers or non-readers at the high school," Principal Ralph Baxter told the board.
The purpose of the course, Baxter said, would be to help students achieve the necessary number of points to graduate. He said the high school already has similar low-level courses in English, math, and science, the other three subjects required for graduation.
THAT is the news from Maine, as reported in the American Journal of South Portland for May 4, 1983, and we have to admit that we are absolutely astonished (and impressed) by that Ralph Baxter chap. We would never have dreamed that there could be a principal so precise in his use of prepositions. "Non-readers at the high school," he calls them, as though they just happened to be hanging around in the halls and waiting for someone to give them diplomas.
And so they are. And they will get those diplomas sooner or later, but not, as one might idly suppose, out of the compassionate largesse of an egalitarian society. Something, to be sure, is handed to them on a platter, but it's just a nasty mess of gristle and grease. On commencement day, when the new graduates gratefully wag their tails and lap up the orts, the Ralph Baxters of educationism wipe their jowls and belch.
In educationistic ideology, there are at least three justifications for mind-boggling monstrosities like the courses offered in Maine. Of two, the educationists are actually aware. The third, however, can be detected only through knowledge and reason.
First, there is the body count.
Even in these days, when everyone ought to know better, you can find an occasional defense of the schools, usually as a filler in the neighborhood shoppers' guide. The apologist is usually a superintendent dodging flak or an assistant porseffor of education padding his list of publications, and the "arguments" are always exactly the same, always the party line. And one of them is always the body count.
By counting the bodies, an educationist can easily prove, by the logic he learned in teacher school, that the American public schools are not only better than ever, but also better than any other nation's schools. Never in the whole history of mankind have so many "achieved the necessary number of points to graduate."
And then there's the business of democracy in action. The schools are democracy in action. When people are denied diplomas just because they were never taught to read, all who can read will become elitists.
The third justification, the one of which the educationists are possibly not aware, is the approach of 1984. The schools have certainly done their best by fostering Doublethink and Newspeak, and rewriting history as social studies. They have managed, even without two-way television, to find out lots of neat stuff about their students' feelings and beliefs. They have not yet, however, provided the One Thing most needed for the New Day--a sufficient number of proles, those slow readers and non-readers without whom 1984 just won't be the real thing. They're working on it.
Those who imagine that American education can be "reformed" would do well to meditate not on more money for merit pay and computers but on a child, one child. Any one of the non-readers of South Portland will do.
Consider him. He is the victim of an injustice, deprived of the fullness of humanity, the habits and powers of rational discourse amid the thoughtful consideration of meaning. And how can we now deal justly with him? By giving him a diploma? By denying it, adding insult to injury?
In fact, the injustice can never be undone, as though it had never befallen him. He is a crooked branch, having been badly bent as a twig. It would need wise and mighty efforts even to begin to help him to grow straight. Who will put forth those efforts? If the schools were "reformed" miraculously tomorrow, what good would that be to him? Or to hosts of others in the same plight?
In the glorious world of tomorrow, when all the high school graduates can read and reason thoughtfully, our non-reader from South Portland will still he a prole, governed, and easily governed, by unexamined appetites, easily engendered; led, and easily, by pandering politicians, flatterers and entertainers of every sort, and those wheedling behavior modifiers who made him not only a prole but also a prole full of self-esteem,
It is the goal of education to deliver us from the captivity of the unexamined life and out of the power of persuaders. Those who now offer to reform education are the persuaders themselves, the politicians of either stripe, and the social engineers now running the schools and peddling garbage like Low Level English for Non-readers, for which they have already assured the need. They imagine that education is a process for producing certain kinds of people for collective purposes. For the moment, they suppose that the ultimate boon of education is not the examined life but the ability to outsell the Japanese.
Our famous excellence commission meditated not on the dismal destiny of one child, but on a nation, "a nation at risk," at risk of not outselling the Japanese. It will bring forth, therefore, if anything, only a revised nationalistic "education," a modernized program of life-adjustment, this time with computers. And, when the need arises, the school board in South Portland will approve Ralph Baxter's proposal for a course in Low Level Computer Science.
The nature of the injustice done long ago to our non-reader is exactly this: He was put into a system that exists not for his sake but only for the sake of the nation.
The "success" of a school system designed "for the good of the nation," as construed by the government employees who run the schools, is not to be measured by the lifelong captivity of one poor clod. Some number of such clods is, in fact, "for the good of the nation." They can do the scutwork and provide employment for government functionaries in social services. They will always be crying for the moon and illustrating "democracy in action" by flocking into the faction of those who most persuasively promise it. We can't have too many, however, lest we fail to outsell the Japanese. Ending up with just the right number is an appropriate, and quite sufficient, goal of a school system that is intended for the good of the nation. In that great cause, what does it matter that some poor clod in Maine can't lead an examined life, which is probably an over-rated, and surely a suspiciously elitist, enterprise? He'll be all right. We'll tell him whatever it is he needs to know. And he may turn out to be a productive worker, anyway, and thus to serve the good of the nation after all.
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The Children of the State
A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. J. S Mill
Sometimes our readers imagine that we go too far. Once, when we concluded that the American government school system was exactly what Lenin ordered, certain readers imagined that we had gone too far. Later, when we concluded that religious schools were in no important way different from government schools, and that what Luther ordered was even more oppressive than what Lenin ordered, certain other readers imagined that we had gone too far.
In fact, however, we never have the space to go far enough. Of the inane pronouncements and the sentimental mantras of educationism, we ask one question, a question that should always be asked of any proposition, even the most familiar, especially the most familiar: If this is true, what else must be true? It is a little question with a big answer. It throws a wonderful ray of clear light into sunless stews of superstition all the way from astrology to the affective domain.
To answer that question, however, is usually an exasperating chore. It's difficult enough to puzzle out exactly what the educationists are saying, and why they say it, is, therefore, all the harder to construe. Often, after having worked out the logical, and horrible, implications of their dicta, we don't know whether to indict them for vice or for folly. It is thus a rare pleasure to discover an educationist who does not leave us in doubt.
He is a certain William H. Seawell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia, a paragon of clarity, a plain speaker in whom there is no mealy-mouthing, no obliquity, no jargon at all.
"Each child," says William H. Seawell, "belongs to the state." What could be clearer?
In saying that, Seawell, who is, after all, a paid agent of the government of a state, was doing nothing more than what he is paid to do. That function is called, almost certainly by every government on the face of the Earth, "Educating the People." But Seawell's forthrightness, in a matter that ordinarily puts educationists to pious pussy-footing, suggests that he is no mere time-server who is just following orders. He sounds like exactly the kind of agent that any government most prizes: a True Believer.
And a brave one, too. For he also said, to an audience of mere citizens, gathered to "celebrate" the opening of yet another government schoolhouse in Fort Defiance, Virginia, that the purpose of "education" is "the training of citizens for the state so the state may be perpetuated."
Although Seawell probably holds to the orthodox educationistic belief that "truth and knowledge are only relative"* he seems to have spoken as one who knew with absolute certainty that Jefferson had left Virginia forever, and could not possibly be sitting quietly, horsewhip in hand, out in the dim back rows of the auditorium. It could only be out of some such certainty although ignorance might serve as well--that a man would dare to admit that "public schools promote civic rather than individual pursuits," and to argue from that, that "only public education can he used to gain a free society."
Fort Defiance, eh? Well, times have changed in Virginia. Our source, The Staunton Leader, a remarkably restrained newspaper, says nothing at all about the mere citizens' reaction to being educated by Seawell. We have to assume, however, that even The Leader would have made some brief mention of the fact if the man had been tarred and feathered and ridden out of Fort Defiance on a rail, So that probably didn't happen.
And that it didn't is witness to the efficacy of an "education" designed for the perpetuation of the state. Such an "education" must see to it that its victims are habitually inattentive to the meaning of the words and slogans in which they are "educated." No one, it seems, muttered any tiny dissent when Seawell over-ruled the Constitution and appointed unto himself and his ilk the task that many Virginians might have deemed more suitable to other hands: "We must focus on creating citizens for the good of society."
So. We are now to hold these truths to he self-evident: That all citizens are encumbered by the State that creates them with certain inevitable burdens, and that among these burdens are a life of involuntary servitude for the perpetuation of the State, the liberty to be required by law to learn from their Creators the worth of the civic and the nastiness of the individual, and the assiduous pursuit--and this is Seawell's parting shot--of only those pastimes deemed (by agents of government, we guess) "productive."
It is possible, of course, that hidden among the impositions of George III upon the colonies there were provisions more heinous and tyrannical than William H. Seawell's grand design for Educating the People, but damned if we can think of any just now. And it gives us sadly to wonder.
Some eminently reasonable and well-educated men found King George's comparatively mild and unintrusive intentions nothing less than a "Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism," as a delegate from Virginia put it. But the king never claimed that he was the creator--and owner--of his subjects, or that their purpose was the perpetuation of the state. He did not require the children to attend schools in which his hired agents would persuade them as to his notions about the "good of society." Nevertheless--and it suddenly seems strangely unaccountable--those thoughtful men took up arms against that king. Was it for this that they delivered us from that?
The citizens of Fort Defiance probably gave Seawell, at the least, a free feed. Maybe even a plaque.
Well, not to worry. All this took place long ago in May of 1981. By now, surely, all the other educationists will have vigorously dissociated themselves from Seawell's eccentric views. As soon as we hear news of his repudiation, we'll pass it right along, lest you fret about the state of the Republic.
_________
* From Bloom's Taxonomy, which we ex-amined last month. It's still in force. back
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A Lecture on Politics
The state in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed; and the state in which they are most eager, the worst.
WE have heard from a faithful, but worried, reader. He is afraid that Ronald Reagan might read The Underground Grammarian and make use of our arguments for his own devious purposes. And we have, indeed, often argued that good schools, cleansed of trashy courses and parasitic functionaries, would cost less than the schools we now have.
Strangely enough, our worried reader obviously did not suggest at all that our arguments are wrong; he feared only that they might be used by a wrong person in a wrong cause. And now we are worried, for that fear is itself a frightening reminder of the tremendous power of factional belief over the freedom of the mind.
If an argument is sound and rational, it is sound and rational no matter who uses it. If Reagan, or some other politician, or the Devil himself, should choose to espouse sound and rational argument, we would all be better off. But that can not happen. Politicians--and the Devil-- just don't work that way.
In fact, if any politician were to adopt our understanding about the costs of public schooling, it could only mean that he has decided not to run. No office seeker, even should he find it true, would dare to say what we say. We do not fear, therefore, that we may provide unintended--and utterly unmerited--aid and comfort either to Ronald Reagan or to any of his currently numerous opponents.
What we do fear, however, is a result even worse than that. Thanks largely to that pussy-footing excellence commission report, which-looks more and more like a clever ploy to precisely this end, the future of education in America may be delivered into the hands of politicians, the only people around whose influence on the life of the mind is even more baleful than that of the educationists. When the very last returns of the election of 1984 are finally in, they may well show that the American people have been persuaded at last not only to accept but also to approve the notion that the character of "education" should be determined in the voting booth. Nothing worse could happen to us.
Among us, the rulers are not reluctant to govern. In pursuit of office, they will bellow with the herd in broad daylight, and, in darkness, hunker down with the wolves. They prosper by persuasion and the exacerbation of factional discord. Like the educationists, they prefer to ply their trade in the misty precincts of "the affective domain," where sentiment and belief can he assigned a greater "moral" power than knowledge and reason, provided only that they be "worthy sentiment" and "right belief," to which every faction lays claim. Politicians must thus depend upon the existence of a certain number of citizens who share similar desires but who neither will nor can inquire as to whether they should desire what they desire. Nor do our politicians find it useful to encourage such inquiry.
All of that may be "only realistic," but if it is, it points to certain loathsome realities. It must mean, a) that Americans have not achieved that "informed discretion" that Jefferson deemed essential to a free people, b) that politicians profit from that lack, and c) that, as to improvements in the hen-house security system, the foxes will have some ideas of their own.
For that is exactly what an education is--a security system that signals the intrusion of ignorance and unreason. It is education that unmasks opinion or belief parading as knowledge, and defrocks persuasion pretending to be logic. It is our defense against the tyranny of appetite and ideology, and our only path to self-knowledge and self-government. It is, in short, exactly the sovereign remedy for politics as practiced among us.
We have listened to Reagan, and we have listened to Mondale, who seems sufficiently typical of the other pack. They show no sign of knowing what they mean by "education." According to the faction they hope to please, they take education to be some sort of more or less practical training in something or other, or an indoctrination in somebody's favorite version of socially acceptable notions, or an incoherent muddle known as "adjustment to life." They address themselves to issues related not to education but only to the school business, to schools as agencies of government and bureaucratic structures. They believe, or pretend to believe, that the solution lies in this or that, prayer, or pay, or something.
And one of those men, or someone just like one of them, will win the presidential election of 1984, trailing behind him his promises and debts. To whom then will he turn in the great cause of excellence and the reform of schooling? Plato? Jefferson? To anyone who understands education as the mind's strong defense against manipulation and flattery? Will he drive out once and for all, by denying them their "monies," the clowns and charlatans of educationism who have brought us to this pass? Or will he rather prove that he "supports education" by handing those innovative thrusters more monies?
The educationists do claim that they run the only game in town, that they are the only real professionals who know all about education. And, since they are not able to detect irony, they can claim with perfectly straight faces that they are the only ones who can help us, now that we have gotten ourselves into this mess.
They lie. But politicians are realistic, and they don't care that educationists lie. They care only that the educationists be perceived as panting after excellence, and that they can manage.
We face nothing less than the ultimate test of democracy, a sterner test than war itself. The survival of the nation may be a necessary condition of individual freedom, but it is certainly not a sufficient condition. If "democracy" means rule by those who know best how to please the uninformed and thoughtless, which is the condition asserted, and presumably accepted, by those who excuse politicians as "realistic," then we can not be free. We must suffer the tyranny not only of our own appetites and notions, but of the appetites and notions of any slim majority of everyone else. If we tolerate the existence of such multitudes, we can not be free. And if we permit the politicians and the educationists to define the nature and purpose of education according to their appetites and notions, to say nothing of their track records, then we will ensure the existence of such multitudes. And we will never be free.
Democracy is not a form of government that provides freedom. That it is, is the sort of illusion easily (and conveniently) induced in the multitudes who are given pep-rallies in "citizenship" rather than the disciplined study of history and politics. But democracy may well be that form of government that most liberally permits freedom. Even Aristotle, who had no illusions about the supposed "rightness" of multitudes in proportion to their size, was willing to grant this:
"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."
An uneducated person is simply unable to "share in the government." (governing is exactly what is learned through education. The uneducated, of whatever rank or station do not even govern themselves, but simply obey whatever desires and beliefs they suppose to be their own. But if they can not govern, they can certainly rule. And should they be reluctant to do that, some realistic politician will be delighted to set them straight.
Jefferson did not commend "informed discretion" as a graceful adornment for a lucky few. He prescribed it as a necessary condition for freedom in a democracy, for he knew that the latter does not ensure the former. And he prescribed it for "all persons alike�to the utmost."
Well, let's keep on looking for a bluebird. Maybe Jefferson was wrong. Maybe we can be "ignorant and free." Someday, maybe, we'll find out. Maybe as soon as November of 1984.
Posted by witnit at 1:34 PM | Comments (0)
April 8, 2005
More Richard Mitchell Stuff
nthony Fassano has been kind enough to supply more Mitchell articles from the NYT and a brief review of The Gift of Fire. Download the Zip file here.
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April 6, 2005
Help with Richard Mitchell Research
nthony Fassano is doing a seminar paper on Mitchell's work, and is asking for help on where to find more writings both by and about Mitchell. He'd greatly appreciate any information.
You can contact him here.
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April 5, 2005
For Serious Mitchell Fans
or those of you who have an archival interest in Richard Mitchell, you can download a PDF here of his 1963 scholarly article "An Age of Issues and a Literature of Troubles" in Western Humanities Review.
*** Hofstadter's Law: It will always take longer than you think it will take, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
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Posted by witnit at 7:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 16, 2005
The U.S. Army Wants Richard Mitchell
few days ago, I received a letter from the U.S. Army, specifically the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas, requesting permission to use material from Richard Mitchell's Less Than Words Can Say.
They want to make 2200 reprint copies and 150 CD ROM copies of Chapter 3, "A Bunch of Marks."
I suppose since Richard Mitchell gave me express permission to reproduce all of his writings on the website I created, and stated his desire that all of the material be made freely available to everyone without charge, even reproduced or plagiarized if they so desired, I did so.
I wrote back granting them permission to reprint any and all of Richard Mitchell's texts at The Underground Grammarian website.
By the way, I have created Word documents and PDFs of all the texts that anyone can download here. This is mainly for teachers who want to distribute Richard Mitchell's writings to students. (Ignore the request for donations.)
If you would like to read what the U.S. Army is having their college students read, I have supplied the text below. Enjoy!
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Posted by witnit at 7:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Bunch of Marks
till, skill in language does provide a better hope of survival; it even wins wars, for struggle on the field of battle is a dramatic version of strife in the minds of men. Long before the first trigger was pulled, Hitler fired off a shattering salvo of words. He pounded his fist and shouted: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein F?" Don't make the mistake of thinking that his listeners muttered back an uncertain "Ach so, gewiss, gewiss." They shouted back, "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein F?"
The cannonade roared across the Channel and shook the cliffs of England. Fortunately for us all, England, although unarmed, was not unready. The answering barrage rings in our ears still: "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat." Battle was joined. Hitler's words sent the Wehrmacht crashing to the outskirts of Dunkirk but Churchill's words sent schoolboys and accountants and retired fishmongers down to the sea in their little boats and over the water to the beaches of Dunkirk.
While that may be an incomplete account of the war, it is not an inaccurate one. It was a war of words and speaking just as much as a war of iron and blood. If the fighting was sometimes noble and brave, it was because certain words were in the minds of men. If the fighting was sometimes stupid and vicious, it was because certain other words were in the minds of men. Whatever else Churchill may have been doing in those days, he was always providing the English with words. With words he formed their thoughts and emotions. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills," said Churchill. Millions answered, apparently, "By God, so we shall."
Imagine, however, that Churchill had been an ordinary bureaucrat and had chosen to say instead:
Consolidated defensive positions and essential preplanned withdrawal facilities are to be provided in order to facilitate maximum potentialization for the repulsion and/or delay of incursive combatants in each of several preidentified categories of location deemed suitable to the emplacement and/or debarkation of hostile military contingents.
That would, at least, have spared us the pain of wondering what to do about the growing multitudes who can't seem to read and write English. By now we'd be wondering what to do about the growing multitudes who can't seem to read and write German.
Speech is tremendously powerful. It moves our minds and makes the path of history. It is, furthermore, perhaps the most complicated skill we have, and the uttering of words and sentences is only its beginning. When we speak, we do many other things simultaneously. We turn our heads and lift our eyebrows and wiggle our fingers and get up and walk about. We find exactly the right place from which to say this thing, and we go over to lean on the mantelpiece to say some other thing. We choose the appropriate pitch and volume for every sound. We sprinkle our speech with nonverbal sound effects, snorts and mm's, sighs and tsk's, and especially pauses, which are as important to speech as the rests to music. We change the shapes of our mouths and throats and alter the very tone quality of our voices. All such things, and innumerably more, we do quite automatically, and with such devices we suggest immeasurably more than the words can say by themselves.
Writing, on the other hand, is just a bunch of marks. It is not speech written down, and it lacks almost all the expressive devices of speech. It simply isn't "natural" in the way that speech is natural. For the natural expressive devices of speech, writing provides only a few pathetically inadequate gimmicks. We have some marks of punctuation and some graphic tricks, like capital letters and underlining. We can find an occasional word or expression that may remind a reader of the sound of speech, you know, and drop it in here and there. An occasional genius learns to write dialogue that we can almost hear and even to devise long passages that sound exactly right, but in general writing is even further from speech than notation is from music.
Like music, speech has a tune, and we have only the meagerest ways of indicating on the page the tune to which our words are to be sung. Commas, for instance, are pretty good as indicators of tune, and so are periods. They usually call for bits of melody that every native speaker of English sings in pretty much the same way. Question marks, however, indicate only a certain "family" of tunes, for any question we can make in English can be sung in many different ways to convey many different meanings. All these gimmicks, nevertheless, even the quotation marks that suggested a certain way to sing "family" in the last sentence, can't come close to a realistic approximation of the tune of English. And even if they could, they still wouldn't tell you which word was to be said slowly and deep in the throat and what sentence was to be delivered while leaning on the mantelpiece. As a way of recording speech, writing is a dismal failure.
It doesn't matter, though, because the recording of speech is not the proper business of writing. The proper business of writing is to stay put on the page so that we can look at it later. Writing, whether it be a grocery list or The Brothers Karamazov, freezes the work of the mind into a permanent and public form. It is the mind and memory of mankind in such a form that we can pass it around to one another and even hand it on to our unimaginably remote descendants.
Language is, essentially, speech. Writing is a special case of language. Discursive prose is a special case of writing. Written, discursive prose may be almost three thousand years old, but it is still our most recently invented use of language. It is no coincidence that the Greeks who first devised discursive prose also constructed formal logic and were the first to provide for their unimaginably remote descendants a visible record of the works of their minds. Thinking is coherent discourse, and the logic and the prose require one another.
The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze. If I mention watermelons, you must think of watermelons; if giraffes, giraffes. The very rare genius can keep his mind on course for a while, perhaps as long as a whole minute, but most of us are always at the mercy of every random suggestion of environment. We imagine that we sit down and think, but, in fact, we mostly gather wool, remembering this and that and fantasizing about the other. In our heads we recite some slogans and rehash the past, often repeatedly. Even in this foolish maundering, we are easily distracted by random thoughts, mostly about money or politics but often about sports or sex. Left to its own devices, the mind plays like a child in well-stocked sandbox, toying idly with trinkets and baubles and often doing the same thing over and over again until some slightly more interesting game presents itself.
If we want to pursue extended logical thought, thought that can discover relationships and consequences and devise its own alternatives, we need a discipline imposed from outside of the mind itself. Writing is that discipline. It seems drastic, but we have to suspect that coherent, continuous thought is impossible for those who cannot construct coherent, continuous prose.
"Writing," Bacon said, "Maketh the exact man," as we all know, but we ordinarily stop thinking about that too soon. The "exact" part is only half of what writing makes; the other half is the "man." Writing does indeed make us exact because it leaves a trail of thought that we can retrace and so discover where we have been stupid. At the same time, though, it makes us "men," grown-ups who can choose what toys we want to play with and who can outwit the random suggestions of environment. In his writing, then, we can judge of at least two things in a man--his ability to think and his intention to do so, his maturity. An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.
To understand the importance of writing for people who want to have a civilization, it is useful to compare discursive prose with poetry. Poetry is much older than prose, but since we have been taught to think it a form of "art," we regularly assume that prose comes first and that poetry, a much trickier business, is "refined" out of it with pain and skill. Not so. Many of the qualities that make poetry what it is are far more "natural" to any speaker of a language than the devices of prose. Like speech, poetry is metaphorical and figurative, elliptical, often more expressive than informative, synthetic rather than analytic, and concrete rather than abstract. Speech may not often be good poetry, whatever that may be, but sometimes it is. Little children devise poetic expressions quite naturally, and there seems to be no culture, however "primitive" we may think it, without its traditional poetry. Even the wretched Jiukiukwe have poetry.
The Jiukiukwe, like all other human beings, have some practical uses for poetry. In little verses, they can remember without effort the signs of a coming storm and the looks of the worms that cause diarrhea, just as we remember how many days there are in April. In poetry, or in language that is like poetry, they perform the social rituals that hold them together. That's exactly what we do when we recite the traditional formulae of recognition: Good to see you; What's new?; Lovely weather we're having. All such forms are permissible variations within the limits of established rituals that we all perform just because we're here and we're all in this together. We can remember and recite those ritual greetings just as easily as we can sing Fa-la-la-la-la and come in on the chorus--all together now!
(Digression: Why do we devote so much idle talk to the weather? Everybody knows, of course, that the weather is a "safe" subject, but that doesn't answer the question. It provides two new questions: Why is the weather a safe subject? and, Why do we devote so much idle talk to safe subjects?
The weather is right there in the world of experience. Even assistant deans pro tem can see that it's raining. When I meet the assistant dean pro tem on the campus in the rain, I am likely to assert, in one way or another, that it is in fact raining. He is likely to confirm this observation, after his fashion. We have used language where no language is needed, to indicate what is in the world of experience. To point out the rain to each other seems about as useful as mentioning the fact that we are both walking on our hind legs. That may be exactly why it's useful. We have taken the trouble to name something that needs no naming, thus acknowledging our kinship while still being careful not to evoke some other world in which our kinship might be questionable. Should I greet the assistant dean pro tem by announcing that power corrupts, he may well reply, "Absolutely!" and we will have evoked some other world, a world we'd rather not explore just now with the rain dripping down the backs of our necks. Twain probably had the truth in mind when he said that everyone talks about the weather but that nobody does anything about it. In fact, we talk about it precisely because we can't do anything about it. It permits us to establish our membership, which is polite, but it doesn't require that we look at each other's credentials too closely, which might be rude.)
Poetry is a profoundly conservative use of language. It conserves not only values and ideas but the very language itself, so that even some grammatical forms that ought to have disappeared long ago are still around and useful for special effects. Even crackpots who want to simplify and modernize English cannot bring themselves to say: Thirty days has September. It's amazing, but that actually sounds wrong, almost as wrong as: Six days shall you labor.
Prose is progressive and disruptive. It must subvert or elude the poetic qualities of speech to go about the business of logic and analysis. Discursive prose is essentially antisocial, subject to constraints and regulations that would be unsuitable, perhaps even rude, in speech. Writing is an audacious and insolent act. When we write, we call the other members of our tribe to order. We command their attention. We assert that what we have to say is valuable enough that they should give over their idle chitchat about the weather. It had better be.
When we choose to address our friends and relatives in discursive prose, it must be because what we want to say requires the special powers of discursive prose: logic, order, and coherence. The mere appearance of discursive prose promises those things. When I meet the assistant dean pro tem in the rain, I send and expect signals of fellowship. When I read his latest guidelines for the work of the Committee on Memorial Plaques, I hold in my hands a promise of logic, order, and coherence, and equally a promise that the language I read will be constrained and regulated in such a way as to engender those things. There is no Rule in Heaven that language has to be logical, orderly, and coherent any more than there is some Law of Nature that requires football players to stay within the lines. You can grab a football and run to Oshkosh anytime you please; you just won't be playing football. Your language can be illogical, disorderly, and even incomprehensible--in fact, sometimes it should be so--but you won't be writing discursive prose.
Ordinary speech, like poetry, is a kind of art; discursive prose in particular, like writing in general, is a technology. Clear, concise writing is a result of good technique, like an engine that starts and runs.
Good technique requires the knowledge and control of many conventional forms and devices. They must be conventional because writing is public and enduring, and the path of its thought must be visible to other minds in other times. Like the conventional "rules" of any technology, the rules of writing have come to be what they are because they work. You do well to keep the subject of your sentence clearly in view just as you do well to keep your powder dry and your eye on the ball. These things work.
Furthermore, although such things are matters of technique, they are derived not from some concern for technique but because they go to the heart of the matter. You keep your eye on the ball because it is the ball, and the meaning of the game is known only because of what happens to the ball. You get no points for cute panties. You keep your eye on the subject because it is the subject, and not just grammatically. It is the subject of thought, and the sentence is a proposition about it. We do not think by naming things but by making propositions about them. Nor do we think by making propositions about unnamed or unnamable things. Any writer forgets that from time to time, but a learned rule of technology calls him to order. The rules of the technology of discursive prose are simply aids to thought, and to learn the conventions of writing without learning the habit of thought is impossible.
Fools and scoundrels say that the time of writing is past, that Direct Distance Dialing and the cassette recorder have done to writing what the internal combustion engine did to the art of equitation. They point out, quite correctly by the way, that the ordinary American, once released from the schools, can go through all the rest of his life without ever having to devise a complete sentence. Even the thousands of forms we have to fill out call only for filling in blanks or checking boxes. This freedom from writing, in fact, doesn't always have to wait on our escape from the schools; fewer and fewer schools require any of it at all. This is, they tell us, an age of technology, and that what we need to know is how to program computers, not how to devise grammatical sentences in orderly sequence.
As it happens, computers work by reading and devising grammatical sentences in orderly sequence. The "language" is different, but that's how they work. Their "rules" are far more stringent and unforgiving than the rules of discursive prose. When we read a sentence whose subject and verb don't agree, we don't reject it as meaningless and useless. We may shake our heads and sigh a little, but we know what the poor fellow meant, and we go on. When the computer "reads" a "sentence" with an equivalent error, it simply spits it out and refuses to work. That's how we can tell which are the machines and which the people; the people will swallow anything. And you will swallow anything if you believe that we can teach all that computer stuff to whole herds of people who haven't been able to master the elementary logic of subject-verb agreement.
The logic of writing is simply logic; it is not some system of arbitrary conventions interesting only to those who write a lot. All logical thought goes on in the form of statements and statements about statements. We can make those statements only in language, even if that language be a different symbol system like mathematics. If we cannot make those statements and statements about statements logically, clearly, and coherently, then we cannot think and make knowledge. People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.
Chapter 3 from Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell
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March 13, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 8
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Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Illusory Limits
Styles: Isn't there a desired sense of finding the limit? Finding what is precisely the limit of a technology?
Richard: Yes, this is one of the great illusions under which we all labor, that somehow all things are in process, and not just in process, but also in progress, so that at some point there is a culmiination. We imagine that at some point, the universe will, as it were, click into place.
The last star will be discovered; the last physical law will be known; the last...well, you make your own list. This obviously has to be an illusion. Why do I say it obviously has to be an illusion? Well, I think I would go back to Wittgenstein, who I think was here before us earlier.
I think at one point Wittgenstein speculates on whether or not language itself is finite, and of course concludes very easily--he didn't speculate very long--that language is not finite for the following reason. If language were finite, then there is some presumable ultimate utterance.
You and I could perhaps discover it today, and then having made the ultimate utterance, that would be an end of language and everything would be repetition thereafter. However, once the ultimate utterance is discovered, then we can make an utterance about it, which then becomes the post-ultimate utterance, so that there can be no end to language anymore than there can be an end to numbers.
And since technology essentially is language, concretized in certain ways, the same has to be true of it. The ultimate reach of our technology, whatever it is, will simply suggest more reaches. The real problem of being a human being, it may be the thing that vexes us and disorders us so much--we know that we have limits, but we have no way of knowing what those limits are.
I can remember when I was a kid, no one had yet run the four-minute mile, and everybody was looking forward to the four-minute mile. And now, I guess somebody did, and we said, "OK, great," but we did not say, "No, that's it, right there." And now someone has run faster. Now, can this go on forever? Obviously not.
Will somebody run the mile in zero? No, this is not going to happen. Somewhere there is, and we imagine this, somewhere we imagine a boundary, like the speed of sound or some such thing. But we recognize that even to imagine that boundary is absurd. That would require us to say that somewhere there is a natural law which says, "Human beings can move only so fast," so we are clearly limited, but we have no boundaries.
Styles: Wittgenstein says that what we can say we should be able to say clearly, but he also says, "What we can't say?
Richard: "?we shouldn't say at all?
Styles: "?we have to pass over in silence."
Richard: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muߠman schweigen? schweigen? excellent word.
I'm troubled by that. I'm a big admirer of Wittgenstein because I'm an admirer of smart people, and he is certainly a smart person. But it seems to me, in fact, that most of what we say is what we cannot say. What he meant by that, I'm inclined to suspect, was a kind of very logical positivist sort of thing.
That is to say that certain of our utterances have no meaning, not that they are true or false, but they have no meaning, and when the poet tells us "Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth, this is all you know and all you need to know," we say, "Bull, come on I need to know quite a lot more than that."
Nevertheless, we do say that truth is beauty and that beauty is truth, and we do mean something by it, but we really cannot say it, as we cannot say it in the sense that we can say this be of all in bodies--and I think Wittgenstein wanted to remind us--"Don't shoot off your mouth and be silly." But I think that he was wrong.
It is the business of language to be silly in that respect; it is to make that world about which we really nicht sprechen. There is "no speaking of it," and I think that Wittgenstein's influence, largely because of that very sentence, has in some ways been very baleful.
It has indeed undergirded the notion that literacy is the matter of writing a letter of application for a job. This is essentially to say the same thing, and it also has led to a kind of disintegration of our sensitivity to metaphor.
I wrote recently a sardonic article about somebody and his influence on somebody else, and in the course of it, I used a metaphor. I talked about a meeting in the main street of a small town in the West, where somebody faces down the angry rabble. And furthermore, says that his friend, Pete the Persuader, has just passed into town and maybe they had better talk to him.
Now Pete the Persuader was a little metaphor in this story for this person whom I was quoting. Somebody knew the man, the original, and sent him a copy of the article, and he wrote back saying, "Well, of course I can't be held responsible for what some zany Superintendent of Schools in Tulsa thinks my words mean; however, the future is coming and we can't hide our heads in the sand."
He did say that, but at the end of his letter, he reached the summation of his defense. He said, "Furthermore, I've never been in Tulsa in my life." Now I ask myself, what kind of man is this? How is this man thinking? Does he imagine that I imagined that he was in Tulsa with a six gun on his hip? What on earth is going on here?
Well I know what's going on. The man happens to be what's called a futurist, and he's terribly interested in an imagined society where there is no literacy but still where people are very knowledgeable because they will punch up computers in some way or another. And I think he has immersed himself in the kind of non-metaphoric language that is very popular among us. This is nothing new; it has always been around; it's always been possible.
You remember that Dr. Johnson, who was frightened by the coming of the Romantics--he was frightened by a lot of things, I guess--objected that their language was prosaic and ordinary and that if poetry continued in their tradition, it would end up sounding that way.
And he invented a little example of what poetry would be like in the future because of the romantic poets, and his little quatrain is easy to remember:
I put my hat upon my head, And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man, Whose hat was in his hand.
And that's the entire poem. Now Johnson was wrong about the future of poetry, poetry didn't become that and never will become that, but a lot of language has, in fact, become that.
Styles: Our prose has become that.
Richard: Our prose has become that and there is this very pedestrian literalness in our prose and even our understanding. I have students who cannot?cannot sometimes make any sense of a metaphor.
I had a marvelous example in a class recently on the King James translation of the Bible. Somebody had read, they all had read the Book of Ecclesiastes; didn't find much in it; seemed to be saying all the same thing all the time. They couldn't really distinguish where the text was any different from anywhere else.
I said, "You noticed that the heart of the fool was in the House of Mirth." "Oh, yeah, yeah." "Well, what's that about?" "The same thing, you know; it's in favor of good; it's against evil." And I asked a very simple question, "Now, what exactly is the House of Mirth?"
Complete silence in class. "Is it a house?" Baffled silence continues. Finally he said, "Well, probably not." Probably not. Get that. Probably not. Well this engendered quite a long discussion and finally someone suggested, "It's not really a house at all. It's just a way of talking about something else, and the heart isn't a heart at all either."
And it took a whole class to get at the metaphor, a very simple metaphor. They don't think that way and they haven't been taught that way. They have been taught, What is reading? Reading is that process which leads to comprehension score, and they didn't think that was a fair question because it wouldn't appear on a comprehension test.
Styles: Perhaps they would have even more difficulty understanding what Heidegger means by language being our House of Being.
Richard: Oh yes. This would not be because the word being, you see, is entirely a metaphor, and it has no meaning whatsoever for them. They understand about living. They know they're alive; they're pretty sure of that; but if one would ask them to distinguish between their living and their being, I don't know where they would go.
Styles: Would they go to language?
Richard: Well, no, they wouldn't. They would go to silence. Isn't that interesting? I never thought of it that way, but that's where my class went in the face of the House of Mirth?Silence.
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End of Interview
Note: I compared the text of the first five parts to the audio supplied to me and made a number of significant changes--additions of text not in the transcript, altered punctuation and emphasis to clarify meaning. You may want to reread these.
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March 12, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 7
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Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Honest and Dishonest Writing
Styles: You mentioned earlier that the audience, the question of the audience, is all important in understanding writing. Particularly when we teach, we say, if we understand with you that language is communication or should not be communication, that we write to other people, but I've often thought that we write for ourselves first, and only thereafter to other people.
And that as we understand that we are writing really for ourselves in this process of self-discovery is the important issue. We learn thereby to write, but also learn thereby that there is something called the spirit of the law as well as the letter of the law, to borrow Jesus's term.
Richard: Yes, I think that is true. Eliot somewhere distinguishes the three voices of writing; that voice in which people speak to each other; the voice in which one speaks to oneself; and the voice in which one speaks to God. And he uses this distinction to make elaborate categories of various kinds of poetry, as I remember. That is, nevertheless, a useful distinction. There is some discourse that is the discourse between us. There is some discourse that I suppose in a way is discourse to God or something like that.
Styles: Prayer.
Richard: Well, not just prayer, but even to think "I should ever live to see such a day," or "What a beautiful morning" when you walk out all alone. There's no one to whom you speak really, but the kind of discourse that we do spend our time with in school, certainly, is the discourse of the self speaking to self. This is the appropriate audience.
Now this raises some interesting questions when students are attentive to it. They say, "Well, look if really my job is to be the self, speaking to the self, I don't care about these dangling modifiers, so why should you?" That raises intriguing questions, because eventually one has to somehow convince students that, in some deep sense, you shouldn't care about the dangling modifiers.
But if those dangling modifiers are, as they so often are, impediments to clear thought, then we do care about them a lot, not because they are dangling modifiers, but because they are impediments to clear thought. And that the so-called conventions of writing are there because writing is not speech, and because it doesn't have the resources of speech, and they serve as convenient crutches, in fact, to this pale imitation of speech; but they?re more convenient ultimately. They are essential.
Styles: Alfred North Whitehead says somewhere that style is the ultimate morality of the mind. I think that's pretty heavy phrase.
Richard: Very heavy?I wonder what he means. I like it.
Styles: Earlier you said that somehow these issues of style, clear writing, being able to share what we have as clearly and quickly and efficiently as possible, is a matter of morality. Just to what extent can you understand this style being the ultimate morality of mind?
Richard: Well, of course, I don't know exactly what he means by style, but I think I do know what most of us would mean by honesty, and when we write, it is a good opportunity to practice dishonesty.
Now by that I don't merely mean an opportunity to say that which is not true. Of course we do that and this is certainly one of the great uses of literacy is to lie and lie in a big and very effective way.
But rather I mean that we do that which is not our own; that when we fall into writing, and we say, "Oh, I am writing writing, and writing goes a certain way, and it sounds a certain way, and it says a certain thing," that we can easily become imitators. And imitators, even of other imitators, which is to say, that we are not making our own judgments--and after all, if we don't make our own judgments, then in a sense, we aren't even living our own lives.
There's another kind of dishonesty that arises from this desire to imitate which is perfectly natural to us all. I can remember the last time I taught writing, I had a horrible experience because somebody asked me about topic sentences, and I said, "Oh yes, topic sentences. Right, I've heard about those. Yes, a topic sentence is part of a paragraph; it's somehow the thing; it's the gist of it, or the beginning of it, or something like that, and I guess the other sentences all sort of hang on it in a way. Yes, that's truly nifty, topic sentence, isn't it?"
However, I couldn't tell them how to come up with a topic sentence. I went home and it occurred to me, you know, I've written I can't tell you how many essays, articles, reviews, all sorts of things, and I have to write all the time as much as I hate it. And never in my life have I been conscious of writing a topic sentence, and I was quite convinced that there would be no topic sentences in any of my writing.
I haven't looked, by the way, and so I don't know if that's true. However, I was paralyzed for almost six weeks after that. I couldn?t write?I couldn't write. I'd start to write and I'd say, "Wait a minute, how can I write this? I don't even know the topic sentence of this paragraph."
Now when we give ourselves to idols like that--it is a kind of idolatry--we fall into the deepest sort of dishonesty. See, if I had fallen into it at that point, I would have said, "Well, now wait a moment; I'm going to learn what a topic sentence is, and I'm going to do it right, and I'm going to do a topic sentence for every single one of my paragraphs, and I'll make a topic sentence outline and so forth."
So that very often our very ways of instructing people in how to write, generate these sluts of dishonesties. Especially when we teach, you know, there's a certain kind of sentence, a periodic sentence, and then there's a nice balanced sentence, and here are some nifty examples.
Well, I don't know how bad that is; it is fun to try those things out, but after all, no writer writes writing. Nobody sits down to write writing. He sits down to write something else; he just has to do it in writing.
In composition courses we dwell so much on writing that people start thinking that that's their job. "Oh, I am now to write writing" and they violate themselves in some way, I think.
Styles: Well, one of the things that we do, of course, is to convert writing into a technology. They say that there is a technique for doing this. In the most fundamental sense, writing is a technology.
Richard: Yes.
Styles: In the root sense of the term, not thinking of the buried metaphor of the term, do you think it's the logos text, it's the wording of the text, and somehow or another, if we can give vent to the root meaning of that technology, it's a liberating thing.
Richard: It is clearly a technology, and it should be a technology, but it is a technology that's obviously without limits. You know the technology that builds us engines has certain limits built into its very nature. The technology by which we write--and in order the to prove this to yourself all you have to do is look at the vast differences that are possible in writing--seems to be open ended.
Yes, there is a technology; yes, there are rudiments; yes, they work; they count; but there seems to be no end to how far these things can be applied. I would think that I imagine the ideal student, yes, although I've never encountered this one but some day, the ideal student would look upon learning the technology of writing as a gateway to a tremendous undiscovered realm, and it is generally undiscovered.
Is there going to come a day when the last possible piece of writing is done? Is the universe going to click at some time? That's it, that's it' we have now finished with the technology of writing? No, this will never happen, so the possibilities are marvelous and they're terribly exciting.
Styles: You mentioned the limits of technology and this being an unlimited form, writing, a technology without limits. In our world today, we constantly are wondering, "Gee, is there going to be a limit to this technology that we have?" in other ways, thinking about practical machines.
Richard: Yes, I wasn't really thinking of technology in general. I was thinking of a technology of the wheel or some such thing. I mean, how round can a wheel be? But a limit to technology in general, of course, is equally unimaginable, except of course that we will, I suspect, destroy ourselves with what we do know before too long.
Richard Mitchell Interview Pt. 8
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March 11, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 6
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Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Making Statements
Styles: Do you think that as more people acquire the ability to make statements for themselves, we can have a better world?
Richard: I doubt it very much, and I would go back to Socrates. I don't think it's my business or yours to seek a better world. In some sense, I hope the world will be better, sure, but it's not my charge. My charge is to be better, and if yours is, and a million other people, then maybe the world will be better, whatever we mean by that, but there is this to be said--the world is continuously dying.
If we made this world a better place tomorrow, what would that matter? What about the day after tomorrow?
I have a feeling it will go its old way, and certainly the philosophers of the past were, I think, notable for their disdain of the world and all questions as to whether or not it was better, because better is a word that goes with good, and they ask themselves, "Where does goodness reside?" and answer it in a very interesting way.
We cannot ascribe goodness or badness to minerals or to trees or even to animals. Goodness is somehow related willing. The tigers don't want to be bad; they don't want to be good; they just want to be tigers; they just tiger around.
Whereas, only you and I can will one thing rather than another. The question is not even whether we can do it; we can will. You and I can will one thing rather than another, so that goodness is an attribute, if it is an attribute only of some human being, only of some individual.
So to assume the world could be better is to assume certain things about the world that are very far from demonstrable. There is, in a sense?ah, you see this is again how language makes the world, but tricks us. There is no world?the world is a word. We say the word, and because we say the word, we believe we have brought an entity into being, or that we are pointing to an entity which is?what is the world?
Do we mean planet? Do we mean all the people on it? Do we mean all the people on it at this time, or at some other time? What the hell do mean by the world? And we treat the world as thought it were an individual, capable of goodness and badness, then we start talking nonsense.
Styles: But as we create ourselves as better forms of ourselves--through writing, through reading, listening, talking, language itself--we create something of value, good for ourselves, and as we can live in our own good worlds, we can perhaps have one in common with others.
Richard: I would hope so, but I don't think that I follow the logic that would require it.
Styles: Writing is clearly a force that can take us away from the world, or into the world, and yet, we live in speech first. A baby and a mother, the children playing together. The philosophers, the religious leaders that start our culture, don't write--Socrates, Jesus. What's the relationship of writing and speech, keeping these people in mind?
Richard: Well, let's say bringing these people into mind in a little while, OK, because I am terribly interested in that relationship, but I am even more interested in the difference, partly because it's a practical interest, partly because it can help students who want to learn to write.
And one of the things that make writing hard is that it isn't speech. It lacks all of the marvelous accessories, the vices of speech; you know, the gestures, the tones of voice, everything, even those things that are non-literate in a way; the hmms and the ahhums, so that, in a sense, speech is natural and writing is artificial.
Furthermore, writing is not speech written down. It's yet another thing, and has its own importance, but the larger and perhaps more important difference between writing and speech has to do, I think, with audience. He who writes, in a sense writes for the world; writes for somebody who doesn't exist, maybe writes for himself in some way.
But the speaker is speaking face to face with another human being, and this is why Socrates and Jesus didn't write. And I would add, and I guess I did, that Jesus also didn't enter into dialogue in the way in which Socrates does. Even when Jesus has a conversation with people, it's not dialectic, as Socrates practices it.
A man comes to him and says, "Master, what shall I do to be saved?" and he says, "Well, surely you've read the prophets." This is not dialectic, and when Jesus speaks, he speaks directly to individuals, and I think he's always making the point that frankly I find very congenial, that the meaning of things is in a person. "You happen to be that person; I am talking to you, but the meaning of things is not in tradition or in orthodox law. You've heard it said of old times that you shouldn't commit adultery. I've got first news for you," he said. "All you have to do is think about it. Where does this sin reside? It resides in the will of you, one person. It does not reside in the tables of the law; it does not reside in the world of language, for that matter; it resides in your will." You as an individual person, which is what makes him so terribly unusual.
I know it is popular to say that, well, Buddha and Socrates and Confucius and Lao Tse and Jesus--they were all very similar people. They all preached versions of the same thing, and we ought to think of them as a kind of committee serving in the same cause.
Is it really true? Of these people, it was Jesus only who actually took the accusing tone that he takes, "You, you, I'm talking about you," and providing very harsh, not precepts, but immediate advice to some person.
Even Buddha--the eightfold way--everybody knows the eightfold way. I think the first step is right thinking. Well, OK, oh good, I'm for right; what do you mean by that? Jesus didn't deal in that kind of abstraction, and at the same time though, remember, what he did deal in still had to be dealt then in language; there is nothing else. And it is as though he was saying to those who listened to him, "Say these things for yourself, and give them a test."
There's a marvelous passage in, I think it's John, it's surely John, of the famous scene where Jesus has brought some woman taken in adultery, and the committee who brings her along, says, "Well, what do we do with this one, Master? She's caught in the act and you know the law."
It's one of those tricks that is so often the case in the Gospels, and Jesus is described at that time as bending over, sitting on a bench or something, and writing in the sand. This is the only time in which Jesus is described as writing, by the way.
Styles: Very interesting.
Richard: And he says, "Oh, well, yes, sure, I know the law. Of course, you should stone her." And I guess they reached out for their stones and he says--I can see him doing it, sort of a double take like Columbo, "Oh, uh, just make sure that he who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone."
Notice what he has, in fact, done right here. He has changed an institutional arrangement into an individual arrangement. "Yes, I do know the law, of course, that's in our institutions; we know that. By all means, let's carry out the law. Let's also go inside of ourselves, and he, the one of you who is without sin, but just make sure that he casts the first stone, somehow, it seems better that way."
And the men who brought the culpritess are obviously decent and thoughtful men; they must be because everyone says in himself, "Ah, well, I am not that one" and little by little they drift away.
This is, of course, it seems terribly remote from considerations of literacy, but I don't think it is. I think that the end of doctrine of literacy is that same kind of self-knowledge. If we don?t have somebody like Jesus around to give us exactly the right clue, at exactly the right time, well, where will we find such a person nearer ourselves?
And we do that by making statements, and statements about statements, and exploring their meaning. There is, of course, all kinds of speculation as to what he was, in fact, writing in the sand there. I think Robert Graves thinks he was drawing a picture, not writing at all, and whether or not this is an act of what we think of as normal literacy by Jesus, I don't know.
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 7
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Posted by witnit at 5:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 10, 2005
The Worm in the Brain
here's an outrageous but entertaining assertion about language and the human brain in Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden. It is possible, Sagan says, to damage the brain in precisely such a way that the victim will lose the ability to understand the passive or to devise prepositional phrases or something like that. No cases are cited, unfortunately--it would be fun to chat with some victim--but the whole idea is attractive, because if it were true it would explain many things. In fact, I can think of no better way to account for something that happened to a friend of mine--and probably to one of yours too.
He was an engaging chap, albeit serious. We did some work together--well, not exactly work, committee stuff--and he used to send me a note whenever there was to be a meeting. Something like this: "Let's meet next Monday at two o'clock, OK?" I was always delighted to read such perfect prose.
Unbeknownst to us all, however, something was happening in that man's brain. Who can say what? Perhaps a sleeping genetic defect was stirring, perhaps some tiny creature had entered in the porches of his ear and was gnawing out a home in his cranium. We'll never know. Whatever it was, it had, little by little, two effects. At one and the same time, he discovered in himself the yearning to be an assistant dean pro tem, and he began to lose the power of his prose. Ordinary opinion, up to now, has always held that one of these things, either one, was the cause of the other. Now we can at last guess the full horror of the truth. Both are symptoms of serious trouble in the brain.
Like one of these Poe characters whose friends are all doomed, I watched, helpless, the inexorable progress of the disease. Gradually but inevitably my friend was being eaten from within. In the same week that saw his application for the newly created post of assistant dean pro tem, he sent me the following message: "This is to inform you that there'll be a meeting next Monday at 2:00." Even worse, much worse, was to come.
A week or so later it was noised about that he would indeed take up next semester a new career as a high-ranking assistant dean pro tem. I was actually writing him a note of congratulation when the campus mail brought me what was to be his last announcement of a meeting of our committee. Hereafter he would be frying fatter fish, but he wanted to finish the business at hand. His note read: "Please be informed that the Committee on Memorial Plaques will meet on Monday at 2:00."
I walked slowly to the window, his note in my hand, and stared for a while at the quad. The oak trees there had been decimated not long before by a leak in an underground gas line. The seeping poison had killed their very roots, but they had at least ended up as free firewood for the faculty. Pangloss might have been right, after all, and, calamity that it was, this latest message spared me the trouble of writing the congratulatory note and even afforded me a glimpse of a remarkably attractive young lady straying dryad-fashion through the surviving oaks. Things balance out.
You would think, wouldn't you, that the worm or whatever had at last done its work, that the poor fellow's Hydification was complete and his destruction assured. No. It is a happy mercy that most of us cannot begin to imagine the full horror of these ravaging disorders. To this day that man still sends out little announcements and memos about this and that. They begin like this: "You are hereby informed . . ." Of what, I cannot say, since a combination of delicacy and my respect for his memory forbid that I read further.
It's always a mistake to forget William of Occam and his razor. Look first for the simplest explanation that will handle the facts. I had always thought that perfectly normal human beings turned into bureaucrats and administrators and came to learn the language of that tribe through some exceedingly complicated combination of nature and nurture, through imitative osmosis and some flaw of character caused by inappropriate weaning. Piffle. These psychologists have captured our minds and led us into needless deviousness. The razor cuts to the heart of things and reveals the worm in the brain.
Admittedly, that may be a slight oversimplification. It may be that the decay of language and the desire to administrate are not merely concomitant symptoms of one and the same disease, but that one is a symptom and the other a symptom of the symptom. Let's imagine what deans, who like to imitate government functionaries, who, in their turn, like to imitate businessmen, who themselves seem to like to imitate show-business types, would call a "scenario."
There you sit, minding your own business and hurting no man. All at once, quite insensibly, the thing creeps into your brain. It might end up in the storage shelves of the subjunctive or the switchboard of the nonrestrictive clauses, of course, but in your case it heads for the cozy nook where the active and passive voices are balanced and adjusted. There it settles in and nibbles a bit here and a bit there. In our present state of knowledge, still dim, we have to guess that the active voice is tastier than the passive, since the destruction of the latter is very rare but of the former all too common.
So there you are with your active verbs being gnawed away. Little by little and only occasionally at first, you start saying things like: "I am told that . . ." and "This letter is being written because . . ." This habit has subtle effects. For one thing, since passives always require more words than actives, anything you may happen to write is longer than it would have been before the attack of the worm. You begin to suspect that you have a lot to say after all and that it's probably rather important. The suspicion is all the stronger because what you write has begun to sound--well, sort of "official." "Hmm," you say to yourself, "Fate may have cast my lot a bit below my proper station," or, more likely, "Hmm. My lot may have been cast by Fate a bit below my proper station."
Furthermore, the very way you consider the world, or the very way in which the world is considered by you, is subtly altered. You used to see a world in which birds ate worms and men made decisions. Now it looks more like a world in which worms are eaten by birds and decisions are made by men. It's almost a world in which victims are put forward as "doers" responsible for whatever may befall them and actions are almost unrelated to those who perform them. But only almost. The next step is not taken until you learn to see a world in which worms are eaten and decisions made and all responsible agency has disappeared. Now you are ready to be an administrator.
This is a condition necessary to successful administration of any sort and in any calling. Letters are written, reports are prepared, decisions made, actions taken, and consequences suffered. These things happen in the world where agents and doers, the responsible parties around whose throats we like our hands to be gotten, first retreat to the remoter portions of prepositional phrases and ultimately disappear entirely. A too-frequent use of the passive is not just a stylistic quirk; it is the outward and visible sign of a certain weltanschauung.
And now that it is your weltanschauung (remember the worm has been gnawing all this time), you discover that you are suited to the life of the administrator. You'll fit right in.
Therefore, we may say that it is not the worm in the skull that causes deans and managers and vice presidents, at least not directly. The worm merely causes the atrophy of the active and the compensatory dominance of the passive. (Through a similar compensatory mechanism, three-legged dogs manage to walk, and the language of the typical administrator is not very different from the gait of the three-legged dog, come to think of it.) The dominance of the passive causes in the victim an alteration of philosophy, which alteration is itself the thing that both beckons him to and suits him for the work of administration. And there you have it. Thanks to Carl Sagan and a little help from William of Occam, we understand how administrators come to be.
You may want to object that a whole view of the world and its meanings can hardly be importantly altered by a silly grammatical form. If so, you're just not thinking. Grammatical forms are exactly the things that make us understand the world the way we understand it. To understand the world, we make propositions about it, and those propositions are both formed and limited by the grammar of the language in which we propose.
To see how this works, let's imagine an extreme case. Suppose there is after all a place in the brain that controls the making and understanding of prepositional phrases. Suppose that Doctor Fu Manchu has let loose in the world the virus that eats that very place, so that in widening circles from Wimbledon mankind loses the power to make and understand prepositional phrases. Now the virus has gotten you, and to you prepositional phrases no longer make sense. You can't read them, you can't write them, you can't utter them, and when you hear them you can only ask "Wha?" Try it. Go read something, or look out the window and describe what you see. Tell the story of your day. Wait . . . you can't exactly do that . . . tell, instead, your day-story. Recite how you went working . . . how morning you went . . . no . . . morning not you . . . morning went . . . how you morning went ... The rest will be silence.
Only through unspeakable exertion and even ad hoc invention of new grammatical arrangements can we get along at all without the prepositional phrase, as trivial as that little thing seems to be. It's more than that. Should we lose prepositional phrases, the loss of a certain arrangement of words would be only the visible sign of a stupendous unseen disorder. We would in fact have lost prepositionalism, so to speak, the whole concept of the kind of relationship that is signaled by the prepositional phrase. We'd probably be totally incapacitated.
Try now to imagine the history of mankind without the prepositional phrase, or, if you're tired of that, the relative clause or the distinction between subject and object. It would be absurd to think that lacking those and other such things the appearance and growth of human culture would have been merely hindered. It would have been impossible. Everything that we have done would have been simply impossible. The world out there is made of its own stuff, but the world that we can understand and manipulate and predict is made of discourse, and discourse is ruled by grammar. Without even so elementary a device as the prepositional phrase we'd be wandering around in herds right now, but we wouldn't know how to name what we were doing.
We're inclined to think of things like prepositional phrases as though they were optional extras in a language, something like whitewall tires. This is because we don't spend a lot of time dwelling on them except when we study a language not our own. We study German, and here comes a lesson on the prepositional phrase. Great, now we can add something to our German. That's the metaphor in our heads; we think--there is German, it exists, and when you get good at it you can add on the fancy stuff like prepositional phrases. All we have to do is memorize the prepositions and remember which ones take the dative and which ones take the accusative and which ones sometimes take the one and sometimes the other and when and why and which ones are the exceptions. Suddenly it becomes depressing. How about we forget the whole thing and settle for your stripped-down basic model German without any of the fancy stuff? If you do that, of course, you'll never find the Bahnhof. You'll be stymied in Stuttgart.
Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.
There's an example from the works of a lady who may also have a worm in her brain. She is "the chair" of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It's very short and seems, to those willing to overlook a "small" grammatical flaw, almost too trivial to be worthy of comment. She writes: "Instead of accepting charges indiscriminately and giving them docket numbers, charging parties are counseled immediately."
"Charging parties" are probably faster than landing parties and larger than raiding parties, but no matter. She means, probably, people who are bringing charges of some sort, but there are many kinds of prose in which people become parties. It's not really meant to sound convivial, though: it's meant to sound "legal." What's important is that the structure of her sentence leads us to expect that the people (or parties) named first after that comma will also be the people (or parties) responsible for doing the "accepting." We expect something like: "Instead of doing that, we now do this." That's not because of some rule; it's just the way English works. It both reflects and generates the way the mind does its business in English. We, the readers, are disappointed and confused because somebody who ought to have shown up in this sentence has in fact not appeared. What has become of the accepting parties? Are they hanging around the water cooler? Do they refuse to accept? Are they at least hoping, that no one will remember that they are supposed to accept? We can guess, of course, that they are the same people who make up the counseling parties, who have also disappeared into a little passive. It's as though we went charging down to the EEOC and found them all out to lunch.
Well, that could have been a slip of the mind, the mind of the chair, of course, but later we read: "Instead of dealing with charging parties and respondents through formalistic legal paper, the parties are called together within a few weeks. . ."
It's the same arrangement. Who does that dealing, or, since that's what they did before the "instead," who did that dealing through "formalistic" paper? Wouldn't they be the same parties who ought to do the calling together? Where have they all gone?
A schoolteacher would call those things examples of dangling modifiers and provide some rules about them, but that's not important. What's important is that those forms are evocations of that imagined world in which responsible agency is hardly ever visible, much to the comfort of responsible agency. Since that is the nature of the world already suggested by the passive voice, you would expect that this writer, or chair, would be addicted to the passive. You'd be right. Here are the bare skeletons of a few consecutive sentences:
. . . staff is assigned . . .
. . . cases are moved . . .
. . . parties are contacted . . .
. . . files are grouped . . . and prioritized . . .
. . . steps are delineated . . . and time frames established . . .
. . . discussions are encouraged . . .
You have to wonder how much of a discussion you could possibly have with these people. They're never around.
Admittedly, it does these bureaucrats some credit that in their hearts they are ashamed to say that they actually do those things that they do. After all, who would want to tell the world that he, himself, in his very flesh, goes around grouping and prioritizing?
The dangling modifiers go well with the passives, and, in suggesting the nature of the world as seen by bureaucrats, they even add something new. The passives are sort of neutral, verbal shoulder-shrugs--these things happen--what can I tell you? The danglers go the next obvious and ominous step and suggest subtly that those charging parties have caused a heap of trouble and really ought to be handed the job of sorting things out for themselves, which, grammatically, is exactly what happens. In the first example the people who do the accepting and the counseling ought to appear right after the comma, but they don't. In the second, the people who do the dealing and the calling ought to appear right after the comma, but they don't. In both cases the people who do appear are the clients on whose behalf someone is supposed to accept, counsel, deal, and call. Does that mean something about the way in which those clients are regarded by this agency? They seem to have been put in some kind of grammatical double jeopardy, which is probably unconstitutional.
The poor lady, or chair, has inadvertently said what she probably meant. Working for the government would be so pleasant if it weren't for those pesky citizens. A waspish psychiatrist might observe that she has taken those charging parties and has "put them in their place" with a twist of grammar, thus unconsciously expressing her wish that they ought to be responsible for all the tedious labor their charges will cost her and her friends. She herself, along with the whole blooming EEOC, has withdrawn behind a curtain of cloudy English from the clash of charging parties on the darkling plain. "Ach so, sehr interessant, nicht wahr, zat ze patzient ist immer py ze Wort 'inshtead' gonvused. Es gibt, vielleicht, a broplem of, how you zay, Inshteadness." And indeed, the result of the dangling modifiers is to put the charging parties forth instead of someone else, as though the word had been chosen to stand out in front of the sentence as a symbol of the latent meaning.
Surely this lady, or chair, is an educated person, or chair, perfectly able to see and fix dangling modifiers of the sort they used to deal with in the early grades. After all, she has been hired as a chair, and for such a position we can assume some pretty high standards and stringent requirements. All right, so she doesn't know the difference between "formal" and "formalistic"--big deal. When such a high-ranking official of our government apparatus makes a mistake in structure, and habitually at that, it's not much to the point to underline it and put an exclamation mark in the margin. In a small child these would be mistakes; in a chair they are accidental revelations of a condition in the mind. To put the name of the thing modified as close as possible to the modifier is not a "rule" of English; it is a sign of something the mind does in English. When the English doesn't do that thing, it's because the mind hasn't done it.
It would be fatuous for us to say that we don't understand those sentences because of the disappearance of the people who are supposed to do all those things. It is a schoolteacher's cheap trick to say that if you don't get your grammar right people won't understand you. It's almost impossible to mangle grammar to that point where you won't be understood. We understand those sentences. In fact, we understand them better than the writer; we understand both what she thought she was saying and something else that she didn't think she was saying.
Many readers, of course, would "understand" those sentences without even thinking of the problem they present, and they might think these comments pedantic and contentious. Oh, come on, what's all the fuss? A couple of little mistakes. What does it matter? We all know what she means, don't we?
Such objections come from the erroneous idea that the point of language is merely to communicate, "to act your ideas across," whatever that means. Furthermore, such objectors may think that they are defending a hardworking and well-meaning chair, but she is little likely to be grateful for their partisanship if she figures out what it means. They say, in effect, that her little mistakes are just that, little mistakes rather than inadvertent and revealing slips of the mind. In the latter case, however, we can conclude that she is merely a typical bureaucrat with an appropriately managerial twist in the brain; in the former we would simply have to conclude that she is not well enough educated to be allowed to write public documents. Which of these conclusions do you suppose she would prefer? It seems that we must choose one or the other. Those are either mistakes made in ignorance or mistakes made in something other than ignorance.
The mind, thinking in English, does indubitably push modifiers and things modified as close together as possible. Can there really be a place in the brain where that happens, a function that might be damaged or dulled? It doesn't matter, of course, because there is surely a "place" in the mind analogous to the imagined place in the brain.
Whether by worms or world-views, it does seem sometimes to be invaded and eaten away. The malfunctions we can see in this chair and in my erstwhile friend, now an assistant dean pro tem, are small inklings of a whole galaxy of disorders that has coalesced out of the complicated history of language, of our language in particular, and out of the political history of language in general.
*****
from Richard Mitchell's Less Than Words Can Say (Chapter One)
I'm ill today, so I am posting this classic to keep you entertained. I will still try to get Part 6 of the Richard Mitchell interview later today, if I fel up to it.
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March 9, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 5
art 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Language Is Metaphor
Styles: You mentioned something earlier about metaphor in language, and getting back to Emerson. I recall an essay, I think it's in the language section of Nature, he says that all language in its infancy is poetry, and that what we have with us nowadays are a bunch of dead metaphors in our language.
And it occurs to me that the joy you speak of, somehow or other, has to do with putting the two together. Saying that love is a rose, or a car is a lemon, and that somehow or other if we only could recapture the spirit of poetry in language, the metaphorical quality of language, we would recover some of the joy in reading and writing.
Richard: Yes, especially in writing. I would think that students must find writing tedious; I know students find writing very tedious, and I think one of the reasons they find it tedious is that as soon as they sit down to a page of blank paper, they put upon themselves this requirement.
They say, "Oh, I am expected now to sound like writing. Oh yeah, I sort of know what writing sounds like. I've read some, and it had that sound." And it does ordinarily have that sound, and it's not the sound of speech, and it shouldn't be. And so they say, "I will now try to sound like writing," which is what gives us the horrors they perpetrate. And they do sound like writing, but, you know, writing like baboons or some such things.
The vivacity, the life of the language is all gone out of it, and indeed, vivacity seems often to be gone out of their speech as well. You know, everything is either "cool" or "a bummer," and there are no gradations between "cool" and "bummer," one being "good," the other "bad," but I'm not sure which.
The importance of metaphor?well, I've put that in the wrong way?it isn't just that metaphor is important in language, language is metaphor; it is entirely metaphor.
That is, the basis of language is this: that I can make a certain kind of sound and it will stand for something else in the world. And then I go the next step and say, "I can also make other sounds which don't even stand for something in the world."
Language is bigger--far, far, bigger--than the world, and we create a world of language which has no existence. If human beings were obliterated, as they very well may be, a massive universe disappears with them; the whole universe of discourse and idea that we have elaborated for all of our history, so that when language is either lacking in metaphor, or when the metaphors have ceased to have any influence or effect on us any more, then it does become a drab sterile exercise.
I think a lot of writing is taught that way.
I can remember that one of the traditional assignments in a writing course was The Description. Another was The Reportorial Account of an Event, and so forth. Notice what's being done here, really, language is being assumed as a form of communication, and you don't know what a framus looks like, and I do know what a framus looks like. And then, what is the point of this, that you will then know what a framus looks like?
In fact, if I wanted you to know what a framus looks like, I would take pains to find you one and show it to you and not bother describing it. But the burden of that sort of assignment on the student comes from the fact that students know it must be metaphor without ever having said this to themselves.
This is an awful restraint. This is a terrible artificiality in this sort of thing.
Styles: True, but that's what we are; we live in language constantly, and the metaphors that we produce in poetry?
Richard: Well, yes?
Styles: ?the words that we live by would stand for something out there in the real world to which we could point. I could bring you a framus , whatever a framus is?
Richard: I don't know either.
Styles: ?you could bring me one, show me what it is and say, that's it. But still, we've used this?
Richard: No. But you see, that's not what language is for. I've made the point somewhere, in one of these books or something, that after all language is what we use for talking about the invisible world; that we really need very little language to talk about the visible world; that, indeed, I can't show you a framus .
Should a lion attack us in this room, you do not need to be informed of that. What I need language for is to warn you, see, that there was a lion come through here yesterday, and this is about the same time that he might come through. Now notice, this is the invisible world, the world of the past; the worlds of the future are at issue here; these worlds are not accessible to experience.
Styles: But they are accessible through language, through memory for the past, and through imagination of the future.
Richard: But you see it is for those things that we need language. We don't need language to define this world as it is now. We also, of course, can define and do regularly define, through language, another world, a world which has never had and never will have any real existence.
The world of ideas, the world of possibilities, the world of values and judgments; these things don't have any practical existence. We can never show them to one another; we can never encounter them, but it is a very, very real world that we have made.
Styles: But there are real worlds that we encounter through language, and it's precisely in mastering language itself, or having it master us, that somehow, we become aware of these. We give account of ourselves that way.
Richard: Well, yes, if language masters us, it defines our world for us; if we can master language, then we can create a world.
Styles: And only by creating a world, not merely living and responding to one already created by other people?
Richard: I wonder if it is a genuine form of creativity. I?no, it's probably not. That is a badly overused word, and I guess, technically, it means "to create," "to make out of nothing at all." And we make things out of other things, so that we're not really creative in that sense.
But we certainly do make worlds that never would have been if it hadn't been for our power of language. And those worlds are very real and very powerful., even if we stopped with the worlds of fiction.
Certainly the worlds of fiction are stronger than the worlds that we live in. Lust, greater passions, they inspire us more deeply; they depress us even more deeply, if they want to. There is a strength in the world of fiction that?it's just not in our world. This [world] is random and disordered, and in which there is no feeling of tying together. Who would say that that is not reality?
Styles: I think it's Robert Frost, who says somewhere, that poetry is what he used as a momentary stay against confusion?
Richard: Oh, I didn't know he said that, but that sounds like a nice thing to do.
Styles: ?and what we're doing constantly, when we use language, is to create this little ordered world in which we can live, perhaps, to protect ourselves from the disorder of the real world in which we find ourselves, day in and day out. And only by having that ordered world, only by having poetry to remember--Robert Frost to remember, Emerson to remember, or those authors that we're living with right now--science fiction is an example, many people live, I think, in science fiction worlds constantly?
Richard: ?that is true, yes?
Styles: ?and sometimes in ways that show the power of language to distort what we would call reality, as well as to illuminate and define.
Richard: Oh yes. Well, the power of language is, of course, not confined to literature. After all, every war that has been fought has been caused by language, has been caused by a series of statements.
There is nothing else at the root of human behavior than the statements that we make about ourselves, and what statements we make determine our destinies in some way.
If we live by the statements made for us by others, then we have a certain kind of destiny; if we live by the statements that we ourselves can generate, we may have a different kind of destiny, except that we almost die, I suppose.
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 6
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March 8, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 4
art 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Why We Read
Styles: This calls to mind what Virginia Woolf said in her book, The Second Common Reader. She suggested that if one wishes to get an idea of what it's like for a novelist to write a particular passage about a person, that person should sit down and try himself to write, and that only by learning how to write do we understand truly how to read.
Richard: Oh, I like it.
Styles: So you're suggesting that perhaps the learning how to write is not learned just to communicate with other people, but really to learn how other people have written in this process of exploration and discovering themselves in this world.
Richard: Oh yes, of course, and that is good, but that shouldn't be the end goal, to learn how other people have written, but rather to learn about yourself. Because the more skill you have of this, the more you can learn about yourself, which is your business, and the more you can learn--well, learning about yourself sounds like an egocentric thing. Oh, all of myself, let me explore my wonderful self.
I suppose it is practiced in this way in some sense, but that's not what I mean by it. After all, the ultimate business of our lives is making judgments, is determining what is worthy and what is unworthy. It is in effect choosing between good and evil.
Now, we can do this on the basis of all that has been suggested to us, as I did with the word "purely," when I wrote "purely theoretical considerations." Or we can do it--we hope, we imagine, we have been told--from within.
We can do it by making a series of judgments of our own, by asking the right questions, which is partly also phrasing the right questions. This is linguistic, by answering the questions, by phrasing the questions that arise from the answers, and therefore making judgments.
I forget who said it, Andre Gide, one of those French novelists: "We have this choice; we can either"?well, I think he puts it perhaps this way: "If we do not live as we think, then we are required to think as we live." And we live in a random and disorderly way. We live as responders, reactors to stimuli. So unless we take hold and make thinking the first thing, we are going to have to think in the very same way. And it seems to me that there is a kind of important human fulfillment in living in the first way.
You know, I've had students ask me, actually ask me--and by the way I think it's a very good sign when they do when we study matters like this, say perhaps as a result of reading an essay by Emerson--"Yes, I can see that it would be perhaps possible to get hold of your mind and to work it in an orderly fashion, and to think for yourself, and to decide whether or not judgments are yours or imposed upon you; I can see that you might do that, but what would be the point of it?"
They think quite honestly what would be the point of it. They say, "Look, I'm going to be an electrical engineer and I intend to work for such and such a firm, and I intend to have a house on the beach, and what would really be the point of this frankly quite onerous process? The end result of literacy? The process by which we learn to think for ourselves?"
I never answer the question. I always say, "I don't know. It's just an interesting possibility, isn't it?" Because I am confident that the person who asks the question will find some point in it sooner or later. But they are few and far between, and I think by and large our students don't even think to ask what that point is, because they are taught and we teach them, and this is through our pretense at literacy that we teach them this, that literacy is entirely pragmatic, that you read so that you can do something.
You read so that you can have some knowledge that you didn't have before. You read so that you will get on in your job. You read for any number of aims, which is why, for instance, all reading is measured by what is called "comprehension tests"--from my way of thinking, an absolutely irrelevant criterion.
Since Emerson is in mind, I've had an experience recently with a bunch of students reading Emerson.
Styles: What essay were they reading?
Richard: This was Self-Reliance, and they had never read it before. And furthermore, they had never read anything like it before, because it's a terribly dense piece. Now, there's no padding, there's no coasting, there's no description, there's no resting place. Every sentence follows, somehow, inexorably on every other, and the same is true of the paragraph.
However, we did read it very closely, and with great attention. And frankly, they were terribly impressed by it in some ways. But they admitted that it was hard to understand, very hard for them to understand, and so I admitted that it was hard to understand. That I had first read it 25 years ago and I found it hard to understand, and I read it again a year later and found it hard to understand, and I read it this year and I found it hard to understand.
I found it differently hard to understand, and if I should ever come to comprehension, if I could get in the 99 percentile on my comprehension of Emerson's essay, I would be terribly surprised indeed. Because a thoughtful piece of writing is endless; it continuously provokes. It is not my comprehension just now that is at issue; that is not its business.
Its business is something quite different from that. I will never understand it; furthermore, if I had waited, you see, as our schools traditionally do, if I had waited to reach the right reading level, then I would still be waiting and I will wait a long, long time. I see nothing wrong with young people, children, being baffled by a piece of reading; nothing wrong with it at all?fine.
Styles: Before we began, you suggested that when you read, you read things that you've read before. And you've just said that you have read and reread again and again Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance. You still do not comprehend it. It is my impression that you are going to read it again, and you're going to read it again and again and again. Why do you come back to it? What is it in his writing that would induce rereading, and why would anyone really want to reread it?
Richard: Well, I have to use a strange word, but I'm going to use it: joy. There is again and again in reading, say, something like Self-Reliance, that moment when suddenly you understand something that you never understood before. You see something in a way in which you've never seen it before, and there is joy in that.
You know, I'm convinced that?I think it's Aristotle in this case. I get those old Greeks mixed up, and you can be convinced that it was he who said that all men--he would have said "all people" if women had been invented in his time, but women are recent inventions--that all men by nature desire to know.
Now, it's very easy to look at the world around us and say, "Forget it, Aristotle, we see no sign of that." But I think any school teacher can see why Aristotle was right. Because I have seen it, you have seen it, in that moment in aclass--you don't know when it's going to happen, or maybe after class--when a student suddenly understands, but more than understands, knows that he understands something that he did not understand before.
There was a fresh unimaginable rush of joy that goes with this. And it is not only a pleasure--sometimes perhaps it's the pleasure, and I believe Aristotle was right.
Now in order to prevent people from wanting to know, we have to do a lot of things to them. To do them, I think, it is the business of our schools to inhibit this desire to know, partly because our schools are agencies of the government, and in the deepest sense, it's not really useful for our government.
And so we do tell each other and our students, "Look, this is all you need to know. You learn a little bit of this and learn a little bit of that, and learn these facts. Facts are very, very cheap and anybody can know them, so go ahead and know them, in order to prevent that kind of rush of joy which is in the long run subversive."
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 5
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March 7, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 3
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Part 8
The Purpose of Writing
Styles: Well, the notion that Nietzsche brings up that Jesus and Socrates are "they who did not write."
Richard: They did not write, no. Northrup Frye, by the way, importantly makes that point in his new book on the Bible. But Plato says that if we teach these students to write, then they will write, and if they write, they will stop using their memories, and their memories will atrophy, and they ought to be able to keep a long, long line of argument in their heads, and writing for Plato is just a crutch.
Styles: It's a crutch, but the same argument is being made today with respect to electronic communications, electronic instruments that--like the word processor and things like that--that somehow, these new things are coming along and are?
Richard: Oh, well no, I don't think that is the same argument. I think it's very different. I think, you see, in the case of Plato's argument, we have to remember that Plato was a genius, and it's a very bad idea to take practical advice from geniuses. Probably, Plato could do that; I can't do that, you see. I need writing, my own, and other peoples.
Styles: You need the crutch, is what you're saying.
Richard: To keep my mind in order, yes, of course.
Styles: But the thing that happens when we write, it would seem to me, is to give us a chance to look at our words, to hold a great many more things in mind at any one time than a memory can hold, and that it opens up to us a new way of handling language, and giving us over to language in a way that we can't be given over to in speech.
To speak is to lose words in the air, but to hold on to those words on a page is to look at them and to say, yeah, I've seen a development of a line of thought that wouldn't otherwise have occurred to me.
Richard: Is that a bad thing?
Styles: That's not a bad thing, but what I'm suggesting is then, what is the relationship between face-to-face speech and the communication of the community that we develop from, and not face-to-face writing. The writer sits alone at his desk, he writes. He expects someone down the line to take time to sit. The great enemy of reading, we say, is sleep, and if you're going to write well, you're going to be able to overcome that tendency to sleep in the chair.
Richard: I wonder if the writer really does write to someone else. Now, of course, his work is completely vain unless someone reads him.
Styles: You're raising the issue of whom I'm writing for.
Richard: Yeah, anyone who has written knows this one thing about it--it is the most painful occupation that most of us normally encounter?
Styles: ?and it's slavery of the pen.
Richard: ...and its painfulness arises from its loneliness. There is nothing more lonely than composing a piece of writing. I often stop right in the middle of a sentence. I don't even wait for a comma because I decide that it would probably be better to go and retile the bathroom than do this; it's such a hateful work, but that loneliness is an important part of writing, because the business of writing is in some ways an outward symbol of the inner business of thought.
Thinking is possible only to the mind alone; committees don't think; task forces don?t think; Congress doesn't think--of course, that I suppose goes without saying--only a mind alone can think, which is furthermore to say that only a mind alone can learn.
In a way, a class can never be taught anything, really strictly speaking. Only some minds in that class, and the process of writing is a wonderful paradigm of the whole larger process of learning, because it is as though you went into dialogue with yourself. You write a sentence, and there it stands; it does not fly away as a spoken sentence does.
There it stands with a lot of empty paper underneath it. It calls you; it rebukes you; it reminds you; it requires you; and the you that is being required is already a different you from the you that has written that sentence, that in a sense was another you, a you of the past--in that sense, another mind. So the mind of you now must make the proper response, must go on from there, and this process is a kind of continual exploration.
I don't teach writing myself except very rarely. I think every four or five semesters, I draw a section of our special expository writing course for English majors, and when I do teach it, I hate it, because I'm no good at it, absolutely no good at it. And of course, I console myself with the theory that writing cannot be taught. But at least I do try this when I teach it, try to suggest that the purpose of learning to write is probably not clear to most of my students.
They have been told that one reason to learn to write is to write that damn letter of application for a job, and of course, it would be nice if you could spell things correctly in that letter. They have been told that the purpose of writing is to communicate and, of course, I don't believe in that.
I try to urge on them that the purpose of writing is exploration. That every piece of writing is a kind of adventure into the dark unknown; the very heart of darkness, which is where you will eventually have to end up.
I do not want my students to be writers; I really don't. I don?t think we teach students to write in order that they become writers. I'm a writer; I make money writing; I don't need any more competition, thank you. No, I don't even want them to be writers.
But if I ask a student to sit and think about something, his mind will very quickly wander, as mine will. I have an attention span, I have measured it, of twelve seconds exactly; that's maximum. It's usually less than that, but the continuous rebuke, the reminder of the written page, enforces this exploration, and perhaps enforces habits which might eventually give some specially gifted person an attention span of more than twelve seconds.
Styles: Are you suggesting here that a person who learns to write, even though he may not in his own work use writing regularly, still learns something from that process, from the ability to write?
Richard: I have to believe its true, and one of the things he learns, perhaps, is how to read. Now those things probably should go the other way around. We should probably learn to read in some way prior to our learning to write?
Styles: I think we should do that anyway.
Richard: ?just as we learn to hear prior to our speaking. I'm not sure we do that. I think, by and large, we never learn to read, but having learned to write, or having given a great deal of attention to the care and precision and selection, and the judgment that goes into a good writing, I think we are more attentive to it in reading.
Not that we can now read, because this is really an idle point, not that we can now see exactly how Emerson gets a certain effect, or why Gibbon can sound so sarcastic while saying the most obvious things. No, not that.
But that the reading itself becomes more of an enlarging experience for us, and that the reading, I suppose, also becomes more of a pleasure for us, and because now it's as though we were at home in this world of judgment about words.
The problem of reading is inescapably connected to the problem of writing. I think we never learn to read in the full sense of the word. Never. I don't know, there may be some who do.
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 4
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March 6, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 2
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What is Literacy
Styles: This is interesting. The German philosopher Heidegger argues that we don't use language, rather language uses us.
Richard: Yes, this can indeed be true.
Styles: Would you give an example of that? You said something thoughtlessly, and all of a sudden you discovered in looking at the words on the page that you've said it and then you stand and you look at it and you say, Hey, I don't want to say that. Something has caused me to say that, a clich鮦lt;/em> You know, a use we have of language that is not your own.
Richard: See, but then you would go behind that and ask, "Why does this clich頥xist in the first place? What organized frame of thought is there which makes this so attractive and so acceptable?" And then you discover a great many more things about yourself and the culture in which you live, but the Heidegger aphorism is a good one.
Language does use us, and probably one of the things we ought to mean by literacy is the reversal of that fact. Of course, our language uses us, all of it. All of its slogans, all of its suggestions, its very grammar and syntax use us and enforce upon us certain ways of thinking.
The literate person would be one who has gotten beyond that barrier in some way, or at least is aware that language is using him, and therefore, pays a certain kind of thoughtful attention--I was about to say and I would say thoughtful discretion--to it, because discretion is the business of making things discreet.
Styles: A kind of discretionary attention to language is what we are looking for.
Richard: Yes, and the ability to write an application for a job, which is, I believe, the highest imaginable goal of the minimum competence movement, is not close; it's not close to literacy, nor is the ability to read a want ad.
In its highest sense, literacy is a profoundly destructive talent. It is destructive certainly of all received opinion; it is destructive of all orthodoxy, all traditionalism, and, therefore, from a government's point of view, it is very undesirable.
Styles: Well, in your case, you wrote something?you say on the force of language, which, because of the force of your own literacy, you could question, you become more self-critical of yourself as well as critical of your own language.
Richard: Well, ourselves are the only things of which we ought justly to be critical. Socrates says somewhere among his other inflammatory things, I think it's in the Gorgias, probably the best life is to mind your own business. And he says it in almost a snide moment, but I think he means it quite seriously, too.
Our own business is the only business we have any business to mind, and rather than rushing around to make the world a better place, Socrates seems to suggest, first sit down and make yourself a better person; that is your business.
And I would say of literacy that literacy is, among other things, that skill by which we can pursue our own business. Examine the work of our own minds; judge between what is worthy and unworthy. It is a great deal more than reading and writing.
Styles: Your own work, here at home, is to produce a little paper called The Underground Grammarian. You have your own press; you have your own mailing list, your own readers and subscribers, and you yourself suggest that it's a kind of subversive activity. How did you start?
Richard: Well, that began?oh, it began quite some time ago now. We are in the middle of Volume 6, which is really surprising, since with each issue I expected there would be no more.
It began in the bicentennial year, and it began really as not much more than a lark. I had been--every teacher has this experience--I had been vexed for years by the fact that nobody in the Dean's Office seemed to be able to make his verbs agree with his subjects. That the Vice President forAcademic Affairs couldn't put his modifiers in the right place, and as far as I can tell can't spell either, and I had for years simply shrugged this off.
But finally I bought a printing press, which every American is supposed to have by the way, and looking at one of these awful memos, this idea came to me. Why not publish these things with cheerful commentary; give the names, ranks, and serial numbers of the perpetrators, along with their salaries, by the way, which The Underground Grammarian frequently does.
Here's a man we're paying $38,000 a year, and his verbs don't agree with his subjects, and basically it subjects him to ridicule, and so it did, and at first, it did mostly that. Little by little it drifted. I mean there's just so much you can say about dangling modifiers and having said that, well the hell with it; if you don't see the point, there's no helping you.
Little by little, it drifted into rather vexing considerations, and they are all considerations really, of the relationship of language to thought. So that what we end up examining finally is not simply the syntax of the utterance, but the thought which must produce that syntax; and then, I'm sorry to say, even further, the morality which must underlay that syntax.
I can give a very convenient example of that because it was terribly striking to me at the time. This was already many years ago, and I was working on a commentary on a piece by some very silly boob, a professor of some kind of education or other somewhere, and he had written the following sentence: "The childhood years may be perceived as formulative."
Now I suppose he meant formative unless he was thinking of babies, you know, sucking on formula; I don?t know, but probably he meant formative and that may even have been a typo, and it's not important, so I'm willing to concede him formative. Now he says then, "The childhood years may be perceived as being formative." Now, one would not think that there is a grammatical problem here, and unless one is paying a certain kind of attention to it, you go right by, but I was for some reason trapped by that modal auxiliary may.
In the first place, what is the man saying, that we are formed in early childhood in some way? Well, that is not exactly a revolutionary notion, you know. That, as a matter of fact, is a little bit too obvious to bother saying. Now that being so, having said such a banal and obvious thing, why does the man take great pains to say it as though he really hadn't said it?
Notice he says?he doesn't say the childhood years are formative--they may, but it isn't even that they may be formative--they "may be perceived as being." He moves this perception away from himself.
It's almost as though he fears that later on someone will discover that they're not, and he can then say, Well, I didn't say they were, I said "they may be perceived as being formative," and that there is in this a kind of, well, there is nothing else to call it--mendacity.
Yes, this is a way of lying, and this is a way of doing another thing that seems to me very important in all considerations of literacy. This is another way of shrugging off responsibility.
When you and I speak to one another, of course, we take some responsibility, but when we write to one another, especially when we write in general to our fellows, we take on a tremendous responsibility, and if I write an article that I expect you to read, in effect I say, Now just a minute, you sit down, don't do anything except listen to me; now I am going to tell you something.
This is audacious; nevertheless, we do it all the time, and we must never forget its audacity because when I do ask that of you, I also now owe you something. I owe you, first of all the best truth that I can tell you; I owe you also the courage out of which to tell it.
I do not really serve you properly when I give you mealy-mouth mendacity, and when I myself try to evade responsibility even for the mildest of generalizations. It seems to me here there was an inescapable moral quality.
Styles: What occurs to me here is that the academic administrator you were talking about, who uses the language poorly, is enforcing on you, through his own rather unskilled use of literacy, some of the very things that literacy gives us--bureaucratic organization, the ability to communicate at a distance, and sometimes the irresponsibility that comes as a result of living in that kind of world that literacy gives us. So literacy is part of the thing that your're combatting.
Richard: If by literacy you mean the ability to make meaningful marks on a piece of paper or a flat surface of some kind, yes, that is true. But I don't really mean that by literacy. However, I think you're in good company. I think even Plato was opposed to teaching students to write, wasn't he?
Richard Mitchell Interview, Part 3
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March 5, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 1
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Part 8
Thanks to Styles for the transcript of his July 6, 1982 interview of the father of The Underground Grammarian. I'm transcribing a hardcopy, so this may take some time. I'll try to do it in fewer than 10 parts.
Richard Mitchell Interview Part 1:
The Purpose of Language
Styles: You express some surprise that the Government would issue a stamp linking writing ability and democracy because you suggest that the propensity of Government is not to insure our liberty, but perhaps to take it away. The suggestion, of course, that literacy is fundamental to democracy, you agree with, but you...well, you had an ironic reaction to the stamp itself. Can you explain that?
Richard: Yes, I did. I'd like to change a word, though, in what you've just said. Freedom I would substitute for Democracy. I'm not sure what we mean by democracy. Obviously, the German Democratic Republic can call itself a democracy, then so can we and so can anybody else.
But I think I do know what I mean by "freedom," and freedom requires the ability essentially to be free in the mind. The ability to think one's own thoughts, and not somebody else's thoughts, and there is no government ever constituted on the face of the earth that does not have an interest in the contrary of that.
Indeed, this was why Jefferson was so hot for what he called, by the way not literacy, but informed discretion, which only begins with literacy. That is, that if the citizens had this informed discretion, then the natural propensities of government could be checked.
I don't think that Jefferson felt he was giving us a good government; he was giving us the least evil government possible, under the circumstances, but these natural propensities, the most important of which is the propensity to seize our minds and our thoughts, can be checked if there is a truly literate public, and therefore?well, I don't think it's the least bit sinister, or even a taunting act on the part of the Federal Government to issue a stamp promoting literacy. I think it's because they don't know what literacy means.
Styles: Well, we as educators certainly have a responsibility to teach the government what we mean, at least, by it. We know what business we're in.
Richard: I wonder if that's true. It's certainly true that we have the responsibility, but as it happens, most of us who call ourselves educators--and by the way I don't?I reject that title--
Styles: Teachers?
Richard: Teachers. Most of us happen to work for the government in one way or another. Most of us are--we don't often think of it--most of us are government agents. There is no other way to put it, and as the current government prospers, and waxes fat, and grows, and is rich, so are we.
So that for all that we know in some compartment of our minds that, in effect, we must be subversives, I think it's probably very hard for us to be that. Literacy?well, look, look at what we have recently done about so-called literacy. I think what sweeps the country now is a rage for basic minimum competence.
Styles: Basic skills?
Richard: Basic skills?the notion here being that literacy is a skill like any other, and that reading--the word reading is very much misunderstood by us--that reading is all one thing, so that if I can read my chronometer, or if I can read a paragraph, or if I can read a stop sign, it's pretty much the same kind of thing.
This arises from the delusion that the purpose of language is communication. So we say, well if our children can read The Times and a chronometer and a paragraph, then that's literacy, but it's not. It is not even close to being literacy, and I think I like very much Jefferson's phrase, thoughtful discretion.
Styles: You raise the issue that communication is a delusion, if we keep that as a focus, and yet communication and community are of the same root. To the extent that we're going to have a community of people who are free, we have to have some from of communication obviously.
Richard: No, I didn't say that communication is a delusion. It is a delusion that the purpose of language is communication.
Styles: What then is the true purpose of language?
Richard: Oh, I think it's a delusion to seek the true purpose of language, too. Let me start though with that notion. If the purpose of language is to communicate, in the first place this is very much like saying that the purpose of the wind is to blow; it is to find some attribute of a thing and because that is, in fact, its attribute, somehow assume that that is its purpose.
Certainly language does communicate as do many other things, but if the purpose of language is to communicate, then suddenly language becomes secondary in importance. What becomes important is that communicated. So that if we sit here imagining the purpose of language is to communicate, then I imagine the following condition.
I imagine that there is something here in one place, and I want to move it to another place. That one place perhaps being my mind and the other place perhaps being your mind, or the minds of the citizens. Now if language is nothing but a bridge from the one to the other, then if there were some other bridge, that would do too. And if I could put my thumb to my nose and waggle my fingers, that would work; or if I could hold up a yellow sign with a blue stripe across it and have the same effect, that would work. Which is to say that the language itself is of no importance. That it is simply a way of communicating.
This is one excuse nowadays in many of our schools for not teaching too much, by the way, in the way of language, the skill in language. Well, if you can get your point across, that is all that counts, but anybody who has seriously read books knows that the business of language is not that.
That is, what takes place right there in the language on the page before our very eyes and mind, that is the business that is going on here, and when you have read David Strauss, for instance, you do not say, "Oh, something has now been communicated unto me," because if you were called upon to say what that was, all you could do would be to recite David Strauss back.
No, something very other than that has taken place there, although many things may have been communicated to you as well. But if we teach ourselves and our students that the purpose is to communicate, then we end up being quite satisfied with the kind of language that is utterly non-metaphorical, utterly without tendency, utterly without those endless levels of meaning that language does have.
Furthermore, we blind ourselves to the fact that a great many things are communicated, even by the most seemingly neutral language, that we are not aware of on either side of the communicating process. I have an anecdote. Would you like an anecdote?
Styles: Sure.
Richard: It happened to me just today. I was writing about something and I wrote saying that there are certain grounds upon which we might object to a certain belief. At least two of them come to mind. One is purely hypothetical and the other is practical. Then I stopped myself and I asked, "Why did I write purely hypothetical?" And examined a rather quite long chain of pros, as a matter of fact, the consequences of having written that, and the roots of having written that.
I wrote it as a clich黠we always say that things are purely hypothetical. Why do we say that? This is to make some important distinction between the hypothetical and practical, but not just the distinction hidden in the words.
I don't say this is purely hypothetical and that is purely practical, you'll notice. This is, in a way, to denigrate the theoretical and to convey the impression that, "Well, we all know the important thing is the practical, and anything theoretical is only theoretical." And indeed the word purely carries flavors of the word only as it carries flavors of the word merely.
So here, you see, in what seems to me nothing but communication--in fact, I have inserted a thought which a) was not mine, b) of which I do not in fact approve, which I cannot in fact commend, and c) which was until I stopped to pay attention to the word, invisible to me.
So that thinking in terms of mere communication, I have in fact done a great deal more than communicate what I thought I was communicating, and I did not intend to do it; I did it as an automatic twitch.
Richard Mitchell Interview, Part 2
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February 22, 2005
Propositions Three and Seven
N THE COUNTRY of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king. And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king. And why not? It's only natural, and considering the circumstances, not really a bad system. We do the best we can.
But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.
Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the half-wit. However, since they do in fact rule, those potentates have not much to fear, for they can command the construction and perpetuation of a state-supported and legally enforced system for the early detection and obliteration of antisocial traits, and thus arrange that witfulness and 20-20 vision will trouble the land as little as possible. The system is called "education."
Such is our case. Nor should that surprise anyone. Like living creatures, institutions intend primarily to live and do whatever else they do only to that end. Unlike some living creatures, however, who do in fact occasionally decide that there is something even more to be prized than their own survival, institutions are never capable of altruism, heroism, or even self-denial. If you imagine that they are, if, for instance, you fancy that the welfare system or the Federal Reserve exists and labors for "the good of the people," then you can be sure that the minions of the one-eyed man and the half-wit are pleased with you.
Furthermore, any institution that still stands must, by that very fact, be successful. When we say, as we seem to more and more these days, that education in America is "failing," it is because we don't understand the institution. It is, in fact, succeeding enormously. It grows daily, hourly, in power and wealth, and that precisely because of our accusations of failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to our power and wealth, in the name of curing those ills of which we complain. And, in our special case, in a land ostensibly committed to individual freedom and rights, it can and does make the ultimate claim--to be, that is, the free, universal system of public education that alone can raise up to a free land citizens who will understand and love and defend individual freedom and rights. Like any politician, the institution of education claims direct descent in apostolic succession from the Founding Fathers.
Jefferson was in favor of education, indubitably, but he meant the condition, not the word. He held that there was no expectation, "in a state of civilization," that we could be both free and ignorant. The modifier is important; it is to suggest that we might indeed be "free" and ignorant in savagery. Free at least from the conventional and mutually admitted restraints to which civilized people bind themselves.
Using Jefferson's terms, we can derive exactly eight propositions to think about:
1. We can be ignorant and free in savagery.
2. We can be ignorant and free in civilization.
3. We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization.
4. We can be ignorant and unfree in savagery.
5. We can be educated and free in savagery.
6. We can be educated and free in civilization.
7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization.
8. We can be educated and unfree in savagery.
Jefferson asserts that the second is impossible, thereby implying the possibility of the first and the sixth. The fifth and the eighth seem unlikely, for if we are indeed educated it will be both a result of civilization and a cause of civilization. The fourth is just a quibble, for the "freedom" at issue is not freedom from natural exigencies, to which all are subject, but from the devised constraints possible only in a state of civilization. The truth of the third and the seventh, unhappily, is recommended by knowledge and experience.
Omitting those propositions that seem impossible or meaningless, we are left with:
1. We can be ignorant and free in savagery.
3. We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization.
6. We can be educated and free in civilization.
7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization.
And, of those four, Propositions 1 and 6 are explicitly Jefferson's, while 3 and 7 are implicitly Jefferson's. They describe conditions not only perfectly possible but perfectly real. Unfreedom, the forced submission to constraints beyond those mutually admitted by knowing and willing members of a civilization, is not unheard of. Indeed, it is, in greater or less degree, the current condition of all humanity.
Civilization is itself an institution and has, like all institutions, one paramount goal, its own perpetuation. It was Jefferson's dream that that civilization could best perpetuate itself in which the citizens were "educated," whatever he meant by that, and we do have some clue as to what he meant. He wrote of the "informed discretion" of the people as the only acceptable depository of power in a republic. He knew very well that the people might be neither informed nor discreet, that is, able to make fine distinctions, but held that the remedy for that was not to be sought in depriving the people of their proper power but in better informing their discretion.
And to what end were the people to exercise the power of their informed discretion? The answer, of course, shouldn't be surprising, but, because we have been taught to confuse government and its institutions with civilization in general, it often is. Jefferson saw the informed discretion of the people as one of those checks and balances for which our constitutional democracy is justly famous, for it was only with such a power that the people could defend themselves against government and its institutions. "The functionaries of every government," wrote Jefferson, although the italics are mine, "have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents." Jefferson knew--isn't this the unique genius of American constitutionalism?--that government was a dangerous master and a treacherous servant and that the first concern of free people was to keep their government on a leash, a pretty short one at that.
Consider again Propositions 3 and 7: 3. We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization, and 7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization. Imagine that you are one of those functionaries of government in whom there has grown, it seems inescapable, the propensity to command, in however oblique a fashion and for whatever supposedly good purpose, the liberty and property of your constituents. Which would you prefer, educated constituents or ignorant ones? Wait. Be sure to answer the question in Jefferson's terms. Which would you rather face, even considering your own conviction that the cause in which you want to command liberty and property is just--citizens with or without the power of informed discretion? Citizens having that power will require of you a laborious and detailed justification of your intentions and expectations and may, even having that, adduce other information and exercise further discretion to the contrary of your propensities. On the other hand, the ill-informed and undiscriminating can easily be persuaded by the recitation of popular slogans and the appeal to self-interest, however spurious. It is only informed discretion that can detect such maneuvers.
And that's how government works. There is nothing evil about it. It's perfectly natural. You and I would do it the same way. In fact, the chances are good that we are doing things that way, since more and more of us are in fact functionaries of government in one way or another and dependent for our daily bread on some share of the property of our constituents, and sometimes (as in the public schools) upon the restriction of their liberty.
It was the genius of Jefferson to see that free people would rarely have to defend their freedom against principalities and powers and satanic enemies of the good, but that they would have to defend it daily against the perfectly natural and inevitable propensities of functionaries. Any fool can see, eventually, the danger to freedom in a self-confessed military dictatorship, but it takes informed discretion to see the same danger in bland bureaucracies made up entirely of decent people who are just doing their jobs. But Jefferson was optimistic. As to the liberty and property of the people, he saw that "there is no safe deposit for them but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information." And he was convinced, alas, that the people could easily come by that information: "Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is secure."
That sounds so simple. A free press, and universal literacy. We have those things, don't we? So all is secure, no? No.
Just as we cannot assume that what we call "education" is the same as Jefferson's "informed discretion," we cannot assume that Jefferson meant what we mean by "press" and "able to read." In our time, the press, in spite of threats real or imagined, is in fact free. And, if we define "literacy" in a very special and limited way, almost everyone is able to read, more or less. But when Jefferson looked at "the press," what did he see? Or, more to the point, what did he not see? He did not see monthly periodicals devoted entirely to such things as hair care and motorcycling and the imagined intimate details of the lives of television stars and rock singers. He did not see a sports page, a fashion page, a household hints column, or an astrological forecast. He did not see a never-ending succession of breathless articles on low-budget decorating for the executive couple in the big city, career enhancement through creative haberdashery, and the achievement of orgasm through enlightened self-interest. He did not see a nationwide portrayal of "the important" as composed primarily of the doings and undoings of entertainers, athletes, politicians, and criminals.
He would not, I think, have been unduly dismayed by all that. Of course, he would have been dismayed, but not unduly. Such things are implicit in the freedom of the press, and if enough people want them, they'll have them. (Jefferson would surely have wondered why so many people wanted such things, but that's not to the point just now.) Jefferson did, naturally, see "the press" giving news and information, but, more than that, he also saw in it the very practice of informed discretion. In his time, after all, Common Sense and The Federalist Papers were simply parts of "the press." And "every man able to read" would have been, for Jefferson, every man able to read, weigh, and consider things like Common Sense and The Federalist Papers. He would have recognized at once our editorial pages and our journals of enquiry and opinion, but he would have found it ominous that hardly anyone reads those things, and positively portentous that this omission arises not so much from casual neglect as from a common and measurable inability to read such things with either comprehension or pleasure.
Thus Jefferson is cheated. The press is free and almost everyone can make out many words, but all is not secure. Wait. That's not quite clear. Some things are secure. The agencies and institutions of government are secure. The functionaries whose propensity it is to command our liberty and property, they are secure. And, as the one-eyed man is the more secure in proportion to the number of citizens he can blind, our functionaries are the more secure in proportion to those of us who are strangers to the powers of informed discretion. It is possible, of course, to keep educated people unfree in a state of civilization, but it's much easier to keep ignorant people unfree in a state of civilization. And it is easiest of all if you can convince the ignorant that they are educated, for you can thus make them collaborators in your disposition of their liberty and property. That is the institutionally assigned task, for all that it may be invisible to those who perform it, of American public education.
Public education does its work superbly, almost perfectly. It works in fairly strict accordance with its own implicit theory of "education," an elaborate ideology of which only some small details are generally known to the public. This is hardly surprising, for the rare citizen who actually wants to know something about educationistic theory, a dismal subject, finds that it is habitually expressed in tangled, ungrammatical jargon, penetrable, when it is at all, only to one who has nothing better to do. I hope, little by little, to dissect and elucidate that theory, for it is in fact even more frightening than it is dismal. For now, I can take only a first but essential step and urge you to consider this principle: The clouded language of educational theory is an evolved, protective adaptation that hinders thought and understanding. As such, it is no more the result of conscious intention than the markings of a moth. But it works. Thus, those who give themselves to the presumed study and the presumptuous promulgation of educational theory are usually both deceivers and deceived. The murky language where their minds habitually dwell at once unminds them and gives them the power to unmind others.
We will, with appropriate examples, explore the evolution of that strange trait, especially in that portion of the educational establishment where it is most evident: that is, among the people to whom we have given the training of teachers and the formulation of educational theory. In the cumbersome and complicated contraption we call "public education," the trainers of teachers have special powers and privileges. Although in law they are governed by civilian boards and legislatures, they are in fact but little governed, for they have convinced the boards and legislatures that only teacher-trainers can judge the work of teacher-trainers. That wasn't hard to do, for boards and legislatures are made up largely of people who have, in their time, already been blinded by the one-eyed man, having been given, as helpless children, what we call "education" rather than practice in informed discretion. The very language in which the teacher-trainers explain their labors will quickly discourage close scrutiny in even a thoughtful board member, perhaps especially in a thoughtful board member, who has after all, other and more important (he thinks) things to do.
It is not strictly true that the public schools are a state-supported monopoly. There are other schools. But the teacher-trainers are certainly a state-supported monopoly. There are no other teacher-trainers than the ones we have, and they are all in the business of teaching something they call "education." No one knows exactly what that is, and even among educationists there is some mild contention as to whether there actually exists some body of knowledge that can be called "education" as separate from other knowable subjects. You may want to make up your own mind as to that, for in later chapters you will see examples of what is actually done by those who teach "education." But for now we must consider the usually unnoticed effects of the monopoly they enjoy.
The laws of supply and demand work in the academic world just as they do in the marketplace, which is to say, of course, that what is natural and reasonable will not happen where government intervenes. Our schools can be usefully likened to a nationalized industrial system in which the production of goods is directed not by entrepreneurs looking to profit but by social planners intending to change the world. Thus it is the business of the schools, and the special task of the educationists who produce teachers, to generate both supply and demand, so that the nation will want exactly what it is they intend to provide.
Within the academic marketplace, there are many enterprises other than educationism, however. Historically, they have not seen themselves in competition with one another, although I'm sure that the faculties of the medieval universities were not reluctant to claim that their disciplines were more noble than the others. Individual professors, of course, must indeed have competed for students, by whom they were paid, but the students, many of whom were to become professors themselves, were free to devote themselves to whatever discipline seemed good. But between one discipline and another there seems to have been, rather than competition, sectarianism.
A similar sectarianism has been revivified by our current educational disorders. If you ask a professor of geography why we seem to be turning into a nation of ignorant rabble, he will not be able to refrain from pointing out that we don't teach geography anymore and that high school graduates aren't even sure of the name of the next state, never mind the climatic characteristics of the Great Plains or the rivers that drain the Ohio Valley. Professors of physics will allude to the all-too-inevitable consequences of ignorance of the laws of motion and thermodynamics. You can easily devise for yourself the comments of professors of mathematics, languages, history, literature, and indeed of any who teach those things we think of as traditional academic disciplines. Their views will be, of course, at least partly predictable expressions of self-interest; however, they will also be correct, and, if taken all together, will indeed tell us much about our present troubles.
The academic world is like any other group of related enterprises in which everybody can provide something but nobody can provide everything. For the building of houses, for instance, we need many different things, and they are not easily interchangeable. When we need copper tubing, we need copper tubing, and we can't make do with wallboard instead. If houses are built, therefore, many people making many different things will be able to produce what is both useful and profitable. And, while the makers of copper tubing won't have to worry about competition from the makers of wallboard, they will have to be mindful of other makers of copper tubing and also of the makers of plastic tubing. That will be good for the whole enterprise.
Suppose, though, that the copper-tubing people should, through quirk or cunning, secure for themselves some special legal privilege. First they persuade the state, which already has the power to license the building of houses, to prohibit the use of plastic tubing. That's good, but so long as the state is willing to go that far, the copper-tubing makers seek and achieve a regulation requiring some absolute minimum quantity of copper tubing in every new house. Now you must suppose that the copper-tubing lobby has grown so rich and powerful that the law now requires that fifty percent of the mass of every new house must be made up of copper tubing.
Houses could still be built. Walls, floors, and ceilings could be made of coils and bundles of copper tubing smeared over with plaster or stucco. Copper tubing could be cleverly welded and twisted into everything from doorknobs to windowsills and produced in large sizes for heating ducts and chimneys. The houses would be dreadful, of course, and, should you ask why, you will discover that craftsmen in the building trades are more direct and outspoken than college professors. They'll just tell you straight out that these are lousy houses because of all that damn copper tubing. If the professor of mathematics were equally frank, he'd tell you that our schools are full of supposed teachers of mathematics who have studied "education" when they should have studied mathematics.
This is, I admit, not an exact analogy. The manufacture of copper tubing actually does have some relationship to the building of houses, while the study of "education" has no relationship at all to the making of educated people. The analogy would perhaps have been better had I chosen, instead of the manufacturers of copper tubing, the manufacturers of gelatin desserts. To grasp the true nature of the place of educationism in the academic world, you have to imagine that houses are to be made mostly of Jell-O--each flavor equally represented--and that the builders must eat a bowl an hour.
(Well, that analogy fails, too. Jell-O is at least a colorful and entertaining treat with no known harmful side effects. The same cannot be said of the study of "education.")
Our public system of education, from Head Start to the graduate schools of the state universities, might also be called a government system. Those who teach in its primary and secondary schools are required by law to serve time, often as much as one half of their undergraduate program, in the classes of the teacher-trainers. Should they seek graduate degrees, which will bring them automatic raises, they will still have to spend about one half their time taking yet again courses devoted to things like interpersonal relations and the appreciation of alternative remediation enhancements. The educationistic monopoly is strong enough that in at least one state (there are probably others, but I'm afraid to find out), a high school mathematics teacher who is arrogant enough to take a master's degree in mathematics will discover that he is no longer certified to teach that subject. If he wants to keep his job, he must take a degree in "mathematics education," which will, of course, permit him to spend some of his time studying his subject. Even where there is no such visibly monopolistic requirement, the laws and regulations of the public schools, which have been devised by educationists in the teachers' colleges, provide an effective equivalent.
The intellectual climate of the public schools, which must inevitably become the intellectual climate of the nation, does not seem to be conducive to the spread of what Jefferson called informed discretion. The intellectual climate of the nation today came from the public schools, where almost every one of us was schooled in the work of the mind. We are a people who imagine that we are weighing important issues when we exchange generalizations and well-known opinions. We decide how to vote or what to buy according to whim or fancied self-interest, either of which is easily engendered in us by the manipulation of language, which we have neither the will nor the ability to analyze. We believe that we can reach conclusions without having the faintest idea of the difference between inferences and statements of fact, often without any suspicions that there are such things and that they are different. We are easily persuaded and repersuaded by what seems authoritative, without any notion of those attributes and abilities that characterize authority. We do not notice elementary fallacies in logic; it doesn't even occur to us to look for them; few of us are even aware that such things exist. We make no regular distinctions between those kinds of things that can be known and objectively verified and those that can only be believed or not. Nor are we likely to examine, when we believe or not, the induced predispositions that may make us do the one or the other. We are easy prey.
That these seem to be the traits of the human condition always and everywhere is not to the point. They just won't do for a free society. Jefferson and his friends made a revolution against ignorance and unreason, which would preclude freedom in any form of government whatsoever. If we cannot make ourselves a knowledgeable and thoughtful people--those are the requisites of informed discretion--then we cannot be free. But our revolutionists did at least provide us with that form of government which, unlike others, does grant the possibility of freedom, provided, of course, the public has the habit of informed discretion. That possibility is all we have just now.
Proposition 3 is in effect. We are largely a nation of ill-informed and casually thoughtless captives. Even when we are well-informed and thoughtful, however, we cannot be free where the character of the nation and its institutions must reflect the ignorance and unreason of the popular will. But if we are well-informed and thoughtful, we can take comfort in the fact that our form of government is carefully designed to preclude that condition described in Proposition 7. As long as we remain a constitutional republic, we cannot ever be both educated and unfree. It just won't work, and that may be the single greatest insight of the makers of our revolution.
Therefore, whatever it is they do in the teachers' colleges of America has had and will always have tremendous consequences. By comparison with the attitudes and intellectual habits and ideological predispositions inculcated in American teachers, the acts of Congress are trivial. Indeed, the latter proceed from the former. If, as a result of the labors of our educationists, we were obviously clear-sighted and thoughtful and thus able to enjoy the freedom promised in our constitutional system, then we would know something about those educationists. If, on the other hand, we are blind and witless, then we would know--if there are any of us who can know--something else about them. To know anything at all about those educationists, however, we must look at what they do, at what they say they do, and even at how they say what they do.
from The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell.
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February 8, 2005
The Gift of Fire
WENT TO TALK TO THE MENSANS. The members of Mensa are the smartest people in America, and I was intimidated. I was afraid that they might catch me in a circular argument or a lexigraphical fallacy. I was afraid that they would rise up, right in the middle of the pathetic little lecture I had thought up for them, and demolish my silly little premises, and then go, not storming, but laughing, from the room, to hold high converse among themselves, not even offering me any coffee and doughnuts.
The speech was meant to be the opener of a small convention, and scheduled to take place right after breakfast. I got there early, and was sent to join the Mensans in a room on the fourth floor, in an upper room, where they were standing around having coffee and doughnuts. I was relieved of at least one of my fears. But they were all watching television, and no one said anything to me. I stood around for a while and went back downstairs, where the brisk young woman who had sent me upstairs told me that I would have to understand that Mensans never did anything on schedule, and that I would have to wait till they came down, Soon, maybe.
I sat in the lobby and read some of the Mensan handouts that I found on the floor near the sofa. One of them was a sample test. To become a Mensan, you have to get high grades on some tests, and what I was reading was a kind of prep for those tests. It had some very interesting questions. One of them asked which diagram of a group of six would be generated by taking diagram C and subjecting it to whatever operations had transformed diagram A into diagram B. Or maybe it was the other way around. There was a very good train question, whose details I can't recall, but it had all the classical attributes of train questions--train A and train B leaving at different times from points C and D, moving at rates E and F, and meeting, at last, at the mysterious point X where ships also, I suppose, pass in the night. It really took me back. But the question I liked best of all went something like this:
Bob and Carol and Alice and Ted all took the Mensa test. Bob scored higher than Alice, who scored ten points lower than Ted. Ted's score added to Carol's score and then divided by the difference between Bob's score and Alice's score was either twenty points more or twelve points less than the average of all four scores. Which of the four made it into Mensa?
Well, I may have forgotten some of the less important details. But it was a great question.
I had planned to start my talk to the Mensans with some mention of Prometheus, and to quote a little from Aeschylus. It was the passage in which Prometheus, about to be chained down for quite a long time, makes a little recitation of the things he has done for humanity, and in which he does not mention at all what we usually think of--the gift of fire. He speaks instead of such powers as those of language and number, and, most important of all, the mind's grasp of itself, in Locke's words. It is the ability not only to think, but to think about thinking. Before humanity had that, Prometheus says, humans lived a random and aimless life, "all blindly floundering on from day to day." I knew that the Mensans were people interested in their minds, as people should be, and I thought that I might encourage them in that interest, and, at the same time, give due praise to the great minds of the past who understood long ago that the mind's grasp of itself is what alone makes possible the examined life, and thus the good life.
So I imagined myself in conversation with Prometheus, who had come back to find out what we mortals had managed to do with the astounding powers that he had given to us alone of all creatures.
How fortunate I am to run into you, he began, for I see by your rumpled clothing and your knitted brow that you must be in the mind business.
I'm honored to meet you, Sir, I replied, and I will confess that I am in the mind business, for I do no heavy lifting. Would you care to have some coffee and doughnuts with the Mensans?
Not just now, thank you. I have come, I must admit, not for social reasons, but on business. Long, long ago I gave you all the power of the mind's grasp of itself, the fire by which you may burn and glow like no other mortal creature. That got me into a lot of trouble at first, of course, but since my release I've had long, long ages of time in which to wonder whether or not I had done the right thing. I have grown so curious, in fact, that I have now undertaken, as you see, a journey whose enormousness you can not imagine, and only for the purpose of finding out to what good uses you have put my gift.
Aha, I said, you have come not only to the right man, but to the right place, and also at the right time. There must be something to that Divine Guidance business. As it happens, I hold here in my hand the answer that you seek.
What have we done, you ask. Just listen to this. Imagine a train leaving point A and moving toward point B at the rate of C. Imagine now another train moving from B to A at rate D, having set forth on its journey E minutes after the departure of the first train. Would you believe it if I told you that we--well, some of us--are able to figure out where and when those trains will meet? So how's that for mind business?
He looks at me steadily for a moment. He clears his throat. I begin to feel that I have not yet fully stated our case. I rush into the silence with six diagrams.
And look at this, just look at this. You see these diagrams? Now this little one over here was made by doing something or other, maybe a little twisting or turning this way or that, to this other little diagram. Now, and this is the beauty part, one of these six diagrams down here got to be the way it is because the very same things, the twisting and turning stuff, you know, were done to this little diagram. Pretty neat, eh? Now suppose I were to tell you that we--well, some of us--by the power of the mind alone, can say exactly which of these little...
At this point, Prometheus silently rises and begins to walk off. I get the impression, probably through Divine Guidance, that he is going to go back and chain himself to the rock for another long sentence.
Wait, wait, I call after him, now heading through the door and out into the street. Let me tell you about Bob and Carol and Alice and Ted! They all took this test, you see, and... and...
But Prometheus is gone. I begin to wonder whether the nature of his gift is such that he can take it back. I begin to suspect that he has taken it back. My mind is losing the grasp of itself. All I can think of is Bob and Alice and Carol and Ted drawing little diagrams while traveling on a train from point A to point B at the rate of C.
What should we mean by "intelligence"? I think it is important to ask the question in just that way--What should we mean? This seems to me an essential rule of thought, that when we talk about things that do not simply appear to us as a part of the world, we take on a grave responsibility to each other and to ourselves. Such things as intelligence and love and patience are possible only where there is a person. We do not find them lying around so that we can weigh and measure them, so there truly is no such thing as deciding whether love is the "true" kind or some other. We can, of course, mean anything we please by such terms, and just as easily mean one thing today and another tomorrow. In the best possible world, we probably would know better than to talk about such things at all, and we probably wouldn't have to. However, if the mind is to take the grasp of itself, and if we are to instruct ourselves in the art of taking that grasp, we must end up talking about things like intelligence. And love. And patience. And whatever else "exists," in some strange way, because persons exist.
Is it by the very same power that we can, in one case, conclude that it is better to suffer an injustice than to do one, and, on the other, discover which of six diagrams was generated by what process? Do we use the same faculty to consider whether patience can and should be cultivated and to tell where the trains will meet?
My questions, I know, seem to imply that we don't use the same power or faculty in all of those cases, but I truly don't know that. Whatever it is by which we do such things, it is not a fish that I can show you so that you might check what I have said about it, and I do not want to pretend that it is a fish, and speak of it as something that we all can see and measure. For when people do pretend that it is a fish, some strange things happen.
Let me rephrase a question just a little bit. Which will be detected by an intelligence test: the ability to make some rationally demonstrable conclusion as to whether suffering injustice is better than inflicting it, or the ability to tell where the trains will meet? Is it possible that we might meet some person who does indeed give himself to consider whether patience is a fixed or a changeable attribute, but can not for the life of him tell you which diagram was made from which? And one more question: How did the makers of the intelligence test come to "know" what intelligence is, that they can devise ways to measure it, and then pronounce its worth in numbers?
In detail, I can not answer. In principle, I can. They made certain choices. They made them, probably, for what they deemed very practical reasons, but with consequences that are not best described as merely practical. They have given the rest of us ideas, of which we may not even be thoughtfully aware, and by which we may, and often do, make choices of our own. We choose, for instance, every bit as much in families as in schools, how to train the minds of children, and which children to subject to which form of training, in accordance with some packaged and delivered ideas about intelligence. On the basis of those decisions, we commit acts, acts that have consequences in the very deepest centers of persons. That is a perilous business.
And that is why I ask: What should we mean by intelligence? It is not a question of fact, for there is no fact; it is a moral question. There is "shouldness" in it.
The word "intelligence" comes from two Latin words, inter and legere, which, put together, suggest the act of one who looks around among different things and makes choices, gathering some and leaving others. That is a portrayal of a mental activity very different from figuring out where the trains meet, but also an act that is a little bit like discovering the right diagram. But only a little bit. The idea of intelligence includes not only the choosing, but the chooser, an agent who chooses to choose. But when you choose the right diagram, you are not truly doing your own choosing. You are walking in someone else's footprints, and the "rightness" of your choice is in having done what someone else has already done.
There is a special case of thinking that is called problem-solving. Solving a problem is not the same thing as understanding a principle. It is, however, the sort of thinking that we have come to accept as the mark of intelligence, and the thinking that some people seem to like a lot. Somebody chose that understanding. Not one somebody, of course, but many somebodies, and I deceive myself and you if I say that "we" have either chosen it or that we have come to adopt it. Certain people did all that. Haphazardly. And now we live by it. We fashion our schools to match it, and measure their "products" by its yardstick. And thus we will win the disapproval of Prometheus and then perhaps even the loss of his gift.
I think I may lead myself into confusion if I accept without thinking Locke's name for the gift of Prometheus--"the mind's grasp of itself." There is no such thing as the mind; where there is mind there is a mind. It is not the mind that my mind might be able to grasp, but only my mind. I will not be able to take the grasp of your mind, nor you of mine, and for that we are both properly grateful. Some things are better kept private. When I do set out to take the grasp of my mind, I must find myself walking into unknown, and perhaps very dangerous, territory, where no one has ever gone before. I can find models of that journey, and accounts of other such journeys in other minds, but I can not find that journey.I end up doing, therefore, what is absolutely unique to me, and what, should I not do it, can not be done.
But when I solve Mensan problems, that is not the case. There, I will be doing what others have done. But those are, of course, problems that seem fake, somehow. Somebody cooked them up to be problems. They are a kind of game, a trivial pursuit. There is something to be learned in such a practice, of course, some habits of consistency and attentiveness, but in those who have learned those habits from earlier problems, the industrious solution of later problems, more of the same, seems a bit childish. The great charm of problem-solving lies in tackling the problems that have not been solved, which is to say, the problems that have never before arisen.
Such problems are almost always related to technology, and their solutions seem wondrous to us not because they come from newly devised powers of the mind, but always because they provide some new thing in the world. In that respect, microwave relay stations and eggbeaters are similar, both wonders. The most important difference between them is that Attila the Hun would have given you Asia Minor for the latter, but nothing at all for the former.
There is a sense in which the unsolved problem, even the problem that has yet to appear to us, is already "solved." You can provide your own easy example of the fact by making up your own train problem, using whatever numbers please you. You don't have to stick to trains. Airplanes or ox carts will do as well. What you now have is a "new" problem, a never-before solved problem. But, of course, its solution does exist. Although you can not make it just now, there is a statement that you will be able to make once you have made the statements that lead to it. That's how any problem is solved, however complicated, and however long.
Problem-solving is a wonderful device, and fun, but it ought to be kept in its place. The best way to do that is through a careful use of language. When I say that I have a problem, my first thought should be to consider as well as I can whether it truly is a problem. As to the meeting of the trains, I have little doubt. When I consider the problem of rearing children sanely and decently, or the problem of making ends meet, I become uneasy. And when it comes to World Peace and the Brotherhood of All Mankind, I am frightened, frightened of what will happen to us if we imagine that such grand hopes are to be realized by the process of problem-solving. In such matters, can the pertinent facts be known? Can anyone know when he has them all? Can they be tested and found as "true" as those given in train problems, or even in the most elaborate and complicated possible versions of train problems?
Where human beings are concerned, can we ever have all the facts? Can we ever know that we do, or that we don't? If we imagine that human dilemmas can be unraveled by that sort of thinking that problem-solving represents, are we not likely to run into something more vexing than problems?
That social and moral human "problems" have proved insoluble for the whole history of our species up to now, is not the least bit surprising, and it is exactly by the gift of Prometheus that we can know that. When we consider and question, and come to have some understanding of the process of problem-solving and its necessary attributes, we are not solving a problem. We are understanding. A mind is taking some grasp of itself. Because it is a mind, its understanding will be its understanding, not the understanding, and what it understands, however more or less, will be itself and its work, not the mind and its work. Not even another mind and its work. As to your mind, I do suspect that mine can make some pretty good guesses, even theories, but they are guesses and theories.
Problem-solving is something that we can also do by the gift of Prometheus. Understanding is the thing that we can do by that gift. The light of problem-solving is like the light of the moon, a reflection of some greater light. And when we single out the skills of problem-solving and give them the name of intelligence, we make a choice between the moon and the sun, and run the danger of putting out our own fires.
There is, in all of those dilemmas and mysteries that arise from the unfathomables of our humanity, a hauntingly familiar quality, as though we were all doing everything again and again. Thus it was, for instance, that Freud could conclude that Sophocles was not just right, but still right, perhaps always right. And it is to help us understand not the quaint beliefs of primitive and unscientific people, but, quite simply, ourselves--at any time, and in any place.
As fire is given in the myth, fire is given again and again in each of us, as it must once have been given to creatures who by its power became human. Like the species, we have all lived out of an impenetrable antiquity into the now. Every one of us must awaken out of sleep and come into the light of self-mindedness. And when self-mindedness arises, when the mind first comes to consider itself and knows that it considers itself, it is in language. It seems that the propensity for language and the propensity for self-mindedness are the same thing, which is, really, not sufficiently distinguished by the word "propensity." "Destiny" seems better. We are the creatures who are destined to think and to know themselves, and that is the gift of Prometheus.
Nobody knows when all that happened, but everybody who knows anything can see that it must have happened. Every single one of us lives again the astonishing and utterly unaccountable history of the coming into this world of the truly human. And we do it, for there is no other way, one by one. It is not humanity that comes into the grasp of the mind. It is a person that comes into the grasp of that person's mind. Information and examples I can take, in that degree to which I am literate, curious, and attentive, from countless other persons, most of them long dead but still speaking to me, but I must discover thoughtfulness for and in myself and come to understand for the first time what I have never understood before and what no one else can understand for me, any more than he might nourish me by his eating or refresh me by his sleep.
Nevertheless, while no one else can nourish me, I will never be nourished by those who are not themselves nourished, never brought into thoughtfulness unless others have gone there before me. This is, I think, a great mystery, and the most powerful suggestion I know that two seemingly contradictory possibilities are both true: that the individual person is the root and dwelling place of all that is truly human, and that society is the root and dwelling place of all that is truly human. Unless, of course, there really was a Prometheus, who started the whole business, out of nothing.
But if there was, he has obviously gone away and left us to what we must call, lacking better knowledge, our own devices. And our own devices are pretty good. As persons, we do make society, and as society, we do make persons. The enterprise of education is entangled in that paradox, and it is the proper business of everybody both to nourish and to be nourished, both to take the grasp of his own mind and to provide for others the power to do the same. It is for that reason that we properly connect the idea of education with the rearing of children. As to which of us are truly the children, we really have no clear idea, but we do know that there are children among us, and that something should be done about them. If we knew exactly what that was, and who the children were, there could be education. Chapter 5, from The Gift of Fire by Richard Mitchell
*** Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
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Posted by witnit at 8:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2005
What to Do till the Undertaker Comes
HAVE just had some exciting news about Boating Education. There are some people somewhere who believe that Boating Education should be just as regular an enterprise in the schools as Driver Education, Television Education, and Brothering and Sistering Education, all of which have won themselves places in schools all over the land.
The proponents of Boating Education make a strong case. What is the good, they ask, of teaching reading and writing, or even physics and calculus, if the young people thus laboriously instructed are only going to tip over their canoes and drown, or decapitate themselves by running motorboats at full throttle under docks and bridges?
A good question. And its logical implications are even more compelling than the question itself, which, unfortunately, suggests facetious analogies. We might with the same justification require that our schools provide their students with Rock Climbing Education and Burglar Alarm Education. We might even conclude, since death is even more certain than a diploma to put an end to all learning, that we ought to abandon the whole business of education, and, while waiting for death, pursue only those "studies" that might help us to live as long and as well as possible in the meantime.
The Boating Education enthusiasts may seem silly and all too obviously self-serving (people actually do make livings from such notions), but, given the meaning of "education" in these times, they are logically consistent and impeccably orthodox. It is our fashion, not only in our notions of education but apparently in all others, not only to consider the meaning (if there be any) of human deeds as a function of time and place, but also to reject as sentimental, and maybe superstitious, the belief, the suspicion, the fear, that human deeds have some meaning not dependent on time and place. It is an unspoken presumption of the practice of our schools that "education" is for a purpose, and that the purpose is to live in one style rather than another until we die. Whatever is conducive to the socially approved style of living is, therefore, the legitimate substance of "education"; whatever is not patently thus conducive is, at best, a harmless and perhaps even an "enriching" diversion, and, at worst, an elitist display of conspicuous consumption and leisure, and a dangerous impediment to the cultivation of socially approved, "useful" styles of living.
I do not mean to suggest that our version of education is hedonistic, although it is often cynically described as "fun and games," and even though Boating Education might come to be "taught" up a lazy river by the old mill run. It is, in fact, quite the opposite of hedonism, and characterized not by abandoned merriment but by a sanctimonious search for a place in life. That place, furthermore, exists only because the social order needs it, and is seen not only as an accepted way to make a living, but, at the same time, to serve some supposed needs of the social arrangement that provides us the opportunity to live. In this respect, modern educational systems do seem to vary, but only in this: while we are all expected to "serve" in some way the system that teaches us how to serve, some systems permit some of us more choice as to how we will serve, and how much pleasure and profit we may take from that service.
This is the final meaning of "life-adjustment," a term intended both to describe and to justify that presumed education to which we are committed: it is designed to adjust us to life as it now must be lived, in this time and in this place, and with due regard to the collective needs of the society that is said to harbor and nourish us. Thus it is that what we call "education," once thought a condition, even a virtue, not subject to passing fashions, has come to be thought a filling of some cavity in the mind, a neutral void to be stuffed with this or that, or whatever else the ephemeral "needs" of the society may dictate. And that is why the practice of the schools must change with every real or imagined change in the texture and style of life.
Such a view of education can seem attractively reasonable. After all, we do have to live here and now. That is our most immediately obvious need, and the schooling that will fit us to do it indubitably "meets a need," a phrase much used by those calling themselves "educators." And what could be more reasonable and salutary than an education that meets not just one but two urgent needs: the need of the individual to live this life, and the need of this life to be served? Why, when a turn of the wheel brings us a need of navigators, or silversmiths, or computer programmers, should we not "adjust" education itself accordingly? What else is there to live but life?
Why, then, are many of us troubled by what seem, well, at least failures, and sometimes no less than evil fruits, of our system of education? I think it is because we do remember some of our history. We must at least pause to reflect on the troubling fact that education, in its beginnings, and for a long time thereafter, was not in any sense an "adjustment" to the obvious needs of getting and spending, but rather a development of the powers by which we might best endure those needs. It was not a preparation for the world, but a preparation against the world, which will inevitably bring us pain and sorrow. And death.
The ancient Greeks, to whom we owe the very idea of education, saw no important difference between the educated person and the philosopher. To be the one was to be the other. Nor did they equate the trained practitioner of any craft or art, however great his skill or difficult his calling, with the educated man. They would not have said, as we do, that the physician, for instance, has been educated in his art, but that he has rather been trained into it. He might, of course, also have been educated, as might the cobbler or the wheelwright, but not so that he could make a living.
The Greeks did not see education as a process that might culminate in the practice of a profession, or in anything else, for that matter. They saw it as an endless exploration, not a way of making a living, but a way of trying--only trying, no more--to live wisely. It is a measure of our values that we deem any powers other than those by which we make our livings either harmless diversions or elitist luxuries. For the Greeks, education was simply a necessity, not a necessity for life--all creatures have that--or for the happy life--nothing can assure that--but for the virtuous life, whose principles can be discovered, and whose attributes do not change with the turnings of the wheels of fashion and fortune.
Just at the end of The Republic, Socrates tells the mystifying little story of Er, who was mistakenly left for dead and taken, like an ancient Dante, on a tour of the Afterworld. Whether it is as a true believer or merely as one who would teach by parable that Socrates tells the tale, I can not guess, but its power as a parable is quite enough for his purposes. Er beholds the souls of the dead as they are shown new lives from which to choose, lives of every sort, humble or exalted, long or short, pleasant or nasty, rich or poor, brave or craven, even the lives of plants and animals. The souls, whose presence at the choosing is testimony to a desire for virtue, are free to choose, but must bear whatever destinies their choices bring. The good choice has nothing to do with the aims of our kind of education, promotion and pay, and what pleasures they may provide. The good choice is "good" in what has become a "special" sense of the word: it is the choice of a life in which the choosing soul can best seek virtue.
"And, here, my dear Glaucon," says Socrates, "is the supreme peril of our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life."
That severe and unfashionable idea of education must seem at the least idealistic and impractical to us, for the bread, after all, must be buttered. We can hardly afford to "leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only." Socrates seems, furthermore, to command something foreign and incomprehensible to us, an education not for living, but for being. We do believe that we live, but we do not take any clear meaning from the distinction between living and being. Partly for that reason, and partly because of its obvious impracticality, the education urged by Socrates just wouldn't do in our schools, and I am not about to suggest its adoption. But I do wonder: Why is it that so many people, when brought to consider such an impractical and esoteric education, can not suppress a feeling of longing and loss, and must even think it, however irrelevant to what they suppose to be their "needs," worthy, estimable, and somehow better than what we have?
But, of course, preposterous. What fools and dreamers we would seem if we said to our children, and to each other: Drop everything else and seek only to learn how to tell what is evil from what is good. Even the teachers, perhaps especially the teachers, would laugh at such an unprofessional notion of education. So we don't say that. We say instead: Study Boating Education so that you won't drown and thus fail to live comfortably while also serving the needs of the society that provides you with practical skills like Boating Education. And that, of course, is not thought preposterous.
I will not recite here yet another list of the many, and always multiplying, preposterous things that we do in the name of education. Any reader can, if only from sad experience, make such a list. I will only suggest that they all may be expressions of one pervasive ideology, all variations on an unstated theme. The Boating Education enthusiasts and their ilk bob up and down on the tide of that theme. What good is anything, they ask, except what we can do while we live? All our "needs," they say, can be defined by what lies outside of us, the world and its ways, to which we must be fitted. The aim of education, therefore, is to fashion us into components compatible with the great system into which we must be plugged, where we "may operate" as effectively as possible until we wear out, when we can easily be replaced by other, and even better, "state of the art" components. And even those few remaining elements of our "education" that do not contribute directly to our componentship, now collected in the disorderly jumble called "general" education, are justified only because they might "enrich" our leisure, and make us feel better, and so contribute to better "performance" as well as satisfaction and self-esteem. It is an education pro tem, an education that sees no destiny but death, an education in which all human understandings once thought incorruptible have put on the corruption of change and decay.
The education that Socrates commended to Glaucon was not, in any modern sense of the word, "religious," and certainly not churchly, for Socrates knew nothing of what we call "church." In fact, the inquiry that he urges, the lifelong questioning of good and evil, is not the chosen task of churches, any one of which can easily recite numerous and invariable rules that will put an end to all questioning of good and evil. In that respect, the church is not different from the school; in the one, questions about good and evil, and in the other, questions about relevance and irrelevance, are routinely settled by "information." We must not imagine that what some churches now propose in their squabble with the schools would be a remedy. Should they have their way, we would have what we have now, except that some unquestioned presuppositions would change. It is important to keep that in mind, for I now have to say something about education according to Socrates that makes it sound "religious": That education was neither the learning of skills nor the acquiring of knowledge, however worthy and necessary those things surely were, but the process of growth in the soul. Our educational devisers have concluded that there is no such thing as a soul.
This is what makes it so difficult--probably impossible--ever to win any battles with the educationists. If we oppose them in detail, they can always retreat, if they have to, into tinkering and adjustment through "innovative thrusts," which always thrust us away from education. If we oppose them in principle, we have to sound like zany metaphysicians ranting against an age of scientific "certainties," and speaking in categories about which professional educationists have generated no findings, not even a parameter. Having proved myself an amateur by speaking of good and evil, I now do worse and speak of the soul. Absurd. Can I really be that far behind the times? Have I never heard of Planck's constant, or of behavior modification? Do I also believe in phrenology and flying saucers? Can I really propose that education, a vast, collective, bureaucratic agency, take cognizance of the soul, instead of things that we know to exist, things like intelligence, and existentiality, and reading readiness, and self-esteem, all of which we can and do weigh and measure through whole batteries of standardized assessment instruments of proven effectiveness, complete with established norms for age, and place of origin, and ethnic background, as well as socio-economic? Preposterous!
Well, maybe. And yet, I am not at all convinced that the exploration of the "affective domain," always pursued with startling incongruity through a statistical method applied to hearsay evidence from witnesses whose self-interest is inevitable and whose self-knowledge is dubitable, is somehow less preposterous than a consideration of the soul. And, while in considering the "affective domain" I must mingle with glib, self-satisfied functionaries, in considering the soul, I find myself in excellent company. I would rather sit with Emerson and Dostoyevski than with concocters of self-worth enhancement assessment instruments. If they see no point in sitting in such excellent company, that fact alone could be sufficient comment on education in our time. And that fact suggests the beginning of a prescription for education: Search out diligently the best, wondering minds, and go and sit with them. And remember as you do that, that our children sit with facilitators.
When we do sit among those best minds, we find that people we know to be "dead," no longer "meeting current needs," are, strangely, not dead at all. They speak to us with far greater power and effect than we can expect from most of the "living," whatever that might mean. And it is to us that they speak; we do not merely overhear them "meeting the needs" of their time and place and forming components compatible with their systems. They had us in mind, but not in our roles as temporary life-forms subject to the necessities of time and place. It is as though, out of something that is not bound by time and place, they spoke to the same something in us, knowing it would be there. And it is. I do not think it preposterous to say that they spoke as souls to souls. I don't know a better word.
Furthermore, if we have from time to time sat with the best, something in us is vexed and saddened by anything less. That is how we know that it is in some deep principle and not just in a multitude of silly particulars that the way we "educate" our children is wrong. Except for brief meetings with the best, almost always happy accidents and seldom a provision of the "guidelines," most of schooling is remembered as a wasteland, where there was neither power, nor passion, nor nourishment, but only, if we were lucky, skills development. Education seems a process through which we must pass, not a condition into which we may grow. We are usually glad to be done with it, so that we can begin to live the life to which schooling is a long, dull overture.
What is it in us that is thus vexed and offended? Does it not also tell us (unless that "education" has overcome us utterly) that the getting and spending, the meeting of needs and having needs met, are not enough, are not the nourishment for the need? Does it not trouble us, hinting that there is more, and better, than job security and comfortable retirement? Does it not hint that there is something degrading in being adjusted to a system, and something vile and tyrannical in a system that admits, no, affirms, that it is not likely to survive unless most of us are adjusted to it?
To talk of the soul is doubly embarrassing. Not only does it invite the charge of silliness, but it requires me to make, on the soul's behalf, some demands that can never be met by a bureaucratic agency of government. The soul seeks not information, but truth; not cultural enrichment, but beauty; not citizenship education, but goodness. These things are not, and should not be, provided for in the official guidelines of a government agency. It is, therefore, by its nature, and not only by its choice, that a system of schooling can not educate.
It is, however, somewhat more by choice than by nature that it makes it difficult for education to erupt, even by accident, within its precincts. The teachers are not expected to have any special propensity for sitting among the best, wondering minds; and the "books" in the schools are ordinarily collective concoctions whose aim is to serve some social cause. Even more significantly, the best minds are very rarely invited to talk to the students, who are seldom at an appropriate level of "reading ability" anyway. Furthermore, the school people make no secret of their opinion that going to sit among the irrelevant ancients is an empty ritual, which opinion they have easily engendered in their students. They cannot imagine that it might be otherwise, that we might go to listen with love and respect to our elders, who speak the inquiries of their minds and the meditations of their hearts from beyond the boundaries of time and place.
The churchly challengers of education have at least found the right word for it: secular. They misconstrue the word, however, in supposing that it distinguishes schools from churches. Churches are just as secular as schools; both are agencies with agendas, hard at work not only in this time and place but on them. Both are adjusters of persons according to the guidelines. Those who resort to the churches will find there what children find in their schools: smooth counsellors reciting glib answers to great questions. And the best, wondering minds, for whom such questions are wellsprings of contemplation, seldom speak.
Our "education" is, therefore, dying. That is not a prophetic utterance, but only another way of describing it as secular. All institutions are dying. The time will come, if we can survive as a species, when no one will remember, or care, what we did in schools or even whether we had such things. Who, a thousand years from now, will know or care what energy and wealth we spent in moving from the self-contained classroom into the open classroom and back? How many would now remember Socrates, had he held off questioning his listeners until he could generate some findings about their comprehension levels, and their cognitive styles, learning disabilities, and occupational aptitudes? Our very science, which we love, and our soft pseudo-science, which we worship, will pass away or be changed beyond anything we can imagine, if not in a thousand years, then two. Or ten. It doesn't matter. Only what souls have spoken to souls will endure as long as humanity lives. Unless, of course, our schools and their brand of "education" should triumph utterly.
Be of good cheer. That won't happen. Any soul is stronger than a whole Department of Education. Schools do what they do with Death always in mind, under the rubric of What to Do till the Undertaker Comes. Souls, even the most ruthlessly adjusted, have Life in mind, and they know it when they see it. I have been there--so have we all--when some soul, oppressed by experiential self-awareness continua, or Boating Education, finds itself spoken to, person-to-person, by one of those best, wondering minds. It knows, in that moment, not the knack of competence, minimum or maximum, not the vainglory of induced self-esteem, but joy. Such a soul does, at least for a little while, and who can hope for more in our times, "leave every other kind of knowledge and follow one thing only." It finds a purity of heart and mind never achieved in Boating Education, or even in interpersonal relating enhancement role-playing.
There is no counting the sad things we do in the name of education, nor would the counting be sufficient indictment. They are, after all, mostly trivial nuisances committed by little people who do mean well but don't know what "well" means. It's almost as though a curse were laid upon the whole enterprise of schooling. Twist and dodge as it will, it never comes up with anything but new nuisances. But a curse is even harder to believe in than the soul; a more reasonable explanation might be sin. Our education commits us utterly to this world until we die and lose our entitlements. We quest not after virtue, but after maximized potentials and safe boating. We have accepted death and fallen into despair. And despair, some say, is the unforgivable sin, since it precludes even the hope of learning "to discern between good and evil." And if that is so, then our "education" will not only die, but will be damned as well. And to that, amen.
A supplement to The Underground Grammarian by Richard Mitchell.
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Posted by witnit at 7:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
