Post #120: Life Is Not an Outcome

30 June 2024

The end of collection is dispersion.

The end of rising is falling.

The end of meeting is parting.

The end of birth is death.

—Geshe Kelsang Gyatso*

     It began with a twinge (or a cringe) of unease when I first encountered the demand, during four harrowing weeks of training for an English teacher’s certificate a decade ago, that every well-designed lesson should have a determinate, well-defined objective. The planning-fetish was an old acquaintance of mine from economics, and I suspect now that there is a connection between the two, via the usual conceits of the intellectual classes; but in an educational setting, this facet of the Horror was quite new to me. The experience, though framed by lovely Barcelona, had all the charm of obedience training for wayward household pets. I would not even cross, in after days,** to the other side of the street my institution was on, so traumatized was I by the cookie-cutter mindlessness of those high “educational” proceedings.

     Not that I mind cookie cutters in their proper place. Baking is a valuable human activity, and perhaps best done to precise recipes once the requisite amount of experimentation has yielded a handy manual. Human beings must not go in the oven, however, another kind of horror that only formulaic thinking of the most demonic kind could ever have rendered plausible. No, I am not equating outcome-based pedagogy with the gates of Auschwitz, though the banality of evil is highly pertinent to my purposes. I am not even going on the attack against the outcome-based myopia in all its myriad variations, which seem to be becoming the flavor of the day in wide segments of the education industry, and beyond. What I would like to do is not to denounce, but to put my dissent on record. Some good may well come of this faddish new paradigm; but that is not saying much. Stalinist planning too may have done some good here and there, and it had plenty of admirers in its day among intellectuals in the West—but that did not make it a salutary direction to go in, all things considered.

     The outcome fetish of our times look so aggressive to me because, like Big Brother, it leaves, by the very nature of its ambitions, so little room for other ways, which are casually relegated to the rubbish heap of history, if not the Gulag. The deeper currents carrying the Armada of Outcome are probably related to the relentless drive towards quantification and the ubiquitous vogue for ranking, tied to the pernicious but apparently irresistible belief that something becomes more substantial because it can be measured, or that what cannot be assigned a number is any less real because it does not lend itself to ready appraisal and comparison in a spreadsheet.

     The finer nuances of quality are the first to be lost wherever this yardstick mentality takes over and dupes us, especially in matters of the mind, with its pretenses to “objectivity” and robustness. It may be a step towards greater rigor, but then so is death (rigor mortis). Just as canned food is not more nutritious than the fresh kind just because the former has a neat label detailing the results of lab analysis, while the latter only has primordial human habits behind it, so canned education is not more effective because there is a lesson plan to point to, a flashing neon sign proclaiming an ostensible outcome, and the obligatory hyperlink to Bloom’s tired taxonomy. The emperor’s new clothes do not in fact become more splendid by being so enthusiastically applauded by the courtiers on all sides. (How wise it is to say so within hearing of the palace crowd and its decorated officialdom is another matter.)

     But wait, I expect to be told: if you do not define your goal clearly, how can you be sure that you will get where you want to go? And, perhaps more revealing as to the underlying motivations, how can you be held accountable for it? (The close relationship between income, outcome, and output is surely no coincidence.) Fair enough, I would reply, so far as basic, easily articulated objectives are concerned that do not leave much room for question or debate. But beyond that, where mere agenda items end and real education begins, who can ever be sure of anything? Thus my answer to the challenge would be in the form of a counter-question: how do you know that where you now want to go is where you should be going?

     It’s not just that I have my doubts about the likelihood of your ever truly getting there by the roads you are anticipating now, which have a way of shifting under our feet as we proceed on them, if it is a journey of any considerable duration or complexity. No plan of consequence survives contact with life, one might say in slight adaptation of Moltke’s famous dictum. But more than that: how can you be so sure that you will even want to go there any longer by the time you arrive? Here I expect to be asked, in mocking tones, whether I am proposing to go anywhere, or perhaps nowhere at all. The jeering is premature: insofar as we all value some things over others, we would all prefer to move towards the more desirable ones. In that sense a certain orientation towards outcomes is simply the program of life itself, the drive of sentient existence to perpetuate and improve itself. I would be the last to proclaim that anything goes in life: it sounds plain foolish to me.

     The alternative to upfront planning, I must insist, is not aimlessness, which I consider as undesirable as anyone, but finding your way step by step—to discover it, that is to say, in the process of walking, not to derive it from a set of tidy equations in advance. When Walter Lippmann was once asked what he thought of a certain issue, he replied that he could not be sure, since he had not written about it yet.*** And that is just how I feel too, not only about my writing, but about my more meaningful teaching as well. If I already knew beforehand everything that would go into and come out of a class, it would no longer be very interesting, just as, when my writing really means something to me, it is because in the process of doing it I get a chance to think things through and discover what I really have to say, for the moment. If I were to repeat the exercise, the result would be a little different every time, or a lot, just as a great book proves itself such by revealing, upon every new reading, a new facet of meaning that one had not noticed before.

     The question is not, then, one of results per se, but of the extent to which they should, or even can, be anticipated in advance. It may be possible, sometimes, to foresee them quite precisely, but that would be much more characteristic of training than of university education as I understand it—liberal education, higher learning fit for the free.† That we need some sense of orientation and direction, some approximate idea of where we intend to be going, in the classroom or in life more generally, I would not deny; but the question of which stars to steer by seems to loom, if anything, rather larger on my horizon than on that of my counterparts. They want to talk destinations and direct flights, I continual navigation in the dark, in stormy seas and among shipwrecks. They insist that they know where they are going, unfailingly and upfront; I answer that they look far more lost to me than anyone who is not so sure of his exact location or ultimate destination, but who can find his way by glancing up at the skies, provided they not be completely clouded-over—a dark possibility that the know-it-alls do not seem to provide for at all in their sunny superficiality.

     It is no mere technical difference, but a contrast of outlooks that could hardly be more fundamental and defining. I don’t know how I appear to the other side: ornery and recalcitrant perhaps, or benighted, possibly. They remind me of those interlocutors of Socrates’ who, in the Apology, prove themselves all the more unwise for being so very sure of what they think they know. Like Socrates, I would rather be the lone one-eyed man who realizes how poor his vision really than join the crowd of blind men who would never doubt their own ability to see things in their true light. (Erasmus thought that the one-eyed exception would be king among the blind; I am more inclined to believe, with Plato, that he would be lucky to escape with his life, especially if professional death be considered a real decease.)

     I see no great discontinuity between my educational vision, such as it is, and my understanding of the Path—a conjunction that has become so intuitive to me, it may be, from teaching Plato’s Republic too many times, the Allegory of the Cave in particular, and doing so with conviction (quite a different proposition, I hasten to add, from presenting it up my students as the last word on anything: the very construction, as I understand it, precludes such self-assurance, unless I believed myself to have made it all the way out of the Cave, to the summit of the highest peaks, and into the immediate vicinity of the Sun itself, which is emphatically not my case, even if I do take it to be humanly possible).

     The educational and spiritual paths converge, from what I can tell. On either side, I do not stride forth towards known destinations, I make my way haltingly ahead, one small step at a time, looking forward to any answers I might find, but animated mostly by questions and uncertainties, and driven on not by the spirit of confidence and expertise, but by doubts and confusions, and the imperative need for further exploration. Pyrrho and Montaigne may, at a distance, look very different guides from Plato’s Socrates or the Buddha; but up close, in my life, I have found them to be quite complimentary in ways that I would have trouble articulating. The common denominator may be a sense of intellectual adventure,†† of walking a Path with a definite direction but an uncertain outcome, sketched for the traveler by ancient guides, but not to be presumed upon until one has verified it for oneself. Or perhaps the common factor is just a shadow cast by my self, ever-changing as it is; what do I know?

     Neither Plato nor Pyrrho, neither Montaigne nor a student of the Dhamma need find himself, most of the time, in much doubt as to the right thing that is demanded of him right here, right now. Do it and leave the rest, the future fruits of your actions in particular, to the powers that be—thus the heart of the Bhagavad Gita that I have invoked so many times already. It may seem, to some, an insufficiently worldly, even a wooly-headed or wishy-washy way to go through life, but it looks quite otherwise to me—not only spiritually more mature, but ultimately more realistic as well, as being much more in line with our real limitations than all the overconfident, narrow-minded, and presumptuous talk of producing results, in the life of the mind especially, as if it were all up to us. We merely propose; other powers, of which I know very little, do the disposing.

*Joyful Path of Good Fortune (1990), p. 285, citing the Buddha “in the Vinaya Sutras,” but with no more specific reference provided.

**Hoping to confirm the validity of my wording, which came to me on a whim, by way of dim recollection, not poetry, I happened upon this gem, by Henry Austin Dobson:

In After Days

In after days when grasses high

O’er-top the stone where I shall lie,

  Though ill or well the world adjust

  My slender claim to honour’d dust,

I shall not question nor reply.

I shall not see the morning sky;

I shall not hear the night-wind sigh;

  I shall be mute, as all men must

      In after days!

But yet, now living, fain would I

That some one then should testify,

  Saying—’He held his pen in trust

  To Art, not serving shame or lust.’

Will none?—Then let my memory die

      In after days!

***Fareed Zakaria quotes the anecdote at the outset of chapter 3 in his Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton 2015), qualifying it as “probably apocryphal.” I see no reason to doubt that Lippmann really said it: not many writers may have the quip ready at hand, but I believe they would all recognize the sentiment.

†A long-eroding distinction that Michael Oakeshott made much of three generations ago already, in part five of his famous essay on “Rationalism and Politics” (1947), for example (“the ominous phrase, university-trained men and women,” etc.). Perhaps things have reached such a pass that the distinction is not even intelligible anymore for many. Only yesterday I heard a student at my college tell me (a reader of Shakespeare, admirer of Homer, and dabbler in ancient Greek, no less, in Thailand!) that her parents had given her a free choice of major, requiring only that it not be the Humanities.

††Friedrich Hayek expressed this aspect memorably in a talk he gave to the Student Union at the LSE in February 1944 (“On Being an Economist”): “Let yourself be guided not by any fixed purpose, but mainly by intellectual curiosity and a spirit of exploration.” Granted, he was talking to undergraduates, not specialists, but he concluded his talk by encouraging them, all their lives, to “regard your economics not just as an instrument to achieve given ends, but as a continuous adventure in the search for truth.” Whatever may need to be said about the place of graduate studies and professionalism in our world, I have my doubts that when it comes to one’s orientation towards the art and business of life at large, more than the equivalent of an undergraduate degree is either necessary or very desirable.