Post #64: My “Sermon” on Higher Learning

25 Sept. 2023

“When Saint Anthony was preaching in Rimini, that town was inhabited by a great multitude who had hearts of stone and treated him with utter contempt. So he went to the mouth of the river close to the sea-shore and began to preach to the fish.”

—Arnald of Sarrant, Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Generals of the Order of Friars Minor (1369–1374)

“Preach,” one of my colleagues wrote to me yesterday, “Preach!” The occasion was an exchange about the implications of bot-chatting for higher education and my remark to her that I see great perils ahead: not so much the emergence of artificial intelligence per se, from which I expect plenty of benefits (as I’ve mentioned before, in Post #40), but water on the mills of an already all-too pervasive attitude that I see as one of prime ways the banality of evil expresses itself in our day. Here is what I said that prompted her reply:

There will be all kinds of benefits to AI, no doubt. But unfortunately the chatbots lend themselves to an attitude that I absolutely despise when it comes to education, higher learning, arts and letters, the life of the mind and of moral man in general: ‘Who cares whether it is done right, or well, or even honestly, just so long as it's quick and effortless and you can pocket the return and go back to whatever brainless and vulgar diversion catches your fleeting fancy.’ That corruption I will fight every inch, in the classroom and out. It's the face of the Devil to me.

I don’t worry so much about our impending perdition: we are far too good at solving our practical difficulties to be headed for extinction any time soon. Wherever scarcity becomes serious, prices will shoot up and create an incentive to come up with better solutions—a dynamic that falls short of a guarantee, granted, but that has allowed us to stay a few steps ahead for a long time, and will almost certainly continue to do so, barring some truly apocalyptic developments. The long delay in effects around climate change, the surrounding political and moral issues, and above all the daunting collective action problems are certainly worrisome; but in light of what reasonable and responsible lukewarmers such as Matt Ridley, Bjorn Lomborg, or Steven Koonin have to say on the subject, I am not convinced that existential panic and drastic action is necessary or helpful. At any rate, it is not what keeps me up at night; not until the plot thickens a lot more.

Nor am I a technophobe. On the whole I appreciate the blessings of material progress and I honestly admire the secular miracle-workers who have given us such an unprecedented edge in our long-running feud with stepmother Nature. My problem is not so much that we are going in the wrong direction overall, or going too fast, as that we are not keeping up on the cultural end, even retrograding. (What I am thinking of when I say “culture” is the old-fashioned meaning, not the current fad in donning national or tribal costumes and celebrating colorful incidentals as if they were essential. I am concerned with what is—or is not—going on inside the head, not with what can be put on stage to mass applause.) When it comes to reading seriously, for example, which I take to be intimately connected with our ability to think seriously, a contemplative glance at the contemporary scene fills my heart with all the delight of a mudslide.

Even so, I will admit to being in two minds, to a point. I concede that books—or rather, the deep habits of distinction and classification that immersion in print culture tends to inculcate—might be accused, with some justice, of endlessly and often needlessly multiplying dualities, as followers of Zen or the Tao might put it. So often the categorization has been done in horribly damaging ways, though not by books alone (and often with more refinement and discernment there than elsewhere). In Vipassana circles, books feature almost as a distraction, and by any standard, much that matters dearly cannot be adequately captured in words. The Tao that can be talked about is not the real Tao. And as for the bookish types that universities and seminaries tend to spawn, their myopic focus on the printed word has all-too often induced a lopsided neglect of much else on the physical and practical side that I deplore wholeheartedly. Not for me the aptly named book-worms.

But there are also precious habits of mind that reading inculcates like no other discipline. I do not fear, on the whole, that we are getting more wicked or more cruel; but we are getting rapidly more scattered and vapid, less coherent, and more silly by the day, not to say more vulgar. Neil Postman warned, almost forty years ago, of the acute danger that we might be amusing ourselves to death; the storm he described has since turned into an all-encompassing hurricane that carries everything before it—but it is still not our destruction I fear.

What I dread is that we are amusing ourselves into an ever more trivial state of mental vacuity. To the blissfully inane—and they are legion—this will not appear a great menace; they cannot see the problem any more than fish can see water. But if they could appreciate just how unfavorable an impression we would make on more cultured ages—or rather, on the more advanced elements of those ages as represented in the books that have come down to us—it might give even the most complacent some pause. That we are technological giants is apparent; but the diminutive minds and spirits—what the Germans mean by their untranslatable Geist—that so often follow in the wake of great technological advances are less obvious points of pride.

If the fashion, this past decade or so, of drawing figures with heads so tiny that the shod feet are often twice the size of the space left for the brain is an unconscious confession of our current cultural state—as I take it to be—then we are in more trouble than we are realizing. We may be the rich men at history’s fair, powerful almost to the point of appearing more than human; but we are also the conceited and oblivious fools that get laughed at behind our backs. Perhaps one would have to be conversant with books, and older books at that, to realize where we really stand with the other fair-goers, or even to realize that there are critics from other ages that are worth taking seriously, often more so than we are ourselves, though that may not be saying very much.

To understand one’s own relative lack of refinement is not only a difficult and unpleasant task, but altogether a thankless one. It is no wonder that we are not very keen on it. Why should we be? Ignorance is bliss, as my American students like to inform me with great conviction. The trouble is that others are laughing at us even if we cannot hear them without turning to our books, and that we are failing to uphold the standards they established for us, though “blissfully” unaware of what we are doing. For my part, I would hate to be the weak link in a more than two-thousand-year history of human literacy, and I cannot imagine anyone else cherishing the role who fully realizes what such idiocy (in the original Greek sense) would imply, namely someone incapable or unworthy of participation in public affairs—in our case, that great republic of letters which connects its citizens across more than a hundred generations of readers. Again, in order to make such inferences, one may need to have picked up a book or two along the way, and they who have not done so will naturally want to protect themselves from the mortifying discovery of how things really stand by a simple plea of ignorance. It will not change either their liability or the verdict. Ignorantia legis non excusat.

So far I’ve only spoken of readers, but writers are an equally vital part of the equation, and among those properly committed to their craft, it has ever been axiomatic that the two are inseparable: you can only write as well as you read (though excellence in the latter regard does not guarantee anything about the former—it is a necessary rather than a sufficient condition). There have always been those who dispute the necessity, imagining that their great gifts or the inherent interest of what they have to say will lift them above such petty limitations. Among today’s cohorts raised on an ethos of unearned self-esteem, the ranks of these self-appointed natural geniuses have swelled alarmingly, but all that is child’s play besides the great flood that will now inundate us as even the most barefaced illiterates can plug their supposed inspirations into the machine with nary an effort and watch it spew out materials by the gigabyte that will allow them to pretend to a proficiency that is far from their own, and perhaps even gain credit and recognition for something of which they are, in plain fact, entirely incapable.

Not that the canned fruit off this artificial tree are likely to prove particularly tasteful; but anything too delectable is probably not even wanted by the pretenders, as it would only make their scam conspicuous and attract unwanted scrutiny. I wish I could believe that the world will not be taken in by this inevitable deluge of counterfeit, or that the silly old cliché about cream rising to the top may hold true for once; but I fear that the truth will lie much closer to the economist’s dictum that bad money drives out good. An apt metaphor for how such things tend to turn out (with a very few, very lucky exceptions) is not a bucolic bucket of fresh milk, but a dystopian discotheque operating along Houellebecqian lines, with the surrounding noise so deafening that only the most uninhibited screamers stand any chance of being heard, and even they only if they manage to restrict themselves to monosyllables and inarticulate grunts.

The look forward is disheartening enough; the look back is no more encouraging. If you are inclined to dispute the steep decline in higher literacy that I am diagnosing and bemoaning, I propose a simple test. Pick any book at least a hundred years old that you can still find in a contemporary bookstore, and see how you fare with the language. I am prepared to bet that you will complain of the “outdated” diction. Repeat the same with a book another century older still, and you will gripe even more bitterly. Alas, in melancholy truth the English that you will wrestle with so unavailingly is by no means less correct or otherwise worse than ours; it is simply too complex for you, because you are used to a debased idiom that earlier generations would have dismissed as a callow jest not fit for the schoolyard. (To say nothing of the fact that to pass for educated once required the ability, even in America, to read three or four languages in addition to one’s own.)

Ironically, the abundant resources of the past have by no means receded from our grasp; on the contrary, they have never been more widely dispersed and readily available, to anyone who cares enough to stoop down and pick them off the pavement. In print, editions of the classics are available at a trifling cost; online they are free altogether, though much harder to use properly. We have not only the leisure, but the health and the wealth and even the basic literacy that we could easily use as a springboard for better things. What is more, the reading mind responds to stimulation no less swiftly than muscles do; I see amazing leaps among my students, sometimes in a matter of a few weeks, always in the course of a few months.

Is that what we aim for, however? I daresay the question answers itself. Admittedly, such distinctions as a discerning and discriminating intelligence, refined tastes, and a tender regard for quality and beauty in our mental and moral productions have ever been the preserve of a tiny minority and cannot be expected of all. Fair enough; but do we look to these few for occasional guidance and inspiration, at least, as other ages have done, however intermittently? Good heavens, no! We cry “elitist” instead and imagine that we have thereby rid ourselves of the challenge and settled the matter.

Bah, humbug! Nothing has been settled, though something has been demonstrated—namely the bleak truth of Edmund Burke’s prediction about how higher learning, once having dispensed with its traditional protectors, would soon be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of the swinish multitude. If that dire verdict will even provoke an impassioned response anymore, perhaps a spark of hope remains; if it will be met with an embarrassed silence, at least shame has not died. But I expect neither; I expect it to be shrugged off or laughed out of court in the usual ironic style, queen of the age. There is a lot of shrugging and laughing in hell too; but only by the overseers.

PS: This text is probably not what M. had in mind when she encouraged me to sermonize. She may even dislike the result; but inspire it she did, for better or for worse, so let this postscript stand as my tribute to her even if the rest might prove displeasing.