Post #77: Teach and Trust, or Bust (The Church of Reason)

15 Nov. 2023

That’s me in the corner

That’s me in the spot-light

Losing my religion

Trying to keep up with you

And I don’t know if I can do it

Oh no I’ve said too much

I haven’t said enough

— R. E. M.

Imagine a struggling student turning in a mid-term exam that is barely intelligible and by no conceivable standard sufficient for passing. To give this lost lamb a chance to catch up and eke out a C or a D in the end (not for everyone, the cruel sport of raking students over the coals with low grades—not unless they absolutely insist on forcing your hand), you tell her to do it over at home, taking a week, on a solemn promise to work only with her texts (it was an open-book exam) and stay away from the usual internet temptations. You have stressed, from the first session on, that you are willing to make every accommodation in the face of sincere though weak effort, but that everything is riding, for you, on establishing mutual trust and not playing cat-and-mouse games. (The students have even signed an understanding to that effect; calling it an agreement might, given the element of duress in a teacher’s requests, be something of an overstatement.)

So you get the rewritten exam back complete with a renewed assurance by the submitter that she had spent the whole week working on the thing, “without any help or any information from the internet,” with thanks for your kindness. Alas, when you read on, you discover with the sinking feeling every teacher knows so well that it is full of academic turns of phrase that no student would ever use, even among native speakers, let alone out here at the periphery. The mixture of twenty-first century academese and garbled student syntax is something to behold, the editing job sloppy at best, until you arrive at the bottom of the first page and there it is, the void opening up before you: “When delving deeper into the topic of this lecture…” On such a pathetic failure to cover even the most incriminating tracks, someone pledges her word with a straight face? To a teacher who, far from visiting cruelties upon his students, is making every effort to pull the lost sheep back from the brink? These are the days that try men’s hearts.

(In hindsight I can see a tragic dimension to the episode that I missed at the time. Precisely because it was a second chance, the student in question seems to have been especially eager to do well and redeem herself. For all I know she really did toil at it for a whole week, as she claimed, but, not trusting her own ideas and not satisfied with her own writing, she resorted to precisely those desperate measures that she had promised to forgo. Perhaps she found a way to justify, to her own mind, this manner of proceeding, such that her professions, though demonstrably false, were sincere to a point; at any rate, after a deplorably halfhearted confession at first, she came around eventually and we worked it out. That’s the redeeming thing about dealing with twenty-year-olds: they are mature enough for serious engagement, on a good day, but not yet so set in their ways that one cannot get through to them or make a difference to their thinking. Nor have I seen much real nefariousness among them, though much undue fear of losing face, with all its attendant follies and evasions.)

Another desperate case, who managed barely half the required words on the exam, and nothing coherent, has not, in two months, made a single contribution to our discussion-based class, and every time you happen to look over, she is hiding behind the screen of her laptop and sniggering at something that for sure has nothing to do with what you are saying. So you call her on it, for the first and only time in the term, and you point out, in a moment of exasperation, that given her performance in the exam she really cannot afford to spend so much time playing around. She glares back at you, no recognition showing that she was in any way responsible, and insists later that it was all just a brief moment of distraction. If only. All this not among the obnoxious set, but with a group of relatively well-behaved and nice students: the culprits even apologize to you before long, both of them.

You could try to separate your herd of screen-addicts from the steady drip of their cell-phones, and insist they be put away at all times. But it would be to little avail, since then you would have to watch the junkies go into withdrawal symptoms right before you. No more attention than before would get paid to class, only what was a quiet mental absence would turn fidgety and even less conducive to anyone’s concentration. There is no prevailing against such odds; you can only win resentment by taking a hard line. Meanwhile the Humanities are getting everywhere abandoned in droves, partly because of the woke turn, partly because prospective undergrads see no point in studying when they could make so much more money with this or that internet racket; the drumbeat of digital diversions in the classroom has gotten so deafening that you have trouble hearing yourself think (let alone anyone else); and even the most rudimentary reflection and writing can now be contracted out, free of charge, to the bots, or to commercial paper mills doing brisk business staffed by millennial swat-teams that feel positively righteous about pulling the plug on a dying traditional academy.

(“Move quickly and break things” is a barbarian’s cry, or that of a petulant child. It betrays, to more seasoned spirits, a lack of mental culture that is only too sadly evident in the playpen for “dumb-fucks” that the chief mover-and-breaker foist upon an unsuspecting mankind twenty years ago. The civilized, if any such remain, will proceed with more caution and circumspection; they give things time to mature in their own course and respect the patrimony of the past even when its uses are not always apparent at first sight. With Chesterton, they will not by any means let the overzealous reformers clear away everything that is not found aggressively contemporary enough. “If you don’t see the use of it,” they will answer, “go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”)

While this bitter brew is already boiling over in the witches’ cauldron of our electron-addled age, you find yourself fighting, to top it all off, a rear-guard action against some of your own colleagues who are arguing, in all sincerity, for the amazing potential of AI in the classroom—as if permissiveness in that direction could have any other immediate effect than to open the last remaining floodgates and ensure that what is already a tidal wave will turn into a perfect storm, a cataclysm of dishonesty and taking undue credit from which there cannot be any more escaping. Police methods of a corresponding severity are no answer: they may work, to a point, but only at the price of undermining what to some of us remains the heart of higher education as an exercise in learning together and building mutual trust.

Like born seamen, born teachers will do anything not to abandon their ship to the raging elements, even if they suspect it is already sinking. Apart from their labors of love, under less stormy skies, there is the bleak material fact of having made their fixed investments in a particular line of work; bleaker still, their having good reason to hold themselves quite incapable of any other. There may be the lingering memory, too, of brighter days, when one’s teaching really did make a difference here and there, and when, though challenging enough, it still felt as if there was a chance of coming out ahead, rather than tilting hopelessly against the giant arms of windmills that are unstoppable even if one allows oneself to get mangled by them.

Should we write the universities off as a lost cause, then—as I’ve heard Jordan Peterson doing in a talk (and not without reason)? Not that much depends on it: they are sure to stay in business whatever we may think of them, not because their degrees translate into reliably higher incomes, but because they are class markers, tokens of social arrival, certification mechanisms for presumed cognitive ability and general employability. They open doors to clubs of varying degrees of exclusivity and provide access to other members whose potential value to fellow graduates cannot be overstated—since it might include not only lifelong friends and professional contacts, but even partners and the children that might come with them. No price tag could capture all that is to be gained along these lines, either in material terms or more intangibly in the eyes of one’s contemporaries. (Economists may try, in their usual reductionist manner, to bring it all down to the bottom line, and thereby misconstrue completely what is really at stake, unless perhaps they take their cue from Veblen).

So much for the universities as invaluable social clubs, and not a word spoken yet about the benefit of anything taught in class, which may drop to zero (or turn negative in an age of rampant indoctrination) without much affecting the value of a degree, provided the issuer’s brand remains exclusive enough. (Veblen even argued that class markers are all the more effective the more egregious a waste of resources they imply, and he may have the last laugh, not in an age where a genteel leisure class has triumphed, but in our own toilsome and acquisitive times.) Even so, despite all the painful truth in what I’ve just conceded, a core benefit remains to undergraduate studies that no amount of cynicism can dispel (so-called advanced degrees are another story altogether).

It is not the knowledge imparted that matters so much, the books read, or the kernel of truth in the hoary educators’ refrain about “learning how to learn.” All genuine advantages, no doubt, but incidental; nor is it even the way one learns how to think, when things work out as they should for a change. (Graduates in YouTube Studies demonstrate the importance of this latter dimension impressively enough, by contrast.) That anyone should learn how to write at a contemporary university can only be taken, in nine cases out of ten, as a wry attempt at black humor, though it may, despite all that conspires against it, still happen at a few institutions that grace the educational landscape as platypuses do the evolutionary charts.

Yet the crux, the true heart of the matter, must be sought still elsewhere, in a place that is sure to come as a surprise, except perhaps to the recipients of serious educations themselves. The greatest boon of spending a few years at a decent university turns out to be an instruction in humility that life will also impart in other ways, but rarely so inescapably: namely the recognition how little you really know about anything, including the most important human concerns; how unintelligent you are in comparison to the truly clever; and how foolish beside the truly sagacious. Or to turn things around, the worst thing about never getting to a university is by no means that it must leave you uninformed, impecunious, unsuccessful, or otherwise socially marginal; it can do so, but it may do the opposite just as well. The danger is of an altogether different nature, namely that you may spend the rest of your life thinking that you are the genius that we all take ourselves to be at eighteen—a lifelong clutcher at every bizarre conspiracy theory in reach, just to reassure yourself of the superior insight that you vainly imagine yourself to possess.

Life has many ways of teaching us this bitter but indispensable disenchantment with ourselves; but if there is one thing at which the better universities still excel, it is in confronting you most reliably with other students, or teachers, or great books that are immeasurably smarter, wiser, and better than you, though you will also be exposed to plenty of windbags along the way—an education in itself. The most egregious vanity is, as Max Weber once observed, very nearly a professional malady among academics; but that is in no small part because they know better than most, deep down, how little their labors are really worth, with all the desperate overcompensations that such a recognition must engender. The typical professor will, to be sure, spend much of his professional lifetime in a hopeless effort at proving the Socratic oracle wrong in his particular case; but if he is worth his salt (the salt not of the earth but of the academy) he will know quite well that all this struggling and striving is but chasing after wind and Sisyphusian labor.

I’ve made much before of how the Buddha chided Ananda, gently, for speaking of good friends as half the Path, rather than the whole of it (Posts #6 and #36). In this spirit, the lifelong friendships one can take away from one’s university years must be considered perhaps their greatest blessing, though the same has been reported of military service and other hardships endured side by side. If universities stand apart in this respect, it is because they can take friendship one step further, one nearly invisible to the non-reading public. For all that must be said about the limitations of book-learning (witness the seeming disdain expressed in the Tao, or in Ecclesiastes, or in the parody of learned incompetence in life that Saul Bellow sketches so unforgettably in Herzog), books can make extraordinary friends—unlimited by constraints of time or age or culture, allowing bridges to be built across thousands of years, connecting the long dead to the living, and succoring (if one only knows how and where to look) the insufficiencies of one epoch with the bounties of another.

Our 21st-century world cannot in fairness be judged worse than those preceding it, on balance; but its characteristic inadequacies are nonetheless glaring, and could be assuaged perhaps nowhere so effectively as in the great Library of Babel that we have at our fingertips now with an ease that boggles the mind. Unlike Borges’ vision, our real-life version does not even require a catalogue: we have digital elves who will retrieve, in a matter of seconds, whatever we may ask for, from practically anywhere human beings have ever done any thinking and put it on record. Ask, and it shall be given to you; only knock on your keyboard, and the greatest of all libraries will share its secrets with you, free of charge, at the speed of light, in the remotest of locations. (If you think that the great books of the past have a negligible influence on your life, or none at all, think again: your world too is surely guided by them, only not at first hand, but at second, third, or fourth, in a debased reading that often bears only the most passing resemblance to its original.)

We stand, as always but perhaps more than ever, at a crossroads of human civilization, before a fork in the road that may yet prove our undoing. No, not looming nuclear war, nor impending ecological collapse, but something much more insidious: the all-engulfing befuddlement of wondrously affluent societies that are rapidly losing their bearings in a welter of ever more inane amusements. To gauge just how bad things have gotten, it is not enough to recognize how little your students are moved by anything serious you try to convey to them; no, the truly devastating realization is how much they care about pop-culture soap bubbles that are so insubstantial and ephemeral, so utterly brainless and banal that one would expect an intelligent pre-teenager to reject them with indignation at being taken for such a baby. (These Asian parts seem to be especially afflicted; would that the K-pop pestilence were a local phenomenon only, not a global one.)

Not that universities are, or ever have been, reliable refuges and bastions for learning how to ask better questions or make better friends, be it among books or human beings. Often enough, perhaps even more often than not, they have themselves become dispensers of the most monstrous confusions. Even so, I see nothing that could take their place, however rarely they may live up to their promise. When they do, at their best, they can give us what we most lack, a sense of orientation that is not mere dogma; they can help us to discover who we want to be, and how to go about getting there; they can rise, if only here and there, to all the dignity of that “Church of Reason” whose doubtful magnificence Robert Pirsig evokes so unforgettably in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought which has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

The primary goal of the Church of Reason is always Socrates’ old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it’s revealed by the process of rationality. Normally this goal is not in conflict with that of improving the local citizenry, but on occasion conflicts do arise, as in the case of Socrates himself. True churchmen in such situations must act as though they never heard the threats. Their primary goal never is to serve the community before everything else; their primary goal is to serve, through reason, the goal of truth.

But why burn oneself out over it, day after day? The explanation I’ve come to arises from the discrepancy between Phaedrus’s lack of faith in reason and his fanatical faith expressed in the Church of Reason lecture. You are never dedicated to something in which you have complete confidence. No one goes around shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.