You don't want to know what the professors are saying in their books and lectures. You don't want to know what the pundits are saying in their columns. You want to know what the students are saying in their drinking places.
That's what will determine the future. Politicians and wise men can talk up something all they want but if the next generation of college students doesn't think it's cool it's dead. A zero in the historical force column.
I had heard this said but was suspicious until I heard a man, a successful modern poet, tell of his literature classes at Vanderbilt in the twenties. The Mighty Romantics and the Great Victorians were still all the rage then with the profs, but the students, even as the room resounded with Tennyson's mighty lines, were passing around mimeographed copies of "The Waste Land."
Can you feel that, the cool of it? If you can't, picture one of those graduate seminars in Southern universities attended after the war by second-tier New York intellectuals squeezed south by the GI competition for Eastern schools. CCNY types. Deliver your opinion and they say, "You sure of that?" Then they're there with the goods. Out of Morris Cohen (Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method), who taught at Columbia. Those guys are cool. Over beer afterward one of them, about to say the word "God," pauses and says, "if you'll pardon the expression." Atheism becomes cool. Marxism and Freudianism follow.
That's what I mean by cool and that's what it was in 1947 Louisiana. It doesn't have to be subversive and it doesn't have to be outside the curriculum. When Cleanth Brooks arrived at Yale with the New Criticism the students greeted him warmly ("Mistah Brooks, he come" headlined the student newspaper) and ate up his teaching.
What's the equivalent of that now in Ljubljana and Zagreb and Belgrade? Sean O'Hagan says that Slavoj Zizek is now "the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard." Is that true? Could I confirm it by listening in on student talk? I, a two-week tourist? Not a chance.
But I know what I'd be looking for. First, the student who says what students (or anybody, really) can say in a hundred different ways in a time of crisis: "Are you with us in the movement?" Second, the student who says, "Are you sure of that?" I'd look at the listening students. If they think the first one is cool they (and their country) face one kind of future; if they think the second one is cool they face an entirely different kind.
It's not obvious which one is better. Everything depends on where you are, when. You're marching for civil rights in '63 (or for independence in '76) you want to know who's with you and who isn't. You want them charged up. You're sword-fighting in a phalanx you want your buddy on your left to be super-charged. That's your unprotected side and your life depends on it.
Those who have been in those situations will tell you: you're not going to do a Ph.D. oral on what did the charging. The British spin experts doctor a picture of Hitler to make him more hateful. It fires us up and we fight harder to defeat his armies. Anything that gets us home quicker is cool.
Academic cool can be ugly. Picture the places where it's most easily maintained: in America with 3,000 miles of ocean on each side and 1500 missiles securely in their silos; in Scandinavia, with all that water around and a homogeneous population. It's easy to look at the Balkans and forget the mixed-up population and close, over-the-mountain borders — with wall-mounted rifles on the other side of them.
What kind of cool is the right kind is always going to be a close call there. Times and situations change so. Outsiders, even when they're willing to risk ugliness, can hardly ever speak positively. "Let's just quit talking about cool. We'll never be able to say anything helpful. Forget the whole category."
At this point I hear one of my profs breaking in. Sam Monk. "You think there's no cool any more. You want to know cool? I'll show you cool. My period. Early 18th century. England is looking back at a bad religious war. The Western continent is looking back at worse ones. The Holy Roman Empire, with its little states, has torn itself into Protestant-Catholic shreds. Here's Jonathan Swift's Gulliver explaining it to the leader of the Houyhnhnms:
Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best color for a coat, whether black, red, white, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference of opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.
That's cool. Enlightenment cool."
Is it always and everywhere cool? It doesn't have to be, not for anybody who feels sorry for the sweet people locked into those Balkan situations. If it's occasionally helpful that's enough.
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