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Well, that's a sad story (Post
245, below), students given their freedom to subordinate everything to their
search for the good life and then using that freedom to walk away from those
who could help them most, Socrates and his friends.
Does anybody have any doubt that
the students of Barbara Herrnstein Smith have
walked away? Does everybody see
that when you trust your tendencies or inclinations or linguistic competence
(as the theory of Stanley Fish has you doing), rather than the logic Socrates
trusts, you have walked away, mentally?
His friends can no longer be your friends. They will, to be blunt, find your life not worth living.
How much do you lose when you lose
friendship with Socrates? "Your
best chance to be a philosopher," I hear, and approve. But I wouldn't put it that way. I'd put the horse before the cart and
say you lose your best chance to be an adult. And I'd define "adult" through my definition of
"child": one who, whatever his age, hasn't learned to check his thinking. Hasn't learned to be careful. The white grown-up who jumps to
conclusions about the behavior of blacks is a child. The white grown-up who studies crime statistics before
entering a neighborhood is an adult.
The grown-up of any color who judges which is a child and which is an
adult just by their behavior (staying out of or going into the neighborhood) is
a child.
Stick around Socrates and you
learn to study, and test, and not jump to conclusions. Simple, but it's not common among
children. Socrates' students are
children learning how to think.
Before the twentieth century Nietzsche said, "Asia has not yet
learned how to think." It has
now, but the learning is uneven.
The Iranian who learns engineering in the U.S. and then tells a
journalist that Allah will raise mountains to intercept any American air strike
hasn't learned how to think. He's
gotten the product of the scientific method but as for the method, he doesn't
get it.
There in that Athenian circle,
there is the germ of the scientific method, organized common sense tested by
experience, the miracle grain of the West. Walk away from the Athenian circle and you have walked away
from the West. There's a loss for
you, the whole West.
The trouble is, it's so hard to
stay, as Euthyphro discovered. You
remember Euthyphro, the fellow whose intuition told him all he needed to know
about piety, and who found questions about it painful? The fellow who thought he heard his
mother calling when Socrates wanted to continue questioning? What he found hard about staying is
what freshmen in college find hard.
There they are, already anxious, as children everywhere are, about
whether they can make it as adults, and then there they are in the middle of this bunch of adults, these carefully
speaking, closely listening creatures ready to dismiss you in four months if
you don't catch on.
Those adults aren't
"philosophers," they're just teachers. But there they are, through the tradition coming down from
Socrates through Plato's Academy to today's university, friends of Socrates. And no matter what they teach, they're
teaching thinking.
That's not easy, learning to
produce what won't be credited to you as thought until it passes the teacher's
tests, and for some it's going to be a struggle. That makes the dropout inviting. But for all it's a strain, and that makes the vacation or
the binge inviting. No more of
that rigor. Oh, how good childhood
looks! Oh how happy Euthyphro must
have been! Oh how welcome a theory
like Stanley Fish's is!
With Fish's permit in hand you can
walk away, but can you walk away without being disapproved of? Yes! You can act as if you're walking across. To another culture or society, at the
same level. If it's a primitive
one, with fewer recorded crimes, you can even claim you're moving up. If it's located at a geographical or
historical distance you can imagine its virtues more easily. It's best, though, to find one at a
philosophical distance, with a model that can be exchanged for that of Socrates
— an Indian guru, say, or a Buddha.
That will give you the deepest justification for a dropout.
You'll get a lot of in-house help
if you take this option. Western
literature is full of noble dropouts (or never-joined), making your move
downward feel like a move upward.
Everybody knows or has been taught that Huck Finn's move out (to the
territories) is a move up (from Midwestern "sivilization'). Nobody wants Holden Caulfield to join a
society full of phonies.
If you take this route, though,
you'll have to deal with Herman Melville. He's rough on romantic primitives, and he doesn't mind
threatening children with pain.
When R. M. Hare says to a student, "You cannot say, on pain of
contradiction, that..." Melville's right with him. He'd pain the draft-rioters of 1863,
those children, without reservation.
Who has reservations? The
Romantics who gave America its faith: "that man is naturally good, and
more, is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged." For Melville it's good to have a citizen fear the pain of
physical injury and for Hare its good to have a student fear the pain of
embarrassment.
There's a definition of adulthood (rationality) for you:
capacity to be embarrassed by a self-contradiction. If you're going to hang onto it, though, you're going
to have to be careful not to misread Emerson ("A foolish consistency is
the hobgoblin of little minds") or Whitman ("Do I contradict
myself? Very well then, I
contradict myself"). Take
them to be referring to the assertion of A and not-A and, with excuse in hand,
you'll soon be feeling no pain.
Take them to be referring only to a change of mind and you're no longer
covered. Your nerves are still
live for the tutor's plucking.
That's the hard life inside the
Socratic-Western academic circle.
Students live it so that they can become adults. They can decline to live it for many
more reasons than the one above but the biggest one in America has been that
they think they already are
adults. I mean, way before they
had "linguistic competence" and "behavioral tendencies,"
those guarantees of adulthood, they had their "American youth"
title. That very often, by itself,
let children think they were adults.
We know how this happens
generally, and it starts out very much to our credit. We love and encourage. Then we overdo it. It's a problem for all parents. You praise a child so that he will think well of himself,
not lose heart, and (the whole idea) keep going. You over-praise, though, and he will think he's already
arrived.
There's where America comes
in. It's the land of over-praised
youth. But at some times more than
others. A time when uneducated
immigrants are counting on that next generation to haul them out of the mass is
certainly going to produce some high-end encouragement. It's ambition, and pride, but still, at
bottom, love. These are children,
after all. And, when it works,
awe. "Oogh, the things that
boy knows."
In any case, that's what made
America famous for youth-worship.
If you could graph it you'd probably see a peak in the years after World
War II. The immigrant awe hasn't
worn off and the soldier who has lost his own youth is home to raise a new
generation. What a generation!
These things are hard to gauge, but going by what I heard from elders
addressing graduates at Ohio University in those years this was the brightest,
best, highest-scoring, soundest-thinking group of young people ever to arrive
in our midst. If you had wanted to
make children think they were already adults you couldn't have given them
higher praise. The Commencement
podium was an altar to them.
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