411. Pornography, Demagoguery, and a College Education

Note: The following piece is, along with the preceding post, from the third article in a series that began with "Herbert Feigl: Philosopher for the English Composition Teacher" (Philosophical Forum, Fall, 2017) and "Academic Freedom, Tenure, and the Unclouded Mind," (Philosophical Forum, Summer, 2018).  The article was declined by Philosophical Forum.  The two parts are published here as posts to complete the series.

Pornography, Demagoguery, and a College Education

I

Those currently concerned over pornography and its online influence sometimes speak of a "victory" over it.  Wrong word.  There's no hope of a victory over porn.  Every species over-energizes the male libido (so it can be sure to energize) and our species, with its imaginative brain and ranging consciousness, flips and tickles it a thousand ways.  As witness the variety of porn sites.  Keep the human hand off the roving mouse?  You might as well try keeping the hand off the genitals.

So if  I use the word here I will mean only "stopping the advance."  And only in our developed society, taking "developed" to include in its meaning "offering human powers (like that of the imagination) a wider field to exercise themselves in," the offering varying with the particular society. 

For our developed society a very good word now is the coinage "pornified."  I don't know who came up with it but if we sense a significant, troubling difference between our society and others I think "pornification" well labels it.  And that's good because we have, I think, a fair chance of stopping pornification.

I know of no better illustration of pornification than the progress of Playboy.  From racy extensions of Esquire tickle, stylized long-leggedness, eyes in the distance, to full-front spread-leggedness, eyes right on you, here it is baby.  That's porn.  The pornification of society is in the seepage into the wrapping, the surrounding disquisitions on foreign policy or the media, or interviews with Martin Luther King or Joyce Carol Oates.  See the centerfold once and you sense it coming, even as you ponder race relations.

The process of pornification is open to test.  Read, say, what Jimmy Carter has to say about foreign policy.  Turn the page to the open body with come-hither eyes.  If you don't blink you're pornified — that is, acculturated, at home in what your society accepts.  If you blink you're behind your society.  If  you say, "My God, somebody's 18-year-old is showing every man in the country what she shows her gynecologist!" you haven't started yet.

The wrapping is important to the publisher trying to sell porn in a market unused to it.  He wants it to speak weight, respectability, "class."  Hefner's target audience can be identified, accurately enough, as "middle-brow."  Taking in millions.  I take his success with them to have powered his move to high brow, in editorials, which put the label "Playboy philosophy" on what was behind the full-front views.  A play for the full range of brows.  Pornification top to bottom.

Our aim is to hold our own against that.  Our hope is in the person we have been calling "well-educated."  That person, saying "Screw brows," will look inside the barrel labeled "Playboy philosophy" and find himself looking through the eyes of a fraternity (Animal House) pledge.  The correct label for the philosophy, he will tell us, is "juvenile male hedonism."  That Hefner could get away with his fancier label shows how poorly educated the American public is.  When Americans elect Donald Trump they show everybody their poverty and us what porn-acceptance and demagogue-acceptance have in common: stopping short of understanding.  Failing to look in the barrel, failing to see what the label really refers to.  For them the cross-over, the Moment of Understanding, still lies ahead.  Anybody whose understanding of words has been deepened at all in the way done fully in poetry class and partially in every humanities course, will blow Hefner and Trump away.

"Deepened," if I may add another glance into the philosophical past, "in the way logical empiricists did not consider essential.  Neither they — who classed it under 'the emotional aspect of words' — nor their followers."

So, though we express it differently, we're agreed on what went wrong: we college teachers failed to deepen our students' understanding of the words they used and listened to before we certified them as "educated."

"Good enough.  Now we've got to show Thomas Jefferson what we're going to do to set things right.  I suggest we each produce a plan and then come together to draw out the best.  Take a week."

Let's make it a month.

II

All right, Mr. Jefferson is waiting.  How do we set things right?  You go first.

"With I'm afraid, a big surprise for you.  I have nothing to say about your development and protection of the imagination.  I bailed out of that as soon as I realized that we already had our answer.  All that fussing around with poetry was unnecessary.  Philosophers, especially analytic philosophers, had already dealt with this problem with what we have to call success.  Their spokesmen to freshmen and sophomores explained so fully what "critical thinking" is, and had given such striking examples of "uncritical thinking," that any doubts about what failure and success were, and what's needed to change one into the other, should be long removed.  Think of Thouless's Thinking Straight and Cohen and Nagel's Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method, the Phil 101 texts of our day.  Require the course, and you have nearly all you need."

Nearly?

"Yes.  The course in critical thinking, to have lasting success, needs the support of courses around it.  If the student goes from Phil 101 to Poly Sci 101 the next hour, and to a history course the next, he or she should again and again be required to think critically.  That's strong support for critical thinking."

As long as it's about what I call the big ideas.  Bigger than the benzine ring.  Ideas about the hazards of democracy and the consequences of needing to be a "great power"  are big; the arrangement of benzine atoms is little.

"Yes.  Discussions of hazards to democracy are where Phil 101 pays off."

That's liberal-arts courses, bundles of payoffs for Phil 101.

"I'd say gyms where you go to strengthen what you acquired in Phil 101."

Yes.  Necessary to the success of its program for thinking.  That's better.

"So you'll join me in telling Jefferson that we're going to require these courses for all degrees that get people called well-educated'?  At 'Drain that swamp' we will look forward to nothing but frowns, and a happy Jefferson."

No, I won't join you.  Because I see a big weakness in your plan.  You don't account for the great number of people in our society who won't be able to meet your requirement.  Get down in the world and you'll see so many tasks that need to be done — bridges built, diseases treated, books balanced, airplanes flown — and so many people with limited time and money eager to qualify for those tasks, that to require them to set aside their training in engineering or medicine or accounting or aeronautics in favor of a lot of liberal arts courses is unreasonable and will be successfully  resisted.  It would be like requiring them to inform themselves about every candidate running for office and every issue at stake on the ballot.  The multitude in any democracy is going to be far too busy at the daily work of life to become the critical-thinking voters you picture

"I see.  I stepped backwards.  The default position for an old philosopher, they say, is the one he held in his youth.  Which here is distance from the problem.  Forgive the relapse."

So we go back to the development and protection of the imagination, meaning the power to deepen the meaning of marks on the page or sounds in the ear.  A return, I think, we were bound to make anyway, since the success of any other program will be measured by its success.

"I'm more solidly with you than ever.  Fail to add meaning and your most brilliantly connected barrels, in the most extensive network, will weigh nothing on the scales of knowledge.  If the imagination fails nothing else succeeds.  So on to our task, the development and protection of the imagination."

Two tasks.  And about the first one I have to tell you that the development of the imagination is pretty much of a mystery to me.  I prepare a bunch of exercises and get a class I'm proud of and some new kid comes in and shows everybody, including me, how much we missed in a Frost poem.  Kids spend so much time expanding their imaginations themselves, sitting alone and reading a book, or getting to know people and going through stuff.  About developing the imagination I'm reduced to humble silence.  About protecting the imagination I do have something to say, though it's only  about the imagination teachers develop.

"That's plenty for me.  Go ahead, humble teacher."

OK.  I go back to the one thing I am sure of, the Wow Moment in reading.  The Wow is forced out by an act of the imagination.  After the teacher has prepared the student for it.  How do successful teachers, the ones that consistently get a Wow, protect that moment and the preparation for it?  Listen to them.  Listen to yourself.  I hear, "Administrators, get out of the way; colleagues, don't intrude; public, be patient."  Administrators (meaning government, all the way up) get in the way by imposing standardized tests, and overloading classes, and demanding paper work eating preparation time as the need to publish eats it.  Colleagues intrude by pressing their fellows to prepare for something other than understanding — furtherance of a cause, righting of an injustice, promotion of an equality.  The public intrudes by forcing us (with good reason, usually) to economize.

"Fine, but you know what this is adding up to?  One damn lame report to Jefferson.  'Well, Founding Father, we just can't lay out a program that will give you the educated electorate you want.   All we can tell you is how to gamble for it.  It's not a very good gamble, in fact the odds are near the vanishing point, but we don't know what else to do.'"

A disappointment to Jefferson, yes, but I know professors who will tell us he deserves the lame report he's going to get.  All that broad praise of  "freedom."  So broad it included freedom of the smart to take advantage of the dumb.  We work like hell to expand the imaginations of the uneducated, and get them educated, and forget how many people, smart people, politicians and porn merchants, are working like hell to keep the imagination closed and the multitude uneducated.  Did we expect nobody to notice that there was money to be made, hits to be multiplied, votes to be gained, if people remained juveniles?  Marketers have a stake in juvenility, even retardation.

"You're making me sore at Jefferson.  And if I didn't know that fascists and monarchists and a lot of others interested in an authoritarian system are cheering me on I'd make a few complaints about him and his common man.  As it is I think I'll just keep my mouth shut in front of him."

What about our commitment to show him how we were going to educate his common man?

"What am I going to say?  With all the obstacles and difficulties we piled up the odds of doing that were already in the single digits.  After what you've just said I think they're down to zero.  So, what do I do?  Put on a Power Point showing all the new moves we're going to make and add, 'PS, they're not going to work and I don't know what else to do.'?"

But you must know something else to do.  If I remember the pragmatic side of your logical empiricism you'll go to the Next Best Thing.

"What a memory you have!  But you're ahead of me.  You've got something in mind.  There you are, convinced as I am that you'll never get a majority of the American multitude educated, but you're not in despair.   I'm waiting breathlessly to hear what you think the Next Best Thing might be."

OK, I'll state it bluntly: the next best thing to an educated multitude is a multitude that respects the educated. 

"Respect" is the pivot word.  What do you mean by it?"

"Respect" is what I felt for the classmates who, in the conversation about the causes of World War I, showed me that they knew what they were talking about.  I take that conversation as a model.  I was one of the uneducated multitude.  I became educated.  I was made to recognize, through blows in the ring, that their ways of thinking, their ways of taking words, were superior to mine.  I could not think that I was their equal, that my ways of thinking were as good as anybody's, that I did not have to listen to them.

"I see control of demagogues in your model."

I see that and more.  I see the absolute necessity of conversations like that, in which I see the necessity of companions like those, in whom I find the ground for hope that, despite the odds, there will be enough education and respect for education in the American electorate to keep the old democracy going.

"And Jefferson from blowing his brains out.  You've got to tell him about these conversations before he does anything rash."

Oh, I'm loaded, I'm loaded.  Talk that tests ideas, talk that shows up ignorance, smooth-tongued ignorance, high-achieving, prize-winning ignorance.

"Commercially successful ignorance, election-winning ignorance.  Talk that embarrasses the demagogue. Talk that shows students that if they are to avoid embarrassment they've got to attend carefully to the meaning of the words they use and hear."

Attend to the interior of the barrel.

"Attend to the roots in experience."

Oh the talk our country needs.  Oh precious college conversations, precious to the student and to the nation.  Blessed be the teachers who set up and monitor such conversations.  Blessed be the colleges and high schools that ease their way.  Blessed be the media that ease such conversations before the public.  Blessed be the participants who try to put the ways of their college conversations to public use.

"Blessed?"

A carryover from the Christianity barrel.  Jefferson will know what I mean.  It's his blessing we want, isn't it?

"And that's all we'll present in order to get it?  There's so much left hanging.   Jefferson is both a real-world president and a theorizing philosopher.  He'll pick over the bundle you give him."

We'll give him what we have and tell him that all that's left hanging will be handled in those wonderful conversations, in schools, in the media, in legislatures, that he and his philosopher-colleagues provided for in their founding documents.  Careful self-correction, that's what they were most careful to allow for, isn't it?  That's the strength of their system, isn't it?  Isn't it?