Why Read?

by Mark Edmundson

  Democracy and Faith

  THIS BOOK TOOK off from some lines of William Carlos Williams's: The new is in despised poems, he said, and men die every day for lack of what is found there. What is found there that prevents death, or death-in-life, is meaning—more precisely, meaning that can do something like what religious conviction can.

  "The future of poetry is immense," Matthew Arnold wrote, "because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything. . . ."

  Arnold tells us that if religious faith wanes in the world—or in a given individual—then the next likely source of meaning will be literature. The literature we have come to value, most especially the novel, is by and large antitranscendental. It does not offer a vision of the world under a deity's guidance. It suggests, though often it doesn't assert, that we humans have to make our own way without the strains and the comforts of faith.

  The teaching of literature I believe in does not argue that always and for everyone, a secular, imaginative vision has to replace faith. My sort of teaching assumes that a most pressing spiritual and intellectual task of the moment is to create a dialogue between religious and secular visions of the world. Many of my students leave class with their religious convictions deepened and ramified. They're more ardent, more thoughtful believers than when they arrived. The aim is not conversion. The aim is encounter between the transcendental and the worldly. The objective is to help students place their ultimate narratives in the foreground and open themselves up to influence.

  Religious faith in America now seems very strong. Somehow, in a culture that has disenchanted everything, a culture where cool prevails, religion has remained relatively intact. But I continue to feel that, as Freud expressed it in his 1927 book The Future of an Illusion, the promise for a large-scale turn away from religion is near at hand. There is simply too little evidence—at least by the relatively scientific standards that we now rely on in other areas of inquiry—that the miraculous tales that come to us in the Scriptures are true. Religion has attached itself to the fact, as Arnold says, "and now the fact is failing it." Efforts to prove God's existence materially and logically have never been fully satisfying. Just so, to believe intuitively in an all-loving, merciful, and omnipotent God is difficult for many of us after a century of closely documented horrors. Why didn't this Omnipotence intervene? Why didn't he prevent the horrible deaths of children and of relatively innocent women and men?

  It may well be a matter of time, as Freud suggested, before lack of hard evidence combines with the absence of experiential proof to turn great masses of people against religion. But there is also the fact that many of the people in America now who claim to be religious have what is at best a tenuous purchase on faith. Their religions, often self-concocted, are Religion Lite, narcissistic investments in guardian angels and smilingly bland deities. There are few resources in such faiths to deal with tragedy and horror. When those things come to pass, how long will our current fragile faiths—think of my student's Catherinism—actually last? And if religion fails, what will there be to replace it? How will we give a meaning and shape to life? How will we tell ourselves stories, collective and individual, about our time here that can make life worth living?

  Freud, for his part, commends a bleak stoicism as a replacement for faith. We need to face the fact that this life is full of undeserved, unredeemable suffering. We need to alleviate as much of that suffering as we can, not for any transcendental reason, but because it is in our interest to live in societies that do all they can to ease pain. Beyond that there is simple endurance. In his marvelous elegy, Auden commends Freud for achieving a fully compassionate regard for humanity: "Every day they die / Among us, those who were doing us some good, / And knew it was never enough but / Hoped to improve a little by living. / Such was this doctor."

  Nietzsche, another major source for these thoughts on teaching and learning, felt the absence of God far more dramatically than Freud did. He saw God's death—by which he meant, among other things, the passing away of God's perceived presence from day-to-day life—as a traumatic event in human history, one whose full impact was not yet clear to most of humanity. It has still perhaps not reached us. The presence of God compelled human beings to quest for an ideal. They had to strive for something to win God's blessing—even if what they strove for was often not at all congenial to Nietzsche. Nietzsche feared that with the passing of God even that striving would stop. No one would think it worth his while to try to overcome himself. People would live happily with their own limitations. To move from a world peopled by Homeric heroes striving for the first place, to a world in which the best men and women struggled to please God by abasing themselves was cause for lament. But worse was life in which humanity had lost all interest in ideals. This was the world epitomized by "the Last Man." This creature who hops and blinks on the earth's crust, small and self-seeking, lives with the most pitiable credo: "One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion." The Last Man has his "little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams"; he is cautious, self-absorbed, noncommittal. "We have invented happiness," the Last Men say, and then they blink.

  What happens now and in the future if our most intelligent students never learn to strive to overcome what they are? What if aspirations to genius, and to contact with genius through Keats's immortal free-masonry, become silly, outmoded ideas? What you're likely to get are more and more two-dimensional men and women. These will be people who live for easy pleasure, for comfort and prosperity and the satisfactions of cool, who think of money first, then second, and third; who hug the status quo; people who believe in God as a sort of insurance policy (cover your bets); people who are never surprised. They will be people so pleased with themselves (when they're not in despair at the general pointlessness of their lives) that they cannot imagine that humanity could do better. They'll think it their highest duty to have themselves cloned as often as possible. They'll claim to be happy and they'll live a long time.

  Against the coming of the Last Man, Nietzsche had little to recommend. He said that we might place ourselves thoroughly on the side of fate, and affirm the eternal recurrence of the same thing, no matter how horrible events might be. Our objective would be to turn the past ("Thus it was") into a function of our own desire ("Thus I willed it") and so come to love our fate. Our goal would be to take any event, no matter how horrible, and use it in our project of self-creation. We might use such events as a motive for growth or as raw material for works of art that would enlarge the mind. "What does not kill me," Nietzsche said in a self-vaunting moment, "makes me stronger."

  But who could really affirm the eternal recurrence of everything? Who would have the demonic strength to wish for the Holocaust to happen again? Who could find possibilities for human expansion in that? And if you cannot affirm all events, including the most horrible, then surely the doctrine of the eternal recurrence dwindles in its power.

  Neither Freud nor Nietzsche has Arnold's faith in the capacity of literature to create meanings that might, at the least, make life bearable. To Freud, literature was illusion, mere wish-fulfillment. To Nietzsche, the lure of large-scale philosophical answers, answers that might be for everyone, or for everyone who mattered, such as the commitment to eternal recurrence, pushed the prospect of literary response aside.

  Literary response is individual, particular: to put trust in literature affirms the antiphilosophic view that there are as many ways of living well a
s there are individuals disposed to do so. Nietzsche and Freud are aristocrats by temperament. The turn to literature for multiple truths is a democratic turn. The conviction that each of us has a particular genius to unfold is a democratic conviction.

  Some will object to an open-ended vision of education in which we pursue our own visions, our own truths. People can become distressed when they imagine a world in which all of us, inspired by poets and other artists, create our lives, with only the inhibitions of community welfare and of our perceived failures to rein us in. They fear chaos, they say. They fear disorder. But perhaps what they fear, most truly, is genuine democracy.

  And there is a sense in which they are quite right to be wary. For understood in its full implications, democracy is a gamble. People educated to enjoy the freedom of the poets may not always make the right choices, and surely they will not always make choices that we ourselves would approve. Jean Paul Sartre says that no great work of literature could ever be anti-Semitic. It's pretty to think so. Consider Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta or Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Both are great imaginative achievements; both, whatever ingenuity a director may deploy to stage them, madly anti-Semitic at their cores. The fact is that literature can do us harm. It's a gamble to put our faith in it. It's a gamble to think of leaving religion behind.

  Democratic humanism is a risk. We are betting that people will prefer life to death, creation to destruction, freedom to servitude. They have not always shown a will to do so.

  All through time the consensus has been that people cannot rule themselves. In the great mass, they're depraved. They need to be controlled. The people at the top of the heap know best. But in America, we've decided to defy that long-standing wisdom. We've taken many steps toward the goal of full franchise for all, but there's further to go. We need to begin educating people now with full respect for their powers of determination. We need to give them the resources of the best that has been known and thought, and then stand back and let them make the decisions that matter.

  The more chance that people have fully and freely to unfold themselves, the more chance, ultimately, that they'll find their own happiness, and the more chance that they will enlarge the scope of the possible for others. In every life-affirming human mutation, however apparently odd, there lies the chance that something new and wonderful will arise that will act as a light to future generations. If America leads and inspires the world in the years to come, it will not be because we have the most potent armies, or create the most alluring entertainments, or manufacture the best products, or even create the most wealth. It will be because here more than anywhere, people are free to pursue their own hopes of becoming better than they are in a human sense—wiser, more vital, kinder, sadder, more thoughtful, more worth the admiration of their children. And it will be because they are free to become who they aspire to be after their own peculiar fashions. They'll feel a just pride in themselves and they'll feel a tough and enduring pride in a country that trusted them enough to let them flourish. Democracy wagers that when you put human beings together and give them every opportunity to express and develop themselves, then their virtues will exceed their faults, if only by so much. To be part of that experiment, and to contribute to its success, that is something that a man or woman, however humble, can take a vast and honest pride in.

  Democracy, and the democratic humanism that can make it unfold—these are my religion. These are the sources of my faith and hope. For the promises of democratic humanism are without bound. Imagine a nation, or world, where people have fuller self-knowledge, fuller self-determination, where self-making is a primary objective not just in the material sphere but in the circles of the mind and heart. ("It tends outward," that heart, "to immense and innumerable expansions.") We humanities teachers can help create such a world, a world of rich, inter-animating individuality, in tandem with flourishing community. A renewed democratic humanism can take us there. We should begin, now, to heed that humanism's highest promise.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS IS A book that was written in nearly ideal circumstances, and for that I have many to thank. Thanks first to my students at the University of Virginia and to my colleagues in the English Department there. They contributed to making this work something like a pleasure.

  Lewis Lapham of Harper's Magazine helped to get the book off the ground with an idea about an essay on the liberal arts. Many thanks to him. To develop early thoughts into book form, I spent a term in residence at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, where I enjoyed the hospitality of Roberta Culbertson, Robert Vaughan, and Andrew Wyndham. A pair of summer grants from the University of Virginia also sped me on my way.

  For the first draft of this book, I couldn't have had better readers. I thank Richard Rorty, for astute commentary and suggestions on philosophical matters. Thanks, too, to David Lenson; a sentence of his on the matter of prose and jalapefio peppers was worth pages. Thanks to Michael Pollan, not only for his editorial suggestions, which were, as always, superb, but for the unpriceable gift of thirty years of friendship. With this book, as with all my books, he was with me from start to finish.

  From this generous trinity, the book traveled to Chris Calhoun, agent and sage, who did me no end of good turns, as he always has. The day I met Chris was one of my luckiest. Gillian Blake, brilliant and humane editor, responded right away to this project and lighted its way to completion.

  Thanks too to Douglas Myers, known elsewhere as Franklin Lears, teacher and friend, whose conversation now and example long ago helped shape these thoughts. For suggestions and good will, thanks to Megan Marshall, Ed Ayers, Allan Megill, Steve Cushman, Michael Levenson, Jahan Ramazani, Jessica Feldman, Karen Chase, Gordon Braden, Paul Cantor, Jackson Lears, and Adam Phillips. Chip Tucker responded to the manuscript with careful suggestions and weighty challenges: many thanks to him. Thanks too to my Sunday basketball brethren, and to my esteemed teachers at 206.

  I'm grateful to the audiences who heard these thoughts out: corroborated, revised, and challenged them. They were at the University of Virginia (particular thanks to Marva Barnett and the Teaching Resource Center), James Madison University, Hendrix College, the University of Hartford, New College, Lehigh University, Keene State College, the University of Richmond, Williams College, Smith College, Florida Atlantic University, Duke University, Wake Forest University, and Haverford College.

  My wife, Liz, and my sons, Willie and Matthew, gave me endless love and understanding and (it came mostly from Willie, but not only) some loud, loud, sweet rock and roll.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Mark Edmundson is NEH/Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia. A prizewinning scholar, he has published a number of works of literary and cultural criticism, including Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, as well as a memoir, Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference. He has also written for such publications as the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and Harper's, where he is a contributing editor.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after the type founder Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan Tschichold and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype, and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to be available in identical form for mechanical hot metal composition and hand composition using foundry type.

  Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a font engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a font by Granjon. It was first used in 1966 and has proved an enduring modern classic.

 

 

 
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