The Conservative Sensibility
Page 43
Aristotle said the aim of education is to get the student to like and dislike what he or she ought to like and dislike. John Henry Newman said the aim of education is not simply to satisfy curiosity but to arouse the right kind of curiosity. Education, he believed, is the thread on which received knowledge, jewels of the great tradition, can be strung. A university should be, not entirely but for most students, primarily a place that keeps young people from getting lost rather than a place where they find things hitherto undiscovered in the human experience. This entails a curriculum rich in required courses. Granted, this restricts a student’s freedom, if freedom is defined merely as an absence of restraints imposed by others. But true freedom is impossible without comprehension of, and submission to, things that are known. The most direct path to such comprehension is through the body of knowledge that is civilization’s patrimony. What we are losing today is the understanding that education consists largely of arguing from, not with, this patrimony.
At some point, “pluralism” in the curriculum of the university becomes an abdication of responsibility. The attempt to make universities all things to all people ignores the fact that not all good things are good for all people. Modern societies flinch from this fact because much flows from it. Universities are, of course, elitist: a society is judged, in part, by the caliber of elites it produces. A serious university is inherently hierarchical and authoritarian: The few who are qualified to be students go there to benefit from supervision by a few people who know more than students do, especially about what is good for students. To those who say that this is antidemocratic, the correct response is that the idea of democracy is irrelevant to the idea of a university’s purpose. Democracy is a political, not a social, concept. It pertains to constitutional arrangements, to the source of sovereignty, not to a “life-style” or a society without hierarchies. It is the opposite of the truth to say that because a democracy is a politically egalitarian regime, a democracy presupposes an egalitarian society. It is democratic sentimentality to expect the political process rather than the social system to produce a leadership class. It is a mystification of voting to hope that the casting of ballots will generate rather than just elevate excellence. Generating excellence is the task of many institutions, including universities, that best serve an egalitarian political system when they furnish standards, and elites that measure up to them, for all sectors of society.
However, a specter is haunting our democratic order. It is the possibility, which looks increasingly like a probability, that the democratic ethos encourages ideas and habits of mind that are subversive of the intellectual and moral prerequisites of a stable and durable regime of liberty. The American regime is founded on the principle that human beings are rights-bearing creatures. But if that is all they are, we had better batten down the hatches. Individuals bristling with rights, but with a weak understanding of the manners and morals of community living, are going to produce an irritable and unneighborly community. The primary political problem of the quarter of a millennium since the Enlightenment has been the tension between self-assertion and self-control. Education is the business of enlarging, strengthening, furnishing, and refurbishing minds for the purpose of improving them, partly by enlarging their capacity for self-control.
Although Lincoln estimated that he spent less than a year in school, he had a thirst for learning that guaranteed a lifelong receptivity to information and an aptitude for reasoning. Lincoln was a miracle of self-creation. Miracles are not, however, to be counted on; society must take auxiliary precautions. Religion gives individuals injunctions and other motivations to control themselves. But as the religious impulse recedes, other sources of self-control must be found. Education has been assigned a large and, it seems, ever expanding role in maintaining social equilibrium by buttressing self-control. And in fertilizing the soil of patriotism, which presupposes a purpose beyond, a purpose sometimes higher than, that of the individual. So, patriotism involves transcending, or circumscribing, the value of individual autonomy.
Although the word “education” is not in the Constitution, the importance of education is implied by the political philosophy that produced the Constitution. The very idea of American citizenship is demanding in a way unique to this nation. It requires continual intellectual exertion by members of the relatively small cohort that steadily participates in the nation’s civic debates. America is, at bottom, about individual freedom, and one cannot love American freedom deeply or defend it successfully without understanding its grounding in the Founders’ philosophy. The constitutional scholar Walter Berns noted that other nations do not have locutions comparable to our “un-American.” Few say that this or that person or principle is “un-French” or “un-Danish.”22 Americans are exceptional because they are a creedal people. They are “a people” because they are creedal.
In 1938, when the world had become a cockpit of fighting faiths, the US House of Representatives created the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which in 1969 changed its name to the Committee on Internal Security, and ceased operations in 1975. Although HUAC did some good (e.g., it brought to light Alger Hiss’ treachery), the mischief it did when wielded for unconstrained investigations by demagogic members suggests that elected officials should not be empowered to designate un-American “activities.” Nevertheless, there are such, because there are un-American principles. Berns argued that “in the traditional or Spartan sense, patriots are citizens who love their country simply because it is their country.” Such patriotism is “a sentiment or state of mind, an awareness of sharing an identity with others.”23 This is, of course, a component of American patriotism. There is, however, something more, something exceptional about American patriotism, something complex and demanding because it involves assent to a creed that says rights are natural to, meaning inherent in, our humanity. A rights-centered society, must, however, take seriously the fact that duties are not natural. They must be taught. Self-interest is common and steady; virtue is rare and unpredictable. A society devoted to guaranteeing a broad scope for self-interested behavior must be leavened by virtue. So measures must be taken to make virtue less rare and more predictable. Among those measures, Americans have always considered education crucial.
John Adams, the most dour of the Founders, expressed typical American optimism about one thing: “The virtues and powers to which men may be trained by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and astonishing.” But Adams also said something that reveals why education and equality are American values in tension: “Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has between man and brute.”24 If so, the more resources that are invested in education, the more stratified society will become. If education is going to create and widen disparities between citizens, it must take care to inculcate some commonalities. Otherwise, links of shared values and understandings will become dangerously attenuated.
In Locke’s imagined state of nature, human beings are, he said, of the same “species and rank” and have “all the same advantages of nature,” meaning the same “faculties.” Therefore they should “be equal one amongst another without subordination.”25 Elsewhere, in his Conduct of the Understanding, Locke acknowledged that there is “great variety in men’s understandings” and “amongst men of equal education there is great inequality of parts.” This inequality inheres in “their very natures.”26 As regards understanding, “there is a greater distance between some men and others…than between some men and some beasts.” All persons have the “seeds” of rationality, but many are “of low and mean education” and are never mentally elevated “above the spade and the plow.” So, “in his own subdued way, Locke is as much of an ‘elitist’ as Plato or Aristotle.”27 But his way was subdued because it allowed for education to enable everyone to reach the threshold of rationality requisite for participation as equals in society’s governance.
Benjamin Rush, the eighteenth-century Philadelphia physician and friend of
many of the Constitution’s Framers, said: “Human nature is the same in all ages and countries, and all the difference we perceive in its characters in respect to virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, may be accounted for from climate, country, degrees of civilization, form of government, or accidental causes.” Education would be among the accidental, as opposed to natural, causes. Rush held that man “cannot alter his nature; he can only cultivate it.” But there is more than the mind to cultivate—more than the mind, that is, at birth, the blank slate postulated by Lockean epistemology. There also is a natural moral sense or aptitude. “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor,” wrote Jefferson, and “the former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” The opposite of artificial rules are those that are natural, meaning innate. Here Jefferson supplies a more robust conception of human equality than that derived from Locke’s epistemology. People are born equal, not just by being born as equally blank slates, but also in their equal endowment with “rules” that constitute a moral sense. As Gordon Wood says, “Once men came to believe that they could control their environment and educate the vulgar and lowly to become something other than what the traditional monarchical society had presumed they were destined to be, then they began to expand their sense of moral responsibility for the vice and ignorance they saw in others and to experience feelings of common humanity with them.”28
HISTORY DEPRIVATION
So, at the dawn of this Republic’s voyage on the choppy seas of democracy, education was counted on to provide a ballast of moral responsibility. “The object of government,” wrote Madison in Federalist 62, is “the happiness of the people.”29 He and his fellow Founders conceived of happiness as Aristotle did, as a durable state of worthy satisfaction with life. To be worthy, satisfaction must flow from the vigorous employment of the faculties that make us human: individual reasoning and social participation. Happiness, therefore, is an activity. From philosophy and literature, from Aristotle to George Eliot, we learn that the ethical life is lived by persons of good character, and that such character is acquired slowly, and more or less arduously, by the disciplines of imitation and habituation. And by the study of history, which provides a record of human experiences with imitation and habituation. In his brief biography of Frederick Douglass, Timothy Sandefur notes that “history-deprivation” was one of the instruments of control that made American slavery especially thorough and brutal. “History,” Sandefur says, “is a shared tradition about one’s origins and the glorification of the achievements of ancestors, which gives one a sense of purpose and a role in the progress of the world. History can generate pride and solidarity among a people.” Which is, of course, why history-deprivation was inflicted on slaves. “Lacking a conception of their part in the progress of a nation or a people,” Sandefur says, “enslaved people were encouraged to regard themselves not as dynamic and full of potential, but as static and fixed in the landscape. If the slave could be deprived of a past, he could not imagine a future.”30 America is doing to itself absentmindedly what was done to slaves malevolently.
Contemporary America does this by indulging in the pleasure known as presentism, which is the practice of judging the past by the standards of the present. This amalgam of ignorance and arrogance invariably leads the complacent people doing the judging to flatter themselves as much more discerning, sensitive, and generally better than, say, George Washington, who did not free his slaves, or Abraham Lincoln, who never allied himself with abolitionists. It is peculiar. Practitioners of identity politics insist that their contemporaries be understood, and empathized with, entirely as situated products of their race, ethnicity, gender, or class. But these practitioners cannot make the imaginative leap of placing themselves in the historical situations of earlier generations that grappled, as all generations do, with reconciling universal moral principles with the inertia of institutions and mores in the society they had inherited from earlier generations. Presentism is an intellectual failure to which progressives are especially susceptible because, believing in the upward unfolding of history, they are confident that they are the pinnacle—so far—of human understanding. But by validating each generation’s vanity, presentism stunts the historical imagination that enables us to take pleasure as well as instruction from our place in continuum with our distinguished predecessors. People who flatter themselves by engaging in presentism should remember that they are tomorrow’s past. By condescending to the past, they make themselves hostages to the condescension of the future.
To study history is to immerse oneself in human particularities. To do philosophy is, among other things, to attempt to pierce the veil of particularities and reach commonalities. It is, however, a prejudgment to assume that there are such commonalities to be reached. The only people we ever encounter are formed by particular, and different, histories and regimes. Can we assume or demonstrate that beneath the veneer of culture there is something constant and universal? What if human beings are only this veneer—culture—straight through? What if when we know history we know all that there is to know about human beings? What if historicity is everything, and man is therefore essentially nothing other than malleability, with some ability—and not much ability—to direct his own transformation? What if even the supposedly most elemental passions are not universal? If so, then philosophy is a waste of time, and history is anthropology on a grand scale, supplanting philosophy’s search for natural standards for assessing human endeavors.
Many American historians, especially, have asserted a professional duty to “desacralize” their subject, stripping away what they consider a long refusal to acknowledge disagreeable facts about the nation’s past, facts that supposedly have been obscured by mists of sentiment about spurious heroism and faux nobility in the service of ideals. “Once, not very long ago,” historian David Harlan wrote in his study of what he considers “the degradation” of American history, “history was one of our primary forms of moral reflection.” Americans criticized their society “just as they criticized their friends: on the assumption that they shared a common set of moral references.” American writers and historians engaged in a “centuries long, transgenerational conversation” as they endeavored to help us “locate ourselves in time” and to “gather the strands of American history and weave them into a fabric of possibilities.” They helped us to “place ourselves in time” because “there is a distinctive set of moral and political values hidden away at the base of American history.”31
Of late, however, “history as moral reflection” has given way to “history as cultural unmasking.” The “redemptive power of the past” evaporates when historical actors come to be seen not as socially situated selves but as socially saturated selves. Hence “the very idea of a single authentic self, with a stable and clearly defined cluster of character traits, has come to seem hopelessly anachronistic.” So people became increasingly inclined to believe, with Jay Gatsby, that identity is and ought to be unstable and kaleidoscopic, “an unbroken series of successful gestures.”32
What else can identity be, if the conventional wisdom is correct that there is no knowledge of, only opinion about, morality, and that human beings have no nature other than their capacity to acquire culture? We must, however, be careful about what we think we are, lest we become this. Human nature is not infinitely plastic; we cannot be socialized to accept anything. We do not recoil from Auschwitz only because our culture has so disposed us. The fact that much about America nowadays, from random violence to family disintegration to scabrous entertainment, is shocking is evidence for, not against, the moral sense. This sense is what is shocked.
Studies have produced powerful empirical evidence of a moral sense that is a component of a universal human nature. This moral sense is the most plausible explanation of much of our behavior. The political challenge is to encourage the flourishing of a culture that nurtures rather than weakens the promptings of the moral sense.
Inside every person there is (in Konrad Lorenz’s phrase) a “parliament of instincts.”33 The moral sense, James Q. Wilson wrote, is among the calmer passions; it needs help against its wilder rivals. We have selfish interests, but also the capacity—and inclination—to judge disinterestedly, even of our own actions. Wilson asked: Could mankind survive if parents had to have the skill, perseverance, and good luck to teach every rule of right conduct the same way they teach multiplication tables? Right conduct is so important that the tendency to engage in it must be rapidly acquired. This suggests that children are biologically disposed to imitate behavior and learn the underlying rules by observation. Children are intuitive moralists, equipped by nature for making distinctions and rendering judgments. Instincts founded in nature are developed in the family, strengthened by daily habits—particularly in work—and reinforced by fears of punishment and social ostracism. We acquire virtues as we acquire crafts, by the practice of them.
Above all, the family transforms a child’s natural sociability into a moral sense. Most of the things likely to produce enduring happiness—education, employment, stable families—require us to forgo immediate pleasures. Today, unfortunately, instant gratification is promised, and delivered, by torrents of entertainments, which are provided by the well-named method of “streaming.” Furthermore, the rising generation is being taught—yes, taught—that all that can be known for sure is what is instantaneous, and hence it cannot be highly valued because it is only of our instant.