What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  Competitive with whom? On what terms? To what end? With anyone whose vigor and good fortune allows them to prosper, apparently. With anyone who has done a clever thing we did not think of first. And will these competitors of ours be left to enjoy the miserable advantage of low wages and compromised health? And is there any particular reason to debase human life in order to produce more, faster, without reference to the worth of the product or to the value of the things sacrificed to its manufacture? Wouldn’t most people, given an hour or two to reflect, consider this an intolerably trivial use to be put to, for them and their children? Life is brief and fragile, after all. Then what is this new economy whose demands we must always be ready to fill? We may assume it will be driven by innovation and by what are called market forces, which can be fads or speculation or chicanery. Oh, yes, rowdy old capitalism. Let it ply its music. Then again, in the all-consuming form proposed for it now, it is a little like those wars I mentioned earlier. It is equally inimical to poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought. It is equally disinclined to reward gifts that cannot be turned to its uses. The urgency of war or crisis has been brought to bear on our civil institutions, which is to say, on the reserves and resources of civility we have created over many generations.

  We in America are famous for our endless and costly election seasons. I think they are a good thing, all in all, even though as an Iowan I am subjected to the campaigning longer than most of my countrymen. There is a logic in exposing candidates to grueling scrutiny for months at a time. Once one of them is elected, he or she will have more control over public perceptions. But in the adversarial environment of primaries and elections, things are revealed that are highly germane to the question of a candidate’s suitability for the presidency, which is certainly the most intense and pressured office in the world. Many of the candidates make themselves ridiculous, providing valuable information to the electorate. The parties grope to discover what is possible, what is needed or desired. Or, notoriously, they offer themselves as agents of certain interests of friendly billionaires, which, we are to believe, align themselves nicely with the public interest. None of this is truer for the fact that it plays out in the press. We have no corner on foolish or mercenary politicians. But we do give ourselves a good long look at them, and weeding takes place. It is regrettable that all the expense in time and money does not buy a more substantive national conversation. Still, we find out what notions and attitudes are lurking in the minds of some of our politicians, and what they hope will have the power to stir some part of the populace.

  One of our candidates has called for an attack on the “university cartel,” by which he means our system of public higher education. The phrase is startling, considering that these institutions are in effect great city-states, shaped by their regions and histories, largely supported by their alumni, variously specialized around faculties that are attracted by distinctive areas of excellence. Recently, despite their enormous contributions to science and technology, they have been losing the support of many state legislatures, first on the pretext of austerity, and then on the grounds that they were properly understood as burdens on the public rather than as public assets. As state financing fell, tuitions rose, involving many students in burdensome debt. For generations people had, in effect, prepaid their children’s and grandchildren’s tuition and underwritten the quality of their education by paying taxes. Suddenly the legislatures decided to put the money to other uses, or to cut taxes, and families were obliged to absorb much higher costs. For this, blame has fallen on the universities. And since the new cost of university is weighed against potential earnings, students and families being so burdened, the humanities are under great pressure to justify their existence. As it happens, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a fine music school, and Rensselaer Polytechnic gives its students prizes for fiction and poetry. These schools might know something about nurturing the technical mind. But there is an impulse behind the recent assaults on great institutions that is historically expressed as social engineering. The ideal worker will not have a head full of poetry, say the neo-Benthamites. It is assumed, of course, that he or she will be potentially omnicompetent in service to the ever-changing needs and demands of the new economy—highly trained, that is, to acquire some undescribed skill set that will be proof against obsolescence. We await particulars. But the object is clear—to create a virtual army out of the general population who will compete successfully against whomever for whatever into an endless future, at profound cost to themselves. All this differs from military engagement in one great particular. The generals are always assumed to be free to abandon their armies and go over to the other side, if there is profit in it.

  The United States is in many ways a grand experiment. Let us take Iowa as an example. What would early nineteenth-century settlers on the open prairie do first? Well, one of the first things they did was found a university, which is now about one hundred seventy years old. Agriculture became, as it remains, the basis of the state economy. How did the university develop in response to this small, agrarian population? It became, as it remains, a thriving and innovative center for the arts—theater, music, painting, and, of course, creative writing. The medical school and the professional schools are fine, as well. The sciences are very strong. But the arts are the signature of the place and have been for generations. Let us say that these old Iowans did not invest their resources and their youth as wisely as they might have. Or let us say that, the world lying open to them, they had the profound satisfaction of doing what they wanted to do, at a cost to themselves in mercenary terms, with immeasurable returns in humanist terms. Their university has been a great nurturer of American letters. If Tocqueville was right, it has nurtured a great deal more besides.

  What are we doing here, we professors of English? Our project is often dismissed as elitist. That word has a new and novel sting in American politics. This is odd, in a period uncharacteristically dominated by political dynasties. Apparently the slur doesn’t stick to those who show no sign of education or sophistication, no matter what their pedigree. Be that as it may. There is a fundamental slovenliness in much public discourse that can graft heterogeneous things together around a single word. There is justified alarm about the bizarre concentrations of wealth that have occurred globally, and the tiny fraction of the wealthiest one percent who have wildly disproportionate influence over the lives of the rest of us. They are called the elite, and so are those of us who encourage the kind of thinking that probably does make certain of the young less than ideal recruits to their armies of the employed. If there is a point where the two meanings overlap, it would be in the fact that the teaching we do is what in America we have always called liberal education, education appropriate to free people, very much including those old Iowans who left the university to return to the hamlet or the farm. Now, in a country richer than any they could have imagined, we are endlessly told we must cede that humane freedom to a very uncertain promise of employability. It seems most unlikely that any oligarch foresees this choice as being forced on his or her own children. I note here that these criticisms and pressures are not brought to bear on our private universities, though most or all of them receive government money. Elitism in its classic sense is not being attacked but asserted and defended.

  If I seem to have conceded an important point in saying that the humanities do not prepare ideal helots, economically speaking, I do not at all mean to imply that they are less than ideal for preparing capable citizens, imaginative and innovative contributors to a full and generous, and largely unmonetizable, national life. America has known long enough how to be a prosperous country, for all its deviations from the narrow path of economic rationalism. Empirically speaking, these errancies are highly compatible with our flourishing economically, if they are not a cause of it, which is more than we can know. The politicians who attack public higher education as too expensive have made it so for electoral or id
eological reasons and could undo the harm with the stroke of a pen. They have created the crisis to which they hope to bring their draconian solutions.

  Neo-Benthamism stands or falls with our unquestioning subservience to the notion of competition, which really comes down to our dealing with the constant threat on the part of these generals to abandon their armies and, of course, with their demonstrated willingness to act on the threat. Does anyone who cares for such things owe them those great and ancient pleasures of life—poetry, eloquence, memory, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought? Do the pressures created in the larger world deprive us and the world of gifts the Chinese or the Russians would bring to it? We know these cultures have been rich and brilliant in ways that are no longer visible to us, at least. If we do have this effect, is there one thing good about it, for us or for them? If the vastness of the Russian imagination, the elegance of the Chinese eye and hand, were present to us to admire without invidious comparison, of them to us or us to them, wouldn’t the world be richer for us all?

  If the rise of humanism was a sunrise, then in this present time we are seeing an eclipse. I take it to be a merely transient gloom, because the work of those old scholars and translators and printers, the poets and philosophers they recovered and the poets and philosophers who came after them, the habit of literacy and the profound interest in the actual world and the present time, have all taken hold, more profoundly than we know. We have not lost them. We have only forgotten what they mean. We have forgotten to understand them for what they are, a spectacular demonstration of the capacities of the human mind, always renewed in our own experience, igniting possibilities no one could have foreseen. Tocqueville may be no more than conventional in speaking of them as “gifts which heaven shares out by chance.” And it may be that the convention of ascribing our gifts to a divine source, a convention that comes down from the earliest humanists, gave him and them a language able to capture something our truncated philosophies cannot accommodate. I never hear the phrase “human grandeur,” though many a planet has swum into my ken, though I know the rings of Saturn in detail. Step back and consider that, more or less hidden from sight, uniquely on this tiny planet there was a cache of old books and scrolls, testimonies to human thought, that when opened, opened the universe to us—six hundred years on, of course, which is not a heartbeat in cosmic time. An amazing tale, certainly. We deal in disparagement and feel it proves we are freer of illusion than earlier generations were. We are, as we have always been, dangerous creatures, the enemies of our own happiness. But the only help we have ever found for this, the only melioration, is in mutual reverence. God’s grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we could extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts, if they really deserve the name, would stand up to cost-benefit analysis. This is not the consequence of a new atheism or a systemic materialism that afflicts our age more than others. It is good old human meanness, which finds its terms and pretexts in every age. The best argument against human grandeur is the meagerness of our response to it, paradoxically enough.

  Then how to recover the animating spirit of humanism? For one thing, it would help if we reclaimed, or simply borrowed, conceptual language that would allow us to acknowledge that some things are so brilliant they can be understood only as virtuosic acts of mind, thought in the pure enjoyment of itself, whether in making a poem or a scientific discovery, or just learning something it feels unaccountably good to know. There is an unworldliness in the experience, and in what it yields, that requires a larger understanding than our terse vocabularies of behavior and reward can capture. I have had students tell me that they had never heard the word beautiful applied to a piece of prose until they came to us at the workshop. Literature had been made a kind of data to illustrate, supposedly, some graceless theory that stood apart from it, and that would be shed in a year or two and replaced by something post- or neo- and in any case as gracelessly irrelevant to a work of language as whatever it displaced. I think this phenomenon is an effect of the utilitarian hostility to the humanities and to art, an attempt to repackage them, to give them some appearance of respectability. And yet the beautiful persists, and so do eloquence and depth of thought, and they belong to all of us because they are the most pregnant evidence we can have of what is possible in us.

  Theology for This Moment

  Honorary Lecture at the University of Lund, Sweden: May 26, 2016

  Moses tells us, Jesus tells us, that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Theology should give us some beginning of an idea of what it might mean to satisfy this commandment. A first step, I propose, would be a step back from all other disciplines and categories, to invite a kind of awe at the entire phenomenon of Being that embraces disciplines and categories and error and aspiration and everything they touch, that embraces thought, and error, and the work the mind does in its sleep. Jesus, again quoting Moses, says another commandment is like this one, that we love our neighbor as ourselves. Our neighbor, like ourselves, is, objectively considered, a creature born out of the tremendous, potent workings of the cosmos since, as they say, time began. We are also to love our enemies, which would surely mean taking on that most difficult and humbling realization, that what they intend for evil, God, in the course of historic time, might well intend for good. We who live now have an overwhelming wealth of knowledge, for want of a better word, since we seem to have a great deal of difficulty absorbing the knowledge we amass. We actually have some capacity to describe the emergence of Being, and to read in very distant light some part of its vast, prehuman life. We have some insight into the brilliance of the trillion lives within our lives, the microbes and molecules that create us and sustain us. Brilliant voices wait in our books to speak in our minds, if we let them. There is a synthesis that is unique to theology, an acknowledgment that, in sacred matters, in this theater of God’s glory we share with those strangers, our neighbors, love means awe, and awe means love.

  A theology for our time would recover its old magisterial scale and confidence. It would address anything and any relation among things, and give the world a supple, inclusive language, far more adequate to what we know, less restricted in what we acknowledge, than any we have at present. For a long time we have treated systems and ideologies as if their terms were at last sufficient to reality, as if, in excluding all heterogeneous assumptions, of religion particularly, they offered a truer representation of the world.

  These systems and ideologies, however we might embroider them, are in effect simple and simplifying—the invisible hand, the survival of the fittest, the dictatorship of the proletariat, superego, ego, and id. They are the antibiotics of the intellect, killing off a various ecology of reflection and experience in order to eliminate one or two troublesome ideas. What will replace that ecology is an open question, of course, and how potent, even to the point of pathology, the strains will be that survive the purge. My metaphor seems alarmist. I know that before we devoted ourselves to Darwinism and Marxism and Freudianism and capitalism it was theology that was meant to inhibit thought, and that these successor monisms modeled their claims on the old claims of religious orthodoxy. We human beings never can make a truly fresh start.

  Nevertheless, a theology that would embrace rather than exclude would be a departure, not only from its own troublesome history but from the narrowness and aridity of the secular thinking that has displaced it. Theology has always employed language of a kind now isolated in the precincts of religion—“the beauty of holiness,” “grace and peace”—phrases that evoke a particular experience, a synesthesia of thought and aesthetic response. From the point of view of objectivity as presently understood, beauty and holiness are excluded terms, and grace is as well. The accepted means of establishing what is real cannot acknowledge them. Yet the celebratio
n of holiness in every form of art has shaped civilizations. Granting human proneness to error, it is naïve to imagine that it afflicts religion or anything else uniquely. It is the genius of science to have built this predisposition into its method, but this has not made science proof against the greater error involved in supposing that it is in fact the arbiter of reality.

  Christian theology uniquely among the forms of Western thought need not proceed by exclusion. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Christ was in the beginning with God and without him nothing was made that was made. The categorical blessing put on all that exists raises the problem of evil, certainly, but more important it asserts a very broad, unconditional reality, a givenness that in its fullness reflects divine intent. It is the tendency of all the systems and schools I have named to raise questions about the origins and even the reality of human selfhood. Specifically they challenge the moral self, that old wanderer through the trials and temptations of earthly life. Considering how they differ in their premises, it is striking how consistently they exclude personal agency, how deterministic they are. Yet we all experience the reality of moral choice continuously. A theology for our time would acknowledge this reality along with the entire complex of subjective experience—love, generosity, regret, and all their interactions—without a diminishing translation into veiled self-interest. It could create a conceptual space large enough to accommodate human dignity.

  I have read too much history to have any impulse to idealize the past. Great pity and very great respect are owed to all those generations who lived and died before us, not least because they, through war and plague and famine, conferred a precious heritage on us of art, language, music, and thought. And they conferred as well a tremendous burden of festering hostilities, vicious inequalities, and outright crimes that we have had no great success in understanding or meliorating, that we have in fact compounded. Those of us who, by accident of birth, live long and enjoy relative peace and well-being know well enough that humankind beyond our borders still struggles under its ancient burdens, with their modern variants. How to make moral sense of this is a question that has been pondered earnestly for generations, yielding few unequivocal results. Modern hospitals quickly become pest houses in the absence of an infrastructure many countries find difficult to sustain. Traditional agriculture becomes a pool of cheap labor, exploited until cheaper labor is found elsewhere and then abandoned to the effects of social and cultural disruption. Ragtag armies have ferocious weapons. The fluidity of modern societies and the chaos of failed states expedite human trafficking.