Myth brings scale to the narratives that stir the human imagination. Old Marduk, whose loss to the pantheon is not particularly to be lamented, did make one pleasing proof of his standing among the gods of Babylon, who did not at first accept his claims to supremacy. He flung a constellation into being, then made it vanish, then restored it. He did other things less beautiful, which nevertheless yielded the Tigris and the Euphrates, heaven and earth. The heavens for most of us now are a kind of wearying ethereal sea that accommodates travel from one coast or continent to another, its vastness and even its turbulence largely forgettable with good earphones and a movie. Or it is the dumping ground, so to speak, of far more detritus than even its great volume can dilute. We keep an eye on it now to gauge its health, speculating nothing, concluding nothing, about humankind from our epic power to de-create. Properly speaking, we are the stuff of myth. And yet we have no language to address the scale of the experience we have, not only as dwellers in a cosmos but also as creatures whose thoughts naturally inhabit the vastnesses of myth, creation to doomsday, who see our galaxy as a path across the heavens, who spin new tales of the impossible even while we sleep. A splendid dignity is spread out over all this, whether recognized or not, by the divine, the good and glorious creator and center and substance of it all.
The American Scholar Now
Presidential Lecture at Stanford University: October 29, 2015 (published in Harper’s Magazine as “Save Our Public Universities,” March 2016)
Emerson’s lecture “The American Scholar,” which he delivered in 1837, implicitly raises radical questions about the nature of education, culture, and consciousness, and about their interactions. He is urging his hearers to make the New World as new as it ought to be, urging his audience to outlive the constraints colonial experience imposed on them and to create the culture that would arise from the full and honest use of their own intellects, minds, and senses. Any speaker might say the same to any audience. Every generation is in effect colonized by its assumptions and also by the things it reveres. The future, in the American experience, has always implied an inevitable departure from the familiar together with the possibility of shaping inevitable change. The historical circumstance of the country at the time Emerson spoke made vivid what is always true, that there is a frontier, temporal rather than geographical, which can and surely will be the new theater of old crimes and errors, but which can and will be an enlargement of experience, a region of indeterminacy, of possibility. The difference between any decade and the next makes this point.
In his introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville says a very striking thing about the world then unfolding.
From the moment when the exercise of intelligence had become a source of strength and wealth, each step in the development of science, each new area of knowledge, each fresh idea had to be viewed as a seed of power placed within people’s grasp. Poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought, all these gifts which heaven shares out by chance turned to the advantage of democracy and, even when they belonged to the enemies of democracy, they still promoted its cause by highlighting the natural grandeur of man. Its victories spread, therefore, alongside those of civilization and education.
Tocqueville, like Emerson, stood at a cusp of history where literacy and democracy were both assuming an unprecedented importance in the civilization of the West. Not unambivalent in his feelings about democracy, Tocqueville did see it as based on “the natural grandeur of man,” brought to light by education. “Poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought.” These things are mentioned as rarely now as the object or effect of education as “the natural grandeur of man” is mentioned as an assumption of our culture or a basis of our politics.
Emerson delivered his address to the Phi Beta Kappa society after the publication of Tocqueville’s first volume and before the publication of the second. He was speaking at a time when colleges were being founded all across America—my own university, Iowa, in 1847. The great Frederick Law Olmsted was at that time putting his aesthetic blessing on our public spaces, notably on college campuses, including finally Stanford. The Oxford English Dictionary defines campus as an Americanism. The conventions established in the early nineteenth century have persisted in meadows and gardens and ponds that celebrate, if only out of habit, these cities of the young, these local capitals of learning and promise. Olmsted, like Emerson, would have seen something like the emergence of brilliant individuality in unexpected places that Tocqueville describes, strongly potential in American life though as yet suppressed, according to Emerson, by a preoccupation with the practical, with trade and enterprise, and suppressed as well by a colonial deference toward the culture of Europe. Like Tocqueville, Emerson is proposing an anthropology, proposing that there is a splendor inherent in human beings that is thwarted and hidden by deprivation of the means to express it, even to realize it in oneself. The celebration of learning made visible in its spread into the territories and the new-made states must have taken some part of its character from the revelation of human gifts it brought with it. It is interesting to see what persists over time, and interesting to see what is lost.
For those to whom Emerson is speaking, who have made a good account of themselves as students at Harvard, deprivation is the effect of an unconscious surrender, a failure to aspire, to find in oneself the grandeur that could make the world new. We know these people. In fact we are these people, proudly sufficient to expectations, our own and others, and not much inclined to wonder whether these expectations are not in fact rather low. We have, of course, accustomed ourselves to a new anthropology that is far too sere to accommodate anything like grandeur, and which barely acknowledges wit, in the nineteenth century or the modern sense. Eloquence might be obfuscation, since the main project of the self is now taken by many specialists in the field to be the concealment of selfish motives. How do we define imagination these days, and do we still associate it with fires? Unless it is escape or delusion, it seems to have little relevance to the needs of the organism for good or ill. So, like character, like the self, it is no doubt by now defined out of existence. We leave it to a cadre of specialists to describe human nature—a phrase that by their account no doubt names yet another nonexistent thing. It must be said that, at best, these specialists would show no fondness for it if they did concede its existence, nor do they allow to it any of the traits it long found ingratiating in itself. This is so true that the elimination of the pleasing, the poignant, the tragic from our self-conception—I will not mention brilliance or grandeur—would seem to be the object of the exercise. Plume-plucked humankind. Tocqueville and Emerson might be surprised to find us in such a state after generations of great freedom, by the standards of history, and after the vast elaboration of resources for learning in every field.
In fact it is this vast elaboration, epitomized in the American university, that proves we have had a loftier view of ourselves historically, and it is a demonstration of the change in our self-conception that our universities as they exist no longer make sense to legislatures and to people of influence, a phrase that, in our moment, really does mean moneyed interests. Traditional centers of influence—churches, unions, relevant professionals—have lost their place in public life, or they have merged their influence with the moneyed interests, speaking here of those churches that do maintain a public presence. From this perspective, the great public universities—and many of them are very great—are like beached vessels of unknown origin and intention, decked out preposterously with relics and treasures, ripe for looting insofar as what they hold would find a market, condemned to neglect and decay insofar as the cash value of what they hold is not obvious to the most astringent calculation.
There has been a fundamental shift in American consciousness. The Citizen has become the Taxpayer. In consequence of this shift, public assets are now public burdens. These personae, Citizen and Taxpayer,
are both the creations of political rhetoric—it now requires an unusual degree of historical awareness to know that both “politics” and “rhetoric” were once honorable things. An important aspect of human circumstance is that we can create effective reality simply by consenting to the reality of the phantasms of the moment, or the decade. While the Citizen can entertain aspirations for the society as a whole and take pride in its achievements, the Taxpayer, as presently imagined, simply does not want to pay taxes. The societal consequences of this aversion—failing infrastructure, for example—are to be preferred to any inroad on his or her monetary fiefdom, large or small. This is as touchy a point as are limits on so-called Second Amendment rights. Both sensitivities, which are treated as if they were protections against centralization and collectivism, are having profound consequences for society as a whole, and this without meaningful public debate, without referendum. Citizenship, which once implied obligation, is now deflated—that is, given an artificial value by use that treats it as primarily a limited good that ought to be limited further. The degree to which Citizen and Taxpayer ever existed, exist now, or can be set apart as distinct types is a question complicated by the fact that they are imposed on public consciousness by politicians playing to constituencies, by interest groups, by journalism that repeats unreflectingly whatever gimmicky notion is in the air and reinforces it. It can be said, however, that whenever the Taxpayer is invoked as the protagonist in the public drama, stalwart defender of his own, past and potential martyr to a culture of dependency and governmental overreach, we need not look for generosity, imagination, wit, poetry, or eloquence. We certainly need not look for the humanism Tocqueville saw as the moving force behind democracy.
I will put aside a fact that should be too obvious to need stating, that America has done well economically, despite passing through difficult periods from time to time, as countries do. It would be very hard indeed to make the case that the Land-Grant College Act has done us any harm, or that the centrality of the liberal arts in our education in general has impeded the development of wealth. True, a meteor strike or some equivalent could put an end to this tomorrow. But if we were obliged to rebuild ourselves, we could not find a better model for the creation of wealth than our own history. I do not mean to suggest that wealth is to be thought of as our defining achievement, or that it is the first thing we should protect or recover. But since money is the measure of all things these days, it is worth pointing out that there are no grounds for regarding our educational culture as in need of “rationalization”—it must be clear that I take exception to this use of the word—to align it with current economic doctrine.
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All this sidesteps the old Kantian distinction—whether people are to be dealt with as means or as ends. The argument against our way of educating is that it does not produce workers who are equipped to compete in the globalized economy, the economy of the future. This has to be as blunt a statement as could be made about the urgency, currently felt in some regions and credulously received and echoed everywhere, that we should put our young to this use, to promote competitive adequacy at a national level, to whose profit or benefit we are never told. There is no suggestion that the gifts they might bring to the world as individuals stimulated by broad access to knowledge have place or value in this future world, only that we should provide in place of education what would better be called training.
If all institutions feel this pressure in some degree, public institutions feel it most continuously and profoundly. A university like mine, founded almost one hundred seventy years ago, before Iowa would even have had much in the way of cornfields, gives unambiguous evidence of the kinds of hopes that lay behind its founding and sustained it through many generations. From an early point it emphasized the arts. It was founded while Emerson was active and at about the time Tocqueville was published, and can fairly be assumed to have shared their worldview. So with many or most public universities in America. Accepting creative work toward a graduate degree, the MFA as we know it now, was an innovation of the University of Iowa. My own program, the Writers’ Workshop, is the oldest thing of its kind on the planet. People do ask me from time to time why Iowa is in Iowa. For the same reason Bloomington is in Indiana, no doubt. If we were better pragmatists we would look at the fact that people given a relatively blank slate, the prairie, and a pool of public resources, however modest, are at least as desirous of the wonderful as of the profitable or necessary.
Atavism is a potent force in human history. There is the pull of the retrograde, an almost physical recoil, much more potent than mere backsliding, much more consequential than partial progress or flawed reform. The collective mind can find itself reinhabited by old ideas almost unconsciously, almost unwillingly. A word around which retrograde thinking is often constellated is elitist. Liberal education was for a very long time reserved to an elite, whence the word liberal, befitting free men, who were a small minority in Western societies. Gradually, except by the standards of the world at large, Americans began democratizing privilege. As Tocqueville remarks, heaven shares out by chance those high gifts of intellect and culture, which had previously been associated arbitrarily with status and advantage, and were now manifest as a vastly more generous endowment. We need only allow the spread of learning to see the brilliance potential in humankind.
But the memory persists that the arts were once social attainments and that the humanities suited one to a position of authority. What use could they be to ordinary people? What claim should anything of such doubtful utility have on the public purse? Or, to look at the matter from another side, why should an English class at the University of Wisconsin be as excellent as an English class at Stanford University, for a mere fraction of the cost? The talk we hear so often now about “top-tier universities,” about supposed “rankings,” creates an economics of scarcity in the midst of an astonishing abundance. And it helps to justify assaults on great public resources of the kind we have seen recently in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Public universities are stigmatized as elitist because they continue in the work of democratizing privilege, of opening the best thought and the highest art to anyone who wishes to have access to them. They are attacked as elitist because their tuition goes up as the supports they receive from government go down. The Citizen had a country, a community, children and grandchildren, even—a word we no longer hear—posterity. The Taxpayer has a 401(k). It is no mystery that one could be glad to endow monumental libraries, excellent laboratories, concert halls, arboretums, baseball fields, and the other simply can’t see the profit in it for himself.
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There is pressure to transform the public university so that less cost goes into it and more benefit comes out—as such things are reckoned in terms of contemporary economic thinking. That this economics could be so overbearingly sure of itself ought to be remarkable given recent history, but its voice is magnified in the void left by the default of other traditional centers of authority. In any case, whether and how we educate people is still a direct reflection of the degree of freedom we expect them to have, or want them to have. Since printing became well established in the West and the great usefulness of literacy began to be recognized, it has been as characteristic of cultures to withhold learning as to promote it. They have done both, selectively, and the effect of this kind of discrimination has been profound, persisting in the present, as it will certainly persist into the future. In most Western cultures the emergence of literacy in women lagged far behind literacy in men, and in many parts of the world it is still forbidden or discouraged, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that this disability in women radically slows economic development, among other things.
Western “progress” is arguably an uncertain road to happiness, I know. But insofar as Western civilization has made a value of freeing the mind by giving it ability and resources, it has been a wondrous phenomenon. Wherever its strong, skilled attention has fallen on the world, it has made some very interesting
errors, without doubt, and it has also revealed true splendors. In either case it has given us good reason to ponder the mind itself, the character of the human mind being so richly inscribed on the cultural experience of all of us, in the ways and degrees that we, as individual minds, are prepared to read its inscriptions.
“Insofar as.” American civilization assumes literacy, it saturates our lives with print. It also fails to make an important minority of its people competent in this skill most of us could not imagine living without. Old exclusions come down the generations—we all know that parents are the first teachers. Old injustices come down the generations—why bother to educate people who have no use for education, the hewers of wood and drawers of water? The argument was made that peasants, women, slaves, industrial workers would be happier knowing nothing about a world that would be closed to them in any case. Therefore for a very long time it was closed to them, since they could be assumed to be ignorant of it. In the degree that all this has changed, social equality and mobility have followed. Many traditional barriers are lower, if they have not yet fallen.
What exactly is the impetus behind the progressive change that has been simultaneous with the emergence of modern society? Our era could well be said to have had its origins in a dark age. The emergence of the factory system and mass production brought a degree of exploitation of human beings for which even feudalism had no equivalent. The severest possible cheapening of labor in early industry was supported by the same theories that drove colonialism and chattel slavery. The system yielded spectacular wealth, of course, islands of wealth based on extreme poverty and on the profounder impoverishments of slavery. Comparisons are made between slavery and so-called “free labor,” which seem always to imply that the second was more efficient than the first, therefore destined on economic grounds to become the dominant system, and to bring with it a general melioration of conditions. It is a very imprecise use of language to describe as “free” a labor force largely composed of children, who, on the testimony of Benjamin Disraeli among many others, could not and did not expect to live far beyond childhood. It is an imprecise use of language to call “free” the great class of laborers who had no rights even to shelter outside the parishes where they were born. The fact of social progress has been treated as demonstrating that laissez-faire works for us all, that the markets are not only wise but also benign, indeed humane. This argument is based on history that is effectively invented to serve it, and on a quasi-theology of economic determinism, a monotheism in that it cannot entertain the possibility or the suggestion that social circumstance can have any other origin than economics. Clever as we think we are, we are enacting again the strange—and epochal—tendency of Western civilization to impoverish.