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The Arts of [a] Free People

Freshman welcome address, August 30, 2009

Well, here we go. The beginning of term is here, and everybody's gearing up for the semester to come. Welcome to Marlboro and the liberal arts.

There is a set speech to be given on liberal arts education. It is usually given by people who are asking for money in one way or another, and who thus portray the liberal arts as an endangered species that needs your immediate attention. It goes like this: a solid foundation in the liberal arts is absolutely crucial to students' success in the competitive job market -- no matter what profession they choose. A traditional, broad-based education teaches young people how to think, learn, generate new ideas and thus become thoughtful, informed citizens who can confront the rapidly evolving challenges of tomorrow with the intellectual vigor and creativity they develop today.

Does this sound familiar? These particular words come from a begging letter I recently received from a respectable society that supports liberal arts education. And why not? It's difficult to argue with the ideal of creating a thoughtful, informed citizenry of successful people.

But I'm going to try.

Let's start with the idea that a liberal arts education -- at Marlboro or elsewhere -- teaches you to think.

I recall myself at the age of perhaps 17 telling my violin teacher sanctimoniously that my schooling was teaching me to think -- and he, a fighter pilot in World War II, and a musician who had single-handedly created a first-rate music program at the school where he worked, raised one eyebrow and said "Teaching you to think, eh? About what?"

It's not just a cynical question. Telling you I'm going to teach you how to think sidesteps the very issue of "about what." It allows me, as a purveyor of liberal arts, to avoid standing squarely before you and say "this is what an educated person needs to know." Many years ago, college professors had few doubts about what educated people needed to know. Then came the revolution of the 60s and 70s, and the issue of what people should know and what people should know it became a very difficult and political issue.

Some of the consequences were great. After years of being ignored, women and minorities were suddenly discovered to have had a voice in American history and culture.

But some consequences were less salutary. One of these was a loss of confidence in the idea that there were some things everybody knew or should know. You are, through no fault of your own, the product of that lack of confidence, because during the past 40 years it has trickled down from colleges to high schools. In a burst of political correctness, high schools have included or excluded books and ideas more or less at random, according to the received opinions of the state or the school board. What has been lost is "common knowledge" that the teachers who taught my college freshman class could count on - before that class became involved in the Revolution.

To demonstrate what I mean, I'm going to ask you some basic questions about what you've read and what you know, and if you've read it or know it - more or less - stick up a paw. Don't worry, I won't call on you. Just look around you at the paws as they go up.

Who here has read the first three books of the Old Testament? Who here has read the Gospels all the way through? Who here has read parts of the Koran? Who here knows why John Brown was executed? Who knows who Confucius was? Who here knows the story of spider woman? Who here knows the story of Daedalus and Icarus? Who here knows what century Bruegel painted in? Who here has read The Merchant of Venice? Julius Caesar? Macbeth? Who here knows who Werner Heisenberg was? If you don't know this last, stay tuned. In a strange sort of way, he has something to do with the question that you'll be wrestling with on the writing placement exam tomorrow. One more question: Who here has read Harry Potter?

My point here is not to expose your ignorance, but to show that the uncertainty about what to teach and what not to teach has led to a generation of students whose common knowledge is determined not by their formal education but by the popular market.

And yet, during all the ‘70's, ‘80s and ‘90s - the years during which the teachers of my generation have taught -- the argument over the Canon, the curriculum, became so destructive that gradually, respectable liberal arts societies like the one whose begging letter I quoted earlier shied away from the "about what?" question entirely and put an emphasis on "learning to think."

This is a major cop out. Real, productive thought needs to be based in knowledge that informs intellectual and moral understanding. Without knowledge, there's only opinion. Without intellectual and moral understanding, legal and political judgment becomes only a comparison of opinions -- one talking head supporting evolution, one talking head supporting intelligent design, concluding with "there is much to be said on both sides - that's what democracy is." If this is what the "liberal" in liberal arts has come to mean, liberal arts education deserves to become extinct.

We can do better than this, but only if we get beyond the thesis of the set speech and examine its premise. The thesis, you remember, is that a liberal arts education, by encouraging students to study a little of this and a little of that, leads them to success in the post-college marketplace. The premise is that the primary purpose of education is to make students competitive in today's market. We're talking, of course, not of the local farmers' market, but the competitive international workplace. The set speech, in other words, presupposes market-based ideas of success, in which the best-educated workers are positioned to compete well and become rich, and in which poorly educated people are uncompetitive - and thus by definition, unsuccessful and not rich.

You may not agree with this premise, but your educations have been deeply affected by it. You've grown up in a society that rewards successful schools with computers, athletic fields, and free Coke machines, and punishes unsuccessful schools by closing them. Both success and failure are measured in terms of test scores. And so you have been extensively tested -- CATs, SATs, MCAS - by teachers whose jobs increasingly depend upon their skills as test-prep technicians. In other words, before you've even gotten to the workplace, you have been footsoldiers in the great American march towards success - or casualties whose statistical failures suggest either that there's something wrong with you, or that your school does not deserve further investment.

The set speech, by saying that a liberal arts education is BETTER than technical or business training at preparing you to succeed in today's competitive job market, buys right into this model, instead of pointing out that the corporate ethic has led directly to the Great Recession, indirectly to continuing educational travesty, and culturally to woefully inadequate assumptions about civic responsibility.

Yet the corporate model is so deeply ingrained in American cultural assumptions that colleges themselves are affected by it. Consider the flood of college fliers you got when you took SATs. Behind the attractive photographs and tempting words there lies the unspoken assumption that a college is a corporation whose job is to turn out a product -- you -- and also to advertise itself in such a way that more customers -- also you -- are attracted to it. Since its customers pay more and more to become products, and because the number of 18-year-olds is dwindling, the market for students has become ... you got it, competitive. As your heap of fliers attests, liberal arts schools -- as corporations -- do not see themselves as colleagues, or brothers and sisters in a common quest for knowledge and understanding that makes informed citizens. They see each other as competitors. And when they are confronted by public disillusionment with education generally, they assume that the problem must be a lack of advertising.

Hence the begging letter from my prestigious society, with its set speech - which, as it turns out, plays into the very hands that are wringing the neck of the vigorous intellectual independence it wants its members to support.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing with the idea that you're going to need a job after you graduate from Marlboro. And I'm not arguing with the idea that a college, in addition to providing the venue in which liberal education can happen, is a corporation that needs to be well administered. But I am saying that if you want a liberal arts education, as opposed to a continuation of (choose one) wishy-washy liberalism, training for corporate success, or four subsidized years of indecisive wandering from one course to another - you've got to envision it independent of its current cultural accretions.

Many years ago -- 1000 years, give or take a century or two -- the liberal arts evolved in a context very different from ours. There were seven of them. First were the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which were taught to boys aged eight through sixteen. The grammar was Latin grammar, because Latin was the one language common to all Europeans and thus the language of the church and of politics. At the next and more advanced stage, students added to these studies the quadrivium, which consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Knowledge of these studies was called liberal because these were the artes liberales -- the arts of free men. Opposing them were the artes mechanicae, the arts (taught chiefly in apprenticeships) appropriate to men Shakespeare called "rude mechanicals" -- artisans, craftsman, tradespeople. Below that social level, there was no education at all; for the only arts deemed necessary, besides a capacity for unceasing physical labor, were deference and obedience.

Thus for many centuries, the liberal arts reflected the basic preindustrial social division between men who worked with their hands -- in a world in which everything was made by hand -- and those who did not. The second group -- the aristocrats, the gentlemen -- were assumed to be free of the necessity of earning a living, because they had inherited land, and with it, substantial rent rolls. The same situation obtained in the church; a living was a house and a quantity of land that went with a pastoral position. The class of men who were free in this sense formed the pinnacle of a society in which 2-3% of all families owned or controlled 90% of the land. From about 1000 on until WWI, its members ruled Europe from Lithuania to the Black Sea to the rock of Gibraltar, and from the fifteenth century on, they had in common the experience of the curriculum of the Liberal Arts.

Of the many possible reactions to this scheme of things, I would like you to consider two. The first is to reject this whole model of education as elitist -- and then, with a sleight of hand, to reject all serious, educated thought as elitist. This kind of anti-intellectualism is as much a part of the American mindset as the ideal of the cowboy, with which it is occasionally allied. You have probably encountered it in one form or another. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that you've paid for the decent grades that got you into Marlboro with a certain amount of social ostracism - and if you have, you know that anti-intellectualism is a powerful social force.

The second reaction to the old model of the liberal arts education is to admit that it reflects the values of the elite it originally supported, but also to note that at its best, it has striven to inculcate in that elite the values of responsible leadership: knowledge, judgment, reflection, invention, compassion, courage. This is the reaction of the group identified in European history books as the intelligentsia. In some cases, members of the intelligentsia are also members of the government or the church. But not always. Some of them, having identified the abuse of power in countries whose leaders are repressive and corrupt, have become dissidents. They have turned their grammar, logic, and rhetoric into tools that allow them to speak truth to power, at the expense of their own comfort and safety. They have written books like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich, or Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless, exposing the horrors of the repressive state, or encouraging millions of repressed people to retain privately the freedom of thought that fear of reprisal has stolen from them. This kind of courageous endeavor does not go over well with the powers to which truth is spoken. Solzhenitsyn and Havel spent a lot of time in prison; more recently, the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot in front of her apartment building in retaliation for her exposés of the corruption of the Putin regime.

There is, in other words, a powerful tradition that uses the millennium-old idea of the artes liberales to redefine freedom. This tradition offers the values of knowledge, judgment, reflection, invention, compassion, courage, with all their dangers, to liberally educated men and women of every race and class. Seen in this context, a liberal arts education provides the basis of creative thought, artistic inquiry, and social and political responsibility.

Because of the power of anti-elitist thought in the American democratic tradition, the intelligentsia in this country is rarely called by its name, but it has a long history. Many of the artists and writers you read about in A Chance Meeting were members of it; their overlapping acquaintanceships give you a sense of an intellectual "circle." And the intelligentsia is active today. If you want intellectual circles, look into the group of people surrounding The New York Review of Books, the group further to the left that surrounds The Nation, the group further to the right that surrounds The Atlantic. Many members of the current intelligentsia have been driven to dissent by the policies of the Bush era. The name you know best is Michael Moore, but there are plenty of others: Seymour Hersh, Wendell Berry, Paul Krugman, and Michael Polan (the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma).

What all these people have in common, whether they are dissident or not, is the way they fit rather oddly into the American scene. In a culture that salivates over celebrity, they aren't celebrated. In a world where the New York Times Sunday Book Review sustains corporate publishing by reviewing the books in which individual editors have invested most heavily, they direct readers to books of social and artistic import that will never make their authors or publishers rich. People of this sort use a variety of techniques -- investigative reporting, photojournalism, documentary films -- to provide a busy public with information on stem cell research, solar energy, sustainability. They offer creative works that are truly forward-looking and original, not just trendy.

What I hope is that the liberal arts education you construct for yourself at Marlboro opens you to these un-media-blitz values -- that it develops your ears for a quiet voice, that it teaches you to recognize and construct a reasoned argument. Above all I hope that you will design your education here so that it teaches you what an educated person needs to know: which is, simply put, everything, good and bad, that the men and women who have lived before you have learned. It's that simple, and that vast. You need to know what people in the past have done and thought; you need to know what they've discovered about the world and its place in the universe; you need to know what they've created. And you need to know not just what they thought, but how. In learning that, you'll gradually learn how you think, what your talents are, and what your role is in the society around you. This kind of education takes time, and you have time. Not enough time to learn all you need to know -- the education of a free person does not end with the acquisition of the diploma. But you do have before you a succession of years in which to put together the knowledge that will inform your mind and create a habit of thought that will give you access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind.

That means, among other things, that you will be doing a great deal of reading. When I say "reading" I mean more than sitting there and studying the damn text so you can pass a test on it. When you really read a text, you bring to it a willingness to understand, as exactly as you can, what it means, as opposed to what you would like it to mean, or what other people say it means. You must also develop an understanding of metaphor, because it has been through metaphors and stories that people have historically worked out their ideas of human psychology.

Let me give you an example. Once upon a time, a dog was trotting down the road with the big meaty bone in his teeth. To get back to his home, he had to cross a bridge, and in the middle of the bridge he looked down into the water -- and there was a dog with a bone in his mouth. "Wow," said the dog. "If I could make that dog give me his bone, I'd have two bones. What a treat!" So he leaned over the side of bridge and snapped at the dog below him. As he did so, the bone in his mouth fell into the water and was lost.

How many of you know the story?

If you encountered it when you were a kid, you probably more or less got the point: the dumb dog didn't even recognize his own reflection, and he deserved to lose the bone. But if you think a little more deeply about this story -- that is, if you really read it, with the knowledge that often writers imply more than they can say -- you find yourself reading a story about greed. And what it says -- or at least what it implies -- is that what makes people greedy is not the reality of getting what they desire, but the illusion of it. That's an extremely perceptive understanding of people who can somehow never have enough.

There is another way you can read it -- fables are so short and so flexible that they usually can be read in several different ways. Think about shadow and substance. The dog has a bone: substance. The dog sees another dog with a bone: shadow. Maybe we're talking about more than greed. Maybe we're talking about not knowing illusion from reality, fiction from fact. In some way we are talking about the effects of not understanding what we see, of being taken in by an unwarranted assumption.

As you read more and read more deeply, you're going to find out that it is more difficult to tell illusion from reality than you might think. How do you know what is true and what isn't? That's an important question, because one of your jobs as free people who labor with their minds is to examine ideas that other people have thought meshed perfectly, but you recognize as mutually contradictory. The example you are most familiar with, probably, is the one of Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, the founder of the University of Virginia, the man who in many ways embodies all the virtues that a liberal arts education seeks to inculcate in its recipients -- including a greatness of soul that often informs his writing. And yet, this passionate believer in democracy owned slaves, and like many other slaveholders, he had a slave mistress who bore him children -- all of whom remained enslaved.

Now we have to do more than read: we have to try to understand a state of mind that couldn't see that democracy and slavery were mutually contradictory. Or did see, but did nothing about it. Or... it's time to do some research, to find out how this complex man lived and thought. To dismiss Jefferson with "Well, he had his idea of democracy, and I have mine," is to fall into talking-head comparison of opinions. To condemn his values so roundly that we condemn the whole man is to wipe out a substantial American inheritance. Better to study the contradiction and realize that it reflects a much greater contradiction in American history.

There are always contradictions. The one that has affected your education is the identification of capitalism with democracy -- the commonly held belief either that they are identical, or that the first supports the second. This contradiction is, in its way, much easier to explain than the one in the complex mind of Thomas Jefferson. During the Cold War, faced with the possibility of nuclear extinction, Americans of my generation were conditioned to see Communism as the great enemy of democracy. One result of this cast of mind, as you have read in Cohen's book, was that W. E. B. Du Bois, the towering dissident of the American intelligentsia, died in exile. On a lower level, however, what got lost in this opposition was that communism was an economic system, and democracy was a political system. Another thing that got lost was a difference between free speech and free enterprise. The thinking went more or less like this: capitalism is better for everybody than communism, democracy is better than communism; and therefore capitalism is democratic. (That's called a false syllogism.)

But to continue: despite the dissent that brought about the civil rights movement, and despite the dissent that finally forced the end of the Vietnam War, the free market remained associated with democracy. Then in 1989 the Berlin wall fell, and shortly after that, the Soviet Union dissolved. And somehow, amidst the general rejoicing, the idea grew up -- closely examined only by a few outspoken intellectuals -- that the fall of the Soviet Union was a triumph for democratic capitalism. Only a few people pointed out that democracy, which depends upon equality, and industrial capitalism, which has historically led to social inequality and economic exploitation, were not identical. Were in fact at odds with each other.

One of the results of this confusion is that in the name of democracy, capitalism has been allowed to proceed unrestricted. And as might be expected, a tremendous disparity of income has developed in America since the Berlin wall fell. In the year I was born, right after the end of World War II, the lowest fifth of the American population made about $18,000 a year, the second highest fifth made about $40,000 a year, and the upper 5% made a little over $60,000 a year -- on average, of course, and in today's dollars. That's a spread of $42,000, discounting the fortunes of a few millionaires.

In 2007, before the crash, the lowest fifth of the American population made about $25,000 a year, and the second and third fifths earned $45,000 and $55,000 respectively. But then we get to the fourth fifth, and we find that the average income is about $110,000 a year. That's already about double the income disparity of my childhood, but hold onto your hats. The top 5% of the population has an average income of almost $200,000 a year. And as for the top .01%, it consists of nearly 15,000 families, each of which makes at least $11.5 million a year. And according to a recent article by Emmanuel Saez, this tiny fraction of the population received 65% of the income growth of the Bush era.

What that means is that the social structure in which you are receiving a liberal arts education looks an awful lot like the social structure in which the artes liberales were invented. These enormously rich people buy submarines as a toy of choice -- everybody has private jets these days -- the way aristocrats bought gold-plated armor, castles and chateaux; the contrast between their gated mansions and the houses of people who can't pay their mortgages is familiar to anyone who has studied history. The old aristocracy fought in tournaments and went on Crusades; the new plutocracy fights for success in the global economy and profits from war in Iraq. It is gradually seeping into public discourse that their amazing wealth allows them control over elections, lobbyists, Senators and Congressmen. This kind of control is not democratic.

The real disparity I'm talking about here is less the disparity of incomes than the disparity between shadow (the kind of society we assume we live in) and substance (the society we actually live in). When substance and shadow conflict with each as severely as these do, there is always a substantial chance of violent confrontation. The only other alternative, besides simply giving in, is a great deal of reasoned, respectful discussion. To engage in this kind of discussion you need to develop not just the skills of grammar and rhetoric, but great skills of observation.

The idea of observation leads to Werner Heisenberg -- I told you he would be coming back later. The man himself is an interesting study -- a brilliant nuclear physicist who played the piano and loved classical music and who was one of the nine physicists involved in the third Reich's attempts to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. But in 1927, before he became thus engaged, he made an observation that permanently separated quantum mechanics from classical physics.

What he discovered was that you can observe either the exact position of a given subatomic particle or the trajectory of its movement, but not both. The process of measuring the trajectory slows the particle down; irradiation enables you to see where it was at a given time, but it knocks the particle off its course. This observation forms the basis of what's called the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle -- and what it proved, among other things, was that scientists were not passive observers or objective chroniclers of what they observed, but participants whose very observation affected and distorted the phenomena they described.

Think about this for a moment. The observer necessarily plays a role in the observed. Once you've considered your first piano recital, or the basketball game you played when a recruitment coach was watching, you will find that the idea is not totally foreign to your experience. But it was foreign to scientific method, which for years had assumed objective observation and reporting was at the core of scientific truth. And in the humanities, which increasingly after World War II had been concerned to be "scientific," it was a real shock.

Out of this shock (and I am oversimplifying here for the sake of brevity) came such ideas as:

the reader of a book has as active a role in determining its meaning as its author does,

and

historians' attempts to be objective are hopeless, because it is impossible to know and to chronicle the whole past -- so all history writing is in its way a distortion.

To a certain extent, these ideas were a necessary break from the intellectual constipation of previous specialized scholarship, and they have a point. All you have to do is go back to the first volume of Harry Potter to realize that you never read the same book twice. And you don't have to progress very far with writing a memoir before you hit a fine line between point of view and distortion. If, for example, you wish to present a succession of conversations as one conversation, are you lying?

These ideas are fun to play with, but the trouble was that in the hands of the most dedicated postmodernists, the playing moved more and more out of the realm of substance and into the realm of shadow. For example, let's suppose five of us see an accident. We are witnesses. A postmodern cop comes around and asks us what we've seen. Having carefully listened to all of us, he concludes that there was no accident, just our stories about it. Try that idea on a substantial Vermont cop, and see how far it gets you.

The most extreme postmodern discourse is now out of fashion, but of course it has affected various modes of thought, as it should. And that brings us -- at last, at last! -- to Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting. Now, what she is doing is really interesting. She is investigating borders -- gender borders (many of the artists here are gay), racial borders, artistic borders. And in her investigation, she is using a genre that is itself as much a cross as the cross on the cover. It's called literary biography, and it is created by crossing the techniques of novelists with those of historians.

The cross is possible partly because twenty years ago, some historians -- quite distinguished historians, as a matter of fact -- became so impressed with the difficulty of being objective observers that they tried to insert illustrative fictional examples and details into their history. What emerged, among other things, was that scholarly historians didn't know beans about writing fiction. Rachel Cohen reverses the situation. She is not a scholar -- she relies more heavily on secondary sources than trained historians do. But she has been well schooled in the use of detail, so the invention with which she embellishes biography reads convincingly.

As a well-trained writer, Cohen makes the form of her book follow its function. That is, as well as chronicling encounters that reached across various borders, she is constantly stepping back and forth between biography (which a reader assumes to be as factual as possible) and fiction (which a reader assumes not to be factual). Her technique implies that she does not think there is a difference in kind between the border of, say, photography and literature, or black people and white people -- and the border between truth and fiction. Is there ? If so, what is the difference? What are the ethical issues behind her tacit assumption that the difference between shadow and substance doesn't matter, so long as you tell a good story? These are serious questions, and I hope you will consider them seriously tonight in your discussions.

For right now, it's time for lunch, and then time to embark upon your educations. As I reach out to bless your endeavors, I have three pieces of advice.

The first one is, if you see a dog stopped on a bridge with a bone in his mouth, explain to him as best you can that shadow and substance are not one.

The second one is, when you sit down to study and all your habits of test preparation come flooding back, raise your fist and say, "I am NOT a customer! I am NOT a product! Down with test-score indoctrination! Up with knowledge and understanding!" And set yourself the task of really reading.

And finally, if someone tells you that your liberal education at Marlboro is preparing you to be successful in the world of democratic capitalism... well, your answer should probably depend on who does the telling. If it's your parents, or whoever else is paying the bills, you should engage them in such exquisitely reasoned discourse that they realize you're into something higher. But if you receive a begging letter that asks you to support liberal arts education because it offers a road to social advancement and success in the great global economy, throw it in the waste basket and say, "up yours."