October's Blog_Life-long Learners: The Degree of our Disquiet is the Measure of our Merit.

So what is the role and purpose of education? Why are our universities so all-fired committed to the liberal arts, which would have us, already through the diversity of our course subjects and readings, at least encounter if not “experience” the almost infinite layers of existential possibility reflected in the World of Storybook?

            The question is of interest, because journalists who specialize in education, and many times even the teachers themselves, often seem to miss the point of education in the democratic process. I recently slammed [25.09.13] an article that was trying to make the case that there is in America a toxic culture of testing; my criticism was that the writer entirely misses the point of education when she writes that, [Our] "ultimate goal is to help children live up to their potential to become happy adults who make positive contributions to society." Her point is of course all claptrap and nonsense... because while the discovery of "happiness" may be in fact the goal of the study of philosophy or perhaps even of religion, it is absolutely not the goal of education per se.

            It has been well said of education, and particularly in our undergraduate universities, that it is “the job of teachers to create productive discomfort—and to help young adults gain comfort with ambiguity.” This, I would contend, is the truest goal of the university education, both in the smaller as in the larger picture. Our education should in fact serve to alienate us from our foundational myths in the greater Culture that surrounds us, instead of trying to affirm our place in those myths in that Culture. This is the nature of fundamental ambiguity, of the equivocality that reaches through all the strata of our onion-layered self-life.

            This was also the conclusion yielded by some of the more perceptive analyses of the Canon Wars. On the one hand, the National Association of Scholars has made the case that the Western Canon of books was created to preserve “the Western intellectual heritage”; more thoughtful minds, however, such as Mark Lilla, historian of ideas at Columbia University, have made the better case that “‘the canon itself isn’t a case for book camp and becoming a citizen in the West […] Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is ‘the most alienating experience possible. When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.’”

            On this reading, what makes “greatness” in a book, and what makes that particular book worth studying, is not that it reaffirms us in our narrative “being” (e.g., being-American, being-African American, being-Woman, etc.), but rather that such a book challenges the very parameters of our cultural being, thereby serving to alienate us from our mytho-cultural foundations, from the narrative “being/s” with which we identify. By alienating us, by making us the Outsiders or Strangers in our own cultural narrative, studying and learning works of greatness drives us forward on the path away from the psychological and intellectual comfort of our informing narrative, and toward more universal possibilities for expressing ourselves in the existentiality of our here-and-now. Learning and education are two prongs of a Sartrean “situation”; and we can rethink and continually rework both in order to make them more nearly correspond to our idea(l)s and needs.

Miscellaneous models of malaise with respect to the life of the mind. Perhaps the most disturbing model for intellectual malaise is the breakdown of the I-You relationship typified by the Cassandra Complex, a syndrome described by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). If we recast the Cassandra story in terms of the classroom, the clear moral-of-the-story would be that Cassandra, the teacher, although speaking about things truthfully and relevantly, can no longer be “heard” by the audience (students). This model in education disturbs precisely because it describes the final worthlessness of speaking truthfully (about anything and everything) in our classrooms, thereby portending the death-through-irrelevance both of teaching, and of the greater life of the mind in general.

            Significant parts of Cassandra’s story are contained in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (circa lines 1140). A priestess who was enabled to foretell the future through the prophetic gift, Cassandra scorned the advances made to her by the god of that gift, Apollo. It could have been well said that “hell hath no ‘fury like a god scorned,’” but Congreve (1670-1729) was otherwise inspired at the moment. According to Aeschylus the Olympian Apollo did not take the scorning very well, but apparently nor do women if Congreve be believed, so Apollo placed a curse on her: she keeps the power of foresight afforded by the prophetic gift, but no one believes her predictions—her audience cannot hear her.

            Cassandra prophetically foresees the destruction of Troy, even announcing the equine gift of the Greeks (the famous Trojan Horse); she foresees the death of her brother, the Trojan Hector; and, taken captive at war’s end by Agamemnon, great king of the Greeks, and led back to his home, she informs Agamemnon –but to no avail, that his wife has been preparing a rather pointed welcome for his return (remember that Clytemnestra, together with her lover, Aegisthus, slays Agamemnon with a knife in his bath). Everyone eventually dies miserably. Ouf—and welcome to the world of Greek tragedy.

Other models for malaise in thinking and perceiving might be derived from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This lovely comedy is woven through and through with farcical threads, of course, but the framework for the comedic action is composed of the classic elements of mis-take, mis-information, and mis-identification. If we transfer the Titania (Queen of the Fairies) “situation” to the classroom, for example, we discover a situation in which the student, in this metaphor Titania, is deliberately tricked/deceived by Oberon (King of the Fairies), i.e., the teacher. Is it possible, following out the implications of this metaphor, that We the People, in the form of students in public education, are being deceived by our schools? To what end? And, what exactly would be the form of the deception being practiced, and what the content of the deceit?

            In the original Shakespeare telling there is Titania, Oberon’s queen, who is deliberately deceived by her Lord…  Oberon explains his purpose and plan in soliloquy:

OBERON

Having once this juice,
I'll watch Titania when she is asleep,
And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.
The next thing then she waking looks upon,
Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape,
She shall pursue it with the soul of love:
And ere I take this charm from off her sight,
As I can take it with another herb,
I'll make her render up her page to me.

Another instance of con- & per-ceptual malaise in the play comes about when Puck, who understands Oberon’s purpose, actually mis-takes the players and thus anoints the wrong set of eyes.

OBERON

What hast thou done? thou hast mistaken quite
And laid the love-juice on some true-love's sight:
Of thy misprision must perforce ensue
Some true love turn'd and not a false turn'd true.

PUCK

Then fate o'er-rules, that, one man holding troth,
A million fail, confounding oath on oath.

And this first mis-take yields a second mis-take and malaise… where Oberon, when he does not see the expected results of his planned trumpery, believes Puck has been negligent or deliberately wayward.

OBERON

This is thy negligence: still thou mistakest,
Or else committ'st thy knaveries wilfully.

PUCK

Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook.
Did not you tell me I should know the man
By the Athenian garment be had on?
And so far blameless proves my enterprise,
That I have 'nointed an Athenian's eyes;

Yet another model for malaise associated with knowledge or understanding might be derived from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear’s malaise is that of a man, a king, who has had all the advantages of being a good king through long years; who has successfully raised up and married off two of his three daughters; but then, in the winter of his life, Lear does something irredeemably stupid—he asks a type of question that most children already know is laden with foolishness, which is to ask his daughters how much they love their father. The first two daughters answer with exaggeration because they stand to inherit great wealth and lands; the youngest, Cordelia, refuses hyperbole and answers the naked truth:

CORDELIA

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.

It would seem, however, that this once worthy man and king is no longer in the way to understand correctly anything of his situation – either to appreciate that his question to his daughters is inappropriate, because it is not “meet” or fitting to ask such questions publically when there is the possibility of great advantage in the balance, or to recognize that the “bond” of the daughter to love her father is entirely “meet,” which a father must not then tempt into public transgression by invitation to hyperbole.

            In this metaphor of malaise, Lear represents the individual or citizen who has had all the benefits that accrue to one through life-long participation in one’s society, but who, moved by some fatal impulse of whimsicality and irrationality, decides to reject and then to act despite every bit of collective wisdom and interpersonal insight accumulated through a long experience of the world.

            Lear’s situation could also perhaps be considered a type of Ted Cruz moment, manifest in the spiteful hypocrisy so apparent in one who has had all the advantages a society can offer, has arrived at a certain level of affluence, but who then actively works to keep others from accessing similar advantages. Nevertheless, the model of malaise suggested by Shakespeare’s Lear is a little more challenging for me to understand and to accept than the straightforward hypocrisy of a Ted Cruz; for short of explaining the actions of this king through some type of mental illness, which makes it simpler to interpret the play in and to the modern reader, this interpretation clearly detracts from the tragic action of the drama, and renders the play entirely less dramatic in the sense of men acting in their world. Shakespeare’s Lear seems to represent the thoroughly Modern Everyman in the irrationality of his approach to his existential “situation.”

KING LEAR

Doth any here know me? This is not Lear:
Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied--Ha! waking? 'tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?

A final interpretative difficulty in this most modern of Shakespeare’s plays is that Lear seems to be less motivated by some comprehensible and realistic ideology or design, with which I may disagree although I can understand it, than simply by a meanness of spirit, which I neither understand nor sanction. It is in this respect that Lear most seems to be the precursor or archetype for our modern Ted Cruz (different article).

There are yet two nobler examples of intellectual malaise in King Lear, the first of which is represented by the Fool, and the second, by Edgar disguised as a mad man, Tom o’Bedlam, who will take on a second fool’s roll, the Cassandra roll, in an attempt to counter Lear’s folly, to reason the old king back onto more sensible thoroughfares.  This mad man plays the roll of a modern Socrates – the “noble philosopher” who continues to speak the truth to the foolhardy Lear who, although still careening along the byways of his folly, is yet beginning to slow down and to re(dis)cover his senses.

KING LEAR

Dost thou call me fool, boy?

Fool

All thy other titles thou hast given away; that
thou wast born with.

When we rub up against greatness in the course of our education, the friction from that encounter should make of us Outsiders to our thought-world, the Rejected, the Alienated, Strangers. As we have seen, such Strangers are known to us from our readings in literature and philosophy, and even the New Testament writer of the Letter to the Hebrews (Ch.13:2) encourages his readers not to neglect “to show hospitality to Strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.” In our current lived-world, one variation of these Strangers would perhaps be translated by the modern Truth-tellers and Whistle-blowers, by those “Fools” who tell truths some do not wish to be trafficked in the public arena.

In his novel Creole Belle, James Lee Burke (pp. 524-525) was kind enough to provide the summary of our reflection:

Is there any worse curse than approval? Have you ever learned anything new from people who accept the world as it is? The bravest individuals I have ever known appear out of nowhere and perform heroic deeds we normally associate with paratroopers, but they’re so nondescript that we can’t remember what they look like after they have left the room. […] Regardless, it’s a fine thing to belong to a private club based on rejection and difference. I’ll go a step further. I believe excoriation is the true measure of our merit.

What if this is true, that excoriation is the real measure of merit for the thoughtful mind –the educated mind? It would sure explain why there are so many unworthy, “Cruz-ean”-type voices screeching against our tympana, while so many excellent voices, abraded and discarded, go unattended.