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I recently read a short book called Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. It was written in 2014, before the "Great Awokening" really became a topic that was a matter of public discussion. I was in university at that time and remember how stifling it often felt when there was an air of heightened political correctness that a bunch of people seemed to think was ridiculous but couldn't bring themselves to speak up about in any way. It was clearly a situation that could not continue for long. I think higher institutions could have done so much to avoid all the attacks they are experiencing nowadays if they just addressed these problems explicitly back then. But that's not what I aim to talk about in this essay, at least not directly. I want to focus on a particular passage from the book which I was struck by:
In a humanities culture in which being smart often means being a critical
unmasker, our students may become too good at showing how things don't make
sense. That very skill may diminish their capacity to find or create meaning and
direction in the books they read and the world in which they live. Once outside the
university, our students continue to score points by displaying the critical prowess
for which they were rewarded in school. They wind up contributing to a cultural climate
that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning, whose intellectuals and
cultural commentators delight in being able to show that somebody else is not to
be believed.
Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters
When people talk about how they hate things that are "woke," I think that at least some of the reason may be something like this process that Roth describes. It's not necessarily about the particular political opinions in this case, but about the attitude. I find that this attitude which Roth describes is not limited to the university. It has become the dominant mode in the entire western intellectual world: a cynical sort of raised eyebrow towards anything and everything.
Why might this be so? I believe that part of it is that we have a bias towards believing that negativity towards and criticism of the "powers that be" is always more "real" and "authentic." From a historical perspective, this makes sense. Dissent like this used to be violently suppressed. "Heretical" opinions from the medieval period are truly rare to see preserved in the historical record. Further, we know that negative opinions cause discord and can hurt people. So the assumption goes that, since negative and critical opinions are more prickly and sticky in daily life, it takes more courage and forthrightness to present them instead of empty niceties. There is some truth to that. And we should never stop being grateful of the freedoms we have to be negative and critical now.
If you think that I'm going to take the standard right-wing pundit move now and blame this all on the (((Frankfurt School))), you would be wrong. I think the anti-authority movements of the 1960s were essential and, in the end, healthy for the university and for intellectual life in the United States and elsewhere. But the error here is to believe that criticism and contrarianism is ITSELF noble. This is not the case. We have now gone too far in the opposite direction and created an intellectual environment where the only way to come across as intelligent and serious is to be critical and cynical. And the end result of that is the same as the conformist and suppressive environment of the early 20th century: an intellectual world devoid of all that is creative and free.
Director Terrence Malick apparently once said something to the effect that whenever
we express what is most important to us, it often comes out as a sort of cliche.
And I find that this is true as well. When I think about the most important
discoveries of my life, most of them can be summed up in tired cliches:
"Wherever you go, there you are."
"All good things must come to an end."
"There is nothing new under the sun."
"The grass is always greener on the other side."
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
"Above all things, to thy self be true."
Of course, these cliches sound remarkably trite and naive when simply put forward
as proclamations. It's more than being trite and naive. They are close to being
"empty" of meaning altogether! The term "thought-terminating cliche" is used to refer
to the way that cliches are meant to smother our ability to critically think. But
cliches are not inherently thought-terminating. It is rather that they only have sense
when they are internalized and realized in an authentic way of our own. Their meaning
can never be public.
Martin Heidegger described our daily life as one in which we are absorbed in the "They" of public life. He said that the "They" that we are in our public life is one in which everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. And I find that these bits of "cliche" knowledge are a good example of what he means. Whenever we realize something important, we have to do so in an authentic way. That is, we must do so in a way that makes it OUR OWN. And if we try to convey it to someone else, it will come across as a tired cliche. And they will laugh at us as being childlike and simple. We are afraid to think these cliches because we imagine everyone saying "DUH!" when we try to put them into words. As a result, we never come into contact with what is primordial.
We live in an environment where all creation and freedom in artistic and intellectual pursuits is immediately met with this sort of critical eye: a desire to suppress discoveries as hackneyed and played-out, so that we never get into touch with anything first and foremost, in an original and unmediated fashion. As I said, I do not think this instinct is always bad. When I see zoomers getting their mind "blown" by shit like Doki Doki Literature Club whose gimmicks have been old for decades, I think it's right to make fun of them a bit, lmao. But when we do not wield this critical eye carefully, we risk destroying all possibility not only of essential growth and change, but also of meaningful preservation of tradition and lore as well. And we have an environment where the only good is to one-up each other to be more provocatively critical.
This is all the more important at a university setting, as a liberal university is one of the last places in our society outside of religious institutions which genuinely is sustained by high ideals unrelated to money. Everyone asks "Why bother with a liberal arts education if it won't help me make money?," never thinking that the ability to study and encounter knowledge of the great cultural fruits of civilization is itself a privilege and essential part of becoming a human being. And the cynical instinct everyone has developed to merely laugh at this is disheartening. This is both due to a right wing which has called all university learning impractical gobbledygook (as if the only measure of value in life is something's ability to earn us money) and to a left wing which has labelled all civlizational "culture" mere oppressive power structures (as if we already knew everything essential and the materials we study are objects to "prove wrong" and "outsmart" rather than to learn from). It is no wonder that higher education is increasingly under attack, with all the associated ills that this brings.
For me then, I think that Roth is correct: To prove that higher education is valuable involves re-capturing a spirit of wonder and genuineness. Critique has gone from being a means to being an end. It involves a vision for something beyond endless critique, which is connected to society at large. I hope that my writing helps with this goal.