Revolutions and Raptures Can’t be Digitalized
By Jim Sleeper – July 4, 2011
Asked recently to compare Harvard and Yale undergraduates, I quipped that a Harvard student studying the German sociologist Max Weber will ask, “What were his main points, and how will they help me when I’m Secretary of State or founder and CEO of Without-a-Tracebook?”
A Yale student, meanwhile, will come to class with a copy of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, heavily underlined and scribbled on, pondering its implications for something he or she witnessed the day before during a soulful walk in New Haven.
I was only joking; the caricatures are really just that, and Harvard-Yale rivalry interests no one outside those two colleges, and not even that many within them. But it is worth noting that Yale was founded, in 1701, to stop a Harvard based social-network from degrading the Puritans’ holy “errand into the wilderness” into a scramble toward “carnall lures,” in a society increasingly connected and flattened by commerce.
The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders insisted. It has abysses, and students need a faith that’s deep enough to plumb them, strong enough to face the demons in them, and bold enough to defy earthly “powers that be” at times in the name of a Higher one.
And now?
You don’t have to care for Puritan theology to be sorry that the old colleges have lost much of their spiritual and moral mission and its civic sequels — and, with that, the capacity they sometimes had to teach young leaders to temper republican Power-wielding and capitalist Wealth-making with humanist Truth-seeking.
Yes, they really did do that at times. And it mattered, not only at society’s margins but at its heart. What matters even more now is that the story of what has happened to that kind of teaching may never be told.
It can’t be tweeted or blogged, after all, and I’m not sure that it can still be sketched even in thoughtful journals, or that it still has any place at all in our tail-chasing, tail-spinning trade-book-publishing industry, which can’t produce profit-and-loss projections rosy enough to carry the Children of Internet across publishing’s own Red Sea.
But the real reasons for silence about colleges’ lost civic mission aren’t technological and economic. They’re political and cultural. We’re losing what every democratic or republican polity since ancient Athens has needed to curb power’s insidious, irresistible corruptions: a public that’s coherent and decisive enough to take well-founded warnings about its leadership training as wake-up calls. That’s how Americans eventually took the civil-rights movement, which opened the hearts of astonished Northern WASPs and Jews, in part because their forebears had made history of the same Exodus myth that Martin Luther King, Jr. was enacting in the 1960s.
Barack Obama touched the mystic chords of memory in 2008 for those who still had them and weren’t just cheering his campaign as an extended Michael Jackson performance. But Obama is beached in the White House now because Americans didn’t give him a Congress anyone can work with. And that’s because too many who voted for him have been too busy “connecting” to plumb the abysses of politics that yawn beneath our data points and “need-to-know” relationships and twittery, metrics-driven apercus.
The court of public opinion has disbanded. It has morphed into an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of consumer audiences, assembled and re-assembled not by writers or activists but by financiers and marketers on whatever ideological, religious, erotic, or nihilist pretexts might draw eyeballs and profits.
Sure, every canny politician has always operated a kaleidoscope of some sort. And, sure, the internet has liberated a thousand points of light and of noise from a ponderous thrall to the licensed pontificators of the past. But it probably won’t take long for the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure that every stake in new media — and hence in public discourse — is traded “publicly” (that is, privately) in markets committed only to bottom-lining and, with that, to dumbing-down and tarting-up news and opinion into products that bypass our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets.
The problem isn’t censors; it’s market sensors, groping and prodding us into impulse buying even before we can tweet about what’s happening to us, much less think about it.
In this widening gyre of casino financing, corporate welfare, and consumer marketing, more of us are networking more and more frenetically. Everyone is self-publishing, but no one is really reading what anyone else is writing. Who has the time – or the discipline? We bookmark whatever it is, RSS it, or pass it on unread (or only virtually read), to someone we hope will thank us for thinking of them. Or we link it or tweet it in exchange for someone else’s tweeter’s linking us.
The more frenetically we connect, the less we bring to the connection. And the less we find that’s connecting with us from the other end.
Apostles of this whirlwind assure us it’s sweeping away authoritarian and repressive hierarchies, stodgy conventions, and grandiloquent ideologies, and that each of us can soar above all that now. But sooner or later, every soaring Icarus discovers that “current events,” upheavals, and pop-cultural happenings are riding undercurrent events and yearnings that can be reckoned with only off-line.
So, how to tell the daily media monster that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom”? How contribute to a civic-republican story line that’s compelling enough to draw admirers and newcomers into a power that’s more cooperative than coercive, a civic-republican ethos that’s strong enough to deflect the demons riding the undercurrents of demagogy and plutocracy?
A few years ago, a gnawing hunger for story lines this good was driving young Americans to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings – spiritually deep story lines that teach courage and loyalty to friendship and a higher, common good in adversity. These began as literary creations, not corporate investments, because their individual creators were able to draw from mythic and religious wellsprings whose symbols were widely and intimately shared.
The creators of Harry and Lord tapped British cultural depths whose universal appeal had more staying power than American republican ones still do. “Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities,” warned John Dewey of America in the roaring 1920s, a decade whose widespread frenzy, disorientation, and loss that we’re recapitulating now.
What next, then? “All attempts to project and establish a cultus, with new rites and forms, seem to me in vain,” Emerson cautioned. “Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms.” He urged Americans to “do what we can to rekindle the smoldering, nigh-quenched fire on the altar.” But Emerson’s “ancient and honorable of the earth” have been swamped by the digital deluge, leaving web-surfers to mistake even real cracks of doom for virtual ones or for popguns.
The old colleges, and liberal education generally, were about meeting lasting challenges to politics and the spirit like this. They were about rousing the faint of heart. When their teaching was at its best (which was seldom, okay? and never for most of the students), they showed a saving remnant of young people how to live with an authorial voice or two or three, and to do so long and intimately enough to find guidance through those yawning abysses.
Some of the colleges also provided what anthropologists call “rites of passage” to adulthood — intense bonding experiences, in initiation rituals that expose students to danger and even to experiences of terror, rendered symbolically as well as physically, testing not only their personal courage and prowess but also their dedication to a community worth loving and defending across generations.
Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter dramatize such rites, but they can’t actually put readers and viewers through them. The communal depth and urgency of the real thing have to come from much closer to a young person’s home. But serious reading, inevitably both personal and communal, can help more than you might think.
“Literature does not deal in information or announcement,” notes the literary critic Michael Wood. “Literature is embodiment, a mode of action; it works over time, on the hearts and minds of its readers or hearers. Its result in us… is the activation of …. knowledge of others and ourselves; knowledge of stubborn, slippery or forgotten facts; knowledge of old and new possibilities…..”
Harvard’s Timothy Leary carried this a bit far in the 1960s by urging students to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” He meant to break up the casino-finance, consumer-marketing juggernaut. But so many people followed his advice so crudely and selfishly that they left the public square open to hustlers who turned their counterculture into the over-the-counter culture. The latter’s only doctrine is, “Connect,” and Harvard’s Mark Zuckerberg has made that command a virtual way of life.
A better answer, at least for undergraduates, might be: Log off, dig deep, and, only then, reach out. If you just twitter and data-point your way around the abyss, you’ll fall into it, with no coordinates or lifelines to shore. To avoid the emptiness of mere”connection,” learn to read as quietly and well as those students who marked up books that tapped wellsprings in the republic and the human heart.
A lot depends on a certain number of us doing it. A liberal capitalist republic always needs a decisive number of citizen-leaders, even if not a majority, who uphold public virtues and beliefs that establish a positive tone in public spaces and decision-making – virtues and beliefs that the liberal state itself and markets alone don’t nourish or defend.
Somehow, a liberal society has to train its public leaders and citizens all the more intensively. It can do it on Little League lots, in immigrant settlement houses, in inner-city church basements, in great state universities. But it has to know what it’s doing, and neither markets nor the state have enough wisdom or virtue to do it.
The mid-20th-century theologian-activist Reinhold Niebuhr read and wrote in ways he hoped would deepen the reckonings of citizen-leaders who read him. George Kennan, Henry Luce, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. did read him, King citing Niebuhr in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Even though I never shared his religious beliefs, I lived beneficially with Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society for almost a year in the early 1970s, marking up my copy on almost every page, absorbing his chastening criticisms of both Marxists and capitalists in the interwar years of the last century. A decade after I lived with Niebhur this way, Barack Obama did the same. (I reviewed John Patrick Diggins’ book, Why Niebuhr Now? in Bookforum in 2011.)
A liberal education encourages such reckonings as few other places do or can. But the corporations that universities have become are turning their campuses into career-networking centers and cultural gallerias for global managers accountable to no polity or moral code. Liberal education itself, struggling to survive in the widening gyre, is becoming a game of money, power, and public relations.
Conceding a little to this reality, I’ve compressed Niebuhr into 900 words in a review of the late John Patrick Diggins’ Why Niebuhr Now?, in Bookforum, which is a portal to many other books you can live with. Another that helped me in writing this little piece is Geoffrey Harpham’s The Humanities and the Dream of America.
But, btw: Please tweet and link this column to every person and website you know, so that I’ll have enough unique page views and mentions to stimulate a trade-market book contract good enough to let me tell you more. (You have just passed through JOKE, population 40 words….)