The Graves of Academe, Richard Mitchell [top books to read TXT] 📗

“fun and games” that might be deplored for its own sake. It is permanent and deadly serious. Sometimes, it is simply deadly:

The Royko Papers

When you talked us in your paper you called us barbarians. It is even more rude than when you call us delinquents. You cant compare us to 50 years ago because we dont wear knickers’ and deliver newspapers. All you Old Farts are the same. At Cominsky Park we were just expressing our feelings about disco, because disco sucks. If you write another column like that you will have to answer to me in person.

A letter to Mike Royko from a high school student

I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer [Eichmann] that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer…was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness_…_ Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove a villain,” not a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?

Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind

Mike Royko is a columnist at the Sun-_Times_ of Chicago. His essays appear in many newspapers throughout the country, thank goodness, for he has the habit of clear language and thought. Mike Royko wrote a column about those eleven people who were trampled to death at a rock concert in Cincinnati. He suggested, by no means injudiciously, that “those who would climb over broken bodies to reach a seat in an auditorium could be called ‘the new barbarians.’ ” That suggestion must have seemed less than humanistic and perhaps even somewhat un-self-esteem-enhancing to a certain Robert Maszak, a teacher of English at Bloom Township in Chicago Heights. Maszak, probably remembering his training in the teacher academy, seized for his students this marvelous opportunity for a relevant and experiential exercise in the integration of self-awareness aspects and the clarification of values. He had them all write letters telling Royko where to head in, and proving, since they could write, that some teenagers were not barbarians. In fact, they couldn’t, and they are.

Royko, to be sure, had said nothing about teenagers—or about the worth of rock music, which was stridently championed in many of the letters. Maszak, however, may well be a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, and thus both a proponent and a practitioner of “holistic” reading, in which the reader must scrupulously refuse to consider what the writer actually says, a mere “aspect” of writing.

Maszak may also be a holistic grader, for he was not reluctant to display the fruits of his teaching, which look like this:

Dear Tenage hater I was disapointed by what you writen on the Who concert. From what you said I can see you have know so called barbarism. You used some strong words in there with very little fact, you say everyone was numbed in the brain. I will say from concert experience maybe half or three forties were high on something or nether but I allso know that theres not one forth to half that weren’t. You say everyone was pushing and throwing elbows, did you ever think that some of the thrown elbows were from people who didn’t like getting pushed. You said something about when you were a kid, well times have change…

Yes. The times indeed have change. Well, let’s try to be holistic. Let’s ignore failures of technique and, as we were instructed in last month’s quotation from ETS, concentrate on “what the student has accomplished rather than on what the student has failed to do or has done badly.” Let’s remember as well the aggrieved whimpers of the educationists who beseech us to believe that skill in writing is obviously, while useful, much less important than humanistic things like the encouragement of self-expression, the enhancement of self-esteem, and the clarification of values.

Now we can understand why Maszak was untroubled by such a piece of work. It is, in fact, a testimony to the triumph of educationism over education. That poor student, not a villain but a victim, has indeed expressed nothing more than himself_._ His esteem for that forlorn and meager self is firm and truculent. And his values are perfectly clear.

Perfectly clear, too, are the values of the few students who actually mentioned Royko’s topic, the death of eleven people. One saw it as a perfectly expectable concomitant of everybody’s inalienable right to have what he wants when he wants it. Here’s his clarification of values:

If there were someone yer looked up to and yer went to see them in person and thier were thousands of peopl just like you and wanted to see him up close would you fight yer way in?

Another shows an even keener sense of values; he gives us the very numbers by which we can reconcile ourselves to death in Cincinnati: “People die every three second. What would you do if you paid $15 for a ticket?”

Eichmann must have said as much in the still watches of the night, if he ever did say anything to himself. Jews die anyway, don’t they? And Eichmann had even more than fifteen dollars at stake.

You can be sure that the humanisticists in our schools will make a profit from that last letter. They will transform it into a “values clarification module”: You have paid for a ticket to hear a concert by the Walking Dead, whom yer look up to. How cheap does it have to be for you to decide that getting to your seat just isn’t worth the hassle of trampling a few people to death, people who may in any case die every three second? The ensuing rap session will be quite long enough to provide yet another day’s respite from the tedious and dehumanizing study of language and thought.

The children who wrote the Royko papers are juniors and seniors in high school. They are probably from sixteen to nineteen years old. They have spent eleven, twelve, or more, years in our “humanistic,” “values-oriented,” schools. What their teachers have praised as “creativity” looks remarkably like anarchic self-indulgence, which is what creativity must always be in the want of discipline and skill. Their much-encouraged “self-expression” cannot be distinguished from dissolute libertinism, a virulent form of self-expression where there is no self-knowledge. Their “enhanced self-esteem” has blossomed into an arrogant narcissism, a perversion of self-esteem where there is no idea of what is estimable.

Can we hope that Maszak’s few students are unique, or at least unusual? We cannot. We know that there are millions, millions of children who have in effect been dehumanized by the “humanistic” education that smugly dismisses the mastery of knowledge and skills and the discipline of the intellect as elitist adornments accessible, if they will have them, only to the few, and eagerly peddles to the many the mindless claptrap of environmental awareness and career orientation and ethnic sensitivity and doing your own thing and letting it all hang out.

Human beings only, of all living creatures, can know what Hannah Arendt has described as “the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.” She said of Eichmann “that he clearly knew of no such claim,” although she does not say of him, as we might have to of Maszak’s students, that even had he known of such a claim he would have proved incapable of paying it thinking attention.

Thinking attention can be paid only in skillful language. And, for those who want to be humanistic, there is no more distinctly human attribute than the power of language and no more distinctly human accomplishment than thinking attention.

Go and learn those things, you humanism-mongers, before you presume to instruct our children in values. And do it fast. There isn’t much time. We have read the Royko papers, and we know what you have been doing. We have seen the future that you have fashioned for us, and, in words that even your victims will understand, it sucks, humanisticists, and all the young farts are the same.

It is possible, of course, to make too much of what seems a smoldering savagery in the students of Robert Maszak. But when we seek mitigation of that ominous threat to the future of an already disintegrating civilization, we discover yet other threats. For instance, it is probably true that Maszak’s teenagers are in part striking poses designed to disturb grown-ups, pour pater, no doubt, le bourgeois. That is not only a child’s inalienable right, but an important part of the training of the mind. Rational thoughtfulness, after all, is not and should not be the ordinary condition of daily human life; it is a stance that we assume, if we can, when appropriate. Even if we are able to do the work of logical thinking, we do not, unless we are John Stuart Mill, perhaps, do it except in response to a summons, exactly the summons that Hannah Arendt has in mind when she speaks of “the claim…that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.” Attentive thoughtfulness is an aberration, an act not only rare in human experience but also an act requiring cultivation. Thinking is not unlike playing the violin; it isn’t simply natural. Even if we can do it, we don’t often do it.

Very well, then. We admit that those teenagers are, in part at least, striking stances. But why these and only these stances? What stance, we wonder, has their teacher himself chosen, so that they can so obviously expect his approval? Their chosen stance is (just like their teacher’s?) tiresomely ordinary and predictable; even its virulent truculence is exactly what “tough” teenagers suppose “stylish.” It pretends to express an independence, especially an independence of the outworn values of grown-ups who wore knickers and delivered newspapers, but it in fact expresses the opposite, for it is nothing but a recitation of attitudes and emotions as generally received and accepted in that milieu. “That milieu” includes the classroom, obviously, and the school. It includes principally, however, the world out there, the popular, the ideology of the streets and the movies and the music. In that sense, Maszak’s classroom is the world, only less so, for it repeats what is uttered first in the world. The agents of American educationism do not lead their students anywhere, theyfollow them, and always downstream, always in the way they would go even if there were no schools.

An education, which requires the training of the mind in rational thoughtfulness, goes against the grain. It isn’t easy. It isn’t even “natural,” as we usually mean that word. To live, even to live an ordinary and comfortable life, requires the practice of rational thoughtfulness no more than it requires practice on the violin. You can come and go, get and spend, work and play, choose and reject, rise and fall, live and die, entirely in response to the suggestions without and the appetites within. You need never feel, never mind answer, that claim that facts and events make on the thinking attention. For any value you share, any “worthy” emotional response to which you are led, any received opinion that you think to call “yours,” there is always the justification of some fifteen-dollar ticket.

Furthermore, a whole culture composed of people just like you would be a very stable and peaceful one. While the social-adjustment educationists may