Last week I turned in the final grades for a course I teach once
a year to college juniors and seniors. As in all other summer
courses, the students are mainly of two types: the scatterbrained
and the compulsive — i.e., those who have fouled up their
schedules in some way that forces them to make up lost credit
hours, and those who want to get ahead to graduate early.
The pace of the course is tight, squeezing the usual eleven
weeks of material into five weeks of lengthy class meetings and
chunky readings. Worse, each student must turn in six 1,000-word
essays at a frantic rate slightly in excess of once per week. Much
worse, I have to read the essays.
The course — which fulfills a university core writing
requirement for upperdivision students and therefore draws a broad
stream of takers from many different major fields — is titled
Argumentation. The summer catalogue bills it as “ideal for students
planning careers in business, law, or politics.” It might better be
advertised as ideal for teachers who want to know what’s really
going on in their students’ heads.
Here are some representative topics in my students’ attempts at
argument this summer:
• Corporate corruption: it’s something Republicans do,
which Democrats must take a stronger stand against.
• Vouchers: they are bad, threatening the integrity of the
public school system.
• Euthanasia: it’s good, often the only compassionate
choice for the terminally ill, whose choices need legal support in
the manner of Oregon.
• Evolution: it’s a proven scientific fact under fire from
religious fanatics.
• Embryonic stem-cell research: it’s a hopeful scientific
breakthrough under fire from religious fanatics.
And while I’m still in the mood during my first week of summer
break, here’s a quiz. What position do you think was taken on the
following issues — and (bonus question) which ones included a
denunciation of religious fanatics?
Gay marriage. Gay adoption. U.S. hostility against Iraq.
Partial-birth abortion. Regulation of pornography. Homeland
security. Affirmative action and diversity …
The burden of reading all this, week after week, was lightened
by a series of personal conferences, in which I discovered yet
again that most of my students are a lot more likable than their
thoughts — not least because, in most cases, the thoughts aren’t
really theirs.
Gingerly, in conversation with each student, I asked about some
of their balder assertions. Without exception, none of them had any
notion of any serious counterpoint to their predictable positions
on predictably framed issues. The student who argued for the
exclusive place of evolutionary theory in the science curriculum,
for instance, had no idea that the theory is under serious dispute
by reputable scientists and philosophers, nor had it ever occurred
to her that the primacy she assigned to “science” over “faith” was
itself a matter of faith on her part.
Chesterton remarks somewhere that we are bound in this life to
be influenced either by thoughts we have thought through or by
thoughts we have not thought through; the latter (thought not
thought about) is what we call a culture. In The Clash of
Orthodoxies (ISI Books, 387 pages, $24.95; click here to order), Robert P.
George exposes the culture inhabited by my students — and by all
of us, apparently, whenever we stop thinking.
George is a professor of law at Princeton who has thought with
uncommon depth about his own and others’ thinking. The essays that
make up this collection range over several public policy issues
connected by George’s analysis of fundamental premises.
The controversy over same-sex marriage, for example, is really a
conflict (a “clash,” to use the term of George’s title essay)
between two radically distinct perceptions of human nature.
Supporters of gay marriage assume (with the culture) that human
nature is constituted by emotional desires; opponents argue
(against the prevailing culture) that our nature is constituted by
basic goods that give us reasons to desire.
Deeper still is a distinction George draws between two clashing
conceptions of the human person. Orthodox secularism rests its view
of hot-button life issues (abortion, infanticide, suicide,
euthanasia) on a person-body dualism which assumes that bodily life
is good only instrumentally. The Judeo-Christian view is that we
are embodied persons, dynamically unified actors whose bodily life
is good intrinsically.
In a stunning argument, George shows the rational superiority of
the Judeo-Christian view. The dualism of orthodox secularism (that
is, of the prevailing culture) is self-referentially inconsistent;
it contradicts its own starting point, since reflection necessarily
starts from conscious awareness of oneself as a unitary actor.
The argument is independent of any claims about divine
revelation, yet huge implications about human dignity flow from the
rational rejection of secularist dualism. One of the unexamined
assumptions common to my students, for example, is that human
rights are privileges or opportunities granted by the state. George
(not to mention the American founders, who believed firmly in
natural law) would respond that we come into this world already
equipped with natural rights which the state is duty-bound to
respect and protect.
How do my students emerge from three or more years of college
little more than children of their own times, with little or no
sense of the culture that directs their thinking?
The answer is suggested in Bonfire of the Humanities
(ISI Books, 373 pages, $24.95; click here to order),
a collection of essays by classics professors Victor Davis Hanson,
John Heath, and Bruce S. Thornton. All three seem to me proof of
George’s contention that traditional moral judgment can be tied to
publicly accessible reasons.
In George’s labeling system, Hanson, Heath, and Thornton are
“old-fashioned liberals.” Although not apparently religious, they
believe in natural human rights, the rule of law, limited
government, private property, democratic decision making, rational
debate.
In other words, they are at loggerheads with most of their
colleagues in contemporary academia and with the whole sorry
process of academic degradation over the past half century:
“radical social protest in the late 1960s; deconstruction in the
1970s; ethnic, feminist, and Marxist cultural studies in the 1980s;
postmodern sexuality in the 1990s; and rampant careerism from
beginning to end.”
That last point is the keynote. Amid several essays and reviews
detailing the farcical collapse of intellectual integrity in
classics and the humanities, the wider backdrop is a “utilitarian
assault on liberal education,” in progress since the early
twentieth century. Under the utilitarian imperative (education
viewed either as training to serve practical ends or as ideological
indoctrination to promote social causes), academe has degenerated
into a site of careerist advancement. What used to be the life of
the mind has become “a juicy plum for the lupine opportunist and
peripatetic prof-on-the-make.”
Yes, my Argumentation course is “ideal for students planning
careers in business, law, or politics.” I can’t help wondering,
though, what my students (and my job) would be like if the culture
were such that the class could be billed a tad more seriously.
