Freud, Zen, and College Hedonism

Still slow. In an effort to speed the day up, I've indulged myself with "professional reading." The term is one of art, and it actually means, "writing that remains unread, but that inhabits lists entitled, 'things to read.'"

Edmundson and Perrin. Today, I read a fascinating article by Mark Edmundson, a very cool sounding (I believe he would find the description insulting) professor at the University of Virginia. "Very cool sounding" because his breadth of work seems fascinatingly eclectic, like that of the late Noel Perrin. Perrin wrote "Giving up the Gun," one of my very favorite books, "favorite" mostly by virtue of the fact that it is short and I have successfully remembered its title over the years. Otherwise, my only other contact with the author's genius was NPR's obituary which sketched a picture of his range. Enough to satisfy me that he was a genius, a wild mind undisciplined by "discipline." In my weaker moments, I like to flatter myself that I also enjoy such breadth of interest and generally applicable tools of intellectual penetration, but admittedly on a more blue collar level.

Mark Edmundson. I think I'll call him Mark. Mark is a literary theorist who, apparently (because who could really be sure?), made himself a little famous by being brilliant, or at least by demonstrating the gift of gab while simultaneously showing an enthusiasm for the genius of others and a keen ability to identify it (this is my way of saying that he's written books about other people). He is a dangerous person, because literary theorists (LTs) are dangerous people. For one thing, they give Conservative "intellectuals" fodder for their "war on Christmasianity" tirades, or whatever they are calling it now. Literary theorists work in a very difficult theoretical environment, and like plaintiff's attorneys, sometimes the world provides them with work, and sometimes you have to make the pig to get some bacon. After all, new literature is produced by folks who have been trained, often either directly or at least indirectly, in the interpretation of past literature by literary theorists. Thus, before you write literature, you learn what good literature is; I imagine that this may dampen the creation of really new, crazy stuff to theorize about. The LTs have to really get creative about the re-interpretation of older stuff. Moreover, consider that their raw material is such a flexible pile of words already barely catching hold of the reality they are meant to describe. The danger lies in that LTs help pull undiscovered meanings out of static texts, but then those techniques are fatuously applied to dynamic real world stories, often by folks interested more in debunking the education system from which they come than with the value of certain theories as literary theories. I'd provide examples, but then I'd move beyond my level of expertise.

Freud and Zen. Mark's article in the New York Times magazine was sort of teaser for his new book on Freud. He seems to be pushing Freud as a guru advocating the value of societal discord as reflecting a potentially Zen-like state-of-being (according to the common definition of Zen: "cool, or at least perplexing enough to suspend contemplation"). Our id and superego battle it out, our exhausted ego mediates whenever it can glean information from our erratic behavior, and this is the natural state, the way things probably should be. If Mark was to attempt to be a self-help best selling author, his sound byte would have to be "Confused and Unhappy? Good." And maybe he'd be right, maybe being confused and unhappy is the emotional equivalent of eating organic.

Liberal Education. The google revealed to me that Mark is also the author of a very read, or at least distributed, article called "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As lite Entertainment for Bored College Students."(http://www.student.virginia.edu/~decweb/lite/) It should not be distilled down to one major theme or conclusion, because it is actually subtle and interesting, at times contradictory (or at least I think so). But if it were to be so summed, I might offer that Mark's thesis is: "consumer culture has sapped our students of any potential intellectual vigor/rigor while forcing the evolution of universities from boring repressive institutions into fun, candylands where teens get to safely play out their self-absorbed fantasizing of intellectual vigor/rigor." Definitely worth a read. Oh, and it's very funny. Sorry, Mark.

But before I take on Mark's ideas, I should lay out my own qualifications. I have only one, viz. eleven years of higher education. And sadly, never in a Ph.D. program. This means that almost all those semesters I was taking classes, a full complement. I was down in the trenches mucking it out with the other students. So, I've seen a lot of professors in action, at several different institutions. In other words, I'm potentially a professor's nightmare, an experienced student with no teaching experience, and thus no compassion for her plight.

Mark wrote this in 1997, one year before I graduated from Sewanee. Probably too late for it to be an assigned reading for me. That's too bad, because it's a nice window into the professor's mind. Reading it may have helped me identify good professors from the bad, and given me justification for displaying some intellectual curiosity, overcoming my fear of not appearing "cool" (sadly, a lost cause anyway). Mark's article is a sort of impassioned cry of the oppressed, appealing to the unknowing oppressor, viz. the student.

Fear and created need (in marketing of consumer products) are important themes in the development of the modern university as he tells it, as is depression. Very interesting, but I want to respond to something else.

For some measure of self-dislike, or self-discontent -- which is much different than simple depression -- seems to me to be a prerequisite for getting an education that matters. My students, alas, usually lack the confidence to acknowledge what would be their most precious asset for learning: their ignorance.

A culture of ignorance of ignorance (is that possible?). A consumer culture that creates unfounded confidence only in our capacity to understand what we need? But Mark may have erred in concluding that this a problem. A conclusion that he will later find further evidence for in Freud's interpretation of allegiance to charismatic leaders as a replacement for
the super-ego, i.e. that discord and confusion may be a psychological and social good. But is this a little shrill, a little too much Huxley? Why not let our universities turn into amusement parks? They are, after all, much larger institutions, catering to a much broader constituency, than ever before. My guess, I'm not a historian (I know it shows), is that there has never been a
golden age in which the public was an enlightened mass of enthusiastic skeptics that were in eager pursuit of some unifying world-view, slapping each other on the back along the way.

Generally the goal has always been comfort, right? And why shouldn't it be? After all, those of us suffering from intellectual discontent will sift through the pleasure filters and suffer a vocation directed at the either picking at our emotional/intellectual wounds or curing them. Why shouldn't everyone else just enjoy life?

But assuming that we believe that sophisticated worldly people are happier, or value life more, etc. Smart students willing to learn, willing to open their minds beyond their past experience, are put in an impossible position when they start at a university. The intellectually curious students often don't perform, or seem to shirk their academic responsibilities. But what are they to do? Studying hard would merely be conforming to another set of rules. How are they to know that their professors are attempting to liberate them? How could they know? How might they be "good" students until they've lived a little?

Students come to school needing to shed so much cultural filth as it is, and on top of that they must worry about disappointing professors who want immediate discipline? Perhaps their hedonistic embrace of irony (and hints of nihilism) is a necessary retreat to a new place of beginning. Those students that do perform at some satisfactory level seem to fall in one of three categories: (1) those lucky ones whose intellectual motivation matches that of the teacher; (2) the submissive sycophant; and (3) those who are strategic about the endgame (decent grades) and bright enough to play to the professor's needs (or to count on low expectations) while reserving the rest of their time to social experimentation and discovering their ignorance on their own (without it becoming some other bit of wisdom fed to them by an authority figure).

Mark (as I read him) suggests the solution lies partly in professors that are authentically rough, open to new ideas, but committed to a particular worldview. Professors with a strong sense of self easily communicated to their audience can create a space safe enough to permit intellectual combat and growth. They must be passionate, they must be eccentric, anything but "cool." They must be willing to judge, but only within the modest realm of their competency. Sounds good to me. But an awareness of ignorance imposed by a dialectical process couldn't be empowering. How does the university and the teachers create some safe place for that sort of mystical truth about one's ignorance, one's place in the universe, to expose itself to the student?

Today's rule: not worry about whether today's blog was really worth writing, but do consider whether it would be worth writing again.