Iqra’i

The Canon Wars, it seems, are being fought on the blogs as well as in my Thursday afternoon seminar. (h/t Helen) I like the Western Canon, which I will happily defend from the ravening hordes of post-structuralist Japanese drabble scholars or whatever they are.

Education is more than the assimilation of facts. College can’t be replicated by reading books – even very good books – or, indeed, by classes in isolation. Education must include critical reasoning and normative judgments applied to the kinds of facts one can get from books, professors, or the internets. Students can’t simply be told that something is true: that would be to learn to internalize an ideology without examining it, and (much to my personal regret) no one has the revealed truth at their fingertips to be sure it’s right.

On the other hand, if there is too much criticism, too much examination, students may examine and discard things they ought not. This is the danger of the “new conquering empire of light and reason,” the Enlightenment project: it questions everything, and leaves nothing behind. Deconstruction is the logical end of the Enlightenment, both as goal and as final step.

The only way out, I think, is to teach a fundamental respect for the system before teaching the kind of questioning that can tear it apart. For American universities, this system is a Western – and more specifically, an American – one. The story of America’s development is full of injustice and oppression (women, Indians, blacks), but we can’t just reject it as the demesne of Dead White Men and start over again. First, of course, there is the obvious danger of utopian projects – the French Revolution, not to mention the Russian Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, &c. should have cured us of that temptation – but, more importantly, we are the outcome of our history, created and informed by it and unable to separate ourselves entirely from the perspective it gives us.

Still, though we are inescapably the product of our context, we can – and must – consider it critically. There is a nature to a human being, or to a culture, that can never be entirely erased, but to valorize that nature as it is rather than as it should be is irresponsible in the extreme. We can’t allow ourselves to relapse into quietism, whether through laziness or a blind adherence to the status quo. The impossibility of perfection is no argument against careful improvement and reform.

To be effective, though, this change needs to be within the terms and framework of our tradition. If we understand the underlying values and premises of our own tradition, with the forces that have shaped us and our society, we can see the flaws in our culture, love the whole despite them, and work within it to make it better.

This is the goal of a university education: to understand the institutions and values that have made our nation and culture what they are, and so made us who we are; to critically interrogate our inheritance, understand its contemporary application, and uphold or transgress it as we think best for the whole.

So, yes, of course teach the canon. But teach the canon critically, as a conversation through the centuries between men of genius. Teach the conflicts. Teach the questions. Teach, in other words, to think – because only after that can you do.

…the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (Eliot, 1922.)

I think this may be God’s way of telling me I need to read Tradition and the Individual Talent more often.