Finding Zeitgeists at the Beach

We're still beach crazy. Once again, look carefully at TJ. Thaddeus's foot is in blissful ignorance of what is coming. I didn't take a photo of the next moment; it would have been ugly. We love Manly, because there's always so much going on there. Yesterday, we saw a film crew working with a surfer dude and three beach babes. They were giving each other high-fives, dancing on surf boards, and running through the waves. They could have looked like Aphrodite rising from the sea foam in the rosy fingers of Dawn, but they didn't. They just looked silly, and they had about a sixteenth of a yard more clothes on. We also saw the coolest sport ever...these muscley guys had what looked like soft hang gliders attached to them by complicated ropes, and flat boards that looked like wide, thin, snowboards. They first got the sail things going, like giant kites, and then got themselves somehow down to the water with the board; they lay down in the water, slipped their feet into the stirrups, and away they sailed, probably at about thirty miles per hour. We saw one jump, and he was in the air for a good three seconds. I understood the muscles after watching them for a few minutes.

After playing in the waves, and feeling so happy, I sat down to Thaddeus' ever-present book-of-the-moment and began to think. The ocean always makes me relaxed, and sets me thinking.

The book, The Unintended Causes of the Reformation, is a new approach to the Western present. The writer uses William Faulkner's famous phrase, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." The idea of the book is that human life is a complex conglomeration of human choices, that cannot be understood simply in epochs or what he calls 'supersession'--in other words, the past is the present, and the present holds the consequences of the past choices, and reality is, in truth, too complex to slice into neat eras, one superseding the other, a la Hegel. 

One of the more compelling arguments he makes is that the Western world has become too dependent upon specialization; I think he means more academia, history in particular, but I don't think this specialization problem is only in academia; the division of labor that revolutionized the world, and made mass production possible, while enriching some by cheaper goods, has also impoverished our ability to see the whole, and thus the teleology, or end, of actions and ideas. I remember an example of this striking me forcefully in sociology: When the first guns were produced by specialized tasks, they became more readily available, and cheaper, but the craft was largely lost. The makers of the gun never saw the parts come together to form the whole; rather, the efficiency of single-task production divorces a person from the product, from what they are making and how it fits into the larger world. This, to me, is a powerful example of the problem with specialization.

I've benefited immensely from specialists; as the guy in Midnight in Paris says, "I like anti-biotics." However, I've seen the problem of over-belief in modern specialization in many forms: doctors who know a lot about the skin, but don't talk to hormone specialists, so cannot see the truth that the hormones and the skin, in this case, are intricately related; scientist-types who hold on to theories as gospel truth because the theory proves one amazing fact, when they don't choose to see, or cannot see, that it is possible that this theory may fall apart in other ways, and may contradict first principles; business people who don't see that false advertising affects more than the bottom line, and on and on. We end up with little Adam Smiths, like the Harvard economists whom I saw almost destroy Russia in the wake of perestroika in the 90's, who cannot see past the formulas and sparkling new rational structures of economics to the good of the person and the cultural reality--and Marx, who was the flip side of Smith, but exactly the same kind of thinker. It is the old problem of Adam and Eve, who became narrow thinkers as soon as they questioned the reality of a whole, a purposeful universe in which they played a part. One of the most serious problems in human life, seen fructified especially in modern life, is the locus of the self as the measure of all things, of the individual's right, in the words of Roe vs. Wade, to articulate his or her own universe.

The solution to this is perhaps the zeitgeist of Thaddeus' and my life together as educators and thinkers: One of the best arguments for liberal education is the fact that by definition, a specialist cannot see the whole truth, or the far-reaching consequences of the principles he himself, perhaps inadvertently, generates.

When I started my true education at St. John's in 1996 (all else before that seemed like specialized pieces of different pies, and nothing came together--except with Dr. Jawardyne in sociology class), I began to see how the pieces fit together, and began to ask harder questions about the 'facts' around me: "What end does this serve?" "How does this relate to the soul?" The articulation of wholeness has only come with experience of the consequences of a liberal education. 

What are we doing here at Campion? What were we doing at WCC? At OLSWA? At Montfort? In our own way, I suppose, trying to help produce a cadre of the young who have the ability to see as generalists; in that sense, we follow Plato, in the Republic, when he said it was absolutely necessary to have philosophers (lovers of wisdom, which is seeing the underlying, deepest meaning that undergirds and drives all other knowledge) as guides for the city, to raise up those who do not take us back to a medieval past that cannot be regained, but those who can see the situation as it is now, and begin to redefine, re-teach the world around them about a teleological end. In that sense, they need to look at science, and math, and literature, both as ends in themselves, and also as bearers of philosophical and theological principles. We need young people (not surfer dude beach babes who strip down for a buck or two, in quest of attention) who will re-open the door for God in this modern world. We also do not need insulated, uptight young people yearning for a past that cannot come again. Philosophers are for the past within the future. 

There is a danger in this--those called to this kind of 'whole-seeing' can easily think themselves somehow superior to the craftsman or the specialist. Perhaps for Plato, there was a superiority; but not so for those who follow a Carpenter. With that caveat, though, I might say that in modern life the specialists have taken over as guides, and what we are left with is a structure of conflicting, part-views, a structure divided against itself. We live in a world that does not respect the philosopher, the generalist, and even asks, "What are you going to do with philosophy?" "What are you going to do with that liberal education?"

Again, those questions uncover a specialist prison: "What are you going to do" is already an assumption, the assumption that our purpose in society, in life, is to find where we fit as a cog in the machine. Does anyone ask, "For what end do you study the liberal arts?" This is a more Platonic, more medieval Christian, more teleological, more wholistic question, and gets more at the truth of the thing. It begs the question, "What are we made for?" "What principle of morality, what truth, does this economic practice or attitude hide?"--and these are the questions that modern society needs to have someone ask.  Only someone whose business it is to see the whole, a generalist, can even begin to answer these questions well, as the deepest service, a kenosis, to those whose business it is to specialize. 

In the US, there is more history, precedent for a movement back towards this Platonic and medieval Christian understanding of the whole than in Australia; one can see it in the budding attempts at integration in small colleges in the States. Not so in Australia. Campion is the only tertiary institution like this, a lone outpost in a deeply secular society, a society that, unlike almost anywhere else, has known nothing different. There is no over-arching history of religious sectarianism, or of one religion superseding another, but of lost souls being in a situation where the people around you might become animals again. There is something, I know it, about Australian history, that produced the first society originating in a secular mindset. This society started with a separation of peoples into criminal classes and freemen, in a series of desperate attempts to escape, with stories of those who had lost hope, those thrown out of ostensibly Christian societies like so much garbage. It started in a desperately sad cry, the cry of a convict, around 1825:

The very day we landed upon the Fatal Shore,

The planters stood around us, full twenty score or more;
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,
They chained us up to pull the plough, upon Van Diemen's Land.

The Australia we know started as a concentration camp. Not that none of the people sent there were criminals; many of them, though, were petty thieves or people actually aping the much larger, more serious theft of some in government, in the British upper classes. There were even children, one of them I remember as young as twelve years old, sent off in chains to perish on the sea or survive upon Van Diemen's Land, for stealing bits of iron to sell. Their stories make Dicken's Fagan and Co. very, very real, and not some Cinderella story. These are the ones with no rich grandfather. Perhaps this mass disillusionment, this over-reaching punishment, has helped produced one of the most purely secular societies in the world. It makes what we're doing here somehow seem more like planting a mustard seed. You look at the seed, and say, "How insignificant that is in this whirlwind" and yet, even one student changed by a liberal education has tremendous potential, another un-buffered self to see the whole again.