Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

I do not wish to suggest in these essays that the past was better than the present, simply that whatever in the past happens to have been of significance or value ought to be held in memory, insofar as that is possible, so that it can give us guidance. Then, too, nostalgia, reaction, and denial, all of which assume a meaningful sense of the past, are potent energies in any civilization at any time. To be sane and manageable they ought to have a solider base than unconstrained fantasy, or prejudice or malice or tendentiousness. This is as much as to say that truth should be adhered to, to the very significant degree that truth can be established. The recovery of the past is now treated as an arcane science, a little like the science that provides the newspapers with a steady stream of diets and cures and newly identified syndromes in terms of which we are to reform our lives and revise our understanding of ourselves. We are content not to know how the discovery is made that yogurt promotes longevity, for example, or that Jefferson was insensitive to the issue of slavery. We are always happy to assume objectivity and competence, though each dazzling hypothesis awaits displacement by the next, the whole project somehow deriving prestige from its very insubstantiality. Meanwhile, many myths abide, so firmly established in the common mind that no one thinks to challenge them, not even the people who write history. This is not a new phenomenon. History has always been self-serving, polemical, and, very often, simply slovenly. The historians I will look at in the course of this introduction satisfy any ordinary definition of cultural literacy, even to the point of illustrating its perils. So when I find fault I am not suggesting decline. The vices of the present appear in many cases to be failed correctives to the vices of the past.

It has formed some part of my intention in these essays to raise very fundamental questions about the way our intellectual life, in the narrowest and also the widest sense, has been lived and is being lived now. I am not alone in finding it short on substance, even though some part of it is sternly devoted to the rectification of old wrongs, and some part to the rehabilitation of old values. In this culture, we do depend heavily on the universities to teach us what we need to know, and also to sustain and advance knowledge for the purposes of the society as a whole. Surely it was never intended that the universities should do the thinking, or the knowing, for the rest of us. Yet this seems to be the view that prevails now, inside and outside the academy.

I do not wish to imply that the universities constitute an elite, as they are often said to do. On the contrary. A politician who uses a word that suggests he has been to college or assumes anyone in his audience has read a book is ridiculed in the press not only for pretentiousness but for, in effect, speaking gibberish. Many editors are certain that readers will be alarmed and offended by words that hint at the most ordinary learning, and so they exercise a kind of censorship which is not less relentless or constraining for being mindless. Language which suggests learning is tainted, the way slang and profanity once were. Rather than shocking, it irks, or intimidates, supposedly. It is not the kind of speech anyone would think to free because it is considered a language of pretension or asserted advantage. People writing in this country in the last century used a much larger vocabulary than we do, though many fewer of them and their readers were educated. I think it is the association of a wide vocabulary with education which has, in our recent past, forbidden the use of one. In other words, the universities now occupy the place despised classes held in other times and cultures in that they render language associated with them unfit for general use.

So the universities have become hermetic. At the same time they have lost confidence and definition. Perhaps because the universities preside over our increasingly protracted adolescence, and are associated with the arbitrary chores of grade-getting, and with football and parties, the stigma which has long attached to any book or poem read in high school has spread to the curriculum of the colleges. Graduate students talk of Dickens seminars in which nothing of Dickens is read, art history seminars in which no art is looked at. It is as if these were subjects we master and advance beyond, and would be embarrassed to return to, like freshman composition. The curriculum itself is not the issue. However a curriculum is put together, its elements are assumed to satisfy standards which distinguish them as especially significant products of civilization. The problem is that there is something about the way we teach and learn that makes it seem naive to us to talk about these things outside a classroom, and pointless to return to them in the course of actual life. In other words, whatever enters the curriculum becomes in some way inert.

What used to be meant by “humanism,” that old romance of the self, the idea that the self is to be refined by exposure to things that are wonderful and difficult and imbued with what was called the human spirit, once an object of unquestioned veneration, has ended. Both institutional education and all the educating aspects of the civilization — journalism, publishing, religion, high and popular culture — are transformed and will be further transformed until the consequences of this great change have been absorbed. Education as it was practiced among us historically reflected its origins in the Renaissance, when beautiful human creations were recovered from the obscurity of forgotten languages and lost aesthetics, or of prohibition or disapprobation or indifference, and were used to demonstrate the heights which human beings can attain. It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution.

When people still had sensibilities, and encouraged them in one another, they assumed the value and even the utility of many kinds of learning for which now we can find no use whatever. It was not leisure that was the basis of culture, as many have argued, but the profoundly democratic idea that anyone was only incidentally the servant of his or her interests in this world; that, truly and ideally, a biography was the passage of a soul through the vale of its making, or its destruction, and that the business of the world was a parable or test or temptation or distraction and therefore engrossing, and full of the highest order of meaning, but in itself a fairly negligible thing.

Literacy became virtually universal in Western civilization when and where it began to seem essential for people to be able to read the Bible. All the immeasurable practical benefits that came with mass literacy, its spectacular utility, awaited this unworldly stimulus. Clearly mere utility is not sufficient to sustain it at even functional levels, though the penalties of illiteracy are now very severe. Reading, above the level of the simplest information, is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity, and this is why and how it had such a profound meaning while it did — the soul encountered itself in its response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass. Great respect for the text and great respect for, and pleasure in, the reader’s subjectivity flourished together. Now they are disparaged together. Dickens must pass through a filter of specialists who can tell us what we must see when we read him. Neither his nor our singularity is of value, nor are we to imagine his spirit acting on ours.