Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

We moderns have defenses against notions like this one, defenses that in effect preclude our looking without prejudice at what we might as well call reality, since so many of us can attest to it. Now that I find myself elderly, I am impatient with the artificial limits we put on our sense of things — in the name of reason, I suppose, or in any case in deference to what consensus will support as reasonable. Out of this rather narrow consensus is extruded from time to time an interest in mysticism or spirituality. By my lights this is a siphoning away of attention, a distraction from a quality intrinsic to brute fact, not to mention the numberless categories of fact available to being described in far gentler terms. Our realism distracts us from reality, that most remarkable phenomenon. I feel that I have been impoverished in the degree that I have allowed myself to be persuaded of the inevitability of a definition of the real that is so arbitrarily exclusive, leaving much of what I intuited and even what I knew in the limbo of the unarticulated and the unacknowledged. I wish I had experienced my earthly life more deeply. It is my fault that I didn’t. I could have been a better scholar of Walt Whitman.

I can’t find excuses in statements that begin “American society” or “American culture,” because in my lifetime there has been a brilliant explosion of knowledge and of access to knowledge. A Martian might think this has been the highest priority of our civilization. And she/he/it might be right. We are groping around on Mars today, piecing together its geology. But if the Martian proposed to an American that all this implied a civilization that is intellectually voracious and highly disciplined, to boot, is there anyone who would not dismiss the notion out of hand? The whole impatience I feel with this constricted awareness I have lived with, and that I see around me, comes from the dazzling universe of contemporary science on one hand and the impressive and moving and terrible record of the deep human past on the other. How many people who have lived on earth could dream of such access? It is a heaven for the pensive and the curious, if they happen to wander into it. (Being who we are, we have an invidious term for all this — we call it information and claim that it somehow displaces knowledge.)

I am speaking again of an odd sort of doubleness. We are archcapitalists, so we tell ourselves and everyone else at every opportunity. We publish hundreds of thousands of books each year. Being archcapitalists, we must proceed always and only in search of profit. So what are we to conclude, except that there must be a voracious market for books not only to sustain this vast output but to make it profitable? But this can’t be true, since another conviction universal among us is that Americans don’t read books. A conundrum, certainly. The objection will be made that publishing in this country is a risky business, by no means reliably profitable. Then a new problem arises: How does this industry persist on such a scale if there is not a lot of money to be made in it? Is this consistent with the disciplining effects of the profit motive? Unscrutinized comparisons are implied in generalizations about the state of the culture. Was there an era in which publishers did not often struggle and fail? Not that I am aware of. Are things different and better in other countries? I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who does. Government subsidies should not be allowed to blur the issue. If, as a last-ditch defense of the right to weltschmerz, the argument is made that our literary culture is provincial and middlebrow, Philip Roth recently listed seventy formidable and gifted American writers of postwar fiction and called the list incomplete. Any student of literature knows that this is an extraordinary flourishing of a difficult art. For such a thing to have happened, many people have to have been doing many things right. It is characteristic of Americans that they think of the ideal as the norm, at least among the polished civilizations, and feel their shortfall relative to this imaginary standard as a great humiliation. We are so loyal to these formulae of self-contempt that there is no interest in or tolerance for doubt as to their basis in fact. To question is jingoism. That these good writers are read all over the world is called cultural imperialism, though, if the same were happening in another time or place, we would say without hesitation that people then or there were living in a golden age. Yes, we are struggling in a swamp of dysfunction and malicious factionalism. But by the standards of, let us say, Renaissance England and Europe, we’re really not doing too badly.

I may seem to have strayed from my subject. In fact I am offering another illustration of the difference between what we think we are doing and what we do in fact. On one hand we scold and scorn the mass of the populace for what we choose to see as their intellectual laziness and their borderline illiteracy. On the other hand we have a flourishing literature and an educational system that, at the level of college and above, is unique in the world and also in history. I have traveled widely in undergraduate America, as many of you have, too, and I have found the experience touching and impressive, especially as it is found in little-known institutions that will never be ranked nationally for anything at all, since there is no way to measure good faith or intellectual seriousness. These colleges are supported by taxpayers, sometimes grudgingly, and by donors, sometimes opulently, and they go on about their quiet work for generations, groves of academe.

Our literature and our colleges are only two instances of the fact that, culturally speaking, often to our great good fortune, we don’t know who we are or what we are doing. Something intervenes between cynicism and vulgarism on one hand — these are the two poles of our public discourse at the moment — and, on the other hand, what transpires in the study and in the classroom. This is not to say that the effects of both these postures are not felt and that they are not corrosive. Their impact on our political system is obvious and frightening, and inevitable, according to them both. It is to say that the two of them are equally the consequence of an insistently pejorative tone in our discourse, if it deserves the name, as it interprets, or assumes, the nature and tendencies of our culture. Cynicism and vulgarism are cheek and jowl. One teaches us helplessness in the face of the abuses and atavisms the other encourages us to embrace. And still the civilization as a whole is sounder, smarter, and vastly more interesting than it is itself able to acknowledge. How does this happen? And why does it happen?

This pejorative stance bothers me because it is so unreflecting, because it is unshakable in the way of moralistic judgments, because it supplies an adequate intellectual posture in the minds of its many adherents and is therefore doubly unshakable. Uninformed deference to a handful of cultures — all European — is an entirely sufficient definition of sophistication for virtually the whole of our educated class, no matter how much authentic sophistication they should have attained in their own right, no matter how immovably such deference enshrines our prejudices in favor of those who are, in a word, white. Still, our towns and cities build great libraries, love them, and people them. Still, the good and generous work of teaching goes on, much of it unpaid and much, underpaid. There are legislatures and institutions who exploit the willingness of many people to teach despite meager salaries, overwork, and insecurity, and this is disgraceful. But it should not obscure the fact that there are indeed people teaching for the love of it. They are the ones sustaining civilization, not the exploiters of their good faith, or, better, their good grace. Therefore it seems right to me that they should have an important place in any definition of the civilization, though they are invisible to cynicism and to vulgarism. They are, of course, a synecdoche for millions of people who work without recognition or adequate pay and contribute vastly more to the common life than the vulgarians who exploit them or the cynics who dismiss them.