David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

College, once a predictable, practicable course of study designed to fit the individual for self-support, has become, at least in the Liberal Arts, an extension of the bad high school, which is to say, of the terror of adolescence.

The advertisement of “choice”—in curriculum, in behavior (in the glorification of “alternative lifestyles”) while a charming idea to the conscious (pleasure-bent) eighteen-year-old mind, is, actually, to him deeply unsettling. For the eighteen-year-old knows that at some point he must abandon even graduate school, and get on in a world which, he knows, the pandering cry of “choice” is not fitting him for. Gender studies, multiculturalism, semiotics, deconstruction, video art, and other such guff, while attractive to the child, as they seem to endorse his “adulthood,” are in truth, terrifying as his clock ticks on toward the school’s relaxation of its authority, that date on which it will spew the unschooled, confused, skill-less student into a world which, he must know, is uninterested in his capacity for bushwah, and wants to know what he can contribute to the common effort.

Consider college education which, in the Liberal Arts, and in the social sciences, or whatever they may be called today, is effectively a waste of money and time, and useless save as that display of leisure and wealth Veblen called “conspicuous consumption.” A Liberal Arts education is essentially a recognition symbol, which, as such might theoretically facilitate entrance into a higher class, were entrance awarded on the basis solely of that passport; but see the MAs in English bagging groceries. Higher Education is selling an illusion: that the child of the well-to-do need not matriculate into the workforce—that mastery of a fungible skill is unnecessary. 9

It spews him eventually, even after the most attenuated “graduate study,” increasingly embraced by the affluent and confused—into a marketplace the lessons of which he is at a vast disadvantage to face, let alone master, having (a) waited too long, and (b) taught himself that he need not stoop to consider the practical.

The Liberal Arts graduate student has stayed too long at the fair—as the once-nubile career woman finds that her marriage prospects at forty-five are not the same available to her twenty years previously; and as the middle-aged roué discovers that the possibility of domestic love and security have receded with habits formed by decades of dating and “freedom.”

Conservative reasoning asks, “What actually is the desired result of any proposed course of action; what is the likelihood of its success; and at what cost ?” (The last, importantly, including the costs of possible failure.) These are, to the social tinkerer, unknowable, their sum being expressed, euphemistically, as “the law of unintended consequences.”

School shootings and the increased enrollment in postgraduate Liberal Arts studies may be seen as two unconscious attempts at adaptation of a culture evolving away from the exigencies of staffing a trained workforce. For though much has been made of the necessity of a college education, the extended study of the Liberal Arts actually trains one for nothing. And the terrified adolescent, abandoned by society, coddled by society, may, if unbalanced, turn to rage and (a) kill; or, if merely clueless, (b) hide in college, as he does not possess the strength to grow up and leave.

Which brings me to the elevator.

A group of strangers enter an elevator. They arrange themselves according to not only conscious, but unconscious patterns of deference. Contributing to the arrangement are unconscious recognitions of size, gender, age, wealth, social status, and education (as evidenced by dress and attitude), vocation (as suggested by dress and appurtenances), sexual desirability, perceived threat (a function of size, age, race, demeanor)—not only of the individual, but of the individual in that particular group . For an individual will be given preference, deference, or the lack of same based not solely on the above per se , but in consideration of the admixture of persons in the elevator, the time of day, the likelihood of many or few stops; a pattern which changes with each new arrival and departure from the car, at which point the entire company redistributes itself.

This, the preverbal, pre-intellectual process of accommodation, is the basis of all culture. It evolves through the accomplishment of shared but unconscious small objectives, which may be collectivized as the preconscious understanding that “We must get along.”

Civilization is preceded by culture, which is worked out by innumerable interactions over ages. 10Culture may be obliterated by revolution (at which point it is, predictably, superseded by Terror), but it will and can evolve only at its own speed, and in a direction shaped by its own countless interactions—neither in response to individual nor to communal will, but through the mechanism of unconscious interaction and toward an unknowable end.

Tolstoy, in the epilogue to War and Peace , wrote that the savage, on seeing the railroad train, believes that the train is caused by the puff of smoke, for he sees the smoke first.

But the smoke, he wrote, does not cause the locomotive, and five million Frenchmen could not have marched into Russia because Napoleon suggested they do so. Obviously, then, there must be some deeper force at work, a force we cannot ever understand.

The actual operations of a culture are deeply mysterious. 11

Those of us in show business spend our lives trying to understand, subvert, and predict the actions of the audience. It cannot be done.

Not only will the audience endorse what it chooses irrespective of cajolery, but it will communicate its preferences instantly and without apparent intervention of traditional forms of discourse or of cogitation. For the audience reacts preconsciously; it will laugh, cry, fall asleep, gasp, or leave, without reference to reason, as a conjoined entity making its decisions in an unpredictable fashion, according to unstatable goals.

The choices of the audience, of Napoleon’s army, of the folks in the elevator, are the working out of a mystery. It may be glimpsed, it cannot be understood, and to tinker with its processes is to court great risk. 12

4

ALCATRAZ

I was in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, looking out of a big picture window at Alcatraz. I asked my ten-year-old, “Do you know what Alcatraz is?” He said, “Yes, it is a tourist attraction, but it used to be a federal prison.”

Things change. Isn’t it interesting how kids learn? I got my information from Warner Bros. movies; where did he get his information from?

In my racket, show business, one learns through doing and through watching. The second assistant cameraman spends years watching the shot being set up, lit, and prepared. Eventually he learns and advances toward the day he will be director of photography.

There is no way to approximate the experience of failure in front of an audience. It has nothing to do with the censure of teachers who are, after all, paid to be nice to one, or at least, to keep one’s custom. Actors and writers stay in school to spare themselves that lesson. And they stay in school because they do not know any better.