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Sunday, August 20, 2006
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'Tis the season... ...to editorialize about the soulless illiterates about to pollute the halls of learning. You've got to get your digs in now, in late August/early September, when lots of people are thinking about our about-to-reopen universities. Our undergraduates only read shlock and don't know the simplest words. They're fucking like bunnies. Their professors are specialization robots. All of us, says a Baylor philosopher, have to start taking the term "soul" seriously, as indicating a sense of what is higher and lower, better and worse, in human life. The word "soul" also figures in the title of Mr. Lewis' book about Harvard. But what does Mr. Lewis mean by "soul"? Can contemporary academics use the term without putting it in scare quotes to indicate its status as a relic from a bygone age of religious primitivism? Without snickering, can we seriously pose to our students the challenge Socrates posed to the Athenians, who in this case are a pretty good stand-in for Americans? Can we issue the challenge to give more care to the soul than to the body? The word soul also figures in Allan Bloom's famous title. It's a winner of a word. It's used in two ways by people complaining about college students. One is the Baylor guy's way, and it tends to mean having a spiritual life, and not having that spiritual life degraded by materialistic and sexually degenerate students, or by corrosively secular professors. This use of the soul word is basically a call for greater religious seriousness at universities and colleges. The other way soul comes up is in defense of the inner life as such. Allan Bloom uses it this way. Professors - humanities professors - are supposed to initiate students into a seriousness about life, through an intensive consideration of the profound thoughts in great books. To be in posssession of a soul is not to be religious necessarily; it is to understand that a valuable life transcends the material realm and is ever in search of, and in enjoyment of, the immaterial. The unexamined life is not worth living. The consciousness unable to respond to the greatest art is not worth having. Etc. One funny thing -- the professor complaining about student illiteracy says the only book they've all read tends to be The DaVinci Code. This is a book which assumes serious religious knowledge on the reader's part, and its massive best-seller status suggests a broad interest in religious matters (even shlocked up) among the American population. So start there. Avoid grand and vague complaints about our soulless culture, and just start teaching serious philosophical and theological works. Define words that students don't recognize. Be patient. Don't preach. |