There is a popular canard in the anti-intellectual post-Dewey sphere in which we live that "those who can't do, teach." Neglecting the logical factoid that teaching is, in fact, a sort of doing, one that most who proverbially "do" are woefully incapable of "doing" well, I have always thought that this statement, for its insight into the minds of the modern members of our vaunted populace, is perfectly expressive of the plight of philosophy and theology. People who "do", one is told by the philosophy major, "do" or avoid doing because of some philosophy. If this is the case, then everyone has a philosophy, or they could not "do" or avoid doing because of it. Judging by this, then, to do philosophy is simply to be; and we don't give people government grants to simply be, we give them to do, don't we?! Thus philosophy majors, for being so tragically "meta", are deemed head-in-the-clouds useless academics who wouldn't know a day's honest work in their own dubious field if it bit them in the ethereal ass. Real work gets done by the practical folks. For all one might say about the politicians, who of themselves produce nothing, they at least organize practical folks into producing something. As to the musicians, they may not make something which will put food on the table, but at least they can make us feel something funny; and even then, they are often a bit too ethereal for the likes of the dirty-handed real man of our era.
This is the attitude of our society towards most of the higher humanities. It has become such that if one mentions that their degree is in Theology, one is like to receive, not an inquiry as to where they procured this degree, but a query as to whether that is the sort of degree one gets from an accredited source. Derogatory comments may be expected; I have been told on no less than five occasions that "it's nice that you did that; my degree, as it happens, is in Truthiness!" On one occasion the less-than-gentleman responding proceeded to add "with a minor in Snack Food Studies." I have grown used to such comments; they are not very clever. And of course, with the current plague of the Youtube attention span, one cannot possibly expect someone to sit through the five minutes it takes to explain that, well, in Ancient Greece theology was considered the highest science, since it affected every other science in principle, and it's only in the last three hundred years we have abandoned this, much to the posthumous chagrin of most of our forefathers. It may profit the soul to respect something which the men and women who brought us into being wished us to respect. Certainly de Tocqueville, in writing Democracy in America, thought so in his defense of the mores of family, private property and religion on the grounds that they perpetuated the culture by which America continued its miraculous existence.
But, of course, we do not read de Tocqueville; to most students of political science, he is an insightful but quaint relic of a past era. We are realpolitik America. "America does if America says it's so." In point of fact, we do not read, not really. We certainly ingest; we, like baby birds, take the pre-digested food provided to us mouth-to-face by our mama birds, the lecturers and writers of textbooks, and we pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves on how very clever we are when we get good marks on a test (and it is always about good marks on a test. It should trouble us that we think one's personal estimation can be graded by a Scantron.) But we do not digest. We, as a culture, something grown, have never had the shock of a real heresy, because for my own generation at least, we have never had a culture against which one may be heretical and shocking. When one has no nutrients taken in, one has no growth; and when a society is not nourished by a fundamental belief held in common by all and grown-into, that society does not grow, it gains no "culture."
This might need an illustration. I will take the example of a popular game among the very young or the extremely immature: the "penis game." The goal of the game is, between two people, to shout that word louder than the other, but not so loud that one is actually caught doing so. The one caught in the act of immaturity loses. This only works because people are scandalized by the word signifying the anatomy. But we are a culture without scandal; walk through your average Ivy League school playing this game and you are like to be mistaken for the latest bunch of Women's Studies majors, those asexual hippies who spell "women" with a 'y' instead of an 'e' because, like, it's so much more, like, liberating that way! And this education is passed down, and has been since the 70s, such that we are now seeing a generation without any sort of discretion with regard to bodily members promote their agenda as the ruling climate. William F. Buckley Jr. anticipated this well enough in God and Man at Yale; let Yale abandon God, and nothing about man remains sacred, least of all Yale.
So in our picture are both ethics and politics vitiated. I have said enough in other contexts about my thoughts on the sciences, and anyone with a fleck of gray matter can see that a decline in ethics also leads to a decline in everything else human beings are concerned with in practice. These are accompanied with a decline in the character of our conception of logic itself; no longer do we begin from true first principles, but assumed axioms, from which internally consistent conclusions are deduced based on mathematical "laws of thought"; this is taken into the conception of science as what we now call logical positivism. Aristotle deduced what this would mean in Ancient Greece millenia ago; if one has no known first principles, one has no known conclusions, and therefore no knowledge at all. Certainty about things is reduced to certainty about appearances, and then uncertainty; knowledge becomes the fading grin of a Cheshire cat in the Wonderland of postmodern deconstructive thought.
There goes Tom ranting again, the casual and hasty reader will say, imbecile-like. This is all philosophical degree-waving, and like Descartes said about Aristotle's definition of motion: "Who understands this?" Clearly, not such a reader. But I will have it be understood to that reader that they had best understand that it is better to have someone with an intact conception of ethics around when the decision to push the nuclear button is being made; or when any sort of decision is being made about any group of people; or when the reader's own case is being decided in a court of law; or in the last judgement, if at no other time. These people do not spring, fully formed, from the womb of their parents; and if we keep neglecting education in the humanities, it is unlikely that their parents will be able to produce something truly human in their soul, not possessing it themselves. You cannot do this without the humanities, which brings me to a point very dear to me.
I am not getting my degree to masturbate myself to the academic rhythm. I intend to do something with it. I will not be a perpetual academic, nor would my graduate school (or any such school) desire me to be so; they do, after all, need donors. However, I am not out to "change the world." I am not a recently-graduated, fresh-faced 21 year old. That is the task of other people, with more ambition than probable result and an infinite capacity for disappointment. I have long ago resolved that if the world is changed as a result of anything I do, welcome as that may be if it is positive, it cannot be because of me, but because of the One who loved me into existence. People are just too annoying for me to expect to be able to change them under my own power. And even if I could change them, as one can see from reading this post, I am terribly annoying, myself. The difference between me and them is that a) I am annoying in a better way, because b) I know that I am annoying, and c) I know the point of being so. Sometimes, doing the right thing is about annoying someone in just the right way, just enough.
No, I do not want to change the world. It's far too big and too difficult to maintain. My mission is to offer young men and women the ability to decide whether or not it's worth it to seek change themselves, according to the highest and best ways one may seek it. Adults today are too set in their ways, since by and large they, and their educators, are the reason why we children of the children of the '60s have our work cut out for us in teaching the humanities. And why do I want to teach them this useless science? Because whatever else those young men and women do, their enjoyment and excellence depends on their having someone teach them why anything is worth anything, and why this is worth more than that, and why this is most worthy of all; so that when they realize, for example, that their husband or wife trusts them not to cheat, they will not; so that when given a choice between drugs and education, they will choose education; so that when they see a stranger in mortal need, they will drop everything and help, not because someone told them to, but because it's the right thing to do and the right thing is always worth doing. And teaching them this useless science, moreover, opens them to the possibility of being happy in whatever they do. There is very little in working in retail conducive to happiness, but one who truly understands what the promises of Christ are may be happy cleaning the slime out of his worst enemy's shower, let alone while working in retail. We understand these in part through imitation and connatural knowing, but in part through arduous and devoted study.
Lastly, and also really firstly, I want to teach philosophy because it makes me truly happy. I am not happy doing research to "advance the field". I will do it, and I will strive always to excel at it, but my happiness is not in innovation but in transmission. I do not want to transform academia, except insofar as I stop it from betraying its charges by poisoning the wonder inside them through politically-motivated betrayals of duty, or insofar as I make it better by being the best damn teacher I could possibly be. I, too, was once a confused, scared teenager, with no direction or conception of my own happiness. I would pleasantly have spent all my time on my computer, then learned a trade skill in community college, packed up my leisure time into a work-a-day job, made some money, eventually bought a house, and probably asked myself a couple of times what went wrong with me and when. This is assuming I did not acquire any worse addictions on the way, as I watched all my friends head off to college. Instead, I made a choice, prompted by my mom, to look at colleges, and by sheer chance she showed me TAC. I fell in love, applied, went, and here I am. I am terrified at what might (not) have been if I had not done it. I am a great believer now in doing the right thing at the right time, because it saved my life from an unfulfilled pointlessness.
Look at this, and ask yourself, reader: is this not worth teaching? Do I not have something to give, having received? I am 23 years old, about to get two Master's Degrees, in Philosophy and Theology, and I now can do something very few people I know can claim: I can save lives. And not just in the basic physical way, either, although I have no doubt that philosophy and theology can stop someone from harming themselves or others, and routinely save the world on their own merits. I can give people the ability to not just be alive, but to have a life worth living, through teaching philosophy; and in theology, I am able to be an instrument of God, by which those same ones may have life more fully. If this is "useless", it is the most noble, useful, beautiful way of being "useless" that I can fathom. I save lives. I make people happy. I give people the chance and the ability and the expertise to be human. That is a damn good aspiration.
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