The Wabash Commentary: Personify C&T by one of its characters.
Professor David Blix: First, I would say Du Fu. He’s this marvelous poet who’s open to all the varieties of the human condition. He meets everybody, writes about everything. He is always on the move. I find him an altogether admirable character. But of course Odysseus is one possibility. He doesn’t quite cut it altogether, because he doesn’t listen as much as he should. Maybe Odysseus and Penelope together.
TWC: If, as seems imminent, C&T is replaced by some one semester course, what is lost? Is it comparable to Odysseus drowning halfway through his journey, or Penelope weaving her shroud much too quickly?
DB: I’m tempted, by all means, to go in that dramatic a direction. The simple answer is that we would lose a lot in terms of quantity, we’d just cover less material, and that, to me, is lamentable. Do you take out modules? Would you just shorten each module to a couple of readings? Do you take each module and try to put it…I’m baffled by it. There’s a certain amount of syllabus time that has to be developed to begin to get even a rudimentary sense of the culture. So either we would lose attention to two or three cultures, or we would not be able to sense syllabus-time elapsing.
I also think there’s a developmental process for the students over the course of nine months. Now I should hasten to add that colleagues whose good opinion I respect do not agree with me on this. But my experience is that sophomores do get better, and it takes a lot of repetition, it takes a lot of practice, to learn how to read, discuss, and make connections among items and issues. And it takes time. My personal opinion is that would be very hard to do – not impossible, but very hard to do – in the course of one semester.
TWC: Many students have the opinion that C&T is getting cut because too many professors don’t want to teach it. They are, to use a recent phrase, uncomfortable with being uncomfortable – uncomfortable with teaching outside of their discipline. Please comment. Should such professors even be at Wabash? If students must be liberally educated, and, ostensibly, made to feel uncomfortable when studying outside of their major, shouldn’t professors?
DB: I’ve heard some of our more recent faculty say they have a lot of fun with the course, they enjoy teaching it. Others are very honest about saying they have to work very hard to prepare to teach it, which I think they’re not saying that I don’t want to teach it, only that they want to do a good job teaching it, and they’re not sure they’ll be able to pull that off.
But I think it’s good that C&T be here as a kind of permanent, ongoing invitation, beckoning to faculty both newer and more experienced, younger and older, saying, “Try this adventure.” And if somebody in an ongoing or permanent way, from one semester to the next, one year to the next, doesn’t warm to the course or isn’t willing to take the risk, it’s hard for me to avoid the conclusion that they just don’t like the liberal arts. They don’t want to teach in a liberal arts setting. I have other colleagues that would say that doesn’t necessarily follow, but to me it’s one good index, an openness, a receptivity to the liberal arts experience.
TWC: We have heard that professors once had to vie to teach C&T, that it was an honor to be invited. When did that change?
DB: This is purely oral history, and I couldn’t even begin to tell you my source, but yes, people would vie for positions to teach it. I’m not sure that’s the feel of the course now, and while I’m always glad when we have younger colleagues teach, especially if they’re willing to take the risk and to try the adventure, I guess what puzzles me is older colleagues who seem to come across as saying, “Well, I don’t want to teach it, so we’ll give it to somebody else.” I’m not sure when that happened. Maybe ten years ago, maybe earlier than that.
TWC: Could you guess a reason?
DB: I don’t know, I just don’t know. This is where I come up against a brick wall, and I admit I’m fully biased, because I like teaching it so much.
TWC: We’re puzzled, too.
DB: Is it the student perception that faculty don’t want to teach it?
TWC: Very much so.
DB: Yes, I think that’s right. There is, now, a certain learning curve. You need to be prepared when teaching C&T to say, “There are things I don’t know,” or, “I’m just a beginner.” I certainly felt that way. I made many mistakes, learned many things, and kept lots of notes. I can’t imagine in my earlier years as a teacher saying, “No, I don’t like that.” I didn’t have enough experience to make that kind of judgment.
TWC: Perhaps there was once an element of shame that pressured faculty for better or worse into teaching the course?
DB: Maybe not shame, but something like, “This is part of your training. We want you to become a good teacher. Do it.” I was talking with an older colleague not in Division II, and he was reminiscing. When he first started teaching C&T, he was very nervous about it, and made a comment, I think, in the presence of the late Dean Moore: ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can do this’ or ‘How am I going to do this?’ And Dean Moore basically said, ‘Just do it. Take the book, take the reading, read it, and just go do it.’
TWC: Apropos of professors being reluctant to leave their shell, address the professor who says to his class on the first day: “I am not an expert in what we will be reading, thus I will, to be fair, only grade your comments based on quantity, not on quality.”
DB: Oh dear. This has actually been heard, by students?
TWC: Yes.
DB: Well, I can understand that feeling, but what you want to say to such a professor is this: All you need is a mind. You can read, you can extract meaning of some kind or another out of that text, or work, or art, or piece of music. You can let it get to you. You can let it have its way with you, let it affect how you think and feel about things.
That’s part of the risk and the adventure of C&T, letting that happen, not trying to dominate the text, not trying to dominate the work of art and bend it, not trying to control it to your own purposes. But let it speak, and then you can come into class and say, “Wow, this was a really interesting passage. What do you think that means?” Hopefully, some questions will come to mind. If they don’t, then conversations with colleagues either in staff meetings or out might push a few buttons. Anybody can do it, but so many of us get used to thinking that our intellectual lives have to be defined by the canons, the criteria, the issues within our field or discipline.
TWC: So to push you a little bit: We’ve agreed that one doesn’t need to be an expert on the subject being taught to teach C&T well - but if one were to look at the structure of C&T and observe that it is organized into modules that are largely based on cultures, one might think the purpose of the Ancient China module is to learn something about Ancient China. Is C&T more about learning things about the world, or learning things about ideas? To learn, when reading Antigone, things about ancient Greece, or about natural law?
DB: I would say they’re basically the same thing. To understand any text well, I think you have to understand it in its historical/cultural context. At a very minimum, that will mean knowing something about the references that the text makes. I would also want to say that learning from Antigone about, say, natural law, is itself to read the text historically. The text is historical when it’s speaking to us.
Let’s make this more complicated. I sometimes think people say what a text means is identical with what the text meant in the past. And so our purpose is to recover what it meant then and there, and then we’ve exhausted the text. I argue with that, and say, No, what a text meant is not the same thing as what it means. Its meaning is ongoing. It continues even as it speaks to us today. It’s a way of discounting the voices of the past, and saying these people were too dumb to be able to tell us about their own culture. We have to rely on the historian, or the anthropologist, or the sociologist to reconstruct it for us, and I would say, Well, that can be helpful, but a premise of this course is that these people were intelligent. They had voices, they can say what mattered to them, and we can get at that.
TWC: Alexander Pope is famous for saying that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” How does the module organization of C&T, through which students are made to learn a little bit very quickly about many cultures, escape this accusation?
DB: Well Pope was wrong. Now, I don’t actually know what Pope meant here. He may actually have been working for a rhyme for all we know. But I think folks sometimes assume that the only kind of genuine knowledge is complete knowledge. They assume that having some knowledge, or only partial knowledge, is not real knowledge, that partial experience is not real experience. And I think that’s not true - you still know something, after all. I think maybe what Pope is getting at is that we’d just make a bunch of dilettantes, you know, a little cocktail chitchat. I don’t think anybody who teaches C&T is willing to say that. To me, the course is a basis for ongoing exploration.
TWC: Let’s return to the supposed false dichotomy between things and ideas. Say instead of C&T having modules that are largely based on cultures, and so pretending to be about the world, it would instead be organized by modules based on the seven classical virtues and their corresponding vices. The first module might be organized around, say, charity and greed. How would that be different from what we have now?
DB: As an example, let us take a reading from Du Fu, the Chinese poet, which talks about the love of humanity and the risks of avarice. There’s a wonderful poem where he travels north, and he goes past the winter palace where the consort is living in luxury and people are dying and so forth. If we were hypothetically to arrange a module that way, and were to put that Du Fu poem there, then what we have done is said to everyone ahead of time: “Here’s what this poem is about.” And to me one of the marks of a classic text is that its meaning really cannot be pinned down, or it ought not to be pinned down in so precise a way. It can mean many things, and these things will spring up in conversation.
So, my worry in arranging the course by theme is that we would cut off some of the meanings of the text; we would limit the range of interpretations. We’d be telling people ahead of time: This is what it’s about. A cultural arrangement gives the readings the coherence of falling within the same geographical area over a certain period of time. There’s a kind of continuity among them, but otherwise we leave it open-ended.
TWC: The German philosopher Erich Heller wrote a book, The Disinherited Mind. We haven’t read it, but it seems to be analogous to Allan Blooms’ The Closing of the American Mind, which we have read. Blooms’ thesis is that American students have become out of touch with their Western philosophic and cultural roots. No doubt the same holds true today. Why not make C&T into a yearlong Western Civilization course? After all, if the outstanding logic for a masculinities course at Wabash – namely, that we’re all men, so we should learn about being men – is somehow sound, why then is it not for a Western Civilization course? We’re all the descendants of Western civilization, so why shouldn’t we learn about being of the West?
DB: [suspiciously] How many lines is that question?
TWC: I can read it again, if you want, or I can paraphrase it.
DB: Paraphrase it.
TWC: Why not a Western Civilizations course?
DB: It wouldn’t be as interesting, I think.
TWC: But we need it, under Bloom’s thesis. We need it, or else we don’t have roots.
DB: I think Western culture is a very useful designation but the boundaries are permeable. They shift. Now I might be suspected of a certain bias here, because I’m interested in Asia and in Islam, and so I want us to look at those things. But I also think that part of the genius of the West is a kind of openness and curiosity about the world. So we can learn about China or Africa or India, because our process of learning about them is part of what it means to live in Western culture today.
TWC: You seem to suggest that in trying to learn about the West, we’d be stabbing at the western heart of ourselves, which is a natural inquisitiveness toward other cultures.
DB: I don’t know if I’d say stabbing, but we would be, in a way, working against one of our own best instincts. So much of what’s interesting happens when you get at this encounter, when you get at and between cultures, or domains of existence that we call cultures, and they interpenetrate. To me one of the models here is Odysseus. Remember the openings words of The Odyssey: “He travels many lands through the minds of many men.” I think there’s an Odyssian spirit here, except now we’ve a wider wine-dark sea over which we travel.
TWC: Except, of course, that the Romans demonized Odysseus. Dante suggested that his very strength was the manifestation of hubris, and cast him into Hell.
DB: Your use of the word hubris is helpful. It depends on the attitude we take with us: Am I going to listen to the people and be moved by them? I think one can go out and be cosmopolitan and do that kind of listening. Now let me add as footnote to this: We also need Western culture as part of the course, because I don’t think we can assume that just because we’ve grown up in a culture, we know it. We should go back and problematize it. We should take some attitudes and assumptions that we’ve taken for granted and say: Is this so? Is it good?
The German philosopher Schleiermacher wrote a short book on what it means to do theology. One of his axioms is that the thesis of the believer must become the hypothesis of the theologian. And I think that can be extrapolated to an even broader context than the theses of the culture – those things we take as evident, in the context of C&T, all become hypotheses…open for testing and questioning all over again. It’s the constant re-hypothesizing of the obvious that should occur, and that needs to work within Western culture on its own terms, not just with Ancient China, or Japan.
TWC: Yes, that should in some way be the goal of every course, the disruption of what Brecht calls the “Selbstverständlich.” But onward. Problem: C&T is a discussion course, which admits of and should encourage worthwhile digressions. However, professors do not know the questions that will later appear on the final, making them nervous to lose class time discussing what may be more interesting and important things, all so that they can pinpoint character traits sufficiently to prepare students for the final. If we admit that C&T isn’t about learning the equivalent of Sparknotes for each book – that it isn’t really interested in teaching anything factual – then what sense does the final make?
DB: I admit, I worry about that. A good final exam gives each student a chance to take everything that he’s done over the semester and tie it up together in some kind of package. So when the student leaves the course, he’s got not just a suitcase full of junk that he’s thrown together, but there’s some handles on it, there’s some lead-ins he can follow. It sticks with him better because he’s organized it.
TWC: But still it seems to betray the spirit of the course. Let us say the last forty minutes with Antigone were spent discussing whether natural law is tenable or not - whether law is just handed down by a sovereign, or whether there are actually principles of fairness to which people in any culture can appeal. Antigone wasn’t betrayed in that instance, but I can imagine that conversation happening without Antigone being mentioned for forty minutes.
DB: Yes, and I’ve had discussions like that. What I’d like to do is say, “Can you tie it back to Antigone?” For the moment, for those fifty minutes, I want there to be some constraints on the discussion. Now I don’t want it to be so constrained that it’s cramped. There’s got to be free-flowing interpretations. That’s the way you take-up a text and work it. It’s a balancing act. So if there’s no mention of Antigone, I wouldn’t say she’s betrayed, but she’s let down.
In a good C&T discussion, what you do is submit to the text at hand. For the time being you say, “I’m going to assume that you, this text, and whatever hands or voices went into its making, are better and smarter than I am, and that you have something to teach me, and I have something to learn. Now I may want to argue with you later in the day, I may want to set you aside and work my own thoughts, but for the duration of reading before the class and discussion in the class, you are my teacher. “
There’s an anecdote I like to tell. There was a woman walking through the Louvre in Paris, and she was complaining loudly about some of the art. One of the guards came over to her and said, “Madame, the paintings are not on trial here, you are.” It’s that sense of being on trial and being questioned by the text that is at the very heart of this enterprise. And that can be very unsettling, very unsettling.
TWC: Evelyn Waugh describes the education of Hooper at the beginning of his Brideshead Revisited with the following words: “Hooper was no romantic…at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry… Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they had taught him had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change…” How much can we think of C&T as a course that educates young men so that they don’t turn into Hoopers?
DB: Absolutely, that is how we should think of it. There’s this trend in academia that says noli me tangere, touch me not, I don’t want to be affected by that. My job as an academic is to comment on it, to write articles about it, to extract facts from it, and I will not let it speak to me. I would say, “Au contraire.” The very mark of a liberally educated person is that it gets to you, and you weep, and you laugh, or you think, or you ponder, or you fret, and you’re all in a sweat because you can’t figure out this dilemma. You’re thinking along the same lines as, say, Burke or Paine, and it matters to you.
