My liberal education has turned an ordinary romance with Western culture into a guilty love affair. I sigh with Juliet, “Prodigious birth of love it is to me/That I must love a loathed enemy.” I recognize and am appalled by the crimes and disease of Western culture; I see the pompous arrogance and the blind ethnocentricity. Yet I am fascinated by what many consider the root of the problem: its epistemological longing for the universal, the timeless, the true, the excellent. I share that longing. The story of my liberal education exposes the formation of an odd dissonance: It is unnerving to be so critical of one’s true love.
My education began in the suburban schools of Salt Lake City, where I was part of a largely homogeneous group of students -- we were white, middle class, and Christian. But my liberal education -- that is, my exploration of the “big questions,” about the nature of the world, human relationships, and my place in any web of meaning -- did not begin until the history classes of my junior and senior years of high school. My classmates and I considered the teacher (she taught both courses) an eccentric: She was obviously brilliant, something of a leftist, and a suspected lesbian. She gave us extra credit for reading any of the now-beleaguered “great books” and writing reports on them. Thus I was exposed to classics like Thomas More’s Utopia and Voltaire’s Candide. My interest in the foundations of Western thought grew.
My teacher seemed to love the canon of Western culture, yet she also encouraged us to look critically at the world. She refused to turn on the class TV to allow us our daily dose of corporate-sponsored Channel One (I wondered why), and she delved into history with an eye to inequality. I became conscious of my identity as a non-Jewish, non-Catholic, non-gay, middle-class white male of Northern European ancestry and a largely rural heritage. I contemplated the possibility that religion (a big part of my life) was an opiate for the masses, that patriotism and nationalism were tools in the hands of an economic elite. In other words, I began to consider the darker side of familiar social institutions.
As a freshman at the University of Utah, I enrolled in “The Intellectual Tradition of the West,” and was introduced to the Greek concept of arete while reading Homer’s Odyssey. As I understood it then, arete was human excellence or virtue. My professor, one of the best I would have, informed the class that for the Greeks the question of human excellence was the question: It drove them, intrigued them, and disturbed them more than any other. I began to share the Greek obsession: “What does it mean to be an excellent human being?” “Am I an excellent person?”
The class continued with the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, and Sophocles; each, in turn, presented his views on the human condition. Elaborate, daring, and, to my mind, beautiful systems of metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics were proposed and critiqued. I found I was falling in love with the books that composed the Western intellectual tradition.
At the same time, the critical mind-set initiated in high school continued to be fed and nourished in college. Nearly every class I took focused on how one group -- my group -- had oppressed the world. White males, usually claiming to possess some ultimate (usually religious) truth, had subjugated women, slaughtered non-Christians in the Crusades, decimated the Native Americans. The list of atrocities grew. Every other racial, ethnic, and religious group, it seemed, had a case against my group. I began to reteach myself how to think, write, talk, act. I learned how to read texts to discover who was excluded. I tried to eliminate the generic “he.” I learned to make the proper comments in class discussion -- the ones sensitive to difference. I could detect when other white males (obviously not as sophisticated as I) were saying things that would provoke indignation. I learned which causes I should support and which I should ridicule.
I learned that the grand systems of philosophy I had loved were considered by many to be a preposterous mistake. We don’t know anything about the physical world or the existence and experience of other minds, I was told. Even my knowledge of my own mental experiences is subject to correction (and yet I am bound to acknowledge the reality of my own existence). Language is a game. Words do not represent things “out there": It is naive to think so. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. Meaning is constrained by circumstance and is inherently unstable. The self is also unstable. The author is dead.
And ethics? Any absolute “thou shalt nots” were summarily dismissed. Prohibitions on sex are hypocritical and damaging, according to Margaret Mead. Moral absolutes are impossible, their genealogy revealing only the will-to-power, according to Nietzsche. All is ideology, according to Marx. Meta-narratives are not only wrong, they are destructive; they are stories created by the powerful (my group again) to constrain diverse ways of thinking and to solidify their superior position. The timeless, the universal, and the true should become the historical, the particular, and the relative. Queer theory. Deconstruction. Poststructuralism. Postmodernism. Postcolonialism.
In many ways, the arguments of those approaches were strong. I tried not to accept every theory uncritically. After all, how could one consistently urge incredulity toward meta-narratives? Wasn’t that itself a meta-narrative? But logic itself was also out -- too confining, too easily abused, too much the tool of dead white males.
Thus, the modern, secular university helped refine my critical mind-set in my undergraduate years. The change it caused was exactly the transformation the modern, secular university hoped to produce. I am more liberal, more tolerant, and more skeptical. I have been civilized.
Historians of education have documented many instances of the “civilizing” effects of education. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, author of They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School, reports that, in the name of civilization, Native American children in boarding schools were forced to give up their language, customs, and religion. The New England Common School Movement, in the mid-19th century, according to the historians Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Wagoner Jr., arose as an effort to create unity in language, culture, and customs among immigrants hailing from disparate nations and religious affiliations. And the historian Charles Wollenberg observes that Christian schools were organized in late-19th-century San Francisco to encourage Chinese immigrants to, in the words of early educators, “adopt our higher form of civilization and purer faith.”
I feel as though I also have been molded into somebody’s ideal of moral civilization. I also have been subtly urged to relinquish certain aspects of my language, culture, and religion. One must concede, of course, that there are important differences between my experiences and those of the members of minority groups. They were “civilized” mostly involuntarily, and I mostly voluntarily; they were forced to learn a new language, and I was only urged to refine my speech; they were made to give up their culture, and I was made to be suspicious of mine. But although distinct in degree, the civilizing done by the modern university is a similar kind of influence. Thus, although I recognize my “position of privilege,” it is important to remember that to be a learner -- of any group -- is to be subject to the civilizing currents of the prevailing culture.
I admit: I am uncomfortable. For instance, I can’t seem to turn off this damn critical mind-set. As I eat Thanksgiving dinner, I wonder how I can enjoy such a happy feast on what some consider a day of mourning. I visit historic sites and am impressed more with what isn’t written on the commemorative plaques. I deconstruct movies, billboards, and my dear old grandmother (what would my feminist friends think of her embrace of traditional femininity?). While I realize the necessity of action, I have lost the ability to act confidently, whether it be in intellectual, political, or social domains. The internalized voices of the modern university ask me how I know that what I am doing is right. I am plagued with doubt. (Of course, doubt can be a good thing, but I am often overwhelmed by nostalgia for my lost self-confidence.)
I sometimes wonder whether I would have been happier with an unexamined life.
I am no closer to answering the “big questions” than I was when I started my liberal education. So what have I received from the university? It has given me an illicit love. The university has nurtured my love of Western culture at the same time that it has taught me to be wary of it. I continue to read the classics, and I’m now trying to pick up ancient Greek so I can delve deeper. But my enthusiasm has diminished, and I feel a dissonance in loving something that often has been ugly, oppressive, and tyrannical.
If nothing else, my love can now reflect on her own disfigurement, which is no small achievement. And, every so often, she whispers to me again of arete. I still do love her.
Bryan Warnick is a graduate student in the philosophy of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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