Institutional Neutrality and the Truth
I have noted in recent days that several American colleges have declared themselves “institutionally neutral,” meaning that they will no longer, as institutions, take positions on contested social and political questions. They rightly note that such declarations put the chill on freedom of thought, inquiry, and speech. They also, though from what I have seen they do it rather timidly, reaffirm that the university is supposed to be a place where people seek knowledge. That quest implies that there is such a thing as knowledge to be sought. Truth exists.
We do not want to produce sophists. Our students are alive with the desire to see what is actually there to see.
There are a few madmen and madwomen who will go so far as to deny that the results of scientific investigation and experiment help us to discover truths about the world. But there are far more such mad people outside of the “hard” sciences. In our colleges and graduate programs, in our law schools and medical schools, they are in the majority.
These not only deny the existence of truths about God and man, about moral good and evil, about beauty and decency; they actively teach that there are no such, and brand as benighted and bigoted those who believe otherwise. Power is all: the power to “control the narrative.” This power has been, they assume, merely the power of the rich against the poor, men against women, the privileged against the underprivileged, and so on through all the easy categorizations of oppressors and victims.
It is, in an odd way, a sign of some stubborn health among the people, that departments in the humanities dominated by such professors are withering. Consider what moves someone to want to study history or literature. The soul in love with truth or beauty is not the same kind of soul as one in love with power, or one motivated by resentment or revenge against the powerful.
Shift the discussion to any other moral arena and the distinction is clear. The young man who loves your daughter for her goodness and beauty is not the same kind of person as one who wants her because of her social rank. A man who prays to God in adoration is not the same kind of person as one who uses the idea of God as a weapon against his enemies. If you go on a tour of the Louvre, you expect the guide to describe the paintings for you, the techniques the artists used, their strokes of genius, the stories they tell in visual form, and so on; if all he talks about is what the artists earned from the sale of paintings, or what political positions they held, you will ask for your money back.
And millions of graduates from our programs across the humanities and the social sciences should be doing just that: asking for their money back. It is one thing to put your parents’ house in hock over the gables to attain the truth, precious as pearls of great price. It is another thing to do so for political posters whose messages will not outlast the cardboard they are pasted on.
The university, then, must affirm its commitment to truth, in all departments and in all matters that bear upon human life. You would not want to trust your money to someone who tells you at the outset that promises are made to be broken, whenever the promiser can gain by it politically or financially or personally. You would not trust your care to a doctor who tells you at the outset that “health” is a mere social construct, and what is called “disease” is often preferable. Why then would you trust your mind to someone who tells you he does not believe in truth, or your imagination to someone who tells you that there is no such thing as beauty?
Here universities are convicted by what they still say about their methods of instruction. Everywhere you go, you will hear praise for the Socratic method, and for the discussion-based seminar. But you will not hear a peep about the Socratic aim: for Socrates sought the truth, and that was why he used the method we name for him, a method of definition, testing the definition, and rejecting it or refining it or developing it.
If you do not believe in the truth, you are not Socrates but one of the sophists with which his enemies confused him, one of those hucksters of rhetorical persuasion. Many a sophist did believe, as the boorish Thrasymachus insists in the Republic, that there is no such thing as justice, but only what the powerful demand. Or, as the evil Richard III puts it to his dubious followers before the battle of Bosworth Field,
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!
At Thales College, where I teach, we believe in the Socratic method because we believe in the Socratic aim: the method is an effective and humanly powerful way to achieve the aim, and to do so in a fashion that helps students experience what it is like to discover the truth. We do not want to produce sophists. Our students are alive with the desire to see what is actually there to see, and not to get themselves up in political fancy-dress, or to shout at one another to see whose lungs are the loudest, whose face is the reddest, and whose soul is the most shameless.
Our care extends to works of art. No one, I suppose, would be so foolish as to say that Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star is as great a work as The Magic Flute, or that a child’s crayon drawing of a tree is as beautiful as the Tree of Life mosaic in Saint Clement’s, in Rome. No one who has ever heard me sing will confuse me with Luciano Pavarotti. Such admissions are points of leverage with which to heave up and clear away any lumpish skepticism regarding the objective existence of beauty.
We may well argue about the details. I would rather hear Jerry Orbach singing “Try to Remember,” from The Fantasticks, than anything at all by Taylor Swift. That sad and sweet love song is beautiful and memorable; I don’t think that Ms. Swift even thinks about beauty; rather about narcissistic self-presentation and aggression. She certainly dresses that way, without grace, without taste.
But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps, in this general area, I am missing something essential from voices that sound as if they were forced out in groans. Perhaps I am expecting melodies in music where melodies do not belong.
Reverence for the Truth
In any case, even beauty can be approached with reverence, as Socrates approaches it. The statements I have read upholding freedom of inquiry still seem strangely limiting, as if their authors believe that a certain irreverence were necessary to the life of the mind. The reverse is true. Sloganeers are not reverent; they are simpletons or bullies or both. Silence is reverence’s gentle companion: a silence that enables the heart to wait upon the object of its gaze, as when through my small telescope I saw Saturn and her rings for the first time.
Irreverence is flippant, slovenly, perfunctory. In our time, the humble, careful, and constant courtship of the beautiful is made nearly impossible by bad habits instilled in us by our high technology, and it is scorned or vitiated, whether consciously or not, by almost every teacher and professor of arts and letters in the land.
Let those in charge of our schools look to it. We will have once more the Socrates of the Republic, when we have also the Socrates of the Phaedrus, sitting under a plane tree beside the brook Ilissus, to talk with a young fellow about what love is and what it is not. Then we may have, once more, faces of young people not contorted in political wrath, but calm and confident, irradiated by a vision of beauty and truth.
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