I often wonder, as I contemplate my future as a scholar, what the purpose of education is. On the surface, this is a fairly ridiculous question; after all, I have been through some twenty years of schooling and I suppose on some level I should have figured out what I am doing by now. But if I have learned anything, it is that a good education is in essence humbling, which is to say that the more one studies, the more one becomes aware of one's ignorance. Such certainties as I will venture belong to those who came before me and whose wisdom, unlike mine, is borne out by the enduring example of the human condition.
I thought about this when I recently re-read Paul Johnson’s
Modern Times, a masterpiece and the best general history book on the twentieth century I have ever come across. His general thesis was that it was primarily the spread of moral relativism which turned the era into a slaughterhouse, and that this subjectivism colored the culture, arts, statecraft, and religion of the age in unprecedented and far-reaching ways. The nadir was the second World War, when the rot really set in, and was never wholly excised to this day. Modern Times was last revised in 1991, just after the collapse of the archetypal relativistic state, and has a hopeful tone. Nevertheless Johnson, a devout Catholic, remained pessimistic about the condition of earthly man, and doubted that he would repudiate “the arrogant belief that men and women could solve all the mysteries of the universe by their own intellects.”
That statement, from the final paragraph of Johnson’s book, brought to mind another writer from another age. Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived long enough to see the promise of the Enlightenment, such as Johnson described it, degenerate into the militarism of the Napoleonic Age. Ideology took over from religion, with all of its fervor but none of its humility or scruples. It became the solvent into which all of the things that make up civilized life were dissolved: faith and law, tradition and character, restraint and compassion. The prize was to be the end of human suffering, the alienation so profoundly described by that Gnostic Calvinist Rousseau. So beautiful an end made requisite the most brutal of means. What was cruelty if it ended Cruelty, war if it ended War? And so it went, down through the decades, a black tide of seductive sophistry that, like the waters of Lethe, made those who drank of it forget the past.
Coleridge was himself not immune to the zeitgeist. As a young man, he was enamored of ‘Pantisocracy’ (his word), which involved making “men necessarily virtuous by removing all motives to evil- all possible temptation.” This was to have been the grounding philosophy of a prospective utopian community in Pennsylvania, which collapsed because Robert Southey, Coleridge’s friend, fellow poet, and pantisocratist, insisted on bringing along his servants and because Southey’s mother was unforthcoming with the travel money. But while the notion that it is society that corrupts was pure Rousseau, Coleridge was no Robespierre. He had no heart for revolution, and unlike his contemporary Shelley lacked the personal ruthlessness to be a true radical.
His development as an artist and a philosopher was bound up with his famous opium addiction. Nothing about Coleridge has been as romanticized as this, not least of all by Coleridge himself. But there was nothing romantic about it. Like all addicts, Coleridge lied; to his family, to his friends, and especially to himself. It ruined his career for a time and his marriage permanently. His struggle was long and painful, but in coming to grips with his addiction Coleridge came to have a deep appreciation for the limits of human power and understanding.
This meant coming to respect tradition. In his “Statesman’s Manual,” written in 1816, Coleridge offered the Bible as the “best guide to political skill and foresight:”
If there be any antidote to that restless craving for the wonders of the day, which in conjunction with the appetite for publicity is spreading like an efflorescence on the surface of our national character; if there exist means
for deriving resignation from general discontent, means of building up with thevery materials of political gloom that steadfast frame of hope which affords the only certain shelter from the throng of self-realizing alarms, at the same time that it is the natural home and workshop of all the active virtues; that antidote and these means must be sought for in the collation of the present with the past, in the habit of thoughtfully assimilating the events of our own age to those of the time before us. If this be a moral advantage derivable from history in general, rendering its study therefore a moral duty for such as possess the opportunities of books, leisure and education, it would be inconsistent even with the name of believers not to recur with pre-eminent interest to events and revolutions, the records of which are as much distinguished from all other history by their especial claims to divine authority, as the facts themselves were from all other facts by especial manifestation of divine interference.
The “collation of the present and the past” is possible because human nature remains as it was and always has been. The business of the revolutionaries, harnessing “general discontent” to their schemes, was to be thwarted by “the steadfast frame of hope,” the knowledge that “divine authority” was still operating in the world. For those who were able to acquire an education, their duty was clear. They were to assimilate “the events of our own age with those of the time before us,” to bind past and present in a continuum of culture and shared values, the key feature of which was the notion that the world and its inhabitants were, rich and poor, great and small, under the authority of the law of God. They would thereby render the public immune to the fantastic and transitory nostrums of the age. Earthly prescriptions for equality and perfection were flawed and hollow mockeries of the dignities bestowed by the divine order.
The Bible is a special kind of historical literature, but Coleridge’s words were meant for those who valued all history, and education in a more general sense. Education is a wonderful paradox, uplifting because it is humbling, complex but readily comprehensible, new to each but ancient respecting all, the property of a few held in trust for the many. More than facts it is culture, more than culture it is awareness of being, the property of no one age, but the voice of countless generations, the lightly-borne weight of the lived lives of multitudes from across the vast expanse of space and eons.
Those who would throw the past away were not necessarily evil, but they are always, in a sense, savages. The atrocities that Johnson so deplored in the twentieth century were wrought by men who had cast away the past as though it were a putrid excrescence on human potential. For them, only the group had dignity, only the tribe, whether cast in racial or social terms, mattered. They were as superstitious as any jungle fetishist, believing themselves at the mercy of all-powerful, impersonal, superhuman forces which rendered individual human agency moot.
What made this mindset palatable to so many was that it could so easily coexist with a patina of civilization. Johnson morosely noted that the Germans, the most ‘educated’ people in the world in the early twentieth century, voted the arch-savage Hitler into office, tolerated his murders and general lawlessness, and gave him overwhelming support until he foisted upon them a long and losing war. His deputies could slaughter Jews all day and play the violin all night. For Coleridge, the difference between that sort of ‘education,’ and the one he had in mind, would have been readily apparent. Hegel, Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche, the darlings of modern thought, among so many others, had abandoned the moral framework that gave humans their individual dignity. Their ideas, half comprehended though they may have been, without even the necessity of their authors’ contrivance, led, inexorably, to the gulag and the gas-chamber.
From my perspective, which I am wholly willing to change should I be argued out of it, the first purpose of education is to acquire an apprehension of the inherent value of human life, which is necessarily bound up with such dignity as we have coming from a source outside of us, a higher power from which our universe, and the rational powers by which we comprehend it, derive. This in turn leads to the necessity of acquiring a familiarity with the whole of human nature and experience, such as can be expected given one’s individual talents, proclivities, and resources. Not exempted from this process, indeed the key to it, is introspection, the constant inquiry into one’s own character and motives, from which hopefully derives the insight that one’s fellow men are not objects of study but co-participants in a shared experience which is incomprehensively vast yet simultaneously intimately personal.
It is too early to tell if mankind is on the rebound from the relativism of the twentieth century, or shortly due to sink further into its morass. The world of Coleridge, wherein a man could confidently hold forth the Bible as the solution to contemporary problems, may yet return. Perhaps what is most likely is that the two schemata will continue to co-exist, and that this one or that will win out, not because of irresistible forces, but as the result of choices made by individuals, influenced by such learning as they have. The role of the educated in all of this is, from my perspective, to preserve the image of human dignity against the onslaughts of those who would in any way erode it. They are many, varied, and powerful. But they have the distinct disadvantage of being wrong. Perhaps in this century that fact will be born out in argument, rather than blood and ashes.