The Secret Knowledge (18 page)

Ivan Boesky, stock manipulator and convict, said, in a speech at the University of California at Berkeley in 1986, Greed is good.

Greed is not good, greed is bad. Ambition is neutral, and the distinction is subjective, sometimes difficult, and no business of the State.

Who is to say that the success we applaud (that of the pitcher or quarterback, for example) stems from one and not the other? Can we know? Is it our business? It is not, save in a theocracy, whether Puritan, or its current remanifestation as Socialist—Humanist.

We cannot know, neither is it our business to know, what is in another's heart. We can judge the results of his actions and reward them should they meet our needs. When we are no longer free to do so, we will have eliminated not Greed but Free Enterprise, and with it, all other freedoms.

I was teaching a seminar on dramatic structure at a university. All was going well, until I suggested that the heroine of the story we were constructing be kidnapped by some Arab terrorists. One student asked, “Haven't the Arabs been picked on enough? Why,” he asked, “did you specify
Arabs
? As terrorists.” “
I
don't know,” I said. “They came to mind, perhaps as Arab terrorists bombed New York.” Another student suggested the Pakistanis might be the villain of this piece, and a third said, “
That's just not funny.
”

But, my golly, I said, can the piece have
no
villain? Are we to suggest that, since any actor must
himself
have characteristics, we strive to create a featureless villain, to our choice of which then, could be ascribed no attempt at derogatory racial or social comment? Whereupon the class degenerated in a way which, seemed to me, must be rather usual, for the students lapsed into rather stilted and formulaic repetition of pronouncements.

Everything, it seemed, was political, and their job was to inform the ignorant of it. The Ignorant, in this classroom, were myself and the young woman who suggested the Pakistanis. A young Idealogue broadened his thesis, it was not only the responsibility of the dramatist, he taught, to refrain from stereotyping, but to use every aspect of the drama to
enforce
upon the public a humanitarian view of the world. Homosexuals, for instance, he said, should be seen kissing onstage whenever possible, was it not an outrage that the part of Blanche in
A Streetcar Named Desire
was always played by a woman? Why could it not be played by a
man
?

“Well,” I said, “it
could
be played by a man.
Streetcar
is essentially a gay fantasy written by a gay writer, and clothed in straight terms.” This gave the young fellow pause, for he was not sure if my comment supported or opposed his thesis.

For, in fact, he was not sure what his thesis
was,
but I think it could be reduced to this: all speech should be susceptible to his review on the basis of a series of precepts which, while they could not be cogently
enumerated,
might be inferred from the generalized precept that all people are equal, and anyone from whose actions a dedication to this principle could not be constantly inferred was a subhuman swine.

“Well, all right,” I asked, “are homosexuals human?” He answered that of course they were human. “Being human,” I asked, “are they entitled to the same rights as any other human?” “Of course,” he replied. “Well, then,” I said, “if one of those is the right to entertainment, might we not study to entertain them, by learning how to structure a play?”

But the class had ticked over into what I recognized was a usual stage of progression; someone had taken the high ground and shouted “racist,” or “homophobe,” first and loudest, and all who did not wish to be so branded must submit to his dominance, for did he not speak in the name of all the Good?

“All
right
,” I said. “Here's my favorite joke: What did Custer say when he saw the Indians coming?” (PAUSE) “ ‘Here come the Indians.' ” This was met with that pause we all know, within which the right-minded search for a clue as to the comment's indictability. Was it a criticism of the Native Americans? How could it be otherwise? On the other hand, were
not
these people actually
called
Indians? “Here come the Native Americans,” of course, does not scan. And so on, ran that dreary brutally foolish pause which was the end of the class and is the end of Liberal Education.

What is Liberal Education? It has become an indoctrination in aggressive Identity Politics, a schooling, that is, in the practice of indictment, assault, exclusion, and contempt, all of which contradicts the statement of Universal Humanity upon which all its educational “ideology” rests.
⁵⁷

But here was my question: On leaving the university, what would these Young Stalinists
do
? Who would pay them for the ability to bravely proclaim, “That's not funny?” In what society could they live?

They were and are the children of privilege—in some the privilege is inherited, and the cost of college meaningless, in some the cost is huge, and families suffer; but in all cases the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a “liberal arts education” is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete—to actually
contribute
to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay,
must
trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called a
developmental difficulty.

A nine-year-old boy is rowdy—he needs to run, to subvert, to climb, to misuse, to expend his energies and explore.

Our civilization, incapable of dealing with this natural phenomenon through immemorial means (discipline, order, sport, parental punishment, the military) deems the behavior pathological, and administers wholesale diagnoses, sanctions, and drugs.

Boys are boys and need both to discharge and to learn how to
correctly
discharge and moderate those impulses appropriate to this as to any stage of their development. The strong, wise, or trained teacher or parent must learn when to say, “Sit down,” and when, “Go out and play”; when “I'm calling the police,” and when “Knock it off.” But we have lost the power to discriminate.

A woman on a transcontinental flight was having problems with her three-year-old twins. She swatted them, the stewardess came over to correct the mother, and the mother and she had some words. On landing, the mother was taken off the plane, indicted and convicted of terrorism, and served three months in prison. For she had disrupted a flight, and had spoken rough to a flight attendant and that, it seems, is now a Federal Crime.

The wise society must deal with transitional periods of youth. The young are confused, frightened, energetic, and require not stringency, neither laxity, but
guidance
, which will consist sometimes of the one and sometimes of the other. The guidance required by the rowdy nine-year-olds is also required by college students: They are full of idealism, but have no experience. They may so easily be subverted into sloganeering, for it gratifies the ego and, more importantly,
obviates the fear of the unknown
(adulthood). If everything one needs to know one knows
now,
there is no need to learn discernment, or to
choose
—there is no wisdom greater than “people are people.” And if all oppression must be stopped and there is nothing further to learn, then
you
are the fellow to
do
it. This demagoguery looses the student from the very constraints of thoughtfulness, courtesy, respect, circumspection, and patience, which, at age twenty-one, it is his final chance to learn. These habits, even absent a marketable skill, may help him begin to earn a living. But the recitation of aggressive, invidious slogans meant to shame stand little chance of doing so.

It is not that this Liberal Arts Student has too much leisure, he has nothing
but
leisure. I have spent forty years sitting alone at a typewriter, and will report that it takes time, and effort, trial and error, to learn how to structure one's day productively when there is no one there but you.

It is impossible that the eighteen-year-old, in the laissez-faire of the Liberal Arts courses of Identity Politics, can do so. Of course he will look for certainty, and he will find it in the herd. Being equipped with neither experience nor philosophy, he will adopt the cant of those around him; and his elders, far from correcting him,
endorse
him, and, indeed, charge him for the experience, and call it “college tuition.” But it is Socialist Camp, and creative not of productive Citizens, but of intolerant, uneducated, and incurious graduates, who now, at age twenty-one or twenty-two, must either look for work bagging groceries, or defer the trauma of matriculation by a further course of “study.”

“Are gay people people too?” I asked the student, and he said that of course they were. “Are they aware of that fact?” I asked him. And he responded similarly. “Then why,” I asked, “as they are aware of the fact, would they find its repetition on stage entertaining?”

“Ah, but,” he said, “the straight people should see it.”

“Ah, but,” I said, “the straight people don't care. They may reward themselves for the ability to be bored by a play with a Good Message, but they, just like the gay people, come to the theater to be entertained. Your enlightenment is insufficient to capture the audience's attention for two hours. Would you like some hints on how to do so?”

But the class was over, and I left feeling like a fool, and sad. For the class members were not stupid, they were, as they should be at that age, idealistic; and the university's disinterest in educating them to be of use in their society had turned their natural energy and idealism into a developmental difficulty. They were being drugged with self-indulgence.

I believe that the Liberal Arts University has had it. Like bottled water, the expense and the illusion of exclusivity are still attracting buyers, but what do they buy and what is it worth? The elite schools sell certification, which perhaps has some theoretical value in some theoretical marketplace, though little in the institutions into which these graduates pour.

What family or graduate is going to benefit from a degree in film or gender studies or, indeed, English literature? What are these people going to do, save spread the gospel of the use of their particular discipline in the hope of obtaining a place in the continuation of the farce?

We scoff at the hereditary Mandarin positions as “Keeper of the Buttonhook,” or “Strewer of Rose Petals in the Back Garden,” but what else is “Associate Professor of Gender Studies”? It means the particular institution wishes to display status by the conspicuous waste of treasure and time and so inveigle the insufficiently investigative (parents and students) to come, buy its hogwash, and swell its coffers. But as the economy implodes, there will be fewer and fewer students and families blinded by the display, and more and more sitting down at the kitchen table with paper and pencil, asking the question, “What do I
give,
and what do I
get
?” which is the essence of responsibility, and it's a question of which the developmentally challenged youth are unaware.