Why Read? (2 page)

Enjoyable: I enjoyed the teacher. I enjoyed the reading. En joyed the course. It was pleasurable, diverting, part of the culture
of readily accessible, manufactured bliss: the culture of Total Entertainment All the Time.

As I read the reviews, I thought of a story I'd heard about a Columbia University instructor who issued a two-part question
at the end of his literature course. Part one: What book in the course did you most dislike? Part two: What flaws of intellect
or character does that dislike point up in you? The hand that framed those questions may have been slightly heavy. But at
least they compelled the students to see intellectual work as a confrontation between two people, reader and author, where
the stakes mattered. The Columbia students were asked to relate the quality of an encounter, not rate the action as though
it had unfolded across the big screen. A form of media connoisseurship was what my students took as their natural right.

But why exactly were they describing the Oedipus complex and the death drive as interesting and enjoyable to contemplate?
Why were they staring into the abyss, as Lionel Trilling once described his own students as having done, and commending it
for being a singularly dark and fascinatingly contoured abyss, one sure to survive as an object of edifying contemplation
for years to come? Why is the great confrontation—the rugged battle of fate where strength is born, to recall Emerson—so conspicuously
missing? Why hadn't anyone been changed by my course?

To that question, I began to compound an answer. We Americans live in a consumer culture, and it does not stop short at the
university's walls. University culture, like American culture at large, is ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment,
to the using and using up of goods and images. We Americans are six percent of the world's population: we use a quarter of
its oil; we gorge while others go hungry; we consume everything with a vengeance and then we produce movies and TV shows and
ads to celebrate the whole consumer loop. We make it—or we appropriate it—we "enjoy" it and we burn it up, pretty much whatever
"it" is. Someone coming of age in America now, I thought, has few available alternatives to the consumer world-view. Students
didn't ask for it, much less create it, but they brought a consumer Weltanschauung to school, where it exerted a potent influence.

The students who enter my classes on day one are generally devotees of spectatorship and of consumer-cool. Whether they're
sorority-fraternity denizens, piercer-tattooers, gay or straight, black or white, they are, nearly across the board, very,
very self-contained. On good days, there's a light, appealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement. But there is little
fire, little force of spirit or mind in evidence.

More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the
progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed
against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own, the World Wide Web. There they met life at
second or third hand, peering eagerly, taking in the passing show, but staying remote, apparently untouched by it. So conditioned,
they found it almost natural to come at the rest of life with a sense of aristocratic expectation: "What have you to show
me that I haven't yet seen?"

But with this remove comes timidity, a fear of being directly confronted. There's an anxiety at having to face life firsthand.
(The way the word "like" punctuates students' speech—"I was like really late for like class"—indicates a discomfort with immediate
experience and a wish to maintain distance, to live in a simulation.) These students were, I thought, inclined to be both
lordly and afraid.

The classroom atmosphere they most treasured was relaxed, laid-back, cool. The teacher should never get exercised about anything,
on pain of being written off as a buffoon. Nor should she create an atmosphere of vital contention, where students lost their
composure, spoke out, became passionate, expressed their deeper thoughts and fears, or did anything that might cause embarrassment.
Embarrassment was the worst thing that could befall one; it must be avoided at whatever cost.

Early on, I had been a reader of Marshall McLuhan, and I was reminded of his hypothesis that the media on which we as a culture
have become dependent are themselves cool. TV, which seemed on the point of demise, so absurd had it become to the culture
of the late sixties, rules again. To disdain TV now is bad form; it signifies that you take yourself far too seriously. TV
is a tranquilizing medium, a soporific, inducing in its devotees a light narcosis. It reduces anxiety, steadies and quiets
the nerves. But it also deadens. Like every narcotic, it will, consumed in certain doses, produce something like a hangover,
the habitual watchers' irritable languor that persists after the TV is off. It's been said that the illusion of knowing and
control that heroin engenders isn't entirely unlike the TV consumer's habitual smug-torpor, and that seems about right.

Those who appeal most on TV over the long haul are low-key and nonassertive. Enthusiasm quickly looks absurd. The form of
character that's most ingratiating on the tube, that's most in tune with the medium itself, is laid-back, tranquil, self-contained,
and self-assured. The news anchor, the talk-show host, the announcer, the late-night favorite—all are prone to display a sure
sense of human nature, avoidance of illusion, reliance on timing and strategy rather than on aggressiveness or inspiration.
With such figures, the viewer is invited to identify. On what's called reality TV, on game shows, quiz shows, inane contests,
we see people behaving absurdly, outraging the cool medium with their firework personalities. Against such excess the audience
defines itself as worldly, laid-back, and wise.

Is there also a financial side to the culture of cool? I believed that I saw as much. A cool youth culture is a marketing
bonanza for producers of the right products, who do all they can to enlarge that culture and keep it humming. The Internet,
TV, and magazines teem with what I came to think of as persona ads, ads for Nikes and Reeboks and Jeeps and Blazers that don't
so much endorse the powers of the product per se as show you what sort of person you'll inevitably become once you've acquired
it. The Jeep ad that featured hip outdoorsy kids flinging a Frisbee from mountaintop to mountaintop wasn't so much about what
Jeeps can do as it was about the kind of people who own them: vast, beautiful creatures, with godlike prowess and childlike
tastes. Buy a Jeep and be one with them. The ad by itself is of little consequence, but expand its message exponentially and
you have the central thrust of postmillennial consumer culture: buy in order to be. Watch (coolly) so as to learn how to be
worthy of being watched (while being cool).

To the young, I thought, immersion in consumer culture, immersion in cool, is simply felt as natural. They have never known
a world other than the one that accosts them from every side with images of mass-marketed perfection. Ads are every where:
on TV, on the Internet, on billboards, in magazines, sometimes plastered on the side of the school bus. The forces that could
challenge the consumer style are banished to the peripheries of culture. Rare is the student who arrives at college knowing
something about the legacy of Marx or Marcuse, Gandhi or Thoreau. And by the time she does encounter them, they're presented
as diverting, interesting, entertaining—or perhaps as objects for rigorously dismissive analysis—surely not as guides to another
kind of life.

As I saw it, the specter of the uncool was creating a subtle tyranny for my students. It's apparently an easy standard to
subscribe to, the standard of cool, but once committed to it, you discover that matters are different. You're inhibited, except
on ordained occasions, from showing feeling, stifled from trying to achieve anything original. Apparent expressions of exuberance
now seem to occur with dimming quotation marks around them. Kids celebrating at a football game ironically play the roles
of kids celebrating at a football game, as it's been scripted on multiple TV shows and ads. There's always self-observation,
no real letting-go. Students apparently feel that even the slightest departure from the reigning code can get you genially
ostracized. This is a culture tensely committed to a laid-back norm.

In the current university environment, I saw, there was only one form of knowledge that was generally acceptable. And that
was knowledge that allowed you to keep your cool. It was fine to major in economics or political science or commerce, for
there you could acquire ways of knowing that didn't compel you to reveal and risk yourself. There you could stay detached.
And—what was at least as important—you could acquire skills that would stand you in good financial stead later in life. You
could use your education to make yourself rich. All of the disciplines that did not traduce the canons of cool were thriving.
It sometimes seemed that every one of my first-year advisees wanted to major in economics, even when they had no independent
interest in the subject. They'd never read an economics book, had no attraction to the business pages of the Times. They wanted
economics because word had it that econ was the major that made you look best to Wall Street and the investment banks. "We
like economics majors," an investment banking recruiter reportedly said, "because they're people who're willing to sacrifice
their educations to the interest of their careers."

The subjects that might threaten consumer cool, literary study in particular, had to adapt. They could offer diversion—it
seems that's what I (and Freud) had been doing—or they could make themselves over to look more like the so-called hard, empirically
based disciplines.

Here computers come in. Now that computers are everywhere, each area of enquiry in the humanities is more and more defined
by the computer's resources. Computers are splendid research tools. Good. The curriculum turns in the direction of research.
Professors don't ask students to try to write as Dickens would, experiment with thinking as he might, were he alive today.
Rather, they research Dickens. They delve into his historical context; they learn what the newspapers were gossiping about
on the day that the first installment of Bleak House hit the stands. We shape our tools, McLuhan said, and thereafter our
tools shape us.

Many educated people in America seem persuaded that the computer is the most significant invention in human history. Those
who do not master its intricacies are destined for a life of shame, poverty, and neglect. Thus more humanities courses are
becoming computer-oriented, which keeps them safely in the realm of cool, financially negotiable endeavors. A professor teaching
Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper," which depicts the exploitation of young boys whose lot is not altogether unlike the lot of
many children living now in American inner cities, is likely to charge his students with using the computer to compile as
much information about the poem as possible. They can find articles about chimney sweepers from 1790s newspapers; con temporary
pictures and engravings that depict these unfortunate little creatures; critical articles that interpret the poem in a seemingly
endless variety of ways; biographical information on Blake, with hints about events in his own boyhood that would have made
chimney sweepers a special interest; portraits of the author at various stages of his life; maps of Blake's London. Together
the class might create a Blake-Chimney Sweeper website:
www.blakesweeper.edu
.

Instead of spending class time wondering what the poem means, and what application it has to present-day experience, students
compile information about it. They set the poem in its historical and critical context, showing first how the poem is the
product and the property of the past—and, implicitly, how it really has nothing to do with the present except as an artful
curiosity—and second how, given the number of ideas about it already available, adding more thoughts would be superfluous.

By putting a world of facts at the end of a key-stroke, computers have made facts, their command, their manipulation, their
ordering, central to what now can qualify as humanistic education. The result is to suspend reflection about the differences
among wisdom, knowledge, and information. Everything that can be accessed online can seem equal to everything else, no datum
more important or more profound than any other. Thus the possibility presents itself that there really is no more wisdom;
there is no more knowledge; there is only information. No thought is a challenge or an affront to what one currently believes.

Am I wrong to think that the kind of education on offer in the humanities now is in some measure an education for empire?
The people who administer an empire need certain very precise capacities. They need to be adept technocrats. They need the
kind of training that will allow them to take up an abstract and unfelt relation to the world and its peoples—a cool relation,
as it were. Otherwise, they won't be able to squeeze forth the world's wealth without suffering debilitating pains of conscience.
And the denizen of the empire needs to be able to consume the kinds of pleasures that will augment his feeling of rightful
rulership. Those pleasures must be self-inflating and not challenging; they need to confirm the current empowered state of
the self and not challenge it. The easy pleasures of this nascent American empire, akin to the pleasures to be had in first-century
Rome, reaffirm the right to mastery—and, correspondingly, the existence of a world teeming with potential vassals and exploitable
wealth.

Immersed in preprofessionalism, swimming in entertainment, my students have been sealed off from the chance to call everything
they've valued into question, to look at new ways of life, and to risk everything. For them, education is knowing and lordly
spectatorship, never the Socratic dialogue about how one ought to live one's life.