 |
| Heracles and Linus, alternative version. |
"Daddy, where does empathy come from?"
"Why, son, that comes from reading the great books!"
No kidding. David Brooks, lamenting Trump's failure to be a Real Leader ("If We Had a Real Leader"), like Lincoln, Reagan, and Obama, not just because he's
a man who can’t fathom empathy or express empathy, who can’t laugh or cry, love or be loved — a damaged narcissist who is unable to see the true existence of other human beings except insofar as they are good or bad for himself
but also because he
is unlettered. He has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis.
From Robert Kennedy on the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting Aeschylus, to Ronald Reagan on the Challenger explosion quoting, ah, John Gillespie Magee:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of...
Why do I have such a hard time imagining Trump getting the education the apparently fluid Frances Perkins (flowing out to sea, perhaps) had, not to mention Morehouse men and Spelman women?
All the leaders I have quoted above were educated under a curriculum that put character formation at the absolute center of education. They were trained by people who assumed that life would throw up hard and unexpected tests, and it was the job of a school, as one headmaster put it, to produce young people who would be “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.”
Think of the generations of religious and civic missionaries, like Frances Perkins, who flowed out of Mount Holyoke. Think of all the Morehouse Men and Spelman Women. Think of all the young students, in schools everywhere, assigned Plutarch and Thucydides, Isaiah and Frederick Douglass — the great lessons from the past on how to lead, endure, triumph or fail. Only the great books stay in the mind for decades and serve as storehouses of wisdom when hard times come.
The headmaster was J.F. Roxburgh of the Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, from 1923 through 1949, and it's worth harping on the fact that it was a "public school", that is a private boarding school like Eton, not a school to which anybody might go.
Actually Trump, also privately educated, arguably references ancient Greek tradition in The Art of the Deal:
Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye. I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I’m not proud of that, but it’s clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists.
The story is evidently another lie, but evokes the story of Heracles's murder of Linus of Thrace, who
taught music as well as letters to the young Heracles.[27] The boy, learning to play the lyre, was unable to appreciate what was taught him because of his sluggishness of soul. While Heracles was touching the instrument unmusically, Linus reprimanded him for making errors and punished him with rods. The pupil flew into a rage and violently struck his teacher with his own lyre.[28] When he was tried for murder, Heracles quoted a law of Rhadamanthys, who laid it down that whoever defends himself against a wrongful aggressor shall go free, and so he was acquitted. He was then sent by his mortal father, Amphitryon, to tend his cowherds.[26]
Thus Trump indirectly asserts his semi-divine status and special right, which I call Trumpian Exceptionalism, to commit crimes, for instance when intellectuals make him feel stupid.
I suppose we may think of the 1st Duke of Wellington as a Real Leader, said to have claimed he won the Battle of Waterloo with the character formed on the playing fields of Eton, although Wikipedia is pretty sure he never did say that, since Eton had no playing fields at the time he went there (1781-84) and he was a lousy and wretchedly unhappy and lonely student who benefited much more from his later studies at the French Royal Academy of Equitation in Angers, where he at least learned to speak French as well as sit a horse well. He really did say, on the other hand, that the British soldiers he cheerfully sent to their deaths in battle after battle were "the scum of the earth", though he also took credit as their commander for turning them into "fine fellows", and I think of him as a sociopath.
Brooks's touching belief in the ability of Great Books to form character must come from his own experience with the University of Chicago core curriculum, though I'm pretty sure it did not include Frederick Douglass in his day (Douglass is not represented in the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World compilation representing the Chicago consensus; nor is Isaiah, for that matter, or any of the biblical books Hebrew or Greek, though of course Plutarch and Thucydides are there). It's remarkable how confident he seems to be that his own character has been formed.
I cherish Great Books myself, and am very grateful for the privilege I've been given of being comfortable with them, which I believe everybody should have, or should have available to them. I can't believe that they form your moral character, though. It's more like an optional richness of experience that broadens you, rather than making you "good"—goodness really is available in principle to everybody, lettered or not. And the Great Books of the Western World also have some pretty severe cultural limitations, as the name indicates, even when it's politically corrected by name-checking an ancient Hebrew prophet and a 19th-century African American political activist.
But above all that, I get the willies from the picture of society as being under the obligation of producing a Real Leader for each generation out of its elite institutions, as if that were its purpose. It's not as if Reagan addressing the Challenger disaster was such an exceptional person, either. He was a terrible president, and a man so shallow that his biographers were literally unable to find a person there. And John Gillespie Magee doesn't belong in the Great Books list. The Reagan example is proof that practically anybody can do that job Brooks is talking about, of comforting the masses at a moment of shock, anyway, though it's clear that a person with Trump's personality disorder can't. Why not aim instead at producing a whole population of people with authentic selves, with an education that takes care of everybody equally, and let the leaders take care of themselves?
Shorter David Brooks: It's not just Trump's fault, it's all of us. For not making him read Plutarch and Thucydides when he went to school. What were we thinking? https://t.co/unslDGV3nc [I guess it's the libs who screwed up education, so Republicans are off the hook too]
— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 29, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment