Returning to the Big Questions
By A.S. Erickson | Monday, May 19, 2008
BOOK REVIEW Education’s End
Anthony T. Kronman
Yale University Press, 2007 “I meant the novel [Herzog] to show how little strength ‘higher education’ had to offer a troubled man. In the end he is aware that he has had no education in the conduct of life.”
—Saul Bellow
Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life traces the downfall of the humanities; specifically, Kronman laments how the humanities have abandoned life’s ‘big questions.’ Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, thankfully eschews the substanceless polemic form—an all too common style in books about higher education—and, instead, presents an historically informed account of where the humanities went wrong.
The second epigraph of Education’s End fittingly comes from Søren Kierkegaard: “What is education? I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself, and he who will not pass through this curriculum is helped very little by the fact that he was born in the most enlightened age.” Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Kronman writes, was one of the works taught in a sophomore-year seminar that provided the impetus for his view on the power of the humanities—the only discipline capable of answering the age-old question, “What is living for?”
In the introduction to the book, Kronman details how, after his freshman year, he left school to work as an organizer for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Chicago. After a year in the city and only a failed rent strike to show for his work, he found himself pulled once again to school. And it was there, in the existentialism seminar, where he discovered that the university could examine the question “What is living for?”—that it need not be left to religion or to the life-in-the-trenches approach of the SDS.
Kierkegaard, and existentialist thought in general, permeates the book. The idea of existential angst is precisely what Kronman builds his case for the humanities return to the ‘big’ questions upon. It makes sense. Questions about the meaning of life fit hand-in-glove with a philosophy that is preoccupied by man’s continual struggle with anxiety—caused by impending mortality.
I know that the question of life’s meaning is with me at every moment, out of view but exerting a pull, and this knowledge is the source of that anxiety, familiar to us all, that enlivens and sustains my belief in the importance of the question....This anxiety is always with us, from the moment we become reflectively aware of our engagement in the mortal enterprise of living until the enterprise is done.
For Kronman it is vital that each person finds his own answer to the question, but he contends that the humanities are particularly situated to be of service, uniquely situated even. The other areas of higher education—the hard sciences and successful social sciences (of which economics and government are the paradigms)—have given themselves over to the research ideal. And rightly so, he is quick to add.
Compartmentalized knowledge greatly increases the efficiency with which new advances in these fields come about. Kronman points to Adam Smith’s well-known analogy of the pin factory. Dreary as a picture this is, it operates well in the hard sciences. Kronman is also fair enough to point to history as a subject in the humanities that has been greatly advantaged by the pursuit of original research. In fact, it is in the field of classical history that the research ideal first took hold in early nineteenth century Germany.
The professor’s role altered dramatically; no longer was he merely introducing his students to the great conversation—one that stretched back to Homer and Moses—rather, he now left something behind that assured his own immortality. Being original trumps being right: “The research ideal elevates originality to a position of supreme importance, it makes the notion of a limited set of ways of life, even incommensurably different ones, seem a barrier to individual invention.”
Despite the research ideal’s roots in the humanities, however, Kronman is adamant that, in the end, the humanities should steer clear of it. “The research ideal also sharply devalues the communion with past writers and artists to which secular humanism attached such importance.” The conversation is shorn of its years. Not just that, Kronman contends, but the search for the meaning of life became “unprofessional,” beneath professors.
One other factor, according to Kronman, combined with the research ideal to deliver what many saw as the coup de grâce to the humanities’ unfortunate preoccupation with questions about life’s meaning. That other factor was political correctness, which rested on the tripod of diversity, multiculturalism, and a sort of Foucaultian philosophy that he calls constructivism—all three of which, he claims, have “failed to gain even a modest foothold in the natural and strong social sciences.”
As always, the issue of diversity is wrapped up in affirmative action. The ground was set in 1978 when the Supreme Court ruled in California v. Bakke that the only way to justify racial preferences in admissions was if the preferences contributed “to the advancement of a school’s internal educational goals.” It being nearly impossible to incorporate race into the curriculum of the sciences, the humanities were a natural home.
It’s a zero sum game. For every class in the humanities that focuses on diversity, that is one less class that addresses the existential problems that Kronman is interested in. But the repercussions reach beyond that, he also believes the actual classroom experience is altered:
When individuals exchange views as individuals, they converse. Their exchange is characterized by the flexibility that is the hallmark of every real conversation. This is true even if their views are different or antagonistic. By contrast, when two people meet as representatives, they speak not on behalf of themselves but of the groups to which they belong.... The individuals exchanging views cease to be individuals, and their exchange ceases to be a conversation. Its personal significance for them declines and its political importance as a negotiation increases.
The student’s burden suddenly expands from (the very personal) finding the meaning of his own life, to representing to his peers himself, his family, his race. Classroom dialogue ceases to have meaning for the student’s personal quest. The result is a classroom where everyone, teachers and students alike, feels compelled to tiptoe on eggshells for fear of giving offense.
Some of Kronman’s more breathtakingly audacious statements in Education’s End are reserved for multiculturalism. The benign formulation of multiculturalism can be simply called globalization, but this is not what he is interested in. In fact he claims, “Globalization is modernization, and modernization is Westernization. That is perhaps the single most striking fact of life today—a fact of planetary salience for all the peoples of the earth.” Nevertheless, part-and-parcel of globalization is the exposure to other cultures, which very few people would argue is an unfortunate reality.
The multiculturalism that Kronman takes aim at is a philosophy driven by hostility to the West and its cultural history. The attack is on the conversation. He concedes that there exist many great works of non-Western thought, but these have not been a party to the conversation.
He is also critical of those who would say ‘Why not read all the great books of history, regardless of culture?’ But something is lost when one attempts to cobble together the disparate great works of the world’s civilizations: namely, “the nurturance of a responsible connection to the past.” And, perhaps, the connection to the future:
It has been, we might say, the peculiar fate of Europe to be the homeland of a set of ideas and institutions whose universal validity...is no longer conditioned on anything peculiarly European. In that sense, it is not only appropriate but necessary to speak of the privileged position of Western civilization, understanding by this the unique place which the civilization that began in the West but now rests on universal moral and intellectual foundations occupies among the civilizations for the world. The ideas and institutions of the West, liberated from the accidental limits of their historical beginnings, have become the common possession of humanity.
The constructivism that Kronman laments is closely intertwined with multiculturalism. Constructivists claim that the human world is simply an artifact created by humans; therefore, all independent—or objective—sources of knowledge or meaning are simply false. “Constructivism further insists that this activity of meaning-making receives its motive and direction from a desire to assert power and control over someone or something;” thus, the idea of the ‘tired narrative of the Western Canon as a means to power for white men’ gets its grounding. Multiculturalism and constructivism fit together so well because the emphasis on all cultures’ being equal ameliorates the traditional power of Western culture.
Throughout Education’s End Kronman creates a powerful argument for resting the decline of the humanities on the research ideal and political correctness, advancing a new argument in place of the more overtly political one. He also tenaciously argues for the return of the humanities to relevance.
He concludes on a hopeful note, in part because of the state of the modern world. With more and more people turning to religious fundamentalism for meaning, he contends, the need to address the meaning of life in the academy becomes more urgent; it is something that only the humanities can resolve. “The truth is that our need for the humanities is desperate; that it is anchored in a real crisis to which others are responding with real effect [religious fundamentalism],” Kronman writes, “and that the recovery of the humanities, and of the space of observation and reflection they afford, is driven by a desire of the deepest and most durable kind which only the humanities can meet."
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