Vox Clamantis in Keystone

Cassio: “O God, that men

should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away

their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance

revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!” 

– Shakespeare, Othello, Act II, Scene III

As fall term kicks off myriad Dartmouth traditions, most involving booze, one wonders why so many bright and curious students dedicate so much time to drunken buffoonery. Considering such buffoonery is the hallmark of most college experiences, perhaps one does not wonder why this is the case. After all, Dartmouth is the source material for Animal House.

No teetotaler myself, I have pondered this matter with local knowledge. While there may be a time and a place to possess less than 100% of one’s faculties, no time is appropriate to completely alienate oneself from one’s reason. Moreover, those times and places should not be every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and some Mondays—and certainly not most waking hours of Sophomore Summer. 

I am not suggesting that many of our cherished activities, such as Pong, are not positive in moderation: hitting the tables with your buddies is a great way to decompress from coursework, strengthen your friendships, and have fun (even for those of us who suck at it). But getting blackout drunk on a routine basis is not the same as the lighthearted camaraderie of a game of Pong; it’s indicative of a serious problem. I tentatively posit that this problem is a fundamental lack of meaning, genuine friendship, purpose, and those other things that engender true happiness and lasting contentment.

To make this article even more pedantic, puritanical, and generally insufferable, I’m going to say that Alexis de Tocqueville correctly identified the origin of this crisis of meaning in the 19^th century:

“When a people’s religion is destroyed, doubt invades the highest faculties of the mind and half paralyzes all the rest… Such a state inevitably enervates the soul, and relaxing the springs of the will, prepares a people for bondage. Then not only will they let their freedom be taken from them, but often they actually hand it over themselves.”

“Religion” I interpret more broadly to refer to a set of firmly held first principles and values; “Bondage” not as literal thralldom but the forfeit of one’s free will and reason to alcoholism and drug abuse.

How does this occur at Dartmouth? Many college students are introduced explicitly in class, or implicitly through a sort of intellectual osmosis, to Postmodernism: there is no absolute meaning, no objective reality, only the subjective perception and experience thereof. For people that had not questioned the nature of reality, their place therein, and the purpose of it all, this is a rather frightening, nihilistic philosophy. 

Their old gods having been killed, so to speak, young people turn to hedonistic distractions and psychoactive substances to render themselves mindless, thereby escaping—momentarily and at great cost—existential dread.

Rather than evading reality, a hopeless act of futility because, despite what some philosophers may argue, A is A, students ought to embrace the quest to make sense of the wondrously complex, meaningful, and many times challenging world that we share the fortune of inhabiting. An inquisitive, optimistic attitude toward the world and mankind’s place therein is what a liberal arts education is meant to foster. To its credit, aspects of Dartmouth do foster such a mentality: the Political Economy Project, many professors and peers, The Dartmouth Review, and the Dartmouth Libertarians, in my experience, all accomplish this.

Instead of wanton debauchery, which can be instantly gratifying, we should embrace the joys of building genuine, deep friendships and relationships founded upon shared values. And I don’t mean political values. I mean meta-values that are far more fundamental than whatever political conclusions you draw from them. Some of these values include: curiosity, enjoying the pursuit of truth through the dialectical method; beauty, appreciation of the sublime; and the sense of purpose that comes from honing one’s skills and pursuing one’s vocation.

I believe Alexis de Tocqueville correctly identified the crisis he observed pervading American society in the early 1800s and which can be observed today on our very own campus. However, he misprescribed the solution: “[G]eneral ideas respecting God and human nature… ought to be withdrawn from habitual action of private judgment.” It is not in forswearing one’s reasoning faculty, and mindlessly deferring to divine wisdom or tradition, that one escapes existential dread. Instead, one escapes nihilism by focusing on one’s own reasoning faculty to understand nature—the world’s and one’s own—to determine one’s highest values and purpose.

One might respond, “Well, perhaps my highest value is getting drunk, high, etc.” To which I’d say, “No, it isn’t.” The nature of humankind does not permit one to drink himself into genuine happiness. No human being’s highest value or purpose is drinking oneself into oblivion or taking other shortcuts to triggering one’s neurological reward circuits. We all know this but continue to evade this reality. To borrow from Ayn Rand, “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”

What is promoting this evasion? Tocqueville’s insight, again, is incisive. He identifies how much easier it is to accomplish a shared goal, maintain a certain lifestyle, and practice a set of values while doing so jointly in the context of voluntary associations. Groups are a double-edged sword: they are instrumental in reinforcing both positive and negative behavior. The Dartmouth community, for example, undeniably promotes a culture of wanton alcoholism. However, when leveraged in the service of virtue, associations provide their members with another benefit: the “happy commerce” of friendship. And, to continue plagiarizing Adam Smith, “[n]othing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness, which is always founded upon a particular relish for all the little pleasures which common occurrences afford.”

Dartmouth students—many of us—are suffering from isolation, purposelessness, and dread. Tocqueville identified the perennial problem and presented a poor and rather elitist (non-)solution. To his credit, he did prescribe an important component to the cure: community predicated on shared values. The part of the cure he himself enjoyed and erroneously labeled toxic for others is the restless pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and meaning by the lights of one’s own reasoning faculty. We should all embrace this noble and happy pursuit. 

^[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Part I, Chapter 5.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part 1, Section II, Chapter 5, Paragraph 2.