|
Article Excerpt
"I am Shiva, the Destroyer of Words"
The above epigraph from the Bhagavad Gita was mouthed in 1945 not by a raving Nazi propagandist holed up in a Berlin bunker, nor by a corn-cob-pipe smoking Allied general wading ashore on a Pacific island. Rather, the speaker of these words was a university professor--Robert Oppenheimer. In August of 1945, shortly after the destruction of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on humanity. Oppenheimer's exclamation marks a sea change of sorts in the relationship between knowledge and power. Although academic knowledge and political puissance have always been stranger bedfellows, during and after the Second World War, academics delivered into the hands of politicians an incredible amount of power. Stepping out of their classrooms and labs, professors moved into the public arena. Although some--like Fareed Zakaria, Henry Kissinger, and the recently departed David Halberstam--might argue that the importing of academic minds into the public sphere has been salutary, there exists a strong counter-argument that such engagement has not been an unqualified success.
In this essay, I'll argue, first, that two very different authors, the German Nobel Prize winner, Hermann Hesse, in The Glass Bead Game, and the American Hugo Award winner, Walter Miller, in the sf classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, present an extended commentary on the relationship between political power and academic knowledge and a critique of academic reductionism. Second, I'll develop the argument of the scholar of higher education William Spanos, who has noted that post-secondary institutions of education tend to erase their own historical and political roots. These institutions, Spanos argues, are always created at specific historical moments and designed to achieve specific political ends. Both Hesse and Miller, albeit in very different ways, draw attention to this erasure of institutional history and to every institution's roots in the historical and political process. Third, I'll argue that Hesse and Miller present a warning to and about academics that they must never forget that their work should, in the final analysis, render service to humanity.
Of Feature Articles and Future Pedagogues
Hermann Hesse's fictional response to world events takes readers to the twenty-fourth-century pedagogical province of Castalia and delivers a pseudo-scholarly biography of Magister Ludi Josef Knecht, the only high-ranking member of the Castalian Order to resign his office and return to the world. Castalian scholars form an elite performing three functions after a century of wars and intellectual degradation. First, they preserve humanity's cultural heritage and intellectual foundations. Second, they create and participate in intellectual celebrations called Glass Bead Games. Third, they train teachers who serve humanity in its schools and universities.
Scholars in Hesse's novel have largely turned away from the world. This renunciation is partly a response to the "the Age of Feuilletonism," a time when "articles about culture seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture" (20). These pieces, in the equivalent of the Culture section of German newspapers, "reported on or rather 'chatted' about a thousand and one items of knowledge" (20). Examples of such essays include the following: "Friedrich Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870," "The Composer Rossini's Favorite Dishes," and "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans" (20). These titles indicate a fascination with intellectual and cultural junk. Not Nietzsche, but Genealogy of Morals' impact on the corset industry. Not Rossini's William Tell Overture, but the composer's taste in linguini. Writers mixed the serious with the trivial for the consumption of masses voracious for bite-sized intellectual snacks. The scholarly author of the biography notes the at many of the writers of these articles "were celebrated university professors" (20). Seeking popularity and remuneration, the professoriate moved from the university lecture theatre into the public arena. A proto rock-star cultural figure emerged: "In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular" (21). In addition to writing their feature articles, these scholar stars hit the public-lecture circuit. Thus, Castalia exists in part because academics turned away from what Hesse saw as high art and the preservation and transmission of high culture. A desire for popularity and relevance robbed academics of their critical distance, their ability to analyze dispassionately.
The turning away of scholarship from world events in Castalia also stems from the use of academic knowledge as a weapon. Knecht tells the Board of Education that "our predecessors and founders began their work in a shattered world at the end of the Age of Wars. Our official explanation of that age, which began approximately with the so-called First World War, is all too one sided. The trouble was, we say, that the things of the mind did not count in those days; that the powerful rulers considered intellect itself merely a weapon of inferior quality, and meant only for occasional use" (352). After the survivors of the Century of Wars cleared away the intellectual and physical rubble, "experience soon showed that a few generations of lax and unscrupulous intellectual discipline had also sufficed to inflict rather serious harm on practical life .... To remedy this, supervision of the things of the mind among the people and in government came to be consigned more and more to the intellectuals in the best sense of the word" (35). Thus, recognizing the need for a baseline intellectual commitment, the state created the monastic order of Castalia to deal with a fundamental crisis. People "know or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, shops and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue" (35). The creation of Castalia reflected an effort to safeguard the "common basis of intellectual honesty and morality" (35). In some ways, Castalia's creation also reflects one of Hesse's life-long concerns.
In The Question of Elites: An Essay on the Cultural Elitism of Nietzsche, George, and Hesse, Stanley J. Antosik notes that Hesse had always dreamed of an imaginary elite determined to "preserve European culture at almost any price, even that of stifling personal freedom with tradition. Again, [Hesse] was changing with the times. For as is well known, one of the salient characteristics of the 1930s was the subordination of the individual to collective ends ... that resulted from man's fearful and negative responses to modernism, responses which made possible, among other things, the popularity of collectivist ideology advanced by the extreme right and left" (159). Hesse's Castalia also fits squarely within the mainstream of nineteenth and early twentieth century German thought viewing high culture itself as an antidote to politics. In Intellectuals and the German Nation, Bernard Gissen argues that for many German writers, "culture and politics collided as two spheres with entirely different ordering principles" (90). For writers like Hesse, who worked in the German Romantic tradition, high culture remained aloof from and, ultimately, superior to politics.
Although funded by the state, the Castalian dream team assembled after the Century of Wars is cloistered, monklike, in its own province and participates in only a very limited way in the functioning of the state. Indeed, Josef Knecht argues that "I am not inclined to urge Plato's thesis that the scholar, or rather the sage, ought to rule the state" (358). Knecht says that "Castalians are not suited for ruling. If we had to govern we would not do it with the force and naivete that the genuine ruler needs. Ruling does not require qualities of stupidity and coarseness, as conceited intellectuals sometimes think. But it does require wholehearted delight in extraverted activity" (358). Knecht concludes that "these are traits that a scholar--for we do not wish to call ourselves sages--may not...
|
