Read an Excerpt
LEARNING IN THE PLURAL
Essays on the Humanities and Public Life
By David D. Cooper Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2014 David D. Cooper
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-112-9
CHAPTER 1
BELIEVING IN DIFFERENCE: THE ETHICS OF CIVIC LITERACY (1993)
I can think of no more urgent moment than now for undergraduate educators to be asking ethical questions about the content and context of a liberal arts education. How can the interdisciplinary work of liberal studies, for example, bring harmony out of the dissonances of a curriculum, on the one hand, increasingly energized by the dynamic differences between races, classes, and genders, and a society, on the other, increasingly threatened by divisiveness, disengagement, and disenfranchisement? Can liberal studies help heal the wounds of our fractured national life? Or is the spirit of integration that has traditionally nourished myths of unity and consensus among interdisciplinary humanists more of a problem than a solution?
Benjamin DeMott (1990) accurately surveys such ethical ground. He questions our pressing need to bring alive the differences between us at a time when "our power to see others feelingly in their separateness and distinctness" is drained by a self-enclosure that grips moral life in America today. "There's too little realization," he complains, "that the first step toward achieving the spirit of liberty is the development of a capacity to believe in difference and to register it, to imagine one's way deeply into the moment-to-moment feelings and attitudes of people placed differently from oneself" (13).
A report entitled "Democracy's Next Generation," issued by the nonpartisan constitutional-liberties organization People for the American Way, concludes that among young Americans of all races between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four "self-interest often drowns out concern about our nation's progress toward full social equality.... Pulling back out of [an] economic fear" fueled by the media myth that living well is synonymous with material wealth, today's undergraduates, according to the report, "are remarkably pessimistic about our nation's future" (Kropp 1992, B3).
I detect a pessimism in some of my own students' moral discourses that stems, I believe, from increasing self-enclosure and, in particular, from the way that civic empathy and social idealism have lost their power to inspire the current generation's ethical commitments. In fact, many students today are frankly suspicious of idealism. Curiously, the word itself has undergone a shift in connotation and now means something slightly more akin to "fatalism" or "fantasy." The idealist is often viewed, then, as a sentimentalist or, worse, as a loser in a contemporary world where the future begins to look more like an inexorable grinding away of the present into itself, a world reawakened to an old nemesis of civic culture in America that the poet Langston Hughes decried as "the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak."
ETHICAL IDEALISM
I cannot draw this discussion into the labyrinth of idealism's many usages and meanings, since, as it has been said, the history of Western philosophy is largely a history of idealism, not to mention the parallel traditions that resonate powerfully in the philosophic and religious idealism of non-Western cultures, especially India and China. I am not as interested, however, in the philosophical character of idealism as much as with "ethical" or "social" idealism as it is most commonly understood in today's moral vernacular. According to this perspective, the notion of a society as a consortium of autonomous individuals is both absurd and destructive. Ethical idealism holds that persons are constituted by their networks of interaction with others, and an existence apart from those associations is, at best, a diminished existence. As such, there are ultimate, higher, suprapersonal "ideals" worth aspiring to—mutual welfare, for example, or social justice, or "enlightened" self-interest, or the empathic civility that is the ballast to jurist Learned Hand's spirit of liberty, "the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women without bias" (Hand 1952, 190).
Equally important, other-directed commitment, while serving the highest common good, is simultaneously the fulfillment of the individual. Ethical or social idealism, then, stakes the communitarian claim that individual moral freedom derives, not from psychological or natural necessity, not from filial or class arrangements, but from a covenant—whether secular or theistic—that binds the individual and the polity together into an ethical holism. In America that holism is a compact called "civil society," a compact that innervates our civic life and gives our national literature, no matter where we locate the canonical perimeters, its ethical urgency and its moral inspiration.
Ethical idealism is, if not the linchpin, at least a critical ingredient in the democratic humanism that makes civil society more than an entry in a dictionary of cultural literacy. It counts for something in the worlds of interpersonal relations, civic duty, work, and especially the vast terrain of self-reflection and self-purpose that all of us take a lifetime to survey. Reports like "Democracy's Next Generation" are particularly disheartening, then, in their implications that ethical idealism is such a low priority for young persons.
MORAL IMAGINATION AND THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE
Few modern American plays better capture the essence of moral exuberance that galvanizes youthful idealism and idealistic action than Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Set against a backdrop of overt racism and pervasive housing discrimination during the 1950s, Hansberry's play manages both to recover and to sustain ethical idealism amid conditions that certainly warrant fatalistic surrender. And the play does so without sentimentality and in spite of the unresolved conflicts and uncertainties left over at the end, which remain Hansberry's legacy to the continuing struggle for racial justice and decency in America. It is a play about distress, futility, and tragedy, but also about hope and pride and what kind of conviction and commitment it takes to bring hope out of hopelessness, courage out of fear—in a word, idealism out of skepticism. Robert Coles (1986) describes the black family—the Youngers—and their ordeal in trying to move out of a segregated Chicago borough as a "continual tension between hope and despair in people who have had such a rough time and whose prospects are by no means cheerful" (60). Nowhere in the play is that tension more gripping than in the penultimate scene between Asagai and Beneatha Younger, a scene that Robert Nemiroff, who produced and adapted many of Hansberry's works, describes as capturing "the larger statement of the play—and the ongoing struggle it portends" (Hansberry 1987, x).
After Beneatha's brother, Walter Lee, squanders the portion of a life insurance claim set aside for Beneatha's medical education, she gives into despair, even cynicism, after watching her dream of becoming a doctor apparently go up in smoke. Beneatha had always pinned her personal aspirations along with her hopes for a more equable and compassionate society on the prospect of becoming a doctor, something that reflects Hansberry's belief that social idealism—the commitment to a better society—is intimately and inextricably tied to the problem of individual moral obligation: or, put differently, that social justice is the collective expression of an idealism held by and deeply felt among individuals. "I always thought," Beneatha says to Asagai, that being a doctor "was the one concrete thing in the world that a human being could do. Fix up the sick, you know—and make them whole again." Once the fragile bond of commitment between an individual's aspirations and society's common welfare is broken, however, Beneatha quickly retrenches into cynicism.
I often detect this same cynicism coming from the struggling young voices in my own classrooms who feel so overwhelmed by the individual's powerlessness when faced with seemingly intractable social problems. Like my students, Beneatha wants to care. "I wanted to cure," she explains to Asagai. "It used to be so important to me.... I used to care. I mean about people and how their bodies hurt." When Asagai asks her to explain why she stopped caring, Beneatha comes to age, so to speak, morally. "Because [doctoring] doesn't seem deep enough, close enough to what ails mankind! It was a child's way of seeing things—or an idealist's."
It is at that point where the play pivots delicately on the moral fulcrum that Coles positions between hope and despair, or, in the social/ethical idiom of my own reading, between idealism and fatalism. Asagai, a patriot for an independent Africa, steps forward to defend hope and idealism. "Children," he reminds Beneatha, "see things very well sometimes—and idealists even better." Beneatha counters, bitterly cynical: "You with all your talk and dreams about [a free] Africa! You still think you can patch up the world. Cure the Great Sore of Colonialism—with the Penicillin of Independence—! ... What about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come into power and steal and plunder the same as before—only now they will be black ...—WHAT ABOUT THEM?!"
Hansberry quickly synthesizes the moral dilemma into two very clear, precise geomoral images:
Beneatha ... Don't you see there isn't any real progress, Asagai, there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us—our own little mirage that we think is the future.
Asagai ... It isn't a circle—it is simply a long line—as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end—we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd but those who see the changes—who dream, who will not give up—are called idealists ... and those who see only the circle—we call them the "realists."
These two contrasting images say it all. How one imagines the shape of the future—whether as another version of the present or as a limitless plain of possibilities for personal and societal change—determines moral action and ethical commitment. Hansberry makes her choice. Beneatha decides to become a doctor in Africa. The Younger family reaches down for the courage it takes to integrate a white neighborhood. Without getting into the important complexities and ambivalences of those decisions, we can say that they represent the courage and moral resourcefulness that were instrumental in and essential to the lasting successes of the following decade's civil rights struggles. Among liberals, for example, the Youngers' decision to move becomes the essence of what liberalism stood for during that time: namely, that the integration of American society was simultaneously the empowerment of black Americans and the salvation of white America. In his commentary on A Raisin in the Sun, Robert Nemiroff lifts the play to this higher level of sociomoral analysis.
For at the deepest level it is not a specific situation but the human condition, human aspiration and human relationship—the persistence of dreams, of the bonds and conflicts between men and women, parents and children, old ways and new, and the endless struggle against human oppression, whatever the forms it may take, and for individual fulfillment, recognition, and liberation—that are at the heart of such plays. It is not surprising therefore that in each generation we recognize ourselves in them anew. (Hansberry, xvii–xviii)
GENERATIVITY
Erik Erikson's fascinating studies of Martin Luther (1962) and Mahatma Gandhi (1969) as young men reveal roughly the same dynamic pattern that emerges from Beneatha's search for self-fulfillment: idealism is a crucial component in a young person's necessary, natural, and humane conflict with the status quo. Not incidentally, the same is true for young women, as Carol Gilligan (1982), in spite of her differences with Erikson, shows in her work on moral development. As such, idealism is central to identity formation and indispensable to negotiating succeeding stages of the life cycle. Moral obligation—virtually synonymous, for Erikson, Gilligan, and Hansberry alike, with social idealism—is in fact the key to psychosocial maturity. Erikson (1968), for example, ranks obligation as the highest stage in the evolution of ethical life. What he terms "generativity"—"the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation"—is essential to the development of our inner resources, without which we risk losing our very "faith ... and belief in the species." Moreover, "generativity," Erikson maintains, "is itself a driving force in human organization" (139). To be fully human, if I may simplify Erikson, is to be ethically concerned with and connected to the maintenance and betterment of the world.
Erikson's "generativity," then, is inseparable from an "idealism" that Asagai ascribes to "those [people] who dream, who will not give up" in their quests to make society a better place. And both are critical elements to identity formation—as Beneatha Younger discovers when she enthusiastically resolves to be "a doctor—in Africa!"—as well as to the development of moral literacy and civic empowerment.
Recalling the concerns expressed earlier by Benjamin DeMott and the People for the American Way over the social isolation and dystopian skepticism of young persons today, what is troubling is the apparent rupture between Erikson's "generativity" and much sense among today's undergraduates that commitment to a better society has anything at all to do with the work of self-discovery during a fertile period of identity formation coinciding with the college years. Skepticism over the possibilities for social progress betrays a surrender of students' allegiance to the next generation, a breach in what Erikson calls "the ethics of generative succession." It is almost as if they were snagged at that point in Beneatha's moral life when her identity as healer/doctor is suddenly aborted by Walter Lee's squandering the medical school tuition and she cynically mocks Asagai's idealistic pretensions—just at that point, in other words, when her personal aspirations and her societal commitments simultaneously unravel. Idealism and generative obligation, Erikson reminds us, are essential to such human dispositions as faith, purposefulness, fidelity, love, and care. Without them we stagnate; we are impoverished. Without them the future begins to look more like a circle, less like a long line of possibilities disappearing into infinity. Erikson gives us a choice in his dynamics of identity development between generativity or stagnation, between integrity or despair, between participation in the civic arena or retreat into a private sphere. But more important, as "criteria of vital individual strength," the altruistic drives, Erikson (1968) warns repeatedly in his psychohistorical studies, "also flow into the life of institutions. Without them, institutions wilt" (138).
Shut into the isolation of their skepticism and economic fear, today's students seem to be discounting hope for the continued vitality and viability of civil society in America along with the principles—the "ideals"—of tolerance, participation, and loyal dissent vital to the survival of its egalitarian institutions and central to traditions of liberal learning in its schools.
OUTSIDE THE MORAL ENCLOSURE
Robert Coles, one of Erik Erikson's most distinguished students, concurs with his former mentor that idealism is both psychologically empowering and socially useful. The kind of robust and inquiring idealism that Coles discovers in certain individuals reminds him how essential it is to be able to see beyond ourselves and to appreciate and value our stake in the dignity of others. The young secular idealists Coles writes about in his book The Moral Life of Children (1986) stand as stark—and, as such, perhaps unfair—contrasts to some of the more fatalistic skeptics among today's undergraduates. The social justice perspectives of Coles's civil rights volunteers and their moral discourses differ so much from today's students, in fact, that one is astonished at the values revolution that has occurred in the past two decades and a half. Coles notes, for example, that the degree of commitment among college-aged civil rights volunteers was so thoroughgoing and unrelenting that many faced crushing disillusionment when their high-minded efforts to completely wipe out racial prejudice among southern whites fell short.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LEARNING IN THE PLURAL by David D. Cooper. Copyright © 2014 David D. Cooper. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.