The Skies of Babylon: Diversity, Nihilism, and the American University

Read an Excerpt

The Skies of Babylon

ISI BOOKS

Chapter One

What kind of thing is a university?

As a sheer swarm of facts, the university has grown beyond all definition-it is a more or less preliminary stage in a career, a fun place for young people set free of their parents, an opportunity to play sports, a bestower of credentials, a designer logo for the soul or the back window of one's car, an agent of research for government, industry, and the market, a business busy selling itself, a Wal-Mart of ideas and programs proposed to gratify a morphing diversity of appetites, a node on the web-work that is globalization, a relay station for swarms of facts.

As a matter of fact, of sheer facts, it is an unintelligible mess and its own best evidence for the nihilism it generally purveys.

But there is a way to ask this question which might create order out of this mess, and here it is: Who is a teacher? Or, what does a teacher desire? Or, most precisely, what is the desire that defines a teacher? The answer to this question might help us see what a university in fact should be.

All of us, teachers included, are hybrids, blends of all sorts of desires, appetites, and motivations, but it is still possible to identify in at least some people, and maybe even in most, some ruling and thus defining desire, one that confers a name, like "Dad," say, or "Mom." A child, after all, rightly assumes that his mother or father has taken him as a matter of first concern and is prepared to live a life dedicated to that concern above every other. A true physician is ruled by his desire to heal and to care for those who are ill. A warrior fights for his country, risking everything else in his desire to serve. A teacher likewise teaches, and is taken by his students as owing them his efforts. They give him a name-"Professor," maybe, or "Doctor," or in high school maybe just "Sir," "Mister," or "Ma'am." All of these monikers are just like "Mom" in that they signify an identity rooted in a lifework and acknowledge the ruling desire required to perform that work. Students are sometimes surprised when they discover that a teacher has a life outside of teaching; it's good that this revelation should come to them as a surprise.

Caring, rearing, teaching, healing, fighting for one's country-the desire to do such things is not just one appetite among others. It achieves its purpose by putting many appetites in their place, ruling over them, overcoming the chaos that appetites produce when taken as the determining facts. What then constitutes the desire to teach, such that it rightfully rules over other perhaps related but potentially competing appetites?

Let's start simply. A teacher likes helping others come to know things they did not know before, or to see things they saw before in new ways, under a new light. To use a personal example, when I first began teaching years ago at a Catholic high school in a blue-collar New England town, my freshmen and I were making our way through the Iliad. I was trying to explain some point when all of a sudden, in the midst of my efforts, a girl in the front row began to shake with laughter. I wasn't intending to be funny, so I asked her the reason for her outburst. She said, helplessly, "It's because ... I understand!" She saw, and because she saw, she burst into life, at least for that moment, and the epiphany was strong enough to make her laugh.

But what I want to point to here is not so much her reaction to me or to "Sarpedon carried off by the swift messengers Sleep and Death," but my reaction to her being carried off in a flash of understanding. It made my week! Teaching high school is tough and I was paid peanuts, but moments like that one made it unquestionably worthwhile. Her coming alive made me a little more alive, too. What was at stake here was by no means mere information; rather, it was life itself, and so also death. If one is not ever enlivened in such a manner as my student, then one is indeed carried off by Sleep and Death. The teacher desires to teach because he desires to give life, and he desires to give life because that's what life itself is to him-giving and sharing life through teaching.

It's like singing or philosophy or parenthood.

Music takes the musician and those for whom he makes music and raises them up together into a region of light, experience, and awareness that otherwise neither he nor they would have entered. And from that new standpoint, ordinary reality-the reality that until then appeared merely ordinary and dull-seems suddenly radiant and luminescent with meaning, or at least with the promise of meaning. Reality is revealed as more real than one had previously thought, and oneself within it likewise.

Philosophy-some philosophy, anyway-makes the determined effort to bring that luminescent meaning into clear speech, almost as if to bind it to ordinary life with the chains of logic, so that we don't have to sink into the dark dullness ever again but can grasp forever the extraordinary, elusive, and beautiful truth of things. Like the musician and the philosopher, the teacher sings songs and makes arguments meant to illuminate the sky like lightning or fireworks-or maybe only like a match struck and extinguished, if that's the best he can do, such that a freshman high school girl suddenly and briefly laughs.

And consider what parents do. The biology of the business is full of wonders, nothing we can ever entirely grasp, yet still the mere infrastructure for the great life-giving work that is the life of fathers and mothers. We don't spawn like fish or breed like dogs. A father wants not only to give life; he wants to give a way of life. He wants to give what he himself received. Because of this, a father becomes a teacher and, conversely, because of this a teacher becomes a father.

A father is not a cloner and he is not a chipmunk. He aims to produce neither a mere copy, some adjunct identity and possession, nor a mere instantiation of the species, an individual member of a universal type. No, the father engenders someone new, unique, unprecedented, and unknown even to the father himself, a child bearing his own identity but still an identity that he possesses precisely because he is the son of his father-that is, because he has received from him not only his species or biological life, but also a way of life.

The product of the musician's craft is not the possession of the musician; it is not (contrary to a mistaken way of speaking) his "creation." It precedes him, comes as a gift to him, and comes fully to be only by being given away by him. Fatherhood is likewise not an imposition of the identity of the father onto his offspring, the oppressive impression of the father's singularity onto the son. It is not "patriarchy" misunderstood as a form of tyranny (the tyranny cloning would surely be). The authority of the father stands in what he himself has authoritatively received. It is in responsibility to that authority that he himself lives, bears his own identity, engenders, and hands on a way of life. The son then bears his own identity, one that is new and vital and itself able to engender, because it too is responsible to what it has received in its beginning.

So, as with music, philosophy, and parenthood, the desire to teach is the desire to engender. It aims to transmit a world of feeling, of thoughts and ideas, a vision of the luminescent meaning of things, of something good beyond all possession, the love and reverence for which make one attentive and responsible. In that responsibility, with a spirit not so much of cold duty, but rather of awe, docility, and gratitude, one rises up into his own identity and finds the reason and wherewithal himself to engender, to open the way to another, so as to give what he was given and so enter into it fully himself.

The practical nihilism of the contemporary university is evidenced perhaps in no stronger way than by the association between university "education" and the extinction of the desire to engender. And perhaps parents are themselves sometimes complicit in this, seeing the university as yet another caretaker for the children they themselves have not wished to raise. But where mothers and fathers mean to be mothers and fathers, the sure expectation is that the university should be faithful to and continue the work they began, handing on to their children in a still more perfect way the world and way of life they received, even when they themselves perhaps never had the chance-for better or worse-to attend a university.

* * *

But if teaching is like the making of music, philosophizing, and parenting, what perhaps gets closest to the distinctive center of the matter is the life and action of language.

Life is all about the passing on of genes-that's the current theory, or rather, the current ideology, as if the passing on of human life were qualitatively indistinguishable from the passing on of the life of apes, cockroaches, and skunk cabbages. It's one of those formulae that purport to explain everything so as to dispense one from having to think about anything. It would make much more sense to say that life, human life, is "all about" the passing on of language rather than genes. In each language, an entire way of life is embedded and expressed, a whole world of those things which make manifest the meaning of a human life, of what it means to be a man, this man, these men and women in this time and this place, looking from here forward to our future, hearkening back from here to the past, our shared past, and from there even toward the Beginning. All this is suspended about us in our language: the name of oneself and one's family; the name of one's street and town and nation; the words that tell the story of our works and days; words of honor and praise, contempt and blame; words describing that which is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, right or wrong, holy or evil-everything is there in our language. With language we delineate our world, revealing ourselves to ourselves amidst all that surrounds us, which is likewise revealed as being not merely matter or infinite space. If it were, there could be no names, and no one-not a single person-could be discerned as such and so merit the bearing of a name.

The universe is not some boundless mathematical grid. No, that describes the Underworld, where not a word is spoken, and which is an empty waste of pure abstraction, to which the world of speech appears absurd only because the grid-that empty abstract thing-is itself methodologically surdus, stone deaf to speech. The Underworld of mathematical abstraction is mere infrastructure; it does not disclose beings, least of all human beings.

But here our languages disclose what they embody, the world we share as we have received it from those who have gone before us and as we give it to those who follow us. The "genes" currently at the forefront of bio-mathematical science are infrastructure, and there is beyond all doubt even deeper infrastructure to be found; but our life here is not "all about" the always abstract and therefore infinitely regressive infrastructure.

It is language that mothers and Fathers pass on to their children. The mouth of a son or daughter, when it is not pulling at its mother's breast, is training itself for speech, straining to pull into itself words, and with them the entire language and world into which it has been born. As the mother desires to give her child her breast, so both parents are urgent to feed him on their language. Watch the father's face and mouth, stretching themselves ridiculously, straining to speak so the child's straining to speak might come alive. This is a matter of life and death, more serious than food, clothing, shelter, resumés, even genes.

A father does not want to cast his son into the darkness and silence of deep space. He wants to give him a home and a place in the human world under the sun. But for mathematical science, where is home? Where is Earth? In terms of mathematical relations, it isn't anywhere except in relation to other things, depending on one's point of view, which is infinitely variable and entirely arbitrary. The modern scientific method places everything on a boundless and impersonal mathematical grid that has no center and therefore, by definition, no definition. Time itself is relative on this grid, so there can be no narrative, no authority, no receiving, no passing on, no moral, no beginning, no middle, no end. For mathematical science, all the world is deep space.

But language has a center, necessarily and essentially, because unlike math it is spoken. The world it discloses is our world-Earth, home. Human speech, unlike the chattering sound a computer makes as it processes "information," reveals a man as here, before me, present. When we speak together, we become the center of a world in common, here, not in a boundless infinity that is undefined and without orientation or sense. We the speakers are the defining point of reference, at center stage in an unfolding narrative where everything is full of meaning, even when we sleep or die.

We first enter the world with our parents, in the circle of our Family. Then, as we proceed more deeply into the world that language illuminates all around us, we travel further from our parents and look further back to the place from which they themselves came. The wider the lighted zone of experience, the further back we can look towards the beginning, the point from which all of the people who constitute our world have arisen, that same one point that unifies us into a world and makes it ours. It's not only our parents who pass this world on to us, but also other people, books, and institutions. Religion, history, the human arts and sciences-all stand as living articulations of our world. Those who desire to teach seek to preserve, tend, prune, nourish, and pass on the life of our language. In the West, the university has been specially charged with the responsibility to serve this desire to teach.

Man's capacity to speak provides access to the human world, supported by the use of the practical arts and their tools. These tools are enormously impressive, unleashing huge power that can radically alter, or even destroy, the infrastructure of our world. Some men, overawed by that power and desiring perhaps to aggrandize themselves by identifying with it, have been inclined to declare that things are not as they are expressed in our language or judged by common sense. All is to be "doubted," as Descartes has persuaded us. The world is not as we received it from those who engendered us within it, but is rather "nothing but" intersections and vortices, genes or particles or waves, mechanics or dynamics, forces and statistics, all relative to each other in an ongoing and indefinite process, where men do not engender men but evolve from one kind of thing to another.

But even if Descartes and his many later clones, replications, and mutations assert such things with vast scientific erudition, they are silly, necessarily reducing themselves and the very science they rely on to "nothing but" such streams of indefinite evolving process, swarms of facts infinitely interpretable and therefore necessarily false whenever they are asserted as definitive, final, or true. They take the relativistic methodology appropriate to the technological sciences and apply it to the overarching human world to which such methodology can have no access whatsoever. Without that human world, technology is an enormous danger.

But whatever the threat posed by the application of blind technological power to the infrastructure of the human world, the inward source of danger is the faith-established on the basis of such power-in the presumed intellectual superiority of mathematical natural science over properly human understanding and judgment. In the name of that faith, some feel justified in attempting to reconfigure language itself, uprooting it and chopping it to pieces in order to force it into the shadowy patterns of the Underworld. Thus, we all are rendered "gibbering shades" whose words have lost their center and are meant not so much to convey meaning as to serve as a set of tools for "social" science.

The rule of such a science over education and the university constitutes an assault more serious than fideism, fanaticism, or propaganda. It seduces the mind by appealing to some of the mind's own fundamental capacities and desires. Mathematical science serves real needs with great and predictable effect, according to reasons unambiguously spelled out, without wandering into areas of frequent and often violent human dispute. But mathematical science has no access to the properly human world embedded and expressed in our languages, much less any right to exercise dominion over it. Mathematical science, its technology, and all its special effects remain necessarily and always the Underworld in relation to the realm of man and language. The human being is not an abstraction and neither is his world. Language-rugged and supple with logic and its own fashion of forming abstractions-is rooted firmly in the world of persons. It is capable of discerning particulars and real beings. Language, not math, is properly suited to naming, identifying, and disclosing human beings themselves and the beings that make up their world. Man himself is the root, the center, the constant. Otherwise, language itself would lose its center and evolve, becoming untruth, relative, historicist, "diverse."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Skies of Babylon by Barry Bercier Copyright © 2007 by ISI Books. Excerpted by permission.
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.

---

Read More