A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis

A quarterly publication of The Center for Moral Reason

Board of Directors:

John R. Harris, Ph.D. (President)

Thomas F. Bertonneau, Ph.D. (Secretary)

Helen R. Andretta, Ph.D.; York College-CUNY

Ralph S. Carlson, Ph.D.; Azusa Pacific University

Kelly Ann Hampton

Michael H. Lythgoe, Lt. Col. USAF (Rtd.)

The previous issue of Praesidium (Winter 2002) and other issues in our Archive may be viewed by clicking here.

CONTENTS

©  All contents of this journal (including cartoon as well as poems, articles, fictional works, and short pieces by staff) are copyrighted by The Center for Moral Reason of Tyler, Texas (2002), and may not be cited at length or reproduced without The Center's express permission.

  A Few Words from the Editor

Spring revives America’s favorite pastime… now, what was that again?

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The Intimate Message of Foreign Language:

One Small Curricular Step Toward Restoring Reason

It’s Been Said Before

Staff

This time we retrieve French novelist and essayist Jules Romains from forty years of dust.

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Bimbos in Limbo: Will the Real Bobo Please Stand Up?

David Brooks’s new book is charming, intelligent, witty… and morally evasive. Just like a "Bobo" (Bohemian Bourgeois).

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William James Visits Yosemite in 1898

and

Itinerary and Chronology of William James’s

California Trip (August 1898)

Allan Shields

"Pieta"

Joseph Soldati

Who Shall ’Scape Whipping?

Staff

R.S. Carlson: Three Poems

"Seeing Space"

J. S. Moseby

Postscript to "Seeing Space":

An Interview with the Author

"Straight Shaft"

Ivor Davies

Watch on the Wry

Staff

Dr. Palaver, Word Therapist

 What do you call someone who is ingenuous?

As in little things, so in big things. When I volunteered to manage my seven-year-old’s Little League team (under some duress: it was implied that without my help, the team would disband), I had not the remotest idea that I was in for an object lesson in human nature. First of all was the draft—a business as sordid as any pork-politicking or fall-guy selection that ever went on behind closed congressional doors. The managers who have seen all the children play ball from the cradle immediately snap up the most talented and experienced, while any newcomer (yours truly, in this instance) is appointed, quite without his knowledge or consent, to be the season’s punching bag. Yet a deficit of experience is not always insurmountable at the age of seven, and I briefly had confidence that our "bums" (a malign spirit whispered "Dodgers" in my ear when I was asked to choose a name) could be drilled into shape. That was before I realized that a good half of the parents considered their mission accomplished once they had photographed their child in his new uniform. Practice? "Why, of course he’ll be there… as long as we don’t have a party or bowling league or choir rehearsal—and, you know, he spends every other weekend with my ex."

If baseball is the national pastime, then Little League—with all of its unethical boundary-drawing, skin-deep family-friendliness, evasion of firm commitment, allergy to drill, and transferred lust to win—must be a national allegory. And a human allegory, too; for, to be fair, much of this was going on when I was seven, a tally of years ago better left to the imagination. (Hint: we used wooden bats.) Believe me, however, when I say that the conduct of parents is different now. Some sign up their little tyke for two or three sports at once, just to make sure that he doesn’t get cheated. They seem to devote not an instant to reflecting that his inability to practice with each team regularly is a betrayal to other children who may wish to improve. They buy him state-of-the-art gear for every role, so that on rare occasions when he actually shows up for a game, he is accoutered like a superstar—until, that is, his pricey toys are hopelessly mislaid over house, van, and field. They find a scapegoat for each of the child’s setbacks during the game: the umpire made a lousy call, the ball took a bad hop, the manager hasn’t supplied adequate direction, the opposing player is on steroids. Yet all is quickly forgiven and forgotten when the fat lady sings. After all, Tommy had fun. He failed to perform at the most elementary level, but he liked wearing his uniform and he got to play tag with Billy in the dugout.

In a decade or so, Tommy will attend college. His parents will fork out the money, not just for tuition and lodging, but probably for a car and a "cool" wardrobe. Undeterred by a full course load, he will sign up for glee club, use his student card for season football tickets, join the Alpha Omega fraternity, film a campy sci-fi flick with his buddies, and discover an interest in rock-climbing. His professors will rack their highly trained brains to make his course work fun, and those who finally assign him a C will receive a very long stare from the Dean. On his way to becoming a virtuoso-dilettante, willing to dabble in anything for five minutes and informed enough about nothing to author more than five lines, he will drop a great deal of money from his porous pockets. At the end of it all, he will be eminently qualified to adorn the upper floors of an office building where potential investors are made to feel that they are "among their own".

So play ball! With this issue of Praesidium, we again invite you to ponder the lost depth of a culture which tunes in to watch people eat loathsome invertebrates, act insufferably rude to other people, and hurl chairs across a stage upon hearing the results of a paternity test. My own essay about foreign language instruction is perhaps a bit pedantic; I am especially grateful, therefore, to Gianna DiRoberti for livening things up with a most stimulating—even polemical—piece about the "bohemian bourgeois", and to Allan Shields for resurrecting landscapes of a hundred years ago. What an irony, by the way, that the age of high literacy was also the golden age of walking! The "book worms" of the old school were often master ambulists: Wordsworth thought nothing of hiking twenty miles to post a letter. Now, with all our "free time" from the "boredom" of clerical labor, our bodies are growing as flabby as our brains.

No recent issue of this journal, furthermore, has been more generously endowed with creative work. Mr. Moseby’s short story strikes me as something more on the order of a prose poem, and rewards the effort which it takes to work through properly; but, if you disagree, surely the ensuing exchange between the two of us will be more to your taste! In any case, the second story, "Straight Shaft" (which reached me just before deadline), is as "realist" and linear as it is delightfully acid. I’ve read nothing else that comes close to satirizing a departmental meeting with the ruthless candor which Mr. Davies displays here.

Then we have our poet-contributors, whose reliable Muse is a needed reminder to me personally that contemplation and mystery have not entirely abandoned us. When I saw that Professor Carlson had sent me a little piece about coaches, of all things, I couldn’t resist!

~J.H.

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produce an educated mind.

The subject of primary and secondary public education was recently a very hot issue in these parts—though not, I fear, at the proper level. The enormous tax increase sought by our school district was earmarked (as well as I could ever make out—details were not forthcoming) for major building projects; and, like good middle Americans, my fellow citizens fell to arguing mostly about whether our children "deserve" to have tedium held at bay daily in surroundings somewhere between the Mall of America and Disneyworld. The general opinion was that no amount of convenience and luxury (at the expense of property-owners, of course) was too good for "our nation’s future leaders". Pundits who keep saying that American character rejected big government and the welfare state after Jimmy Carter should get out of DC once in a while. Madison lies a-moldering in his grave. So for the Protestant work ethic; and as for the Western valorization of endurance, self-discipline, and inner strength… Sparta, thy ghost has been laid, and thy very foundations carted off to make golden arches.

If we could have concentrated this debate upon what actually happens in the classroom, we would, I believe, have taken a major collective step toward arresting the vast ruination of our young minds and the sickening degradation of our culture. We would at least have been shooting on the same range, if not at the same target. Another missed opportunity... and who knows when the next may come? In preparation for that distant day (may it be much nearer in your own community), I share the contents of a letter which I addressed to our local rag. It was never published in that venue, by the way, and I can’t really argue with the editor. Considering that the biggest bone of contention was an eight-million-dollar swimming complex, I can hardly maintain that the thoughts expressed below were in the fore of my neighbors’ minds.

"Dear Editor," I wrote:

"Though much has been said lately about the importance of schools to our children’s future, little attention has been paid to the content of their classes. I wish to state briefly my concerns about the ‘silver bullet’ of contemporary education: computers.

"Computerized searches are anti-hierarchical whenever values cannot be quantified (as in morality). They strew limitless information over the table without ranking any of it for beauty, truth, or goodness: a smorgasbord of fare to flatter every whim.

"Computerized studies are anti-deliberative. They keep the eye (and ear, increasingly) always occupied, and at a click they bring up a flashy new screen. To sit in still silence and think a question through is not a skill anyone ever learned from Microsoft.

"Computerized communications are anti-social and prone to misuse. No amount of ‘interaction’ substitutes for the presence of other human beings, and the dependency of such interaction on protocols is an open invitation to cheats and crooks. No program is hack-proof. Every time you log on to the Net, you are trusting in methods of verification whose exploiting is a nice livelihood for criminals who cannot be caught.

"Computerized expression is counter-creative. All the talk about creative freedom is based on the correct perception that computers destroy hierarchies of ethics and taste—but that doesn’t mean there’s no ‘first’ and ‘last’. Marketing is all about the morally repugnant and creatively degraded competition to seduce bystanders. The Net’s big winners are the best seducers. Even off-line expression—say, a mouse-controlled ‘paintbrush’—gives a pitiful approximation of the shades and textures found in real paint; and the project almost always begins with a pre-packaged image (like a photograph).

"Finally (and most importantly), computerized life is anti-spiritual. By that I mean that computers deprive reality of its depth precisely by destroying hierarchy, deliberation, social bonds, and creativity. A trip to the art museum becomes ‘virtual’, a climb up Everest is packaged on a CD or Website, and a moral question like abortion produces an opinion survey and some ‘bulletin boards’. I call this drowning at the shallow end of the pool.

"Add to all this that many of our society’s leaders have staked their reputations or fortunes on luring us into this ‘web’, and you have a crisis far greater than Islamic fundamentalism. (By the way, Al Qaeda has massively exploited the West’s digitalization.) So you’re concerned about education? Go see if our schools are using computers to supplement literate, humane learning or, rather, to fill large parts of every child’s day with fireworks displays."

The letter ended here. I should most certainly have stressed the parenthetic point in the final paragraph had I wished to sound a utilitarian note over a moral one (viz. "Computers may not leave us worse people, but they may well leave us all dead"). If identification documents were not checked by computer, flights not booked and cleared and virtually flown by computer, power plants and water treatment plants not operated by computer, financial business from sales of stock to bank loans to credit card purchases not transacted by computer, and intimate friendships and confidences not cultivated by computer, opportunities for catastrophic sabotage and undetectable infiltration would not so abound in our society. (Yes, I know, we’re all being pushed to accept a "foolproof" electronic identity card of some kind. Incredible. Then the fake Mr. Jones will no longer need to shave his thumbprint with a razor: he will only need to hack into the FBI’s database.) Already as I sit writing, a purely natural disaster—a mid-winter ice storm, say—is capable of visiting calamity upon vast areas thanks to our electrified way of life. Our wood-burning ancestors didn’t stay as toasty as we do, but neither would they have frozen or starved because a blizzard brought down a bunch of tree limbs. In the near future, our very doors and windows will open by computer command (as our garage ports already do by hand-held remote-control stick). We shall have invested so heavily in this single technology that its compromise for any reason will leave us fully at the mercy of raw nature and malevolent aggressor.

Even though the rest of this paper is not dedicated to stressing the practical dangers of wired living, we should never forget that its proliferation has thoroughly tarnished the motives of our age’s leaders. With or without cause, Democrats have always accused Republicans of pandering to big business throughout my lifetime. The computer revolution, however, has soiled everyone’s fingers, at least potentially. Its profiteers and piggy-back riders include dot-com fly-by-nights as well as oil magnates, radical propagandists as well as Madison Avenue publishers, incendiary crackpots as well as straight-laced establishmentarians. When the local school board or a national representative, therefore, recommends that we teach our kids from screens, their or his or her political affiliation or age or race or gender or socio-economic profile cannot be relied upon to supply any kind of filter which might help us to snare traces of self-interest. All are tainted. The stock trader owns shares of Microsoft, the small businesswoman has a lucrative Website, the councilman’s son-in-law sells computer systems, the college freshman grew up on video games. You have a far better chance of finding a critic of the automobile, whose toxic emissions are disputed only as to degree and whose lethal abuses have left human gaps around us at the rate of a major war.

Neil Postman’s recent work, Technopoly, is as splendidly insightful as his now almost legendary denunciation of TV culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman recognizes that we cannot backpedal to a pre-electronic age of Jeffersonian letter-writing and Addisonian pamphleteering. Computers are here to stay, and in some ways we all welcome them. The labors of Praesidium would be impossible for so few people so poorly funded if the word processor and the Internet didn’t lend a thousand mechanized hands. The trick is to keep these hands from unlocking their cage: to restrain this Briareus from picking our pockets, stealing our lunch, redecorating our living rooms, playing with our babies—taking over every aspect of our lives, in short. Postman ends up advising that we acknowledge "technopoly" to be, not just a specific range of household and marketplace conveniences, but an entire philosophy, complete with its own epistemology (what we know about reality) and its own ethics (what we should do about what we know). Since this digital philosophy is miserably impoverished, we should actively combat its toxic effects by teaching other ways of assessing reality and its obligations upon us. Along with a historical overview of technology and of the arts, Postman counsels a course in comparative religion. No particular religion would be allowed to dominate the student’s attention; rather, the course would cultivate the religious sensitivity to truths not fully visible, not remotely quantifiable, and not amenable to popular vote despite their hold upon our basic humanity.

This is a daring proposal, and, of course, has little chance of finding its way into either public or private education. Public schools will reject what they see as incipient narrow-mindedness, despite Postman’s emphatic insistence that sacred texts from the Bhagavad-Gita to the Koran to the Communist Manifesto (you read that right) should be included.² Private institutions, in turn, will reject what they see as a dangerously demoralizing broad-mindedness (Islamic schools more vehemently than Christian, by the way, and Marxist academics more vehemently than anyone). In the real world, at the very least, one would hope to observe a smattering of the great ethical philosophers introduced someday into the last years of high school. They have long been banished from most college campuses, as we all know, but not because adolescent minds cannot grapple with them at some level beyond the merely superficial. (On the contrary: Plato, Aristotle, and the other "dead white guys" would make only too much sense to inquiring young minds, which must be "protected" from them for subsequent programming with addle-pated ideology.) A few brave, thoughtful, and competent administrators could redeem our young minds from the nauseating nullity of their cultural surroundings by offering them such intellectual bread of life. Here the problem seems to be less political than practical. Neither bravery nor thoughtfulness nor even basic competence is in abundant supply at the top of our educational hierarchy.

There is one well-established discipline, however, which is by nature humane, social, analytical, dependent upon hierarchy, insistent upon clear and distinct truths, indebted to tradition, dedicated to correct self-expression, and—in short—pregnant with all the values our children sadly lack and our avant-garde theorists vigorously persecute. It is the discipline of learning a foreign language. Consider the virtues of submitting to such a regimen. You have to talk to other people, or at least attend their recorded communications very closely and respond in point-by-point fashion. It isn’t enough to have your own "thing" which you’re going to do in your own way: indeed, it runs entirely contrary to the exercise. You are not even allowed to say things like "thing" without, at a minimum, becoming aware that you are using a highly ineffective idiom. Hence the analysis, the hierarchy, and the clear truths which follow from such an intense degree of human interaction. When your mind is narrowly focused on what others are saying, you scrutinize each piece of the puzzle—not just individual words, but the inflections and prefixes and suffixes of those words—to arrive at the most accurate perception possible. In this analytic exercise, your mind is concurrently leaping back from the minutiae to view the emerging landscape. Which of two homonyms confers a clearer sense upon the emerging sentence? Which of two orthographically identical verb forms better suits its action and time frame? This synthetic counter-motion to the analysis of small parts is a hierarchy-building operation. It creates priorities of greater and lesser likelihood. (And let’s be honest: when not translating in a professional setting, we often shoot in the dark. Our quick measurements of likelihood in these circumstances may go so far as to include what we know of the author’s character and tastes.) Obviously, any solid affirmation we can clutch in such clouds of witness is a great help. The French tirer can mean "to shoot" as well as "to pull", and it almost certainly does if we find fusil—"a rifle"—in the same sentence. Words mean things when we anguish through these quests after another human being’s intent. They may not mean anything at all when we later sit at the feet of some critical-theory guru; but in French class, tirer means "pull" or "shoot" or one of a few other things—not "sail" or "simmer" or "make love".

I remember a passage in Tobin Siebers’ excellent Morals and Stories which reflects upon the analytic-synthetic tug-of-war involved in the discovery of meaning. I plainly recall, in fact, that when Siebers summarizes the research of linguists Schank and Abelson on the importance of verbal clusters and social environment in conferring sense, I thought immediately of translation from another language. "Both literary and ethical notions of character," Siebers concludes, "rely on a dense social context that is responsible for their applications and that is influenced in turn by those applications."³ The chapter in which this remark appears is titled, "The Case Against Linguistic Ethics". Siebers takes aim in these pages at such contemporary torture of words (usually called "play") as one sees in deconstruction and reader-response criticism. I find him right on target. As a matter of fact, in dealing with defunct languages, we sometimes have nothing but inference from context to suggest a word’s meaning to us; and in reading such formulaic texts as the Homeric epics, we may well choose to make little of a specific word’s known meaning if it creates dissonance in its setting. ("Swift-footed Achilles" would be an irritating phrase to encounter while the hero sits in his tent if we truly dissected each bit and piece to the skeleton.) The intensity of analysis practiced by literary critics upon single words often seems to have gone haywire, leaving its complementary synthetic "checks and balances" far behind the way an overheated machine might lock in a certain gear. The crowning irony is that many theories which the simplest translation exercise would prove ridiculous have been concocted in Europe, where every educated person is a polyglot. But then, perhaps that’s why they had to emigrate to the New World to attract a following: nobody back home took them seriously! Certainly mainstream French scholars, whose letters have long been guarded with Cerberus-like ferocity by the Académie Française, would not take kindly to the notion of "playing" with words until they yield ideological bias. A French colleague once assured me that she viewed Derrida very much as a bad boy reacting against the academic successes of Lévi-Strauss and structuralism.

Would that we were capable over here of telling a genius from a prankster! But we are not, at least in linguistic theory, and our clumsiness with foreign language must be part of the reason. Because the discipline of learning another language, while firmly established in our schools, is now just a shadow of what it might be or what it once was in the United States, we are easy prey for charlatans selling the propaganda that every expression conceals propaganda. As a society, we already denigrate those other virtues which I listed as implicit in acquiring a second language: high regard for tradition and dedication to expressing oneself clearly. We Americans have always trusted that newer is better and complained that time-honored formality is suffocating. We call ourselves rugged individualists —which creates a contradiction, of course, with our contempt for precise self-expression. Perhaps we view the painful labor involved in crossing all our t’s as oppressive to our free-wheeling spirit. If so, then our individualism isn’t very rugged, or else our ruggedness is doomed to become crudity incapable of individual finesse. We latch onto the phrase, or even the entire sentiment, currently in general circulation, and then we self-indulgently try to cover our tracks by saying that we value the common man’s honesty over the scholar’s stuffy jargon. (On the morning of my writing these words, I was forced to sit through a video tape chronicling the ascendancy of a certain religious denomination. I found myself wincing at each of the narrator’s pregnant pauses in anticipation of a "warm fuzzy" shibboleth: "God shows his will through… people. His ultimate purpose is… love." Flann O’Brian, blessed be his memory, would have found ample matter here for his series, "The Catechism of the Cliché".)

The truth is that accurate self-expression depends mightily upon conventions. People must be able to index your formulations to a set of generally received and acknowledged meanings before they can determine in what sense and degree you are challenging the received or the acknowledged. When we abandon such accuracy, we enter the unwholesome realm of the inarticulate mob, part of which is ruled secretly by sophists who speak only to pluck the desired nerve, the rest of which belongs to the frightful chaos of pre-rational whimsy, passion, and stupor. The new sophists who reached our college literature programs from France and Germany were deluded, no doubt, only in thinking that the adulation they harvested was a proper verdict upon their merits. (Sophists are always so deceived: a liar may be bright enough not to believe himself, but he is never honest enough to refuse himself the praise of his believers.) English and History departments fell like dominoes before the trend. Young people, many of them exceptionally intelligent, swallowed whole the toxic notion that every notion wants you to swallow something toxic. How could that have happened—why had they no confidence in the ability of rational discussion to ferret out illogic and falsehood? Because their own culture had already betrayed them in a way they never suspected: because, that is, they had not been educated to analyze and synthesize and re-analyze, to work toward coherence however they could (including by appeal to common sense), to establish priorities of resemblance to the real, and to have recourse to convention in all these endeavors. They could not express themselves, and so they were willing to believe that their unexpressed frustration grew from the manipulative expressions of others which had somehow cut them off, somehow stilled their tongues. They had never learned how to think.

The cause of this intellectual debacle is manifold. The appearance of the television and the disappearance of neighborhoods where people walked about and spoke to one another probably had far more to do with it than the recession of foreign language study from the curriculum at all levels. Yes, we still have such study. Time was, however, when young adolescents studied Latin and Greek and French or German in many schools, and had access at least to Latin courses in virtually every school, public or private. High school graduates of three generations ago were often better thinkers than Ph.D. candidates are today: they plainly wrote better English, at any rate. Ask your grandparents (or, better yet, a great-grandparent if you can find one) where they learned to handle sentences so well and they are likely to answer, "Latin class." Subject-verb agreement and subordination, especially, are linguistic concepts with which English-speakers bent over the Latin grindstone become very familiar. Now that such apprenticeship has virtually vanished, we need only click on CNN to hear senior newscasters and successful lawyers-turned-politician mauling the King’s English in their profound ignorance of these very concepts. Even worse, their reasoning reveals deficiencies corresponding to their grammar. They have no sense of proportion: they quickly lose the main point, or else have never identified it among a debris of loosely relevant detail.

I repeat that the causes of such intellectual degeneration are many. If learning a second language, however, could merely slow the bleeding of what increasingly looks like a mortal wound, why not apply the poultice? Instead, colleges are actually abandoning the foreign language requirement among their core courses with alarming insouciance. Some campuses have the audacity (or the stupidity) to volunteer "computer literacy" as a replacement. Gertrude Himmelfarb, ruefully reflecting upon this trend, explains, "The presumption is that any method has its own justification, has to be tolerated on its own terms and judged by its own rules".⁴ Just so. The administrative brain trust is so far from understanding the interconnectedness of disciplines (and, in this case, the very special connections of foreign-language learning) that it advances computer studies because of their difference from everything else! These architects do not answer the question, "How does Field A relate to Fields B, C, and D?" Rather, they defiantly fling out the rhetorical question, "Why not Field Q—what genuine relation has anything to anything else, after all?"

And indeed, computer-speak encourages none of that intellectual stimulation which I catalogued in the learning of another language. The occasion is not social; those who stress that we are receiving instantaneous messages from people all over the world have blinded themselves to the machine’s ineradicable drawback: its obstructive mediation. "Worldwide earth-linking internet"? We’re actually crouched in reverence before a screen whose flickers claim to come from Russia or Kenya, but might just as well hail from the next room or be a "glitch". As for analysis, computers may greatly assist statistical studies by providing instant graphics or projecting trends quickly into the future, but they cannot question the quality of the data. Hence we have the vexatiously "unanalytical analysis" of opinion surveys or of next year’s weather. Too many people are falling on their knees before the electronic oracle’s print-out, and too few are aware that "facts" need to be evaluated very closely before they are fed into mathematical formulas. For the computer knows no true or false: its definitively yes-no, on-off digital nature takes you left or right without ruling upon the soundness of your choice. If we pursue this absence of truth a little farther, we find that it becomes an absence of hierarchy. A stint on the computer is a lateral navigation among various options: any command will open a door. The level of satisfaction your journey raises in you after a long series of opened doors, however, is an entirely subjective response to a medium indifferent to vertical thinking. Tradition, of course, is the computer industry’s primal adversary. Though computer programmers must observe certain protocols, the level at which the typical college student is expected to become "literate" on the machine hides the binary coding and the HTML. The celestial term "user-friendly" might indeed be defined as relying minimally on any fixed body of knowledge. What "self" this sad student has left to express, having been liberated from analysis and the past to lurch around in a menu, is quite beyond my ability to imagine.

I have just recapitulated the letter to the editor with which I opened this essay. What an irony! The digitalization which is carrying us away from the Western tradition of humane letters and literate analysis is prying its way into the curriculum behind the wedge of foreign language! Foreign it surely is, but language it will never be. One hears occasionally that mathematics is also a language, and not without justice. The "laws" which govern numerical relationships are the most impressive example in our human world of universal truth not dependent upon empirical phenomena and yet as "objective" as anything we know. What these laws gain in truth value, however, they lose in finesse. They require no negotiation, no qualitative sensitivity, no soul-searching struggle toward consensus. In that regard, they are only half human. "Computer fluency" takes the worst of both worlds. It borrows from mathematics a disdain of tradition and a worship of rigid numerical "fact", marries these to rhetoric’s lame pretense of sociability (which is truly a following-leading immersion in mass whimsy), and gives birth to a barbarous pseudo-objectivity of pseudo-feeling.⁵ This is precisely the sort of influence which we most need foreign language programs to combat.

I cannot "prove" that curricula with stringent foreign language requirements make better thinkers—not in the sense intended by the stuffed shirts who always require proof. They seek a statistical vindication for everything they do; and, not surprisingly, they are leery of the humanities and all other fields not readily susceptible to quantification. I can only promise them that the world would have fewer of their kind if it had more foreign language instructors. I know this because it is a thoughtful observation based upon long experience. I have spent most of my life in and around schools in some capacity. At the moment, I am tracking my young son’s progress through grade school with great interest. I find that the settings which produce eloquent, imaginatively agile, profoundly discerning graduates are those which offer more foreign language. Naturally, if an institution does not measure success in eloquence, imaginative agility, or profound discernment, but only in ability to attract the attention of the region’s accounting firms and machine shops, the advantage I cite will seem negligible. The never-known is never missed: no swine ever wept for a pearl.

Yet one experience in my own considerable stock of anecdotal evidence has nagged at me steadily as I have prepared these comments. It directs us back to college—in fact, graduate school—rather than keeping us focused upon our local school district, and to that extent it constitutes a digression. Yet I pursue it here, not only in the spirit of honesty, but also because I believe that, however irrelevant graduate study may be to grade school in other ways, in this one there are meaningful correlations.

I received my doctorate in Comparative Literature. The "comparatist" on most campuses which have such a program is required to be fairly competent in at least three languages. If my theory about the intellectual rigor of studying other tongues is valid, then surely here, if anywhere in the humanities, we should find scholars being produced who have no patience with theoretical mush and irrational victimology. We find nothing of the sort, however. On the contrary, Comparative Literature was the landing craft which outlandish critical theories of conspiracy, privilege, and propaganda used to make their beachhead on many campuses around the country. This would seem a most embarrassing circumstance for my argument.

The more I ponder it, the more the Comparative Literature phenomenon strikes me as the exception that proves the rule. It is complex, and requires careful dissection. First of all, every such program of which I have any knowledge accepts English as one of the languages qualifying one to participate. This means that our "polyglot" graduate student may in all probability turn out to be a) a British or American national strong in one other tongue and passable in a third, or b) a foreign national who happens to speak good English as well as a third language usually related to his or her mother tongue (e.g., Spanish and Portuguese, German and Danish). Now, since the gurus of theory were almost all northern Europeans early on, our graduate student, if British or American, may well have learned another language precisely to plunge into the delights of the sacred tantrum tantra; or, if European, may have come to America precisely to discuss the banished prophet unharassed—and perhaps to sit at the Great One’s feet. Even students who were not fully converted to a faith in verbal conspiracies upon entering grad school would be instantly and permanently immersed in anti-propaganda propaganda. Their reading lists would contain practically nothing else: just trendy theoretical works and a few non-canonical (i.e., miserably written) primary texts showing the "play" of exploitation and oppression in "narrative". To put it bluntly, the connection of Comparative Literature with foreign language was often no more subtle than getting to read folderol in its original form.

I have frequently tried to imagine how a faculty of comparatists would go about evaluating such a candidate’s competence to proceed to the dissertation. What would a competency exam look like when given over texts which overtly—even militantly—declare that all efforts to establish hierarchies of competence are an oppressor’s power play? To say the least, a dedicated footsoldier of the movement would be under great pressure to grade charitably. So what if this student doesn’t know that tirer means "to shoot" when coupled with fusil? Why should any decent person expect another decent person to be versed in the wicked male idiom of detonation and murder? Better to fail the ones who get the sentence right: their heads may be sitting straight, but their hearts are horribly skewed!

I exaggerate, of course (or so I fervently hope). I may add in all candor, however, that the best thinkers in the program I entered were invariably those who did not fit the categories I have just described. They were not self-styled victims of oppression in search of a soapbox who happened to be bilingual. Many of them did not choose English as one of their three languages of specialization. Others specialized in the ancient or medieval phase of a certain language and culture rather than insisting that all should be contemporary (and, as anyone knows who has ever tried it, studying medieval French or German is like learning a language almost entirely distinct from modern French or German). I will not say that I found these people politically out of step with the theorists. Most of them lived on the borders of nihilism, at least superficially: after all, this was graduate school! Yet with a little persistence, one could always bring them to a depth of conversation about literature where the theoretical jargon simply blew away like chaff, leaving behind long-deliberated opinions and a genuine humility before the evidence’s vast diversity. They were not above secretly sniggering at the pompous critical jargon which their less weighty peers clung to as a shipwreck hugs his driftwood.

Then there were the Hispanists, the Spanish majors who spoke fluid English and tacked on a bit of Portuguese. I must say immediately that I intend no disparagement of Spanish literature, either of the Old or New World, in what follows. I came to Spanish rather late myself and am completely self-taught (with a lot of help from Latin and Italian). Nevertheless, I have already discovered a great many jewels which I highly prize, from Antonio Azorín to Rómulo Gallegos. I will admit that Spanish literature confronts the classical temperament with certain challenges not met in other romance languages. Spain was so well insulated from the rest of Europe that she preserved her serious ruminations in a Latin Catholicism longer than other nations (including Ireland), allowing mostly popular legend and picaresque narrative to leak into the vernacular.⁶ Yet there are quite enough Spanish classics to keep the most voracious reader busy, even if they do not root as deeply in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance as do the canons of France and Italy.

That said, I may proceed to certain geographical and cultural realities which bestow upon Spanish a unique position as a foreign language in North America. These realities will carry us right back to our original discussion of foreign-language learning in our grade schools and high schools, so they are worth stressing. Spanish is actually the mother tongue of many North Americans—and I do not mean simply Mexicans. It is the only language other than English which Americans find on most of their government’s publications (much to the chagrin of many). It is the language, therefore, of a culture in highly visible rivalry with traditional Anglo-Saxon customs; and since Anglo-Saxon culture is so deeply infused into our institutions, Spanish is a language of the underprivileged. Bilingual Hispanics who entered Comparative Literature programs thus already bore a much more substantial baggage of victimization when they walked through the ivory gate than did classmates who merely felt out-of-joint with life and were looking for somebody to blame. Furthermore, the massive corpus of Spanish literature generated by Central and South America over the past century is replete with Marxist sentiments dramatizing the struggle of oppressed against oppressor. How could it be otherwise? This part of the world has seen more years of real oppression by an alien culture than anywhere else. (I am not excluding Africa: the European exploitation of the African interior began relatively late and lasted relatively briefly. Besides, Europeans never settled in Africa and merged racially with Africans to any degree approaching what we find in the Americas.)

In short, with the Hispanists you often got real victims with a genuine literature of victim-chronicles. There’s nothing anti-intellectual about recognizing this, either (though there is something quite unintellectual, I believe, about founding an entire Manichaean philosophy of good guys/bad guys upon it). One may hone one’s reasoning skills just as sharply by reading and analyzing Karl Marx as by paying homage to Dante or Shakespeare; and if you add Gabriel Garcia-Márquez to the equipment, you can bring a sparkle to your blade. My reservation about Spanish as the major power in today’s foreign language departments, I emphasize, has nothing to do with the progressivist tendencies of modern Spanish literature. It has to do with speaking. The special reality of Spanish to us in North America is a spoken reality, not a read or written one. Many of our hispanophone neighbors are no more literate in Spanish than in English: printing government documents in both languages doesn’t help them much unless they find a friend who can read. Nor is this true simply of the poorer classes which tend to slip into the United States in desperate search of work; even the comparatively affluent Argentinians and Chileans are finding that their populace, though widely educated, chooses not to read.

Spanish-American culture is vaguely but significantly opposed to literacy. I have already grazed the reasons why this should be so. The original Spanish who subjugated the New World did not themselves have a vernacular literature as liberal, expressive, and meditative as the rest of Europe. What literature in Spanish existed, furthermore, was no more passed along to native converts and collaborators than was the Summa Theologica. Transplanted Spaniards themselves were too busy with the work of administering colonies to cultivate literary taste. Hence today’s Hispano-Aztecan Mexican or Hispano-Mayan Guatemalan or Hispano-Carib-African Dominican has no centuries-old tradition of literature upon which to draw, even if we may assume that he knows how to read, nor are the endemic customs which survived Spanish colonization remotely relevant to life in the TV-and-Computer Age. These people have few roots reaching back either to oppressor or oppressed. They have been dumped into the twenty-first century almost as if they had been transported through several previous centuries in a dark knapsack.

Now, at last, we confront a major issue. Spanish departments are clearly going to endure at our universities, and Spanish classes will clearly continue at our local grade schools. The ideology of victims-and-villains which reigns in the academy will secure the place of Spanish in the former venue, and the blunt reality that immigrants from the south are permanently settled among us will secure its place in the latter. The last stand of foreign language promises to be a good one. In fact, it may just turn the tide of the battle.

Unless, that is, you insist upon the healthy survival of literature as a condition of victory. Spanish may not be able to deliver this prize. Since the ivory tower has been so heavily politicized, I fear that even graduate programs in Spanish may become steadily mired in contemporary fiction which is little more than the transcript of those soap operas so extremely popular south of the border (even more than here). Such works are centrifugal in every way: they orbit no nucleus of common values or traditions, their style chases after the ever-changing slickness of the movies, and the patois in which they are written is itself almost indecipherable in other quarters of the Hispanic world. Certainly our schoolteachers seldom inspire a love of literature. Administrators and parents alike lean upon them to produce adolescents who can chatter away like some fudbol sportscaster—this so that Johnny and Susie may have the inside track when it comes to getting a job among a bilingual public. Our primary and secondary schools have the ethic of instant utility forced down their throat in this age of "accountability" (I cannot resist the quotes, as a defender of the humanities); and our "higher" educators (no explanation of quotes needed, I trust) choose to live out their Juarista fantasies rather than to help us all rediscover what unites us as human beings.

Allow me to explain why this emphasis upon speaking, and upon a popular literature more attuned to electronic performances than artistic composition, undermines the thought-provoking qualities of foreign language study. The speech of ordinary people in ordinary situations (called "demotic" from the Greek demos) is far less rigid than the formal language of "serious literature", if one may still use that phrase of any creative writing in the world. In Spanish culture, at any rate—especially Spanish-American—it has little meaning. Writing is judged on how closely it approaches informal speech, just as plot is judged on how closely it replicates the microscopic melodramas of unheroic multitudes. There are many casualties of such popularization. For instance, the tense which is designated conditional in Italian and French, constructed from the present infinitive, and employed under specific circumstances has collapsed into the imperfect subjunctive in Spanish.⁷ I have found repeatedly that even college-level instructors cannot define for me the circumstances in which one form should be chosen over the other: they only remark that the infinitive-based subjunctive (once the conditional tense) predominates in the New World, while the other structure (the imperfect subjunctive in Italian and French) is Old World, old-fashioned, and practically obsolete.⁸ Demotic usage simply lost sight of the distinction, and its indifference soon became law (i.e., abolished the existing law) since Spanish has no watchdog like the Académie Française to guard its standards.

This "tyranny of the street" is even more apparent if one examines vocabulary. The common people frequently don’t understand big or rare words. As a result, they either discard them or press them into service as synonyms for words with only approximately the same meaning. A few issues ago, we wrote in Praesidium of how the Spanish verb cavilar rather brutally comes to mean "think", leaving a gap around the subtle act of caviling which can only be filled by supplying descriptive phrases ad libitum. Demotic language lacks rigor and precision. Any student of Greek who has read Plato and then attempted the New Testament knows the frustrations of rule-bending and oversimplifying for the earnest translator. If you are an educated American who has lived at least forty years, of course, you must be painfully aware of this leveling phenomenon already from observing how quickly a sloppy coinage, once popularized, finds its way into the dictionary. The man who wins the lottery is "fortuitous", we hear it said, and an idiot does not "bungle" but "bumbles" like a bee.

To be sure, diminished rigor is still better than no rigor at all. Yet the laxity of demotic language has more serious consequences. A language can get along nicely without a conditional tense, and the meanings of words are never rock-solid; but the most morally salutary quality of language study—its invitation to think things through—may actually be opposed by the ethic of casual conversation. When people talk casually, they spend far less energy on thinking than on keeping the verbal ball in lively motion. They grab at idioms instead of pondering the mot juste. The teaching of conversational technique—which, I repeat, dominates foreign language pedagogy today—depends heavily upon burning into the student’s memory a bunch of tired phrases, trite sentiments, and dead metaphors. It is a preparation in how not to think, in how to jabber seamlessly and volubly. You know what people sound like on a given day at a given street corner:

"Hey, Bob. How’s it going, man?"

"Okay, I guess. No complaints. How’s Jane?"

"She’s back up again, she’ll survive."

"So she’s cool with your new job?"

"Hey, man—totally. She wants that new pad, know what I mean?"

How could anyone not know what these vocalized hand signals mean? That is, how could anyone think that they mean much of anything? It is into such challenging situations as these that we prepare our students to plunge on a faraway street corner.⁹

The objection may be raised that idioms are traditional, and hence uphold that respect for the past and for hierarchy which I recommended earlier. Not so. The idiom is precisely the lingo of the idiotês—the regular Joe, the average bloke. In today’s parlance, idioms last (I would guess) about five or ten years: less all the time. Our electronic technology causes them to be churned out at breakneck speed—and we all know better than to ascribe any regard for tradition to that source! In fact, The perceptive reader may already have reflected that to draw closer to street talk in today’s circumstances is to draw closer to TV, the movies, and the Internet. If I am correct that the skills involved in acquiring a foreign language are in some important way opposed to those involved in "computer literacy", then dedicating a foreign language program to bus-stop blabber is sleeping with the enemy. With the flux of "in" phrases, naturally, comes a parallel flux of topics and ideas. Rock stars pass into and out of popularity, movies explode on the scene and then vanish, and even the most critical events now have a shelf life of mere months. (How many people were interested in President Clinton’s impeachment even for a few weeks? How many people on the streets of New York mention the World Trade Towers today if they do not happen to pass by the yet littered chasm?)

In a truly, functionally oral society, language is anchored firmly, not by the idiom, but by the proverb. It has been plausibly maintained that oral-traditional peoples do not search their souls as do their literate counterparts. "By separating the knower from the known…" writes Father Ong, "writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set."¹⁰ A counter-argument might be made, however (and I very much doubt that Ong would disagree with its terms), that the pre-literate person is not wholly deprived of self-expression—he simply "seeks" himself in the broader community rather than in his intimate thoughts and feelings. Proverbs are indeed a measure of such self-expression. A speaker puts before his audience a timeless proverbial truth, implying that it is relevant to a specific situation being considered. The audience’s members then ruminate over the suggestion, fitting specific details into the universal panorama. One of them may respond with another proverb, which may either confirm the first or hint at an adjustment. These people are most certainly in some sense "speaking their mind". Their exchange is punctuated by respectful and meditative silences. (One sees the like, for instance, in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.) They are not riding the crest of trend to sustain themselves in incessant prattle. Though Ong, Havelock, and others have been quite right to distinguish their activity from its literary equivalent by depth of analysis and force of individual assertion, they are in their way infinitely more analytical—and, yes, even more individualistic—than the tourist armed with a host of "guidebook phrases" learned in French or Spanish 202.

Lest I seem to be bullying Spanish, I must add the final point about demotic language’s degradation that, in every particular venue around the world, it is growing more and more anglicized—and especially more americanized. Eventually, I suppose we will end up with one bland American cheese of slang. The assault, as one would expect, comes primarily in the form of technological terms. Words for "telephone", "microwave", "minivan"… a glance across my desk assures me that the French for "toner cartridge (according to Xerox’s box) is cartouche de toner. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry refused to learn English when he took refuge in this country during the Nazi occupation, worried lest the gradual American conquest of his culture proceed through his own writing! What would he think of télévision and the rest? Reading with great pleasure the Venezuelan novel Doña Bárbara the other day, I ran across the word Güinchester for a Winchester rifle. As an enthusiastic student of other languages who does not, however, make any effort to sustain the conversational fluency of the soap operas and gossip magazines, I can only imagine how many such barbarisms have been machine-drilled into reverend tongues around the world. And with this techno-speak come more conventional Anglo-American idioms. Irish has a colorful and intriguing phrase for "give an account" or "describe": cur síos (literally, "put down"). Move the image in the opposite direction and you get cur suas, as in "put up [with], endure"—an image very familiar to us, as well it should be.¹¹ It is ours. You won’t find it in any Gaelic text of more than a few decades old.

When things are viewed from this perspective, one has to conclude that all foreign languages—but perhaps especially Spanish, with its relatively thin layer of literary tradition in the New World and its immense weight of popular pressure—would very much benefit from being taught more from plays, poems, stories, and novels and less from the language lab. Those exponents of ethnic preservation in the Hispanic community should realize that delivering Spanish instruction to a slaughterhouse of electronic chatterboxes will sooner or later strip the language of most of its character. What people like the Irish and the Welsh hope to achieve in Europe by foisting their ancestral tongue with similar jingoism upon uncouth teenyboppers is beyond me to say. National unity, perhaps… but what they will in fact achieve is the ultimate colonization of their heritage, not just by the English, but by all the tasteless ephemera of postmodernism’s posthumanism.

Here, then, is my most urgent recommendation for availing ourselves of foreign language instruction’s happy survival among compu-kid games and PC history books, among business departments and nursing programs. Teach the literature. Relegate speaking to a secondary status: don’t avoid it, but don’t stress it. First and foremost, teach the rules of grammar and cultivate a richness of diction. Do so as quickly as possible, in preparation for the marvelous day when children (or young adults) can pick up a short story by Dario or Maupassant or Deledda and read it in its original form. The blessings of literacy include a richness of internal life and an acute analytical ability; those of orality include a richness of communal life and a wonderfully synthetic sense of transcending purpose. The electronic habit of living, I am fully convinced, cultivates the psyche from neither of these directions, nor does it have anything substantial to offer in their place. It is the first step upon the path to becoming a robot. Computers can already talk to us with about the level

of sophistication that we find in the typical language lab: "Would you like to write a letter… may I make some suggestions?" (Of course, the suggestions themselves will be dictated by a suffocating uniformity.) If, instead, we surround the nurturing of verbal skills with thoughtful, humane, intricately crafted literature, our language programs, rather than "programming" kids to ask directions in German or Russian, will bestow upon them the best gifts of oral and literate culture at the same time. Rather than preparing them to think like robots, we shall be preparing them to think and live without robots.

My own experience has been that language labs are of doubtful efficacy even in the narrow endeavor of learning how to speak among natives. If one could pass within a few days from the lab’s headphones to the streets of Paris or Madrid or Cairo, the strategy might make sense. In fact, if I were a coordinator of events, I would never use a speech-and-listening intensive program except in just such a context: that is, when I could arrange for students to hear and speak the relevant language several hours a day immediately before they take a school-sponsored trip to another part of the world. But this is seldom the procedure. Instead, the student routinely devotes a couple of hours a week throughout the semester to listening in on taped conversations, repeating certain passages as directed, and taking aural comprehension tests. These tedious hours would be better spent reading, writing, and learning grammar. Whatever facility may be acquired in making conversation vanishes over summer break, if not the Christmas holidays. One must hear and speak a language almost daily if one has no other means of preserving a mastery of it. Of course, one must read it scarcely less often to maintain the same level of mastery, and most students will no more take a French novel home over vacation than they will track down a French speaker to address; but the point is that they could do the former with relative ease—and throughout their lives—whereas the latter would eventually prove impossible (always barring marriage with a French national). Read a language every other day, and you will be able to bring your speaking skills up to speed with little pain whenever the need may arise. Basic grammatical principles will be firmly fixed in your mind, and your vocabulary will grow by the month. Immerse yourself in speaking, however, and all your painful learning will fly away within weeks of your leaving lab and classmates behind. Even if you should find a conversing-partner within your life’s stabilized boundaries, what are the chances that brief chats about job and family will keep in repair (let alone improve) your knowledge of the language’s complexities?

There is a species of teacher, I know well, who will not appreciate my suggestions. In fact, I am bound to say that one of the reasons speaking and listening are so strongly endorsed by teachers of foreign language is the ease of lesson-planning and paper-grading involved in that strategy. Administrators, in their characteristic ignorance, are impressed by such chirping extroverts, who often speak their special tongue with the beauty of a cardinal calling for a mate at springtime. But if these same teachers don’t read anything except the textbook dialogues assigned to their students, they have little to their credit beyond their warbling mellifluidity—and they can scarcely impart that to their classes!

Until we face up to the liabilities of such methods, we shall be getting far less out of our language programs than we ought to. I can well recall the first college-level interview I ever endured after earning my doctorate—for a joint Latin-French position, with emphasis on the former. Now, even with secondary emphasis, the French duties concerned were arguably beyond my competence, given that developing conversational abilities in the students was a stated objective and that my delivery in French was halting. (My English isn’t much closer to the torrential: I have a nasty habit in all languages of pausing to think over what I’m about to say.) I could have accepted my rejection, therefore, if it had been couched in those terms; but what I heard instead has left me disturbed for two decades. I sounded "too much like a book", read the verdict—not halting, but too formal in style and too florid in diction. What strange reasons for denying one access to impressionable young minds! If I had possessed a cab driver’s command of French, on the other hand, I suppose I would have been ideal.

Where will this orientation take us, if not (I repeat) down a cloaca maxima where everybody speaks in the same hybrid slang of the same television-and-poll filtered ideas? Why not speak like a book to one’s students? What’s so frightening about a live person with a better-than-average vocabulary and an uncommon respect for subjunctives? Indeed, isn’t it precisely those languages most ravaged by popular short-cuts and misconceptions (I repeat) which should most heartily welcome a few "bookish" referees?

I shall close with two scarcely more recent memories. I found myself in Dublin during the summer of 1986 to attend a three-week course in Celtic Studies. At the first week’s end, all of us students (there were only about forty of us) were invited to some sort of nightclub/eatery where only Gaelic was spoken. I almost didn’t make it past the door. A rather assertive young scoundrel kept yammering something at me which I finally understood to be a question about how many were on my ticket. As if touched by an electric cow prod, I piped in sudden recognition, "Mí fhéin" ("Myself"), the only Gaelic I managed all night. (One of the instructors kindly translated my dinner order for me.) The whole outing, beyond being a bit humiliating, struck me as thoroughly ridiculous. Why would people do this sort of thing—just to give England and her language a political thumb in the eye? If these Dubliners had political differences with England, would such differences not profit from being addressed directly; or if they merely wanted to cultivate their ancestral tongue, could they not do so with less ostentation and more method? What was the exact nature of the good being served when one uttered, "Tasty grub," or, "I like that song," in Irish? What good is served, for that matter, by the new rash of Gaelic short stories about teenagers running away from home or priests arranging trysts with hookers? In our miserably ignoble world, is our squalor somehow sanitized when expressed in the Irish? Wouldn’t we do better to use language in our recovery of right reason than to translate our lunacy into every language on earth?

Then I remember a scene involving Proinsias MacCana, author of many fine books, scholar of international repute, and gentleman of the old school. He had just finished his daily lecture on the medieval Fled Bricrend, a new edition of which he was preparing at the time. I had made the trip across a quarter of the planet largely to hear him on the subject of Irish myth and legend. He had attended the soirée at the nightclub, of course: in a way, he was our host. I can’t vouch for the quality of his modern Irish, but I should be very surprised if it were deficient to any other’s except in abundance of slang and "colorful" mispronunciation. This particular scene, however, occurred right outside the classroom which we were all in the process of vacating. As I followed the others out, I noticed that he had stopped to converse with another student—in fluid French. Having just parsed a great many difficult Middle Irish verbs in impeccable English, he could respond when plucked by the arm in yet a third language without breaking stride. To be sure, what I inadvertently overheard of his response sounded a bit bookish: no ça va bien or je m’en fiche. But then, I feel fairly confident that he must have been talking about books, not taxis or soccer or draft beer.

The full experience of another language does not confine you within that language: it carries over, rather, into how you speak your mother tongue and treat a stranger and grapple with a moral dilemma. Likewise, another language is experienced most fully when not severed in artificial "concentration" from issues of universal value. Our creature concerns will take care of themselves; if I had been ejected from the nightclub, I would have dined just as well from the corner supermarket. Education isn’t about how to stay alive, but about what one lives for.