The Soundness of a Discipline
Ken Burns has come in for some deserved criticism for pushing the line, in his new documentary on the American Revolution, that the Founding Fathers got their ideas about confederative government from the Iroquois and the Six Nations. From what I have been able to gather, outside of his dutiful reportage of treaties and conflicts, Benjamin Franklin himself, put forward as the best case for Iroquois influence and generally friendly to the Indians, mentions them only a small handful of times in writings that take up many thousands of pages, and never with any specificity as regards governmental structure.
But colleges … have a duty to transmit these bodies of knowledge, and to develop them if they can. If they do not, they are pointless.
Historians who take the trouble to read through all the debates, newspapers, broadsides, letters, and contemporary books on the new nation, and who immerse themselves besides in what the Founders read — Scripture, ancient historians, political philosophers, Milton and other politically minded poets, the great jurists such as Coke and Blackstone — and who familiarize themselves with well-governed nations that could serve as examples for the Founders to imitate, such as the Dutch republic — do not take the notion seriously. To put it another way, if you do not know who Polybius was, or why George Washington was considered the Cincinnatus of his country, or what the governor of the Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, was referring to when he scouted the impracticability “of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients, applauded by some of later times,” concerning the elimination of private property, you are in no position to express an opinion on this matter.
Meanwhile, I have seen a clip in which the historian Victor Davis Hanson explains what was going on with the Romans and the Jews in first-century Judea, and why Pontius Pilate, as Hanson interprets the matter, was content to have Jesus executed and to pin the blame on the Jewish leaders. His questioner is the fitness coach and podcaster Jillian Michaels, who throughout the clip looks at Hanson with blank disbelief, as if he were speaking madness.
That is because she takes for granted that only Christians believe that Jesus really existed; that the gospels were written “hundreds of years” after the events described; that there is no evidence for his existence outside of the gospels; and that the faith only really began at the Council of Nicaea. These are opinions she may have picked up socially, as a dog in the woods picks up burrs, because, again, anybody who reads history, not to mention the New Testament, knows better.
My point is not to criticize our poor schools and colleges, but to note a shift in what it has come to mean to think you know things. Knowledge is hard-won. That is why we used to have intellectual disciplines, defining what was to be studied, the methods of investigation, the criteria for judging probability or certainty, and the ancillary fields the scholar needs experience in to help him make sense of his own. If you were going to study Renaissance English literature, you had to familiarize yourself with the poetry, the drama, the prose fiction, the essays, and many other works, such as Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, or Hakluyt’s Voyages.
That in turn would require a broad knowledge of English literature generally, to be at ease when you judge what an English poet can do with words of various provenance, or with the typical meters of English poetry, or with the various “voices,” direct or suggestive or ironic or self-critical, that a poet may use while writing in the first person. Especially you must be well-acquainted with what the poets read, both in English and in other tongues. Because no one can learn all the languages in the world, we must often rely on good translations. Still, certain foreign languages might be, for practical purposes, recommended or required, such as Italian at least for the study of Edmund Spenser, or Latin at least for the study of Milton.
Nor could you settle your focus on literature alone. The most influential scholar of medieval English literature in the last 100 years, D. W. Robertson, devoted his A Preface to Chaucer to the study, among other things, of medieval iconography, to show what Chaucer’s audience might have seen in their minds when, for example, the two roguish scholars in the Reeve’s Tale describe the action of the grain and the hopper in the mill they have gone to, to make sure the miller does not cheat them.
Robertson shows us the “mystic mill” on one of the capitals of the basilica at Vezelay, with the figure of Moses pouring grain from a sack into a mill, with the figure of Saint Paul gathering the meal below. To understand the thought behind the image, and to understand Chaucer’s allegorical art, you must be familiar with New Testament exegesis of the Old Testament, as in Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans: you must separate the wheat of meaning from the integument of the letter. As Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest says at the beginning of his tale, we are to “take the fruit and let the chaff be still.” To read Robertson’s work is to encounter, on every page, artists, poets, critics, philosophers, and theologians, spanning two thousand years. His knowledge was both encyclopedic and acutely specific, and his skill at interpretation was careful and subtle and yet always productive of clarity.
Now, such work is exceedingly difficult. Nor is there anything in our current universities that encourages it, or that reliably produces scholars capable of appreciating it. There are several causes of this cultural and intellectual decay. I will bring up only one of them here. We have, in the humanities and the social sciences, given over the notion that our central task is to impart a clear body of knowledge, with the intellectual skills necessary to understand it.
“Programs,” ill-defined, often determined by political advocacy, produce graduates trained in no discipline at all, with a shallow and scatter-shot approach to a set of items that otherwise have little to do with one another. An American Studies graduate will be neither an historian nor a literary critic nor an economist, but he will be encouraged to think he is all three. Unfortunately, a little of this and that and the other adds up to less than nothing — to someone trained up in skimming, and thus peculiarly susceptible to academic fads and pretensions.
Nor is the problem limited to such programs. It infects departments too. Few of our graduates with a degree in English know much about English poetry, or about literature written before 1900 generally. The creators and writers of the old Star Trek series could quote, without fuss, Hamlet and The Tempest in a single episode whose title comes from the 17th century poet George Herbert: “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” I would now be pleasantly surprised to meet English majors who know who Herbert was — and Herbert, for my money, is the greatest writer of religious poetry in English, and one of the two or three of our language’s greatest lyric poets.
Is over-specialization the problem? Yes and no. Abandon general knowledge, and you end up with idiosyncrasy: an English professor who focuses on cross-dressing in Renaissance drama, but whose knowledge of English literature and language generally is scant. But such a “specialist,” in our time, is not even a specialist, strictly speaking, because he has not been brought up in any clear discipline. The remedy, again, is not to be “interdisciplinary,” or rather sub-disciplinary, flitting from one flower to another, like a butterfly.
It is to return to the disciplines, which, as I say, always required broad knowledge of matters beyond one’s field. The Shakespeare scholar, as such, should read Plutarch. The Tennyson scholar, as such, should read Newman. How can you read Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto,” or Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, written when the Hawthornes and the Brownings lived in Italy and became good friends, if you know nothing about Renaissance and Greco-Roman art?
Most people will not incline toward such painstaking work, supposing they are capable of it. But colleges — and ancillary institutions of public learning — have a duty to transmit these bodies of knowledge, and to develop them if they can. If they do not, they are pointless. If they do, the knowledge does not remain trammeled up within ivy-covered walls. We would get people outside of the colleges, saying, “But separation of the executive and the legislative came from republican Rome” and not the Iroquois, or, “But Luke leaves off Acts before the death of his friend, Paul,” and so forth. We would know too much to fall for the barrage of nonsense aimed at us from all sides, every day, on all subjects, world without end.
READ MORE from Anthony Esolen:
‘Magical Keys’ Are No Substitute for Real Knowledge
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