The Sacred and Beautiful

Roger Scruton has a short essay on the postmodern life, posted up on the City Journal website. Let me offer two responses.

1.) Scruton does not need to work so hard trying to scrape out a new form of transcendence in human experience. While the rational mind of this era does "desecrate" by nature - putting reason to the sacred in order to understand its human utility and social construction - and can be "transported" and "captured" by a moment of empty clarity, we people of the modern have always kept alive the sacred in a most fundamental way: ourselves. Consciousness, that undoubtable moment of experienced self-awareness, can not desacralize itself. The "phenomenon of consciousness" (as termed by William James) keeps itself whole; we can not stand apart from our own being to problematize our self in any way other than the abstract. Action in the world is self-actualizing, and no amount of reflection can alter the immanence with which we live.

2.) Scruton sets aside certain human endeavors (holiday meals; getting lost into a suddenly appearing shaft of sunlight) as evidence that we still live invested in beauty. In doing so, he emphasizes what Ellen Dissanayake calls "making special." This means, to be entirely too reductive, to invest value into acts of social construction, to acknowledge what William James (again) called the more to our lives. The very power than enjoins human reason to understand the world elides what it can not fit into meaningfulness. "For what we do not have language, we pass over in silence" (Wittgenstein). Elision becomes ignorance; the more becomes not the mystical dimension, where art and religion serve with soteriological agency, but a null part of human existence. Put another way, the observable and rational subvert the hapticity of experience. What we can not explain, we dismiss and move on.

His essay adds elegant prose to the dialogue between art and utility. The fact that something is created by humans for humans in order to live more autonomously in the world of humans does not deprive it of a kind of godliness. The final cause can not be known. The challenge for us the people is how to deal with that.

ADDED: I had the chance to attend a dinner in honor of Nell Painter, the Princeton professor of History. There were few people around the table, maybe ten, at the point that Dr. Painter claimed that "beauty did not have a narrative." Cam White and I had no idea what she meant, and neither of us were bold enough to approach her about this claim (it came across with a tone of perceived obviousness). I am still unable to understand her point, though I occasionally find ways to justify it.

Its relevance here, then, reminds me of the complex dimensions at play in what Scruton writes. Is beauty a thing itself, an end without recourse as a means? Should we pursue beauty, like the good and the true, for no utility other than to experience the beautiful? If so, then beauty as a social construction opens us to bad, bad faith: creating out of the flesh of human experience the portal of transcendence from humanity negates the transcendence. We fall back into ourselves.

Schools fail this test continually. Art, or any non-"objective" content subject course like music and PE, gain traction in schools in proportion to the utility for the mainline content course. Or their ability to raise measurements (re: testing) of these contents or the efficacy of schooling. There is, of course, a political and practical advantage to taking this purposefulness as a given. What it means, though, is the subjugation of beauty, and truth and the good, to their value in social life. Education deprives students of their experience of the goals of meaningfulness, in order to prepare them for a life that seeks these goals. Pursuit of the Good is not an end of schooling. Education sucks away the humanity of experience - even just the recognition that such a thing as the Good exists and the significance of a life of seeking.

Education becomes the process of regression, the infinite deferral of the goals of living in favor of more tools in which to seek them.

two ideas

1.) Results oriented action. Life is unpredictable, but somewhat consistent. They idea that we can know, with surety, the next moment does not create a kind of bad faith. Things seem to work out as planned, making it safe to anticipate the reaction and results of our actions. 'Anger the Gods; make plans' fizzles into a harder reality of 'anger the Gods; lack expectations.'

So for schooling. Outcome-based teaching seems a rational approach to education. Figure out what we want our students to know, to know how to do and to feel; create lessons that enable students to know, to know how to and to feel. Results; proof; efficacy.

Yet striving for outcomes depends on a messy process. Knowledge, skills and disposition are not produced so easily in a lab setting, much less the decidedly unsterile schoolhouse. Too many factors jump into play for teachers or students. What is learned does not easily fit into concise, clearly conceptualized results. Broadly, yes; a student learns to add, to dissect, to read, to understand how a bill gets enacted. If these rather broad goals count as results, then outcome-based teaching has a strong kind of validity. In fact, the broader the goals, the less we care about the mess. Learning on a macro-level does not impose complexity. Increasingly, though, learned is being targeted on the micro-level. We must deal with the mess; the divergent nature of knowledge and skills and the highly individual psychology of every student.

Put another way, schooling resembles a court case. The law is what it is, but the process determines the reality of the abstract law. And that process is highly contingent (the personalities of the lawyers and judges and juries; the particulars of any case; the social climate and norms present at the time of the case), thus messy. The results of the case can not be known ahead of time, even though the broad outline can be: the law will be applied in a way that does little damage to what the law means.

The little things are the most unpredictable and least conducive to plan for. However, they are the heart of how truth is discovered.

2.) Understanding life. In a longish discussion on affirmative action, I tried to make the case that using race as a 'plus' factor for a candidate will not help bring about the end to race-based decisions (on hiring, school admissions, whatever). Even as a transition, from the overtly racist, white paternalism, to a more just society, I doubted that using race to move past using race would effect any social change. My partner explained something, though, that I found important: Blacks have lived the experience of being black. No matter how equal the qualifications between two candidates - one black; the other white - the lived experiences in contemporary America will be different.

To be clear, I have no delusions that such a thing as "equal qualifications" exist, nor the immense value of diversifying a faculty or student body for its own sake. And I understand the logic of compensatory measures to equilibrate the diversity of an organization. My concerns are that such action will not lead to overcoming such actions.

And this argument which I found really strong - the experience of being a minority in America - got me thinking. By this, do we mean that a black's experience of being black is enough? In other words, is their blackness itself the worthy feature of their experience? Or is it their ability to experience their experience of being black? Is there a difference between hiring someone who is black and hiring someone who is conscious of the experience of being black? The distinction seems crucial, since awareness of experience is not limited to minorities, and thus perhaps a better description of what race in American means.

For example, I am white, Jewish, well educated and from successful parents. This experience is not unique in itself. Nor does it lend me to an untapped perspective on things. But let's say that I come to understand what it means to be white in American; I develop a consciousness complementary and opposite of blacks who are conscious of their experience in being black. And I develop a consciousness of being Jewish; the consciousness of being relatively privileged and secure as I grew-up; the conscious of what these mean in society today. Would these levels of awareness mean that I have a similar experience as minorities who are conscious of and understanding for being a minority in America?

Perhaps this sounds all very dismissive to the real plight of many in America, of the history of real discrimination and poverty suffered, of the actual experience of living this experience. It may be that my words here make it seem like I am looking for a way to explain away this experience, to not have to deal with it, by turning a lived experience into a concept, and a concept that I can arrange for myself. And maybe what I have just done is demonstrate to those, like my partner, who argue for diversity as a value itself to slap awake those, like me, who can not truly know what it means to live in the other Americas.

I probably agree, then, to all that. My point, though, is to help make clear the messiness of our concepts and actions, to anchor what is to be done more snugly into the bedrock of why we need to do it. This post may be a terrible, and possibility ignorant and insulting attempt. Grant me the chance to start here as I make my way somewhere better.