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COLUMBIA FORUM
Listen To Learn
PHOTOS: MIKE LOVETT
Eugene Goodheart '53 received his
Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from GSAS in 1961. He
taught at Bard College, the University of Chicago, Mount Holyoke,
MIT, Boston University (where he chaired the English department)
and Brandeis University until his retirement in 2001 as Edytha Macy
Gross Professor of Humanities at Brandeis. Goodheart also served
as a visiting professor for Columbia's English and comparative literature
graduate program as well as at Wesleyan University and Wellesley
College.
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Goodheart believes that
listening to others' views helps to strengthen your own. |
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He has authored 10 books of literary and cultural criticism
as well as a memoir, Confessions of a Secular Jew (2001, The Overlook
Press). Among his other books are Desire and Its Discontents (1991,
Columbia University Press), The Reign of Ideology (1996, Columbia
University Press) and Does Literary Studies Have a Future? (1999,
University of Wisconsin Press). Goodheart's many fellowships include
a Fulbright and a Guggenheim, as well as ones from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned
Societies. He also was awarded a fellowship to the National Humanities
Center. Goodheart's daughter, Jessica, graduated from the College
in 1989. Here is his address to the Class of 2003 at Brandeis' commencement
ceremony on May 18.
This is what I remember of my college days. Compare them with your
own. It was a time when I was first taken seriously as an adult. For
the first time in my life, I was addressed as Mr. Goodheart. The difference
today is that everybody is called by his or her first name, in many
cases even professors. But still, I suspect that you began to think
of yourselves as adults at Brandeis. I was an English concentrator.
(One of my teachers, Lionel Trilling [’25], wrote a short story
about an instructor in English literature who was visited in his office
by a student complaining about his grade. The student mentioned the
fact that he was an English major, to which the unsympathetic instructor
replied, “In what regiment?” The effect of the story was
to turn me into an English concentrator.)
Like Brandeis, Columbia didn’t let you confine yourself to
a concentration; it was committed to providing its students with
a broad liberal education. So I took courses in history, music,
the fine arts, philosophy, French, science and math in addition
to general courses in the humanities and Contemporary Civilization.
I remember debates about different interpretations of the classic
texts we read. Certain works of literature became permanent possessions:
Aeschylus’s Oresteia, King Lear, John Donne’s
poems, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Keats’s
“Ode to a Nightingale,” Joyce’s The Dead
— a very partial list. I remember teachers, their style, their
crotchets, their idiosyncrasies. Some were charismatic, some profound,
some shallow, others amusing, still others boring. And then, of
course, there were the friendships. My closest friend was someone
who could have been a model for Holden Caulfield. Catcher in
the Rye was the cult book of my generation, not in our curriculum.
My friend had Holden’s passion for genuineness and contempt
for phoniness. He even dared to call his teachers by their first
names. He was a forerunner of the rebels of the 1960s.
There’s much that I’ve forgotten of the content of the
courses, though I suspect that a good deal of it is still in my mental
blood, and parts of it get aroused by events. Certain class events
come back to me in all their vividness. In a moment, I’ll tell
you about one of them. I also remember that in my best classes, I
was challenged to think hard and critically about a subject or a book.
Like everyone else, I had to cram information, especially to perform
well on objective tests. But much of the information has disappeared
down a memory hole. What finally mattered was not the information
I have retained or forgotten, but the habit of thinking critically.
We are told nowadays that we live in an information age, that if we
want to learn about the world, all we have to do is to go to a computer
for whatever data we need. What we sometimes forget is that no amount
of information (valuable as it may be) will teach us how to think
and to think critically. What my experience, and I believe everyone’s
experience, tells us is that information is a temporary possession,
but the habit of thinking critically, once acquired, is permanent.
Here is an example of a classroom experience that still resonates
with me. I took a course called Contemporary Civilization with a
distinguished American historian, Richard Hofstadter. The assignment
for that morning was Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.
At the time — it was in the prehistoric year 1950 —
I thought of myself as a Marxist. Professor Hofstadter entered the
classroom, and, without saying a word, he turned to the blackboard
and wrote the following sentence: “The history of all societies
present and previously existing is a history of class cooperation.”
I was a great admirer of Professor Hofstadter (he was a terrific
teacher, and because of his class, I almost decided to change my
concentration from English to history), but I couldn’t believe
the mistake he made. The sentence of the Manifesto, as
anyone who has ever read it knows, reads: “The history of
all societies present and previously existing is a history of class
struggle.” So I raised my hand to correct him. Professor Hofstadter
smiled and said: “I know that, but,” addressing the
class, he continued, “I want you to tell me what’s wrong
with saying that it is a history of class cooperation. Classes may
be in conflict, but they also cooperate. One could write a history
of the world from the perspective of cooperation as well as of conflict.”
I had been taught by my Marxist mentors to believe that conflict was
the whole truth of class relations, and my first impulse was to resist
what Professor Hofstadter was saying, but he was such an intelligent
and persuasive person. I knew that it was to my intellectual advantage
to listen and take seriously what he had to say, even if it rattled
my confidence that I possessed the truth. Not because he was the teacher,
but because of what he said and the persuasive way he said it. What
he taught me was that there are different ways of seeing and understanding
the world. It was a lasting antidote to my dogmatism, a decisive and
liberalizing moment in my liberal education.
Listening seriously and carefully to the views and arguments of people
who disagree with you may unsettle your own views, but they also may
strengthen them by forcing you to revise your arguments to make them
more persuasive. The early ’50s of the 20th century was the
period of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union (you remember
the Soviet Union). I’m sure that Professor Hofstadter’s little lesson about class warfare and class cooperation
had something to do with the side that he took in the war. The American
side stood for class cooperation, the Soviet side for class warfare.
Still, whatever side you were on, you had to take seriously his argument
on intellectual grounds. The dialectic of discussion and argument
inside and outside the classroom is what I remember best about my
college experience. It was the nutrition of my mental life, and it
continues to sustain me. Thinking hard about difficult matters (personal,
political and social), even thinking against myself, prevents me from
relaxing into complacency about what I believe, about what I think
is right and true.
I graduated from college, but unlike many or most of my classmates,
I did not leave the academy. Along with professional colleagues, I
have been a witness to and a participant in the changes that have
taken place in the academy as well as in the larger culture during
the past five decades: the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam,
the counter culture of the ’60s, the disintegration of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War, the radicalization of the academy,
the Gulf War, terrorism. I’m sure I have left out other major
events. What I would like to focus on is a preoccupation of colleges
and universities during the past couple of decades. You’re all
familiar with it. The preoccupation goes by the phrase “political
correctness,” and it is relevant to what I’ve been saying
about critical thinking and, indeed, the mission of higher education.
It’s a waning preoccupation, but it’s worth reflecting
upon.
What is political correctness? I may be mistaken, but I believe it
had its origins in the Communist party many years ago. If you were
in the party, you were required to follow the party line in all its
twists and turns. Nowadays, the phrase is generally applied by political
conservatives and some liberals to those who embrace what they view
as the pieties of the Left: identity politics, multiculturalism, affirmative
action, feminism, gay liberation, a fixation on the devastations of
colonialism, canon bashing, speech codes — you know the whole
megillah. What are we to make of all this? Are the conservatives right
in their view that political correctness of the Left has taken over
the academy? There has been a strong tendency in the academy to embrace
certain causes normally associated with left-wing or liberal politics.
And that embrace has too often been knee-jerk and uncritical. The
worst of it is the feeling of intimidation, the feeling that you have
to follow the fashion and go along with the herd. But the conservative
critics too often make it seem as if liberal politics per se necessarily
entails political correctness and that liberal thought does not deserve
respect.
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What needs to be distinguished is the content of a political or cultural
view from the attitude taken toward it or from the way it is held.
Some of the causes I have mentioned (not all of them), if thoughtfully
and intelligently embraced, have nothing to do with political correctness.
It is the thoughtless adherence to a cause, the refusal to listen
to and the impulse to repress those who have a different view who
deserve the label. The conservative critics are not in good faith
when they assume that there is no political correctness on the right.
How often do we hear politicians and heads of corporations talk up
the virtues of the free market without reflection about how free it
is or about its casualties? How often do we hear conservative politicians
speak about the disinterested intention of our government in spreading
democracy around the world without considering the historical practices
of America’s foreign policy? There are thoughtful conservatives
and thoughtful liberals as well as mindless ones. Our literature contains
well-thought-out and powerful expressions of views on both sides of
the political spectrum. Truth and falsity are not the exclusive possession
of one side of the spectrum.
What is anathema to the intellectual life, to our politics, indeed,
to our humane relations with one another, is an intolerance that disables
us from listening to one another and from thinking freely and boldly.
If in a university, one is not free to take one’s ideas in the
direction of wherever logic and evidence dictate, if one is not free
to disagree with prevailing views and ideas, what is the rationale
for the university? Politician and philosopher Edmund Burke was a
conservative critic of the French Revolution. Late in life, reflecting
upon his opposition, he changed his mind. Nineteenth-century critic
Matthew Arnold called it “Burke’s return upon himself,”
and he went on to characterize and praise Burke’s thinking in
a way that superbly captures the spirit of what I am trying to say.
“That is what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question
has long had your earnest support, when you hear around you no language
but one, when your party talks this language like a steam engine,
still to be carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the
other side of the question, and like Balaam to be unable to speak
anything but what the Lord has put in your mouth.”
We are reminded daily by politicians and the media that we live in
a democracy, and that, unlike the benighted dictatorships in the world,
we are free to express our views without fear of government retribution.
This is true, certainly relatively true, and we should value this
freedom. But the laws that allow our freedom (what British philosopher
Isaiah Berlin calls our “negative liberty”) do not guarantee
it. If we listen and submit to a strident language, whether on the
left or the right, our thoughts and actions are in a sense no longer
ours: They have been chosen for us. We are then not thinking for ourselves,
but rather following the leader. Our citizenship becomes a form of
obedience. The name for this is indoctrination, and it can occur in
a democracy as well as in a dictatorship.
Dictatorships specialize in indoctrination, their educational systems
are based on it. But as I say, it can occur in democracies. In varying
degrees, it is a feature of all societies. What makes our educational
system so necessary and precious is that, at its best, it is the place
where the citizens of a democracy become aware of many languages and
perspectives and where the powers of critical discrimination are cultivated
— where, in other words, we acquire the freedom to choose and
act intelligently. I hardly need to spell out the relevance of such
an education to our present time. Our political air is supercharged
with angry, often mindless, rhetoric from all sides, urging us to
speak and to act in behalf of one cause or another. I would like to
think that the habits of listening and reflection acquired in the
university might reduce the pollution. But here’s a caution:
Listening and reflection as ends in themselves can become self-impoverishing.
There are times when you have to suspend reflection and take a stand.
What you want to avoid is the fate of the Hasidic rabbi, who when
asked to adjudicate a quarrel between two neighbors said that they
were both right. When an observer pointed out that the stories told
by the neighbors contradicted each other and they couldn’t both
be right, the rabbi responded: “You’re also right.”
The poet William Butler Yeats knew the risks on both sides. Of the
Easter 1916 Irish rebellion, he wrote: “the best lack all conviction/
the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Better than Yeats’s
“best” would be a person of conviction not overwhelmed
by mindless passionate intensity.
Commencement speeches are characteristically filled with warning and
hope. They tell you that the real world can be a dangerous and scary
place, and they also speak of opportunities to be seized and occasions
for fulfillment, and they remind you of the resources that your education
has provided. But they tend to be misleading when they say that one’s
liberal education is a preparation for real life. I would suggest
that if your education has been of a genuinely liberal kind that you
may well experience a discontinuity between that education and “real
life.” Which is not to say that it may not give you certain
advantages in your pursuit of professional success. Those advantages,
however, are incidental to the aim of a liberal education. That aim
is to cultivate within you powers of self-awareness and critical understanding
without which a civilized and truthful life is impossible. End of
sermon. I wish you all success, fulfillment and happiness.
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