Mark's Letters

At my college some students have tried to organize a chapter of the Secular Student Alliance. I don’t know how successful they have been. Mobilizing sophomores and freshmen around not believing in something seems challenging. Militant unbelief is something of an oxymoron—like uncompromising tolerance. It will be interesting to see how this goes.

I do have two concerns, which may be ungrounded, but seem important to avoid. The first is that because it is hard to get excited about not doing something, in this case believing, it may become imperative to demonize those who are doing something. Indeed, recently some writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have gone beyond putting forth arguments for unbelief and attacked religious faith as a great evil. The title of Hitchen’s book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, indicates clearly enough the degree of rage and irrationality present among this new breed of atheists. If one put the word “Zionism” where Hitchens has “Religion,” the title of his book would pass as a piece of Nazi propaganda.

I hope, however, that the Secular Student Alliance can be fierce in the defence of their ideas and humane towards people of faith who disagree. C. S. Lewis when comparing the atheists at Oxford and Cambridge said he liked those at Cambridge better because he preferred “fierce to the flippant.” I too prefer fierce atheism if the ferocity expresses itself in intellectual rigor and a belief that the question of God’s existence is truly central to human existence. I am weary to the bone with mushy atheism that wallows in intellectual sloth or unhappy hedonism. I also prefer fierce atheists to those who claim both belief and unbelief are private concerns, not the proper topics for public discourse. So many have worked to confine theological and religious discourse to the church, it is now more acceptable to talk publicly about one’s sex life than one’s faith.

My second concern is many campus clubs form to provide mutual support to a disadvantaged or mistreated minority. Here the danger is that this requires members to see themselves as victims. Now this might make sense if the club was forming on the campus of a Christian college—Christians (because they too are people) can be mean, and I suppose even being “prayed for” could be a kind of persecution. But at most state colleges and universities, a majority of the faculty are not religious. And although it is always possible for individual students to act like a religious idiot, most state schools offer a thoroughly secularized environment. In most classrooms contempt for religious faith is more common than contempt for atheism. A student losing their faith at college is much more common than one finding it. Therefore to play the role of victim, members of the Secular Student Alliance may be forced to find persecution where there is none and take offense when none has been given. This quest for victim-hood often extinguishes any real dialogue and the kind of intellectual debate and inquiry that colleges should nourish. But perhaps the Alliance will admit at universities they always have home-court advantage. Christians are clearly the visiting team.

But with those two concerns stated, I fully and cheerfully welcome the Secular Student Alliance to campus. I prefer those who take the question of God’s existence seriously. I prefer the fierce.

In his essay “Hedonics” C. S. Lewis records being made uncommonly happy by the beauty of evening sunlight and the domestic scenes of people coming home from work. He points out that this pleasure did not force itself upon him rather it offered itself. Lewis says he accepted the invitation, but that there is a Jailer who is always forbidding such pleasures.

Like Lewis, I have read enough realistic modern fiction to know the “Jailer” he mentions. It is realism. It is what Lewis calls the “wiseacre” that points out the reality behind every vision of happiness. Realism tells us cute babies grow into smart-mouthed teenagers. It will remind us that about half of all marriages end in divorce and that half of the remaining marriages are unhappy. The guy celebrated as a hero today will be discovered to have a criminal record tomorrow. In the famous words of Holden Caulfield, “Everyone is a phony.”

This Jailer used to be my friend. I liked punching holes in the optimism of nauseating saccharine and mindlessly cheerful people. Realism would wink at me when someone naively said something stupidly optimistic. We enjoyed the inside joke. When we spoke of the American Dream it was always with irony—implying it was no dream but at best a delusion and at worse a lie. Just the mention of a “white-picket fence” was short-hand for a whole cynical view of American domestic happiness. Realism and I thought it was cool that there was a TV show called “Suburgatory”.

But like Lewis I have discovered that realism is a fraud. As Lewis points out, the common pleasures and “unreasonable happiness” we sometimes experience are also real. Lewis insists,” If we are to be realists, let us have realism all round.” Realism wrongly asserts that only the twisted is true and only the tragic real.

On fall Friday nights I can hear the high school band playing at the football game and sometimes even hear the announcer and crowd cheering when our team scores (evenings were quiet last fall). The sound of the game and coolness of the autumn night makes me happy as I remember watching my boys play football or listening to Peter play the drums in the band. Realism, or something uglier, will remind me of all the anxiety of watching your kid play and the trips to the hospital after concussions. And even worse, I will think about small town politics, bad coaching, and my boys not getting to play as much as they wanted. My nostalgic sigh can turn into a cynical sneer in a heart-beat. But the pleasure of the memory and moment is just as real as the negative stuff. Realism is our Jailer, not our friend.

Lewis proposes that we “knock the Jailer down and keep the keys henceforward in our own possession.” The ordinary pleasures and common wonders that encompass our lives are real, and they are ours. And literature that is sometimes called escapist may simply be giving us a reality our Jailer has forbidden. Here is Lewis’s solution:

He [the Jailer] accuses all myth and fantasy and romance of wishful thinking: the way to silence him is to be more realist than he—to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that he calls realistic omits.

I now know the cynicism that empowered me to see through everything was blinding me to much that was good and real. When we protect ourselves from disillusionment by believing nothing, we are just as blind as those who see only the good. Cynicism not only numbs us to life’s pain; it robs us of its pleasures.

Not long ago a fellow teacher at my college complained that a student was challenging the grades she assigned to papers. The student dismissed her grades as “merely her opinions”. The teacher showed me the rubric she used to evaluate the essays; it was fairly standard.

However, the whole situation was bathed in irony because my colleague was very much the product and proponent of the counter-cultural values of the sixties and seventies. This generation, my own, has held and still teaches that authority should be challenged and that rebellion against authority is intrinsically good. In the eighties and nineties this same generation embraced post-modernism with its emphasis that objective truth cannot be known and that all truths are simply social constructions of those in power.

In education these counter-cultural values have been institutionalized in a call for student-centered education and a real contempt for “the sage on the stage” approach to education. Those who argue for student-centered education point out that “authority-based” education is often patriarchal and Euro-centric. The very root of the word education, they argue, is educe, which means to draw out. Education should be the drawing out of the knowledge and understanding within the child—not putting in what we have decided the child should know.

In What’s Wrong with World G. K. Chesterton considers this authority-free doctrine of education:

I think it would be about as sane to say that the baby’s milk comes from the baby as to say that the baby’s educational merits do. . . . You may indeed “draw out” squeals and grunts from the child by simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the matter.

Despite these commonsense arguments against education without authority, such an approach is the prevailing orthodoxy in academia today. For decades baby-boomers have been telling students to distrust authority and that we all have our own truth. Yet when they actually take us at our word by challenging our curriculum and our grading, we respond with righteous indignation. For years this generation has taught that all truths are merely opinions, yet we are dismayed when students dismiss our ideas as opinions.

Building a an educational system without authority, without deciding what is true and false, what is worthy or unworthy of transmission, is like building a house without nails. Nails are sharp and hammers hard; it may be better to just let things rest on each other and not force nails into the wood. After all, who has the authority to say a nail should go here rather than there? Let those living in the house build as they go! Away with architects! Away with the supposed expertise of carpenters and framers! We are all equal. Empower people! Away with inspectors and building codes! And by the way, we will be forming another national commission to study the crisis we are facing in our housing industry.