Schools of Love, Schools of Resentment
As King Lear is being dragged off to prison with his daughter Cordelia, the old king assures her of the mutual solace they will provide for one another in their confinement: “We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage. / When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down /And ask of thee forgiveness.” The downfall of these characters at this juncture of the play jolts the audience; just two scenes earlier, they had been reunited, and the mercy and affection they showed to one another at that meeting seemed to augur an upward turn of fortune. But it is not to be. They have not yet reached the wheel’s nadir. Edmund has them carted off, with orders for their murder – orders that will be carried out upon Cordelia. Yet even in the face of this brutality – especially in the face of this brutality - Lear’s tenderness for Cordelia remains poignant:
Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee?
He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven
And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes.
The goodyears shall devour 'em, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep! We'll see 'em starv'd first.
It is one of the most remarkable and moving passages of literature we have in our language – in any language. The range of tensions at work here – the gentleness of a parent’s devotion in contrast to the heartlessness of warfare and its calculations, the debility of old age juxtaposed to the steadfast power of love – generate a poetic intensity that impresses the depicted emotions upon the audience, rather than just rendering them observable. To read this passage sensitively, or likewise to see it performed, is to encounter one of the noblest possibilities of human life – the love that endures all things. And this is only one small moment in the extensive corpus of an author who regularly provides his readers with such glimpses into those spiritual instincts that render us most answerable to our own ideals.
This is what our society now stands prepared to throw away. The campaign against “dead white men” has come at last for Shakespeare, with explicit calls now being made for the elimination of his work from the curriculum, on account of his “problematic, out-dated ideas.” It was always going to come to this. Once it became an accepted pedagogical practice to determine curricular selections based solely on the identities of their authors, it was a given that even figures as august as Shakespeare and Homer would no longer pass muster with our current educational leadership.
And yet what is this mania to yank the most beautiful and profound works of literature out of the hands of young folks but an act of unmitigated cultural vandalism? In times past, the vandals rode down from the steppes, draped in rotted animal skins and barging into the closest library with torch in hand. These days, they wave around their Phd’s while yammering about “white supremacy” and such things, all while ensuring our intellectual heritage lies as neglected as if it lay in a mound of ashes. The appearances are quite different; the effects of their enmity are the same.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to even respond to these efforts, so vacuous and cliched is the mentality that drives them. What does one say, after all, to a person who can find nothing else in Shakespeare but evidence of racism and misogyny? How does one engage with such an impoverished mind? How does one engage with the school board members from San Francisco, who planned to change the names of dozens of schools based on falsehoods they culled from Wikipedia, and when questioned why they didn’t consult historians in the course of their evaluations, responded, “What would be the point…There’s no point in debating history?” To any person of sense, these sorts of statements are categorically disqualifying. People who talk like this have no business meddling in the formation of young minds.
When a teacher – and official with the National Council of Teachers of English, no less – declares that “your kids will be fine if they don’t read (Shakespeare),” the minimal polemical standard her case requires is some demonstration on her part that she understands why he was taught in the first place. Why has he been such a canonical fixture all this time? What is it that generations of scholars have found in his works which they considered an indispensable part of their students’ mental formation? Until his detractors can state this, and explain how they intend to supply their students with what Shakespeare has to offer through other means (good luck with that), then there is no reason for us even to weigh their opinions seriously.
This holds true for all of the previously canonical works currently being canceled. Consider Huck Finn, for instance, perhaps the most reviled of the classics. We all know why so many people want to throw this book out. But why has it been taught in the first place? Answering that question means recognizing that the novel captures, with more memorable literary art than any other book we have, the distinctively American way of understanding the relationship between man and his society, conceived as an insuperable enmity. Huck’s repeated excoriations of “sivilzation,” and his constant need to fly its corrupting influences and return to his raft, are the narrative emblems of that reflexive hostility to social order which, under the name of “individualism,” has become one of the defining features of the American character.
Is there nothing to be learned from reading such a book? Is there no self-awareness that can result from seeing our national character portrayed so effectively? Perhaps those people who rail endlessly against their country’s heritage – who deplore its “systemic” evils and its legacy of oppression – might gain something from a recognition that such an antagonistic attitude to their own society actually places them firmly within the dominant tradition of American thought. It might moderate their passions a bit to recognize how characteristically American those passions are. At the very least, it might teach them that the matter is a bit more complicated than they think.
In Twain’s masterpiece, at least, there is the improbable bond between Huck and Jim, with its alternating hilarity and tenderness, to meliorate the acerbity of the book’s satirical bent. But with our modern day educationalists, there is nothing but the bitterness. All of their plans for the schools they operate stem from their various hatreds – hatred for “patriarchy,” for “whiteness,” for Western culture itself. Their attitude towards the children in their charge – as opposed to their ideological project - is at best indifference, though in the increasingly common cases where students are being taught to berate themselves for their “privilege,” and internalize a sense of guilt on account of their identity, there is an unmistakable hostility towards the students themselves. All the text-disrupters and the Shakespeare-scorners have to offer our children is their own resentment.
What a contrast with the motivating energies of a classical school! The prevailing ethos of classical education emerges from a gratitude towards the great works of the spirit that have been transmitted to us, a gratitude for all they have bestowed on us, and a desire to share the marvels of that inheritance with young people. I have never come across a classical educator who did not exude an affection for the material they teach, and a passionate commitment to engendering that affection in their students. In that invitation to an experience of wisdom and beauty – an invitation extended to all – classical educators demonstrate their concern for their students’ development. It is a concern that is similarly demonstrated through all the many and mundane tasks that classical educators routinely undertake to get their programs off the ground – painting classrooms, canvassing for funds, completing mountains upon mountains of paperwork.
That is why, in our classrooms, we read Shakespeare constantly, and without compunction - because we understand, as those much wiser generations who came before us understood, that from his pages students stand to acquire an insight into the fundamental lineaments of their own souls. Through such insights they gain the sort of self-knowledge that serves as the sine qua non of any real moral and intellectual development. We know that is an invaluable gift to students, and we know it cannot be found elsewhere in the way it can be found there. We know that when students encounter Cordelia’s devotion to her father, Viola’s devotion to her brother, or Portia’s devotion to her husband, they are awakened to the capacities for devotion latent in their own personalities, and that capacity for love – as another of our heroes, Socrates, once assured us – “will help (their) mortal nature more than all the world.”
Now that I think about it, it strikes me how many of the texts I have taught in the past year center on the nature of love – Augustine’s Confessions, with its frustrated reminiscence over the author’s restless and disordered affections; Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, with its lovely though not entirely mature depiction of fin’amor, that love whose soul is “gentleness;” and Dante’s Commedia, with its stupendous vision of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” The content of our curriculum reflects the devotion of those who shaped it.
So I have no real concerns that the present fanaticism for cultural destruction, as ominous as it appears now, will win out in the end. The texts I teach survived past ages of darkness; they will survive this one as well. The works of resentment do not last for long, and parents will not long subject their children willingly to an educational program designed in a spirit of resentment, intended only to inculcate in their children that same spirit of resentment. Eventually, they will go searching for something better, and when they do, they will discover classical schools, and discover there the wholly different spirit that animates their work. That is what will draw them in, and that is what will ensure the classical model prevails over the next two millennia, just as it did the previous two, because at its core is the “love that endures all things.”