The Voracious Nought

I just got back from
giving a lecture at a small liberal-arts college. The tenured professors were
complaining. (That, after all, is allegedly what tenure gives professors the
unlimited right to do). Their main complaint: Students are no longer doing the
reading for “core texts” or “real books” courses.

My response: That’s not
so true at Berry College. My students have always been pretty inconsistent when
it comes to doing the reading for a particular class. They don’t always read
Marx or whomever for the class when I actually talk (and want them to talk) about
him. And one of the skills of the professor is to sort of dance around that “issue”
in getting them as up to speed on Marx as best I can. On this front, things
really haven’t gotten better or worse during my thirty-five years at Berry. And
as far as I can remember, things were about the same when I was in college.

The best way to get
students to do the reading is to have them write text-based papers. On this
front, it might even be the case that things are getting slightly better. I
just graded the second (of three) papers for my class in modern political
philosophy. Maybe more than ever, the students displayed the “competency” about
being able to argue intelligently based on their own reading of Hobbes, Locke,
and Rousseau, and of being able to integrate particular arguments from the text
in their own “comparative narratives.” More impressively still, most of the
papers were animated by the strong possibility that these great thinkers really
know what they’re talking about and that they have really learned much about
who they are and our political life from reading them.

Most impressively, there
was plenty of evidence in particular cases that the student actually enjoyed
writing the paper and displaying his or her wisdom for my benefit. Clever turns
of phrases and witty asides weren’t uncommon. Neither were pointed shots
directed toward making clear his or her disagreement with me.

It’s not true in most
cases that students—out of an exaggerated intellectual humility—surrendered
their critical spirit when reading great thinkers. In a case or two, the
student dissented from Locke or Rousseau for not sharing today’s views
concerning class and gender and the environment. More common—and pretty
reasonable, was the objection that Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s understanding of the
natural condition of members of our species doesn’t square with what studies
show concerning evolutionary psychology. It’s just not true, the argument goes,
that it makes any sense to say that we’re free and self-centered individuals by
nature. But a couple of students defended Locke’s “capitalist” view of property
from Rousseau’s objection that what amounts to the historical invention of
property is the source of most of our inequality and misery. And they did so
despite my effort in class to get them moved by the moral force of Rousseau’s
objection.

Most common (although
still a minority view) was basically a Christian objection to the dogmatic atheism
of these three thinkers. Hobbes, for example, says that our miserable natural
condition isn’t our fault. That’s just the way we are by nature. A more
plausible explanation, however, might be the irreducible reality of sin. The
Christian explanation of who we are as free persons might make more sense that
Rousseau’s account of human freedom as an inexplicable cosmic accident. And
finally, it’s the tendency of modern and liberal thinkers to be weak on
personal love, on those human experiences that can’t be reduced to contract and
consent but which make life worth living. I alluded to such objections in
class, but didn’t make a big deal out of them. But a few of the students did,
in one case with attention to Hobbes’s and Locke’s butchering of particular
Biblical passages.

In my class in
contemporary political thought (which meets once a week for over two hours), I
require weekly papers on the reading. That really does insure that most of the
students do most or all of the reading each week and everyone read some of it—which
has included Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, Havel, Solzhenitsyn, Hannah Arendt, Pierre
Manent, Chantal Delsol, and others. Many and sometimes most of the weekly
papers are by authors who actually wanted to remember that they learned
something crucial, and that experience rarely keeps them from being critical
and even playing the texts off against each other.

One of the students—Ian
Taylor Nugent—cited this from Walker Percy:

The
self of the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the
feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness
by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in
emptying them out.

What’s great about that
quote, of course, is that it’s over-the-top even by Percy standards, and it
obviously samples Nietzsche. It also calls to mind my “teaching method” of
telling students to make their own key phrases in modern texts by thinking of
them as “hipster” names for the latest garage band (VORACIOUS NOUGHT—yes, you
can use it, as long as you give Ian credit for calling it to your attention). Has
the twentieth century’s self-understanding really been basically a “voracious
nought” emptying particular selves of all human content and leaving freedom as
just another word for nothing left to lose? Or, as we read from Solzhenitsyn,
is there a “howl of existentialism” just beneath the surface of all our
happy-talk pragmatism?

It also samples
Heidegger, who was a huge influence on Percy and whom some of the nerds are
reading in another class. So Kristian Canler comments: “Oh yeah let’s all get
our Heidegger on.”

To which Ian responds: “Heidegger
has nothing on Mr. Percy. You can’t beat the Southern Stoics.”

Kristian’s retort: “#Faulkner
#ouch.” I’m not sure I understand that, but I’m not fluent in Twitter
pithiness.

So I try to bring the
discussion home: “You can’t beat a Southern Stoic who becomes a Catholic,
partly by reading Heidegger.” My big point is that my Protestant and skeptical
students, who really don’t take much pride in being Southern, are ready to
really think about (and, of course, contest) that seemingly strange conclusion.
I’m sticking with my thought that the pinnacle of American political thought is
the indigenous American, Southern, Catholic Thomism of Walker Percy and
Flannery O’Connor. (You say O’Connor was innocent of Heidegger? Well, check out
her “Good Country People.”)

But America is good, it seems, in part
because it can find places for Southerners, especially Southern Stoics (think
the novelist Tom Wolfe, Atticus Finch, Admiral Stockdale, Navy SEALS, and the
proud men of Morehouse), Catholics (as, to begin with, the best organized in
countercultural thought and action of our large institutional religions), and
Heideggerians (who are right, after all, about the American propensity for
inauthentically deferring to the “they” of public opinion and scientific
expertise). Neither liberalism nor the liberal arts have quite been swallowed
by the voracious nought, as my students daily remind me.

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia. His previous articles can be found here.

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