Education in America, 3. G. C. Roche, III

cation as we defined it earlier, based upon the individual's free dom to choose and upon a mean ingful moral framework within which the individual makes his choices, thus becomes doubly im possible of achievement. As science and technology have performed their wonders in ma terial achievements, it has been easy to dismiss moral questions (and those who deal with such questions) as unimportant since they apparently do not contribute to "Progress." Such a view has been so largely accepted in our time that the validity of the whole moral framework has been called into question. We seem to have reached a point in our society 729 730 THE FREEMAN December where science and technology have so advanced our material fortunes that we feel we need look no further for guidance or salvation. Such scientistic values have played a larger and larger role in our modern educational processes. Let me hasten to draw the dis tinction between the scientistic and the scientific outlook. Man's pursuit of an improved under standing of his material world is an important and legitimate scien tific activity, an activity of prime interest to all inquiring minds who have lived on this earth. Sci en tism, the assumption that modern man may now find all his values in science, to the exclusion of any other guideline, is a totally differ ent concept, a concept peculiar to our materialistic times. One of the men perceiving this tendency was the late Mahatma Gandhi: Modern education tends to turn our eyes away from the Spirit. The possibilities of the spirit-force there fore do not appeal to us and our eyes become riveted on the evanes cent, transistory and material force.

The modern barbarian produced by such scientistic educational at titudes remains blind to a lesson learned long ago and transmitted from one generation to the next in all civilized communities: The world in which man finds himself can be understood only if he turns at least in part to abstractions that go beyond the merely material. The man who perceives the pres ence of only the mat.erial soon finds himself indistinguishable from the stones around him. The Authoritarian Type, Determined to Manipulate Society As our technological civiliza tion advances further and further in its study of things as a substi tute for the study of men and their ideas, a new sort of per sonality comes to occupy the cen ter stage. This new personality sees the entire universe and all its components, individuals in cluded, as portions of a great ma chine which can be manipulated according to preconceived notions.

Men who thus begin to fancy themselves qualified to serve as manipulators of others, men who feel bound by no higher authority, become narrow and bigoted. Cardinal Newman described such a man in the middle of the last century: The various busy world, spread out before our eyes, is physical, but it is more than physical; and, in making its actual system identical with his scientific analysis, such a Professor as I have imagined was betraying a want of a philosophical depth, and an ignorance of what a University Teacher ought to be. He was no longer a teacher of liberal 1968 SCIENTISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF STANDARDS 731 knowledge, but a narrow-minded bigot. Such bigots are poor judges of what constitutes a decent educa tional framework. They are likely to assume that man is no more than the final result of the forces acting upon him. This leaves no room for personality, individual ity, or free will. Once such a view of the individual is adopted, the idea that men can be manipulated for social goals never lags far behind.

Thus, we come to accept a start lingly new concept of education. Perhaps it is still premature to predict that we will, within the next generation, be able to produce, through drugs or manipulation of the environment, very significant changes in memory and learning capacity of children and even adults. Nonetheless, the current research with mice indicates that such things are theoretically possible, and it is therefore not too early to begin to discuss the social and philosophical problems that such possibilities will generate. 1 Both the biochemist and the teach er of the future will combine their skills and insights for the educa tional and intellectual development of the child. Tommy needs a bit more of an immediate memory stim1 Peter Schrag, "Education in Amer ica," Saturday Review, Jan. 20, 1968, p. 45. ulator; Jack could do with a chemi cal attention-span stretcher; Rachel needs an anticholinestrase to slow down her mental processes; Joan, some puromycin - she remembers too many details, and gets lost.

To be. sure, all our data thus far comes from the brains of goldfish and rodents. But is anyone so cer tain that the chemistry of the brain of a rat (which, after all, is a fairly complex mammal) is so different from that of the brain of a human being that he dare neglect this chal lenge - or even gamble - when the stakes are so high?2 Make Others in Their Image It seems that man is not to be exempt from the new manipula tors. In that same issue of Satur day Revie'w, Joseph Wood Krutch reported a speech by a professor of biophysics: Robert Sinsheiner, professor of biophysics at Cal Tech, ... declared before his institution's 75th anni versary conference that the scientist has now in effect become both Nature with a capital N and God with a capital G. Until today, he stated, prophecy has been a very chancy business, but now that science has become "the prime mover of change," it is not unreasonable to hope that the race of prophets employing its methods may have become reliable.

2 David Krech, "The Chemistry of Learning," Saturday Review, Jan. 20, 1968, p. 68.

732 THE FREEMAN December Science has now proved beyond ques tion that there is no qualitative difference between the animate and the inanimate, and though we don't yet know exactly how the inanimate becomes conscious, there is every reason to believe that we will soon be rid of that bothersome mystery also. "It has become increasingly clear," Professor Sinsheiner said, "that all the properties of life can be understood to be simply.inherent in the material properties of the complex molecule which comprises the cell." Already we make proteins; soon we will make viruses, and then l~ving cells - which will be, as he calls it, "the second Genesis." What better examples could be given of the scientistic hubris which today dominates so much of our thinking 1 We are being confronted with Faust's bargain give up our souls and gain power in return. Traditionally, education has not been concerned so exclusively with the mere manipulation of the in dividual. The teacher found him self within a framework of values, within a situation faced in com mon by all men. To teach, there fore, did not mean to manipulate the young into some "socially ac ceptable" pattern. Instead, teach ing meant sharing with the stu dent the mystery of being human.

Today's scientistic approach prom ises to do away with the human condition entirely, putting its own goals and means in place of the individual human being and his feelings, aspirations, and qualifi cations. C. S. Lewis has predicted that such a change in our educa tional and social philosophy is a move toward "the abolition of man." The Transcendent Order The story is told that one of our leading physicists concerned with nuclear projects spied a turtle one day while taking a walk with a friend. Thinking he might take it home to his family, he picked it up and carried it with him for a few steps. Suddenly, he stopped, retraced his steps, and, as nearly as possible, replaced the turtle where he had first discovered it. "Why did you do that 1" his friend asked. The reply: "It just struck me that perhaps, for one man, I have tampered enough with the uni verse." It is a sobering thought. There are signs that our power over na ture may become uncontrollable.

The size, complexity, and uncer tainty of the choices available to us might become so great that no one is qualified to make those choices. Could it be that each time we apparently subdue a part of the natural order, we merely cause a dislocation of natural processes 1968 SCIENTISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF STANDARDS 733 which will return to haunt us in a new form? Could it he that our polluted atmosphere and our pol luted water are symbols of an ecological equation in which na ture herself will have the last laugh? Could it be that man, in his denial of a higher power than science, threatens to destroy him self? Is it possible that the end result of scientism will be the destruction of all values, including the very human beings who hold those val ues? Man's search for meaning in his life has always centered on discovery of a higher truth, some thing even more certain· than his existence as an individual. It is the denial of any possible higher reality that finally leads scientism to deny the individual as well.

Some modern men have perceived this necessary' connection between the identity of the individual and the existence of a higher reality. One such flash of insight was granted to the playwright Eugene O'Neill: Most modern plays are concerned with the relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at all. I am interested only in the relation between man and God. Any one trying to do big work nowadays must have this big subject behind all the little subjects, or he is simply scribbling around on the surface of things. We have been "scribbling around on the surface of things" and wondering what was happening to our civilization. We have been try to get along without God and at tempting to put society, scientism, and political manipulation in his place. We may yet discover that despite television, air condition ing, and all the other trappings of modern material civilization, man cannot survive such self-idolatry.

In our attempt, we are, in Georg.e Schuyler's phrase, "like a colony of ants riding on the end of a log floating down the Mississippi, while discussing destiny." If we have no values to trans mit to our young, we need not be surprised that we live in an in... creasingly valueless age. The Academy and the Collapse of Values Nowhere is the collapse of val... ues which plagues our educational community and our society more apparent than in the academy. That we live in an age of tremen dous activity may be but a sign of decay. As Ortega y Gasset has commented, "In the world to day a great thing is dying; it is truth. Without a certain margin of tranquillity, truth succumbs." Perhaps the reason for all the "sound and fury, signifying noth ing" is that somehow we have lost our common sense and sub ...

734 THE FREEMAN December stituted a total intellectual an archy in its place. Man has never been more problematic to himself than in modern times. We no longer seem to know what we are; and the growing body of scientific thought engaged in the study of man seems to do far more to con fuse than to clarify the problem for us. Never have we possessed more facts, but never have we suffered such a poverty of insight into the hu:rnan condition. Thus, we seem to run faster and faster in pursuit of a progressively more illusive truth. Indeed, many people have given up the search entirely, and today regard truth and the meaning of life as "metaphysical" concepts, insisting that really "sig nificant" scientific investigation must center on the mere gathering of information. And what information we have been gathering! The isolation pro duced by the jargon of the various disciplines, each busy gathering facts quite apart from any higher standard of truth, has often ren dered the work of these specialists unintelligible to one another or to the society of which they are a part. Indeed, any unified view of culture is totally unattainable for the modern scientistic mentality.

Unity implies standards; stand ards imply a scale of values which can be universally applied. When scientism promises to vrovide us with constantly new "facts," sup posedly implying a constantly changing world view, such an em pirical paradise can hardly accom modate itself to immutable values. Finally, the fact chasers must reject the concept of value alto gether. Those who would abandon all the old standards of good, those who would condition the human race to accept their new system, are faced with a terrible dilemma. If the conditioners have no fixed standards of their own, what standards can they inculcate in the human raw material they con trol? The blind are leading the blind. If we can indeed "see through" first principles, if we can "see through" everything and anything, then everything and anything must be transparent. C. S. Lewis has reminded us that a wholly transparent world is an invisible world, and to "see through" all things is finally the same as not to see at all.

A patron saint of the intellec tual climate of twentieth century America was J. Allen Smith (orig. inator of the "debunking" view of the Founding Fathers and the United States Constitution, later made famous by Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution). Smith, in a mo ment of reflection, apparently had 1968 SCIENTISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF STANDARDS 735 misgivings about the course of events: "The trouble with us re formers is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all, and now neither we nor anyone else have anything left." Nothing left! Strong words, coming from a prophet of the mod ern academy. If Smith was right, if standards are all smashed, then to what can we turn in educating our young people? What Is the Truth? This failure of standards within the modern academy can be easily demonstrated. One of the fore most students of St. Thomas Aquinas, Professor Josef Pieper, gives graphic illustration: The medieval philosophers, in studying Aristotle and Plato, wished to know all those things and only those things which were true. Where the truths of these philosophers were not complete, they asked them selves how to complete them.

There is an enormous difference between this attitude and that usu ally held nowadays and which we consider the sole possible and re sponsible attitude toward "sources." For the student especially, that dif ference is of vital importance. Any one who asks Thomas his opinion receives a reply which makes per fectly clear what he, Thomas, con siders to be the truth - even when his reply is couched in the form of a quotation from Aristotle. But if we are asked our opinion, we reply with historically documented quota tions which may reveal a good many things - for example, how widely read we are - but fail to reveal one thing alone; what we ourselves hold to be the truth. 3 Such a tendency is painfully ap parent in modern philosophy. One of the latest "isms" to catch the fancy of modern philosophers is structuralism. Dr. Michel Fou cault, for example, insists that each thinker can be no more than the point of condensation and ar ticulation of the total thought structure, within which he finds his place. The philosopher, then, can possess no original insight into the nature of things. Instead, he reclassifies thoughts and words according to the thought processes within his civilization. It is this total social process which gives man his structure. For the struc turalist, man without this social structure would be "a mere figure' in the sand whose forms are washed away by the sea."

Such totally valueless thought processes are increasingly typical of the age in which we live. In deed, we might ask the structur alists one question. If a philoso pher's insight is no more than a series of essentially meaningless 3 Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, p. 52.

736 THE FREEMAN December shufflings and reshufflings of previous words and values, why should the thinking of the struc turalist himself present any ex ception to the rule? But to deal in these terms is to play their game, admitting that all is ulti mately pointless and meaningless and without direction.· Our very conversation with one another comes to mean less and less until it finally means nothing. Ortega. quotes a seventeenth century sati rist who put his finger squarely on the final results of such think ing: The Creator made· everything out of nothing, This one [man] nothing out of everything, and in conclusion, The one made the world and the other has destroyed it. An Age Without Roots How, then, shall we characterize our age? Our age is characterised by the strange presumption .. that it is su perior to all past time; more than that, by its leaving out of consider ation all that is past, by recognising no classical or normative epochs, by looking on itself as a new life su perior to all previous forms and irreducible to them. I doubt if our age can be understood without keep ing firm hold on this observation, for that is precisely its specialprob Iem. If it felt that it was decadent, it would look on other ages as superior to itself, which would be equivalent to esteeming and admir ing them and venerating the princi ples by which they were inspired.

Our age would then have clear and firmly held ideals, even if incapable of realising the,m. But the truth is exactly the contrary; we live at a time when man believes himself fab ulously capable of creation, but he does not know· what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of him self. He feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at its disposal, more knowledge, more tech nique than ever, it turns out that the world to-day goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts. 4 Thus, the world drifts, without a moral code. It is not that we have exchanged an antiquated pre vious code for a bright new mode of behavior. Instead, modern man aspires to live without any moral code. Much of the talk about the "new morality" is better charac terized as a departure from any moral standard whatsoever. More precisely, it might be defined as the desire to call the old im morality the new morality. We are not contrasting a rising new civilization with the de clining old one, a rising new stan dard replacing a dying code. In Ortega's words: "If you are un willing to submit to any norm, 4 Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, (Norton, 1957), p. 44, 1968 SCIENTISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF STANDARDS 737 you have ... to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which pre serves the empty form of the other."5 C. E. M. Joad suggests that the principal characteristics of a so ciety without moral standards are "luxury, scepticism, weariness, and superstition." He adds that another sure sign· of a decadent society is an individual preoccupa tion with self and a totally sub jectivist view of the world and all higher values. Once the individual comes to believe that he may think whatever he likes with equal valid ity, that any value is no better or worse than any other value, then the decadent society must indeed be at hand.

Such a society, of course, will allow no limitation upon individual sexual mores, and will also under cut other traditional patterns of action. This is readily observable in our own society in the decline in genuine individual charity, mercy, pity, honesty, and unself ishness. We live in an age which has not so much rejected these values as it has simply refused to bother to think about the subject at all. We are becoming, in the truest possible sense of the word, an age without standards. 5 Ibid., p. 189. Art and the Modern World While it is true that most critics and many minor scribblers are true sons of our present society, it is also true that Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and the other maj or literary figures of our time have consistently devoted their art to a bitter rejection of the modern spirit. It seems that meaningful literary production can only arise in those-who possess some value system, who reject the flaccid and valueless spirit of the age. Never have we had more novelists and poets ... never have there been fewer great novels and great poems.

Meanwhile, what sort of art has been produced? Work filled largely with hate, hate directed not merely at individuals but at an entire universe which must be hated simply because it is mean ingless. Coupled with this hatred of all men and all things, so-called "ar tistic freedom" has released a flood of sexuality, violence, and perver sion without a peer in man's re corded history. J oseph Wood Krutch has commented on a list of one hundred books representing this modern tendency that while the list "does include certain works which are neither beatnik, sadis tic, existential, nor sexually per verse, at least half - and perhaps 738 THE FREEMAN December two-thirds - of them might, I think, be classified as guideposts to perdition." What, it might be asked, has all this to do with education? Even granted that scientism had stripped us of all values and that this is reflected in our philosophy and our art, what possible connec tion does this have with what our children are learning in school?

Unfortunately, the connection is painfully direct. Before we can begin to discuss the improvement of individuals and of the society which they compose, we must first of all grasp the fact that there is a difference between the good and the bad. If the object of education is the improvement of men, then any sys tem of education that is without' values is a contradiction in terms. A system that seeks bad values is bad. A system that denies the ex istence of values denies the possibil ity of education. Relativism, scien tism, skepticism, and anti-intellectu alism, the four horsemen of the philosophical apocalypse, have pro duced that chaos in education which will end in the disintegration of the West. 6 Our national prosperity, the 6 Robert M. Hutchins, The Conflict in Education in a Democratic Society, pp. 71-72. welfare of our institutions, and the welfare of all individuals de pend directly upon the values which we inculcate in our educa tional system. If we deny to our children the philosophical frame work of values by which they may order their conduct, we are deny ing them a true education and guaranteeing the decline of our civilization. There are other di mensions to our problem, but this matter of the rejection of value is of prime importance in fully appreciating the sad estate unto which we have fallen.

One hardheaded Yankee who perceived the proper place of moral values and the close connection be tween self-restraint and freedom was Ralph Waldo Emerson: All our political disasters grow as logically out of our attempts in the past to do without justice, as the sinking of some part of your house comes of defect in the foundation. One thing is plain; a certain per sonal virtue is essential to freedom; and it begins to be doubtful whether our corruption in this country has not gone a little over the mark of safety, so that when canvassed we shall be found to be made up of a majority of reckless self-seekers. The divine knowledge has ebbed out of us and we do not know 'enough to be free. ~ The next article of this series will discuss "The Decline of Intellect"