The word “harrowing” has a double meaning. It is a kind of farm machinery that breaks open the earth but it is also a word for the kind of event that breaks open a person emotionally. It’s often painful but counseling philosophers also say it means new opportunities, as harrowing makes way for seeds. The more mystical like Remi will say, “Wounds are where the light comes in.” Or some Jungians claim that wounds can speak.
Our times are beyond harrowing, approaching cultural apocalypse. Some commentators reach back centuries to remember past systems. First they talked about 20th century Fascism and then they began to speak of 15th century Feudalism. Vaknin speaks of modern democracies as being related to the invention of the Rule of Law because that principle of order created enough safety and continuity for life to become modern. He asserts that Feudalism is based on emotions and personality of the mighty leader, who is competitive and arbitrary. This is useful but not the whole story.
A competing force is the gathering of people into cities where population density allowed more extreme specialization of what people did. One means of keeping order was through religion, which claimed a building distinctive among the others: a church or a temple. Likewise, they developed rules about behavior and justified that by assuming privilege as priests who studied and therefore had greater wisdom. Maybe supernatural connections. This was much fortified by the invention of writing..Theology loved books.
Over the years the priests were joined in prestige by doctors who could heal and devise medicines. Chemistry, even as alchemy, was a special wisdom. Like religion, medicine had experience with death. The third original profession was law, based on the premise of the Rule of Law, which quickly became complex enough to need interpretation.
These were the three basic professions, learned professions based on institutions. That is, the professions became entwined with “higher learning” whose prestige came from both government and religious sources. Communities of scholars formed around two religious institutions, the cathedral and the monastery, and both taught the people. The Ivory Tower with prestigious learned people came from the cathedral while the monks taught the same people for whom they baked bread, distilled Benedictine, and raised bees.
All this is far from the heedless mindless frat boy reputation of today’s universities who seem to value only sex and beer. At least that’s what the media sees and portrays. At one time university education was believed to be the main way for people to rise through the classes of society to a position of respect and security. Now predatory capitalism has disrupted that by “buying” universities and predicating even beginning employment on certificates of graduation, which also turned out to be buyable.
The Pandemic has “harrowed” all that by making the basis of shared learning in a concentrated environment impossible — as well as a social life featuring parties and physical interaction — scattering serious scholars onto electronic media and into books. Their achievements need to be “endorsed” somehow in order to be monetized — as is the case of the autodidacts who have always educated themselves and simply proven themselves by action and cooperation in the world.
The modern media hasn’t quite grasped this, so doesn’t speak to it. The tech world has and recently responded by offering time-limited single-bore online classes that result in a certificate of accomplishment purported to make employment almost inevitable. Sometimes this system works, but I remember my long-ago Famous Writers course. I signed up with a check, sent in my first efforts, and then — stung by scathing criticism and mockery that turned out to be part of the scheme — just failed to proceed, which meant they didn’t have to hire more teachers. The secret motive was their own profit.
Ironically the first writing course I took at Northwestern University was also an experience in mockery but this time I ignored all that. I had a defender, Bergen Evans, a character often forgotten now. One of the uses of a university setting is that a hierarchy can be protective.
Another advantage is the fabulous libraries, a culture to themselves that defy the party life. Usually they allow access to non-students. Books can be mailed, manuscripts can be online, lectures are streamed in a dozen places and the only pressing need is how to find one’s way through the abundance.
I went to the bookstore, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, and studied their shelving system before choosing a book and reading bits. One can go online to virtual bookstores and do something similar. Some experts call it “discovery”. I think of spelunking, the exploration of labyrinthine caves.
Real-time big-hall lectures can be valuable. One of the most memorable moments of my life was in a physics survey introductory lecture to which the professor brought the sound of the newly launched Sputnik satellite. It was only beeping, but he drew mental pictures for us of the future of satellites. A person simply hearing that beeping on the radio might have not had access to those vast ideas, which mostly came true.
So much education comes from simply being present. To sit among friends debating the things they know is an undocumented but vital access to education and a discovery of what to look for in other places. Connections become pipelines. University is as much about the other students as about the professors.
Dropping the names of universities, like dropping the names of famous people (as does media), is a way of claiming status, but those who are truly into the world of scholarship know that going to a big name institution is not as important as knowing which departments are outstanding, which professors are leading thought, and what policies are allowing innovations.
My big deal is to have gone to the University of Chicago which people have heard of. But most have not heard of the Divinity School within it that is focused on comparative and historical religion rather than evangelism for one particular school of thought. They wouldn’t know what comparative religion entailed or even realize that it’s not Bible School.
It’s important to me that I earned a Master’s Degree in an arduous program though it was meant to be a way of sorting out those capable of undertaking the work for a Ph.D. in the program. I didn’t have the chops for that but my goal was the “learned ministry,” which is a damaged concept now, losing even more of the original idea of the profession.
Potent forces resent requirements, seeing them as irrelevant, like having to learn a foreign language, a kind of xenophobia. The idea that an individual should rely on his own inspiration and convictions underlies a whole religious branch that once believed that all an inspired preacher only needed was a horse and a Bible in the saddlebag. Moral leveling that considers each soul equal is the source of democracy.
Recently we’ve discovered what happens when we elect to our highest office a man who bought his education and faked his success and what he can do to the Rule of Law simply by ignoring it. He embodies the force against the status and exceptionalism of universities.
If the university is a phenomenon of concentrated populations that is brought to life by the cathedral, the emblem of exception and entitlement in ultimate transcendence, a meritocracy, now is probably not the time to boast about it. But for the monastery, where a community lives through individual humility and service, now is the time to go back to the original concept, this time with computer access to the world. Among their other occupations, monasteries sheltered those who were healing.
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