Op-Ed
Native in a Strange Land
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Between the Lines
May 3, 2007 - 12:00amCornell prides itself on offering a liberal arts education, even to scruffy computer systems types such as myself. By this, Cornell means that students should attain a certain broadness of perspective. Broad should not necessarily mean “progressive”; rather, it should mean that students graduate understanding the evidence for their beliefs, and with an appreciation for conflicting evidence and views. But to attain such a perspective, it is necessary to see opposing arguments. These arguments, to be seen properly, should be presented as strongly as possible, and this means, presented by people who actually believe them.
I can vouch from personal experience for the value of such an education. I grew up “between the lines” of America’s perpetual culture war. My parents, notoriously, are some of Ithaca’s few Republicans. My friends in high school and college were mostly earnest progressives. The Ithaca city schools were largely left-wing: most of the teachers consciously so, the students mostly unconscious of their biases and inclinations. As one of the only outspoken conservative students, I often found myself at odds with my classmates, leading to some heated, but stimulating, classroom discussions.
This was an invaluable experience for me. As a result of it, I very gradually learned the skill of holding a civil conversation with people I profoundly disagreed with. It is of course a difficult task, and I do not claim to have mastered it. However, talking to people you disagree with is frequently much more stimulating than talking to those you don’t. Talking to people you disagree with, who are thoughtful and have taken the time to frame coherent arguments, is better still.
The Cornell humanities and social science faculty, alas, are not generally well equipped for such discussion. Politically, they generally lie in a range from the mainstream left to the wacky left. One marker of the academy’s intellectual shoddiness is that it is the only place left in the world where Marxism is still respectable; it has been abandoned by even such former supporters as the Chinese Communist Party. Since most Arts College students occupy a similar political range to their teachers, students are generally confronted only with sharper or softer versions of what they already believe, and not with truly contradictory perspectives. Hiring a more ideologically diverse faculty should be a priority for Cornell, if the university is to truly educate its students.
In the meantime, students seeking to be challenged by other views do have one avenue open to them: Cornell’s excellent libraries. Learning to read carefully is one of the things I’m most glad to have done at Cornell. My senior year, I took a pair of ancient and medieval philosophy courses with Terry Irwin and Charles Brittain. They were among the most stimulating courses I took at Cornell. I had grown up conditioned by science classes, to assume that human understanding of the world creeps inevitably forward. In philosophy, however, progress is far less clear. Experiencing Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas was a disorienting experience. They are generally much clearer writers, and more perceptive thinkers, than the modern scholars I had encountered first. Something I was especially surprised by is that many of the arguments that they deftly refute are still circulating in the world today. Naive moral relativism, for instance, is a very old idea, and Plato and Aristotle raise powerful counter-arguments to it. These arguments are often simply ignored by moral relativists today, since they cannot be readily blunted. Not only can the ancients debate with the moderns, but they often win.
Books can thus supply a crucial sort of intellectual diversity that no university faculty possesses. All university faculty today are inevitably adults who grew up in the 20th century. One actually can experience “temporal intellectual diversity,” however, by reading books whose authors came from a different era. Such books, however, can be hard to read properly. You won’t learn anything from old books if you read them out of antiquarian interest, to learn about the authors and their time and place. The best way to learn from a good book is to try to learn what the author is trying to tell you. It’s much more rewarding to learn from books, rather than about books. You may, at the end, disagree with the author, but it makes no sense to disagree before you’ve read it carefully and receptively.
In addition, many skilled writers of the past are deliberately obscure. Often, crucial points are implied, or suggested “between the lines,” rather than flatly asserted. It took a long time, and some prodding from several of my professors at Cornell, for me to start noticing some of the subtleties in the works of habitually subtle writers such as Plato. On the Cornell faculty, Terry Irwin (alas departed to Oxford) and Fred Ahl particularly emphasized this sort of care in approaching a text. This prodding was reinforced by my reading the works of Leo Strauss, a strong proponent of careful reading. As a result, studying philosophy encouraged me to pay attention to details and to implications: to follow a speaker’s train of thought past where the speaker grows quiet and to read between the lines.
My name is the only one listed on my columns, but there are a number of other people who contributed to them. I want to thank my friends for being generous with their time and their comments; particularly Kate and Lauren, who between them vetted nearly every word I wrote. Without them, my columns would have been much less well organized, and would have given readers an acute case of semicolon poisoning. Last, I want to thank my parents for their constant support, advice and encouragement.
Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu. Between the Lines appeared Thursdays.