Teaching a certain type of student wrong

 I keep seeing images in my head of some of the young men I have taught over the years—the ones with a certain. smug, insecurity on their face. They’re proud of their cleverness and also insecure about it. And I always senses that insecurity and figured that’d root out its source—which is the fact that cleverness isn’t how we build a happy life.

To be clear, I love being clever. I love that I am clever. I enjoy clever television shows and plays and jokes. Cleverness is delightful. But cleverness is not a way to organize society, and these young men (in my recollection they were all men and, specific to this particular smugness, white) seemed to want it to be so. 

I always figured that they would use their cleverness to learn, that they would dig themselves out of the holes that they built for themselves, have children and discover empathy, learn that their conclusions don’t matter if they don’t make people’s lives better, learn that love is the feeling that makes life worth living and not winning arguments. I figure they would realize this because it was inside of them all along and because I believe that cleverness is good because it involves thinking.

I think I was wrong to encourage them to think in this heartless and insecure manner.  I should have figured out a way to add humanity into their criteria of judgement.

(Recently a man I was debating politics with said that republicans are more rationale that democrats. He didn’t. mean it as a insult—well not one he thought I would be insulted by—he meant that republicans choose not to prioritize feelings so that they can see clearly while democrats must be prioritizing feelings (that was the nicest way he could say it; recognizing divergent values). But I think you can’t think clearly if you don’t include feelings and real effects on people.

Another time I was reading an autobiography of a philosopher who ripped into the anlaytic philosophy that used equations and liginuistics to win arguments. His point was devastating and inarguable once he made it—which is that philosophy is only relevant to the extent that it solves the inherent problems of life. Life is a struggle, at times a philosophical one, and philosophy as a discipline exists in order to make life more liveable: how should I life? Why do I live? What is purpose? What is meaning? To use linguistics to reframe the question and then say that is anything but cleverness is pathetic (and not in a good feeling way). No one is helped by not having their question answered or by reframing the question as some kind of mathmatical proposition. But analytic philosophy is a good place to warehouse super-clever, unempathetic young men who enjoy winning.

Was there a way we, as college professors, should. have reframed their idea of winning? Was that possible? Or is it simply that some people—computer people, comic book fans, investment bankers—are always going to be interested in winning over living? And we simply need to make sure that they’re not given the responsibility for designing society? Since I don’t think that failsafe can be implemented, I suspect you need to teach people how to hace a more wideranging and (ironically) pragmatic view of argument and social debate.

One story that I’ve remembered forever is a conservative friend saying that he’d rather walk over homeless people all the way to the “dock” than lose one iota of individual liberty. At. first, I remember thinking, “Well, I suppose you are being logically consistent, but I’d also like to simply point out that you’re also being an asshole. Forget the implied relationship between homelessness and individual liberty—why do you got to walk over them? You can’t stop and give them a sandwich?” But later I thought, “How lovely it must be to KNOW that you will be the walking and not the homeless. If he had phrased it as “I’d rather be walked over by an endless line of more well-of people than lose one iota of liberty” he may have come closer to winning his argument. But he didn’t. He didn’t even think it.

Another story I remember is a young conservative who participated in a play I made about the Minnesota state Capitol. Never mind that he explained to me that both diverse casts and art itself was considered liberal by his friends—he was a nice guy; he was simply explaining not arguing here—what I take issue with was something else. He considered himself an expert on technical legislative maneuvers—whatever worked to get the outcomes necessary. All’s fair in love and war-kind of mentality. Because “Everyone will be happy when we win.” I didn’t say anything because it wasn’t my place to say anything, and he was a fully formed human at that point anyway. However, this nice guys inability to see that he was as responsible, as a legislative aide, for maintaining the spirit of the law as well as the letter of it, was deeply disconcerting.

I see his face now. I see him, nice guy, signing on to that stupid supreme court case about throwing out the votes of people in four fellow states because—hey if it works, whatever. I can see him believing that a technical maneuver, a linguistic calisthenic, an attempt to do something, in no way is representative of who he is as a moral human.

What should I have said to convince him that isn’t true? You are defined as a moral being by how moral the outcomes of your actions would be, and if you care not at all about the effect of your actions on humans and their struggle to live because you’re focused on winning by any means necessary then you aren’t a moral being and the outcomes of your actions aren’t moral. They are immoral.

More and more, I return to the idea that all of our lives—laws, actions, attitudes—need to be pegged to the question fo whether they uphold, enrich, and further the dignity of all living creatures.