The Education of the Vulgar
from Robert Grudin’s manuscript, American Vulgar
Not everyone is called to be a physician, a lawyer, a philosopher, to live in the public eye, nor has everyone outstanding gifts of natural capacity, but all of us are created for the life of social duty, all are responsible for the personal influence that goes forth from us.
—Vittorino da Feltre (1373-1446)

Is America the empire of vulgarity? Many journalists would seem to think so. Within a single week in January, 2005, both the American Vice President and the President himself were hauled into the journalistic world court for alleged acts of grossness. Dick Cheney attended the sober Auschwitz Memorial ceremonies in “The kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower,” while George Bush’s demeanor at his inauguration a few days earlier inspired a tirade entitled “The Emperor of Vulgarity” which characterized him and his administration as a “strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers, and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight-of-hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.” —Mike Carlton in the Sydney Morning Herald, January 22, 2005.

Granted, not all journalists take such a dim view of Bush & Co. But just about all have at one point or another held his Presidential table manners under scrutiny. The cowboy boots, ideal equipment for the Executive Swagger. The bungled language. The moments of apparent disorientation. And more seriously, the self-righteousness. The phobia for dialogue. The religious idolatry. No, George W. Bush may not be wrong about everything, and those who write him off as a mere fool are making a big mistake. But his altitudes and behavior firmly qualify him to be First Citizen of American Vulgar.

Why should the world’s leading nation have reelected a man of such debilitating limitations? First off, we must acknowledge the fact of life that Presidents who engage in global conflict have always been reelected unless, like LBJ, they chose to step down. But to stop with this explanation is to ignore a huge cultural phenomenon: millions of Americans support George Bush because they think like George Bush. They are bored by information and ignore learning. They seek macho leadership and easy answers to issues. They believe that they have been saved by the Lamb of God.

How did this state of affairs arise? I would like to suggest two factors that are especially compelling because they seem to be related to each other: the rise of the religious Right and the voluntary self-destruction, by the intellectual Left, of American education in the humanities. These two factors and their culturally-erosive interaction with each other are illustrated spectacularly by a legal issue that arose in Alabama and soon gained national recognition.

The top of Moore's washing machine-sized monument is engraved with the Ten Commandments as excerpted from the Book of Exodus in the King James Bible.... The front of the monument references the Declaration of Independence with the statement,"Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."

Moore again referred to the Declaration in justifying his actions:

Rights come from God, not from government. If government can give you rights, government can take them away from you. If God gives you rights, no man and no government can take them away from you. That was the premise of the organic law of this country, which is the Declaration of Independence.

So began a battle royal between pro-Mooreites and anti-Mooreites over an engraved block of stone.(1)

What is embarrassing about this debate is that it is based on a serious misunderstanding of the history of ideas. The “Nature’s God” of the Declaration was not a Christian god, nor could it have been taken as such by a literate citizen in 1776. Instead it is a reference to the much vaguer Prime Mover as envisaged by Jefferson, Franklin, Paine and other free-thinkers. Jefferson believed neither in the divinity of Christ nor in the authority of the Bible. By using the idiom “Nature’s God” he and his co-signers were, in fact, diplomatically distancing themselves from the Christian tradition. Evidence of this distancing abounds. It was Franklin himself who brought Freemasonry, with its indifference to religion and its reverence for reason and nature, to America in 1735.(2) Washington, Adams and many other Founders were Freemasons, and the U. S. Dollar bill is imbued with Masonic imagery. The Washington Monument is itself a Masonic symbol, as is Jefferson’s gravestone at Monticello. Ethan Allen co-authored a book called Reason: The Only Oracle of Man (1784) and, at his marriage to Fanny Buchanan, when the Judge asked him if he promised “to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God.” Allen refused to answer until the Judge agreed that the God referred to was the God of Nature and the laws those “written in the great book of Nature.” (Italics mine)(3)

Thomas Paine wrote a book in a similar vein, entitled The Age of Reason (in two parts: 1794, 1796), in which he wrote:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.(4)

When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this — for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so — it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.(5)

Thomas Jefferson considered himself an “Epicurean” (I. E., free-thinking non-Christian). He admired Jesus as a moralist but used rough language to describe the writing of his original “biographers” (Matthew, Mark and Luke):

“As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. ... But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man; outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up.”
-Letter to William Short, October 31, 1819

Jefferson actually edited out the religious parts out of the Bible, leaving only those passages that he deemed conformable to reason.(6) Among others of the Founding Fathers who were sharply critical of Christianity may be numbered James Madison and John Adams, and the list of avowed non-Christians includes Abraham Lincoln.(7)

What makes the Moore case significant is that there would have been no Moore case at all if America and its press, almost without exception,(8) knew anything about American history. Nothing illustrates our educational poverty, or justifies Gore Vidal’s phrase “The United States of Amnesia,” so aptly as Justice Moore and his Ten Commandments.(9) Ignorance of this magnitude can lead to dangerous misunderstandings of law and misuses of power. Ignorance of this magnitude, moreover, can only spring from an epidemic failure of national education. From the very inception of our democratic system, education was seen as its indispensable underpinning. As Thomas Jefferson himself put it,

I do most anxiously wish to see the highest degrees of education given to the higher degrees of genius, and to all degrees of it, so much as may enable them to read & understand what is going on in the world, and to keep their part of it going on right: for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant & distrustful superintendence.(10)

Jefferson repeatedly returned to the idea that liberty is viable only if it is protected by an educated electorate, and he embodied this view in action by helping found and design the University of Virginia. Jefferson realized, as few realize today, that our schools and colleges are not just training camps for the Marketplace. They are the staging grounds for Liberty.

It is especially urgent, at this stage in history, to remember the foundational and Constitutional bases of education. Only an education in liberty can equip Americans to respond to the massive and evolving challenges posed by global leadership, national development and a vulnerable environment. But most teachers and administrators at the secondary and higher levels seem to have forgotten that they are supposed to be educating for liberty. In consequence of this, an overwhelming majority of our B.A.’s and B.S.’s are sallying forth into the world as political ingenues. As citizens, they are cluefully challenged.

This lack of training is vulgarity at its worst. There is no excess so gross, no abuse so unjust, as popular ignorance of the practice of citizenship. Other ills we can reform or alleviate, but not without a reasoned awareness of our own rights and responsibilities. Citizenship in a free society demands that we should be able to tell truth from lie, able to access and comprehend key information, able to evaluate new initiatives in terms of history, able to read critically and express ourselves coherently. Our education, or lack of education, in these matters ultimately informs our marketplace and selects our leaders. Yet it is precisely this form of education that current curricula ignore.

Higher education has come to this pass through an unfortunate combination of factors. Most colleges cannot afford to staff writing courses. Professors, who must publish in specialized fields, have grown more unwilling to teach the sort of generalized lower-division courses that make up a core curriculum. Current academic wisdom dismisses core curricula as arbitrary and simplistic. College catalogs and college budgets are crowded with the pedagogy of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Lecture halls buzz with the rhetoric of literary theorists who dismiss American liberty as subjective and fictional. The discourse of liberty has fallen victim to the free marketry of Academe.

This crisis is unintentionally illustrated by an article entitled “The Postmodern English Major: A Case Study,” appearing in the Winter, 2003 ADE (Association of Departments of English) Bulletin and written by Professor Lawrence Schwartz. Schwartz claims that, at least on his campus (Montclair St. U.), literary studies are “more alive than ever,” and credits this happy state of affairs to the work of a faculty task force that swept away the old major and brought in a new order of things. Its 1992 report “made the context of dissatisfaction clear:”

There is the general perception that the structure of the old major no longer meets the challenges of shifting faculty interests, a student constituency undergoing broad sociological change, and an academic discipline in the midst of dramatic conceptual and institutional transformations.

Schwartz then goes on to show how the new English major speaks to these considerations by destructuring its requirements, redefining its parameters and allowing for more curricular variety, all of which tend to make it more “postmodern.”

I have no issue with Schwartz’s conclusions. “Postmodern,” for better or worse, is indeed what the new major is. My question is whether “shifting faculty interests, a student constituency undergoing broad sociological change, and an academic discipline in the midst of dramatic ... transformations” are more important considerations than the basic issue of how much students should know, and what they should be able to do, after completing the English major. We must assume that the English major should be part of a B.A. degree that in some sense prepares students for life in a complex and challenging world. How will altering the major to conform to “shifting faculty interests” and changing disciplines contribute to this goal? Here are some of these new interests as presented by the premier American literary association, the MLA:

The Politics of Critical Language; Cinema; Theory of Literary History; Performance; Literature and the Idea of Europe; Literature and Censorship; Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition; The Status of Evidence; Ethnicity;; Rereading Class; Globalizing Literary Studies; Imagining History; Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium...(11)

A handsome bunch of topics, if you want your paper accepted for the next conference or published in a scholarly journal, but rather recondite when applied to students who have only a handful of semester courses to learn reading, writing and critical thinking. Readjusting major requirements to suit this sort of shifting faculty interests would seem both short-sighted and self-serving. And readjusting major requirements to suit any shifting faculty interests at all should never be done without the students’ best interests in mind. As Jonathan Culler more sensibly remarks in the same ADE issue,

If we can imagine a totality of some sort – general education in the humanities, for instance – it will be easier to articulate and argue both the value of the major and what ought to go into it than if we continue to treat it as a conglomeration of the various things we are interested in teaching.(12)

One cannot resist noting that the things professors currently “want to teach,” together with the equally popular topics, Gender and Gay Studies, all have something in common. Though each of them carries its own specific social truth, they are all vulgar. They are vulgar in that they ignore, and sometimes seek to obliterate, human continuity: not only the vertical continuity that binds us to all of history, but also the horizontal continuity that binds us to each other. Instead of these continuities, our students are offered a fragmented world where sects and cadres compete for hegemony. Instead of critical thinking, dons dun home the politics of interest. Something similar can be said about changing major requirements to accommodate “a student constituency undergoing broad sociological change.” Over the long term, sociological change can contribute to the renewal of professions and the strengthening of institutions. But this fact does not justify short-term accommodations of a major whose goal ought to be a baseline of literacy. Academic adjustments in favor of student constituencies, moreover, are often merely ways of asserting political correctness and pandering for enrollment and approval. Quality almost always suffers.

Readers concerned about this state of things might consider writing their local college president with the following questions:

Is there something wrong with being able to read and express oneself well?
Is it a sin to be able to tell truth from falsehood?
Does society no longer need an informed and literate populace?
Has citizenship become a meaningless fantasy?
Do young people learn to practice citizenship more or less automatically?

And, if the answers are all No:

Then why not do something about it?

But what can be done? Much can be done, in fact, in the long term and even in the short term. But before turning to what can be done, let me anticipate two possible misconceptions. First, I would never be able to live with, much less recommend, a college course in Citizenship. The topic is too general and, worse, suggests a preachy and vulgar pedagogy. Second, by “discourse of liberty” and “citizenship” I am not suggesting a flag-waving endorsement of ‘American’ values. Americanisms like complacency, gullibility, materialism and consumerism are what got education into this mess in the first place. By “discourse of liberty” and “citizenship,” I mean instead the ability to analyze and critique one’s own political system, and to reform it if necessary. If the American system is indeed the best in the world, it is so because it is capable of self-criticism and repair. Mere repetition of patriotic mantras is the surest path to failure.

The fall semester focuses on the development of culture in ancient Greece, beginning with Homer's Iliad. It progresses through the rise and evolution of the polis as reflected in the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides as well as in Aeschylus's Oresteia and selected plays of Sophocles and other dramatists. The semester ends with the critiques made by Plato and Aristotle in the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics of individual and polis virtues. Parallel developments in the heroic ideal and civic art are followed through a study of archaic and classical sculpture, vase painting, and architecture. The course concentrates on the Greeks' relation to the gods, to the state, to their fellows, and to their developing self-consciousness.(16)

In the period covered by this course, the ancient Greek mind evolved from polytheistic and preliterate saga to analytic and even utopian thinking, and the Greek idea of politics evolved from tribal rivalries to the Panhellenic empire of Alexander the Great. These developments vividly suggest the sort of awareness that students should cultivate within themselves. Similar thematics play themselves out in ancient Rome (covered in the second semester of Reed’s Humanities 110), Renaissance/Enlightenment Europe and the United States. Concentration on specific themes within these periods, like religious toleration, civil rights and women’s rights, makes the emphasis on consciousness more pronounced.

Continual attention should be given to the role of fiction, poetry and drama in enhancing consciousness. This technique of using fictional experience to expand awareness is one of the chief means by which, down through the ages, enduring art distinguishes itself from its competition. Thus it is through reading ‘great’ books, rather than merely typical books, that students can get the fullest possible experience of past times and the fullest possible expansion of consciousness.

they encountered a bevy of damsels, fair and richly arrayed, being on their return from a wedding; whom the young man no sooner saw, than he asked his father what they might be. "My son," answered the father, "fix thy gaze on the ground, regard them not at all, for naughty things are they." "Oh!" said the son, "and what is their name?"The father, fearing to awaken some mischievous craving of concupiscence in the young man, would not denote them truly, to wit, as women, but said: "They are called goslings."Whereupon, wonderful to tell! the lad who had never before set eyes on any woman, thought no more of the palaces, the oxen, the horses, the asses, the money, or aught else that he had seen, but exclaimed: "Prithee, father, let me have one of those goslings.""Alas, my son," replied the father, "speak not of them; they are naughty things."Oh!" questioned the son; "but are naughty things made like that?" "Ay," returned the father. Whereupon the son: "I know not," he said, "what you say, nor why they should be naughty things: for my part I have as yet seen nought that seemed to me so fair and delectable. They are fairer than the painted angels that you have so often shewn me. Oh! if you love me, do but let us take one of these goslings up there, and I will see that she have whereon to bill." "Nay," said the father, "that will not I. Thou knowest not whereon they bill;" and straightway, being ware that nature was more potent than his art, he repented him that he had brought the boy to Florence.
—Decameron, Day Four, Introduction.

Boccaccio’s tale is so wittily told and so universal in its implications that it can serve as a satiric gloss on thought-control in any nation or period. It is a powerful example of how literature can work with history in building social consciousness.

"If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master — to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.
—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

If he were alive today, Frederick Douglass would be gratified at the substantial progress made in civil rights. But he would be alarmed to discover that the very education that liberated him is currently being back-burnered on American campuses. For by denying our students the guaranty of an introduction to independent thinking, do we not come close to creating a nation of slaves?

© 2004 Robert Grudin



For more information, visit Robert Grudin's American Vulgar website.

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