“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” Nietzsche

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” J.S. Mill

“All the principles of sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc., are true. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true.” Blaise Pascal

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The academic world is inundated with discrimination, oppression, and hate crimes. Nary does a day go by when these atrocities are not discussed, decried, or otherwise defamed. However, one kind of abuse is rarely mentioned: religious. Sometimes the persecution of Muslims is disparaged, but these critiques are usually more politically than religiously motivated.

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The US and the Czech Republic have had a rocky alliance history, but since the defeat of Communism the two states have grown closer together. Despite the radical asymmetry in size and power, since 1989 the Czech Republic has been a valuable ally to the United States.

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“Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason.” —Benjamin Franklin

G.K. Chesterton is perhaps the greatest forgotten intellectual from the early twentieth century. (more…)

As August 20, 1968 turned into August 21, Czechoslovakia was overrun by Russian tanks, and the puppet Communist regime was reined in by the granddaddy of Communist states. The Prague Spring was over, and the reforms of Alexander Dubček, which President Gorbachev later copied for his famous perestroika and glasnost reforms that helped cause the collapse of the Soviet Union, were reversed.

As the fortieth anniversary of this historic event has just passed, the Czech Republic and its neighbors are again wary of Russian power. Due to the two countries’ missile-defense deals with the United States, Russia threatened the Czech Republic and Poland over the summer. They followed that with the recent invasion of Georgia. As the Czech Republic and all of Eastern Europe reminisces during this time of historical solemnity, they are hoping it does not have implications for the future. In the midst of this pivotal point, it is worth reliving the story of the past as the Czech Republic deals with the present and looks to the future.

This past June, I, along with 14 other American students and young professionals, had the opportunity to travel to the Czech Republic. Our host was Oldřich “Olda” Černý, who founded the Prague Security Studies Institute after serving as the National Security Advisor and Director General of the Czech Foreign Intelligence Service for President Václav Havel.

Even though Prague used to be the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and the Czech Republic has been called the “Crossroads of Europe,” I knew little of the illustrious past of this historic country until my recent trip. Due to bouts with Nazism and Communism over most of the twentieth century, much of the world has forgotten the earlier, brighter chapters in Czech lore. During this time of remembrance though, the Czech Republic is again rising to prominence. After years of experiencing slavery and human rights abuses, the Czech Republic has grown into one of the world’s premier defenders of freedom, democracy, and human rights.

Václav Havel, the playwright-turned-President, receives a lot of the credit for this transformation and deservedly so. However, a lesser known character also deserves credit for directing the Czech Republic’s real-life theatrical production.

Olda is so unassuming that it took me a while to fully grasp the important role he played in the reformation of the Czech Republic and he is so humble that once I did, he would not really admit it to me.

Olda is the epitome of a great man who had greatness thrust upon him. His whole life has been shaped by decisions he made in doing what was right in the face of the evils of Communism. Without the external influence of Communism, he would have been perfectly content minding his own business rather than rerouting a nation. He is the ultimate reluctant leader. That, as Plato pointed out long ago, is the hallmark of the ideal leader and is probably why Olda has had such an influence on the Czech Republic and the world.

Life for Olda was hard. His father spent time in a Nazi prison camp before he was born. In 1950 his father was whisked away by the KGB to the harshest Communist camp in Eastern Slovakia. He died there in 1956, when Olda was only ten. Due to his father’s activities, Olda was blacklisted by the Communist regime and should not have even been allowed to attend the “gymnasium,” or secondary school. However, in the thaw that led to Mr. Dubček’s reforms,, Olda was admitted to Charles University. He even secured a grant to study English at Newcastle University in England.

After graduating from the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University, Olda served in the army, got a job with a publishing house, got married, and had 2 children.

Despite its ordinary appearance, Olda’s life was still not easy. Twice the KGB tried to recruit him. The first time he was interrogated he was apprehensive because the KGB was, as he said, “a totally incomprehensible organization.” Looking back, the interrogations were pretty systematic. As Olda explained, they consisted of “threats, promises, threats, offers, threats, enticements…” But before encountering the brutality of the KGB, they are a mystery.

He would not give in, however. As he said, “Something inside of me surprisingly held out and I just wasn’t able to do it. I knew life would be easier and so on.”

He says, “It took six months until they finally realized I was a completely useless case.”

Being confident after turning the KGB down the first time, Olda said he was “brazen” during the second interrogation in 1977 by a separate branch of the KGB. The KGB did not take kindly to his behavior, and the next day Olda was fired from his publishing job. It took him until 1985 to find another one.

It was during this time that Olda became “more vigorously” involved in dissident activity. He “went to demonstrations and distributed banned books and petitions,” but he never really considered himself “a great dissident.” Even though he worked as a freelance translator of American and British literature and theater producer, he did not consider this work anything more than a way to provide for his family.

There never was a large dissident movement in the Czech Republic, not even after the Russian invasion. Olda recalled, “There was no uprising, there was passive resistance on a mass scale particularly during the first week of the occupation, then it gradually began to erode, the country was heading toward the bleak 20 years of ‘normalization’.”

There were a number of reasons for this lack of opposition. “Unlike in Poland, the dissidents in Czechoslovakia presented a very small group,” Olda said. “It was much easier to be a dissident in a bigger town where people helped each other than a dissident in the countryside where you stuck out. There were several coordinating groups that sometimes overlapped. Some of them were infiltrated by informers.”

As time went on, Olda started making some important connections. He already knew Václav Havel. “I met him ages ago when I was still a student at the gymnasium,” he explained. “I loved his first play, and I invited him for a cup of coffee.” Eventually, he met all the important dissidents. He said, “Prague is a small town and if you move in certain circles you eventually meet everybody.”

Olda did not work with President Havel as a dissident, but in 1989 that began to change. He said, “During the ‘Velvet Revolution’ I ran errands for him, et cetera.”

Then, after the so-called ‘Velvet Revolution’ (as the Czechs are apt to call it), Olda reluctantly joined President Havel’s team. After refusing the first time, Olda became President Havel’s National Security Advisor, a position he held until the split of Czechoslovakia.

After the split, Olda was the only high-level advisor President Havel retained. He was given the title of Director General of the Czech Foreign Intelligence Service, and his task was to construct an intelligence agency. Ironically, after twice refusing the KGB’s coercive overtures to join their intelligence team, Olda became the founder of the intelligence community of the new Czech nation. According to American Ambassador Richard Graber, today this community has blossomed into an agency that can provide the US with valuable intelligence in the War on Terror.

Upon his resignation from his intelligence post in 1998, Olda was ready to rid himself of politics. However, President Havel had other ideas. He asked Olda to be the Executive Director of his Forum 2000 Foundation. Again, Olda reluctantly accepted the post. He only planned on staying for six months, but today, ten years later, he is still there. In 2001, he also created the Prague Security Studies Institute, a sister organization to Forum 2000. Today he serves as its Executive Director.

The two organizations are connected in their pursuit of spreading freedom and human rights, but they are different. Olda explained, “Forum 2000 is more broadly oriented in its focus (globalization in its all negative and positive aspects, human rights, inter-faith dialogue, outreach programs, Water and the Middle East project, etc.). PSSI began as a purely educational institution related to security issues that over time developed into a think tank represented on the international scene.”

As Executive Director of both organizations, Olda sees his work as a continuation of his efforts in building a Czech Republic and a world that recognizes both freedom and human rights. This is the work he began under Communism and continued in an official capacity since its fall.

Despite all the difficulties the Communists presented to Olda, he denies that the effects of Communism were all bad. He recognizes that the difficulties he faced shaped his character and prepared him to rescue the Czech Republic in its time of need. For example, he said, “when I was fired from my job in the publishing house and had to freelance to make ends meet, it taught me how to swim and improvise, which was a great advantage to have after 1989. Lots of people were too much used to someone else making their decisions for them. Not my case.”

It is hard even for Olda to speculate how his life would have been different if he grew up in a democratic country. My hunch is that he would not have chosen the type of life that doing the right thing under a Communist regime forced him to do. “But,” Olda said, “when I look back at my life so far, I am not sorry.” Then, in typical understatement, he added, “it is quite an interesting and eventful story.”

It is also a story that is inspiring others to do great things.

As a student, Bara Holkova worked with Olda through both the Forum 2000 Foundation and PSSI. “Olda is a great person with great stories, amazing experience in both professional and personal life and admirable knowledge about many subjects. I have just recently realized that it is an honor to work with Olda, since one can learn a lot from him.”

Olda inspired Bara to make an impact on the world. She said, “Once I worked in the Forum 2000 Foundation, I believe I will always be looking for a job where I can at least try to make a difference.” She has already begun to do so. She has worked with People in Need, one of the largest nonprofit organizations in the Czech Republic, as a Financial Advisor in Amman, Jordan from March 2007-April 2008.

Olda is proud of the hundreds of young people that he and his organizations have touched over the years, and students like these are what keep him going.

The more students Olda inspires to act like him the better the Czech Republic’s chances are of counteracting Russia’s negative influence in the region that has a positive influence of its own.

Inside Higher Ed recently had an interesting article, written by Lindsay Waters, called “A Call for Slow Writing.” The article is an adaptation from a talk so, ironically, it is terribly written. However, the message it presents is important.

Mr. Waters is the executive editor for the humanities at the Harvard University Press and a member of the editorial board of the Duke University Press journal boundary 2. He calls for the university to return to the essay as the criterion for tenure acceptance. He says that the modern university has bucked historical precedent and has accepted the book over the essay as the gold standard for tenure.

The book became the accepted form of academic scholarship because scholars lost the art of constructing good sentences, Mr. Waters argues. The publishing world tried to make up for this lack of quality with a higher quantity of that poor writing. Slowly this form of scholarly work became the norm and then the expectation. We are now at the point where the bad writers are the ones judging the writing of potential journal contributors and the ones who are deciding to which professors to give tenure.

Mr. Waters has made it his goal to turn this sinking academic ship around. Logically, he plans to start with the rediscovery of the proper sentence. He says, “What I’m saying is that the first step to re-establishing the essay as the standard in humanistic writing is to reinvigorate the sentences we write, so that, when one reads an essay, one feels it.” Later, he continues, saying, “As we prepare for the next thirty years, we need to refind our foundations to re-establish learning on the best foundations, and the best one of all is the sentence that the Renaissance reinvigorated. A sentence is not like a laundry line on which we pin words so they can flap in the wind. No, a sentence ‘is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.’” The art of writing has declined because the fundamental tool has been stripped of its usefulness. Just as an exquisite painting is impossible to produce with a damaged brush, so an eloquent book is impossible to write with a denuded sentence.

Mr. Waters never explains why the return to the sentence is important, but the context of the article as a whole suggests an answer. He seems to say that by focusing on the sentence rather than the larger paragraph or even the work as a whole, the writers are forced to write slower. This slower writing produces smaller, better thought out works.

Mr. Waters presents the procedure of the editorial staff of boundary 2 for making the return to slow essay writing a reality. He says, “We decided to serve our readers more than our contributors.” This is being done in four ways: first, “ordinary language, not jargon” is demanded from all writers; second, all works must be “essays first, [and] scholarly articles second;” third, is the requirement of the “application of the ‘cui bono?’ test to all submissions;” and, fourth, the “contents of [the] journal must educate the readers and serve the audience, not the careers of the writers.”

He alludes to the danger in this approach, saying, “We need to do what we might fear will be dumbing down our publications by insisting upon clearer language set forth in rhythmical sentence.” However, he feels this is a risk worth taking for two reasons. First, the insistence upon clearer writing will produce better thinking. He elaborates, saying, “The reason for the persistence of gobbledy-gook is that it’s a lot easier to hide mediocre thinking under the cloak of gobbledy-gook.” By removing the “gobbledy-gook” scholars will be forced to produce better scholarship. The second benefit of works that are more accessible to the layperson is that the writing, and the corresponding ideas presented in the writing, will be read by more people and will have a greater impact on the world.

At its core, Mr. Waters’ concerns are legitimate. One of my professors is apt to say that professors are the worst writers of us all. He says that their books should be journal articles and their journal articles should not be written at all. His point is that the more words professors use to express an idea the worse writers they become. Further, the more they string out their ideas the more those ideas get lost.

There is a lot of truth to that sentiment. Many of the academic books I have read in college could have very easily been compacted into an essay of article length. Two influential works of recent years quickly come to mind that illustrate the opposite of this process. Francis Fukuyama produced an article version of “The End of History” before the book was published, and Samuel Huntington penned “The Clash of Civilizations” as a scholarly article before writing a larger tome. These and other examples prove that important ideas can be expressed in an essay.

Oftentimes, these ideas can be better expressed in essays. In the writing of my own undergraduate thesis, I am finding it much more helpful to read scholarly journal entries than the books written by the same experts on the same topics as those essays. The articles provide all the meat in a fraction of the reading time. Additionally, in the book versions the main thesis tends to get lost in all the verbiage. Sometimes forced brevity will compel a change in the writing style of some of the thickest academicians and would, hopefully, make their works more readable.

Forcing that brevity is not an easy task. Professors often enjoy the competitive shield that comes with erudition. It is infinitely harder to attack a theory you cannot quite grasp due to the inane amount of technical jargon and ill written sentences it contains. As Mr. Waters says, bad writing can create an illusion of superior intelligence, so many professors will resist the removal of the lax literary clothing that hides their pseudo-academic nakedness underneath.

Mr. Waters makes another valid point: professors should be disseminating ideas that actually encourage positive change in the real world. When most of their academic work spends years collecting dust on library shelves and is only accessible to the twelve other experts of that same particularly narrow field of scholarship, then there is a problem. Unfortunately, this is the sad state of much of the collegiate writing of today.

On the other hand, there is the danger of dumbing down the writing. Part of the job of the educated is to create a tide that lifts all the boats of a society. If the most educated of our society are not pushing the vocabulary envelope, then who will? If the professors of the world are not prodding us to expand the literacy of our minds, then who will? If the scholars of today do not encourage us to step out of our instant gratification, microwave world and enjoy the struggle of a 500 page tome, then who will?

Mr. Waters’ intentionally provocative suggestion “that anyone who publishes a book within six years of earning a Ph.D. should be denied tenure” is taking things too far. There is still a place for good books, and there is still a place for good academic books.

The key, though, is that they be good academic books. There is no such thing as content without form. Or, as my professor would say, your ideas do not matter if they are not communicated well. Maybe Mr. Waters’ suggestion that professors write slower and return to the era of essay writing is the way to accomplish the proper synthesis of thought and word. Maybe writing smaller is the way to thinking bigger, for the teacher and the learner both. It is an interesting thought for the collegiate world to ponder.

Originally published by Campus Magazine Online. Slightly revised version republished with permission.

Valentine’s Day means that, for many colleges, sex will be front and center. Lehigh, like many colleges and universities across the country, had a full slate. The sexual celebration started off relatively slowly. The sexiness was heightened the Friday before Valentine’s Day, however, when the Dirty Drown Writer’s Series was showcased by the university. The ad for the series gushed, “Join us for salacious scintillating stories of licentious lustful lewd lechery!” How charming.

Things really started heating up the week of Valentine’s Day. On Tuesday, February 12, “All are welcome!” to attend a question and answer session on sex at an event that was dubbed “Ask the Sexperts!” At the event, “A panel of experts will host a lively discussion and answer ANY questions you may have about SEX” (emphasis in the original ad). As with the Dirty Drown Writer’s Series, this event shows the lack of sexual bashfulness at the modern university.

On Wednesday, the day before Valentine’s Day, the university encouraged all students to bring their “partner or friend” to the Health Center to take their free STD/HIV tests. Also, all throughout the week and a half leading up to Valentine’s Day students could visit the University Health Center, and “For just $1, buy your Valentine a condom rose or a love pop (condom lollipop)!” With all the university-sponsored sex priming, these tests and trinkets may have been particularly necessary in the decision-making process of the big day.

It is degrading that the university expects us to gratify our every sexual desire. The attitude that we college students cannot help ourselves, that we have no self-control, and that we are so sexually depraved that we need the university to protect us and that we want it to help stimulate us is belittling. I would hope that most college students are adult enough to make wise decisions and moral enough to make right ones, and I would hope that the university would support both. Sadly, that is not the case.

The climax of this Lehigh sexual extravaganza, of course, was the Vagina Monologues. The Vagina Monologues is the Women’s Center sponsored theatrical performance that frees women from the male and sexual oppression they have faced throughout history by allowing them to monologue on their most feminine sexual organ. This is such a popular event that it was held two nights in a row, opening on February 16 with an encore performance on February 17, in one of the largest venues on campus. Lehigh students, faculty, and staff could view these liberating sexual diatribes for $7. However, “Vagina Loving Patrons” could pay $25 and receive “[the] best seats in-house, [a] t-shirt, [a] goodie bag, and [a] dessert reception.” Proceeds from this most sexually titillating event went to the Turning Point of the Lehigh Valley, a non-profit organization that deals with domestic violence. It is the hope of all involved that by drawing attention to the exact place that has caused women to be so objectified over the years that they can reduce the objectification of women.

The only well advertised event that dealt with the romantic rather than the sexual was not even sponsored by the university. The Goose hosted the first ever Valentine’s Day Dinner on February 14 and 15. This ticketed affair allowed couples to enjoy a pleasant Valentine’s Dinner together.

Lehigh’s Valentine’s Week Bash is mere child’s play, however, when compared to another school’s much more prolific lewd lineup. Lehigh is known as one of the “baby-Ivy” schools. In keeping with that theme Yale University made sure that Lehigh is also the home of “baby sex.”

During a bi-annual, 9-day sexual extravaganza aptly named “Sex Week,” Yale hosted events such as “The Female Orgasm” and “The Business of Pornography: How Vivid Made it Mainstream.” In fact, Vivid was honored with an entire day’s worth of events, including a Q&A with two Vivid models (the advertisement assures us that “Yes, there will be a screening”).

According to the event’s official website, “Sex Week is an interdisciplinary sex education program designed to pique students’ interest through creative, interactive, and exciting programming.”

Beyond that there is no agenda. They say that “There is no ideology behind Sex Week. Its mission is simple: present students with a range of perspectives about sexuality to get them talking, so that they can begin to reconcile serious issues of love, sex, and relationships in their lives. Let the discussion begin.”

I guess that by allowing a religious pornography counselor to appear in “The Great Porn Debate” alongside a porn star and by offering events such as “God and Sex” that they do allow for diversity of opinion in this blatant sexfest. However, it is hard to maintain a level of ideological neutrality when the main sponsor of the week’s events is Pure Romance, a sex toy company, and the only other recognized sponsor is Vivid Entertainment, the porn company that one of the week’s own events boasts made porn mainstream.

To help advertise the week’s events, the organizers produced a magazine, which can be viewed on their website. However, before proceeding to the contents of the magazine, the reader is greeted with this message: “WARNING: Some of the content in this section of the site may not be suitable for visitors under the age of 18. If you are under 18, please click HERE to exit.” After choosing to view the magazine in either PDF or plain text format you can peruse such articles as “The Hottest Porn Star We’ve Ever Interviewed” and “Thinking Outside Her Box: A Primer on Sexual Cliteracy.”

Surely to the delight of the organizers, the week was amply covered by the media. Yale Daily News, the nation’s oldest college daily newspaper, had at least 11 articles or opinion pieces about the events, and Nightline ABC videotaped “The Great Porn Debate.”

However, most of the media scrutiny centered on the screening of a violent porn movie. According to a Yale Daily News article, the event’s hosts invited porn director Paul Thomas to screen a pornographic movie. They also decided NOT to pre-screen the movie. It turns out the fantasy rape scene portrayed in the movie was too much even for these hardened sex educators. The movie was stopped mid-showing.

During the question-and-answer time that followed, however, Sex Week coordinator Colin Adamo “described the images as sexually unhealthy and disrespectful to women.” “Thomas’ response [to Adam] insinuated that he was a prude and just needed to watch more porn.” Despite the reservations of some Sex Week organizers, “Sex Week Director Joe Citarella ’08 said he thinks the event was positive overall because it gave people the opportunity to speak out against violent pornography and the effect it can have on the public’s conception of women.” Somehow inviting a porn seller to come show porn seems like a bad way to discourage porn viewing.

As can be imagined not all of the reactions to the week were positive. Two women wrote into Yale Daily News decrying the week’s events. In the article, the women pointed out that advertising sex in a glamorized, pornographic way focuses attention on the physical. This leaves women with less-than-stellar bodies feeling inadequate, and it tricks guys and girls alike into seeking perfect sexual satisfaction every time.

Victoria Wild, director of public relations for Sex Week, responded to their concerns thusly: “Reading Virginia Calkins and Callie Lowenstein’s article ‘Sex Week at Yale promotes hypocritical image’ (2/13), it is clear to me that they have not yet had the pleasure of attending any of our events. While they make a valid point that our advertising is sexy and catchy, it certainly has not deterred a large and extremely diverse group of students from showing up to our events. I would venture to say that the diversity I witnessed at these events is greater than at any other event I’ve seen on campus.”

Now there is a comforting thought: Ms. Wild is pleased by the massive attendance at these crude events. Her basic message is that there is nothing like shocking sex to bring a diverse campus together. That sure speaks volumes about our most highly educated citizens. They need flashy sexual charades and pornography to get them to attend university-sponsored educational events. It is a shame they require such explicit sexual perversions to learn about proper love, relationships, and sex.

Despite her reveling in the gratifyingly high attendance, though, Ms. Wild fails to really address the concerns of Ms. Calkins and Ms. Lowenstein. Thankfully, we are told by a Yale Daily News article, their concerns for female body image were assuaged by another Sex Week gem. The article describes how the “Yale Lingerie Show – one of the most popular events in past Sex Weeks -” allows women to feel better about their bodies. As they say “The Lingerie Show is also sending a very powerful message about body image. [Two event organizers] have both continued to stress the fact that this show will teach people to be comfortable with their bodies – both the models and the audience. [An event organizer] said that they did not cast anyone based on body type, shape, or size.” Have no fear Ms. Calkins and Ms. Lowenstein. A Victoria’s Secret-style lingerie modeling walk will make even the simplest girl look and feel sexy.

At the risk of being a complete curmudgeon, presenting this much sexual stimulation to a group in their sexual prime seems sophomoric. Bad things are bound to happen. It is ironic that at the same time the university is showing a fantasy rape scene, the Yale Women’s Center is going after the fraternity system for their culture of sex. According to Yale Daily News, the Women’s Center issued a 26 page list of demands in response to one fraternity’s rush photograph entitled “We Love Yale Sluts.” The article quotes the report saying, “‘Fraternity parties with sexist themes are a fixture of undergraduate life,’…and dress codes at the events ‘exclusively encourage women [particularly freshmen] to dress in a sexualized way.’” It’s funny how the word “Fraternity” could be replaced with the phrase “Sex Week” and the statement would still ring true. The Women’s Center has no problem with the latter, but spends time writing a 26 page tome to chastise the former.

Inside Higher Ed recently did an interview with Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at LaSalle University, on the topic of her new book entitled Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus. She relates how college students have all but completely abandoned dating relationships in favor of hookups. In a campus culture that is so fixated on instantaneous sexual pleasures rather than long-term intimate relationships, it is a shame that the most important institution of authority over that culture propagates such shallow sexual gratifications. Valentine’s Day should be about loving, committed relationships. It is a shame that the modern American university has used it to promote, and indeed celebrate, all kinds of sexual perversions.

Sex is not something to be taken lightly. It is an important topic to understand. Orgasms and pornography, though, are not the means to properly understanding sex. Unfortunately, Yale and other colleges, in all of their enlightened splendor, fail to recognize this.

Lately, the print industry has been abuzz with discussions about the humanities, both as an academic institution and as it functions in society. Stanley Fish, a well-traveled professor and contributing writer to the New York Times’ blog, wrote a two-part blog entitled “Will the Humanities Save Us?” He was inspired to do so because of three recent pieces of writing: the report of the New York State Commission on Higher Education, which barely mentioned the humanities amongst its widespread proposals; Anthony Kronman’s book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, which Mr. Fish said implied that colleges should be “a place of the training of character” through the use of the humanities; and reader comments to a previous Mr. Fish blog post. Mr. Fish’s blog series facilitated a wave of reader reactions leading to hundreds of comments on the New York Times’ site and numerous blogs elsewhere.

Simultaneous to this firestorm, but apart from it, was the reaction to a newly published book by Yale University Press: On Eloquence by Denis Donoghue. John Wilson, of the magazine Books and Culture, wrote a review of the book and Denis Donoghue himself wrote about it for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Interestingly, even though these writers were not collaborating with each other, all three men came to roughly the same conclusion.

Mr. Fish’s answer to the question posed by his blog’s title is that the humanities will not save us. In fact, the humanities will do nothing for humanity, because they can do nothing for humanity. He denied that the humanities create well-rounded citizens or that they teach people how to improve as human beings. According to Mr. Fish, the humanities will not build character just as they will not build bridges or computer infrastructures. They will not build careers either. While Mr. Fish does think it true that the humanities can teach “critical thinking” skills and make people more interesting to talk to, he does not think they have a corner on providing such skills.

In fact, Mr. Fish purports that the humanities do not do anything at all. As Mr. Fish says, if the humanities were the answer to our society’s problems, as he believes Mr. Kronman says, then “the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.” Mr. Fish swears he cannot remember a single time when a poem moved him to improve himself or those around him.

Mr. Fish contends that there is one thing that is “more than enough in my view to justify the enterprise of humanistic study:” that is “aesthetic wonderment.” The great satisfaction of the humanities, he says, “is the opportunity to marvel at what a few people are able to do with the language we all use. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ I often say to my students. ‘Don’t you wish you could write a line like that?’” For Mr. Fish, this more than justifies the study of the humanities.

On this point Mr. Wilson and Mr. Donoghue would agree. Mr. Wilson relates Mr. Donoghue’s experiences with his English students, saying “He finds among his students—students who have chosen to study literature—and in ‘departments of English’ more generally a suspicion of or indifference toward the merely ‘aesthetic’ and a preoccupation with moralizing.” Both Mr. Wilson and Mr. Donoghue lament this state of affairs. They both decry the modern tendency of turning education into mere utility, a means to a career. They, like Mr. Fish, do not think that eloquence or aesthetics or the humanities need justification.

Instead, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Wilson praise eloquence as a noble end just as Mr. Fish does aesthetic wonderment. Mr. Donoghue says, “Eloquence is not the same as rhetoric. Eloquence isn’t even a distant cousin of rhetoric — it comes from a different family and has different eyes, hair, and gait.” He adds, “Normally, eloquence is taken to be one of rhetoric’s flashier tricks. It is not. I want to release it from that servile employment and have it enjoy its independence as a play of language, gratuitous, a grace note in the culture that permits it.” Mr. Wilson expounds on this saying, “If eloquence is associated with ‘pretense’ and all that it implies, it is also suspect because it lacks weight. You can’t eat it. It won’t save souls, prevent global warming, reduce the spread of AIDS or the incidence of abortion. Yes, all true, and this is why eloquence is precious.” Eloquence is so gratifying precisely because it is superfluous.

All three men are correct in their assessment of aesthetics. Beauty, eloquence, aesthetics: they are meant to be enjoyed in their own right. They do lose part of their essence if they are employed in rhetoric, because part of their beauty is in their uselessness. As Ray Bradury said in the “Coda” of the 50th Anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page.” What makes literature beautiful is its rhetorically useless parts.

However, the study of the humanities for the pleasure of “aesthetic wonderment” does not lead to nothing. It, in fact, does something very important for the human race. It creates men with chests. Taking inspiration from Plato, C.S. Lewis, in his classic work on education entitled The Abolition of Man, describes humans as containing three parts: a head where the intellect reigns, a stomach where the appetite lurks, and a chest where magnanimity and sentiment resides. He says that the chest is the most important part. “It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.” The middle part allows the head, or reason, to control the stomach, or appetites. “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organisms.” Without the chest humans are not humans at all.

When done right, the humanities give people proper chests. They teach people what is beautiful and true and noble. By studying art and literature people can be trained to recognize and appreciate the sublime and aesthetically pleasing. Through the study of history people can connect with the pure emotions of patriotism and duty to fellow mankind. If the humanities are done right they will provide a good education, as C.S. Lewis described it. They will “build some sentiments while destroying others.” Sentiments properly constructed will allow humans to use their intellect to its fullest capacity and will allow them to enjoy the pleasures of their appetites without gorging themselves on them. The humanities can help make humans human.

Originally published by Campus Magazine Online. Republished with permission.