Carnival

The school year winds down and nostalgia creeps in.  There is a sameness to the rhythm of college.  And while the individual change, the nature of the average student doesn’t change much.  Indeed, it hasn’t changed much since at least 1920.  That was the year Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise.  We read it in my tutorial this year.  It is one of those inter-war expression of the hopelessness of the modern age.  And after a century of unbelievable change, I was shocked at how much Amory Blaine would fit right in at MHC (well, if he were a she, of course).  Nearly a century after the book was published, college students are still chasing after the same things with the same hopes and fears and the same ennui nagging at the fringes of consciousness. 

Amory ends the novel with the declaration: “I know myself, but that is all.”  In that phrase is captured all of the angst and problems of the 21^st century undergraduate college.  Amory, of course, does not understand himself at all.  He just thinks he does.  But he does know that he knows nothing beyond himself, nothing greater than himself.  His whole life is reduced to the Self:

“I am selfish,” he thought.

“This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’

“This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

“It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

“There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend — all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.”

That is, of course exactly what the modern college teaches students.  Live for the Greater Good because then you will fully express yourself.  Study hard because then you will be able to do great things and feel self-fulfillment.

What about all those classes and things?  Knowledge is dead.  As Eliot put it in 1934:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

So, what does the modern college student learn?  We talk about teaching critical thinking and life skills, but never wisdom.

So, what is the modern college?  It’s just like the frenzy of social activity described by Fitzgerald in a subchapter entitled “Carnival.” It’s also just like the Carnival (Karn Evil) Emerson, Lake and Palmer described in 1973.  It doesn’t have to be like that, of course.  But, the fact that the college Fitzgerald describes and the college my students attend are more alike than it is comfortable to admit, must give one reason to pause in hoping for a dramatic change in the culture of higher education.