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Editor's Turn Robert W. Hill
Chacun à Son Goût: Ruminations on Opinion, Authority, Consensus, and Truth [OED: “education,” from the Latin ducere, “to lead” (as in “Il Duce”-RWH)] It’s almost miraculous that we agree on anything. We need not have read Being and Nothingness, nor understood the aptness of “Kafka-esque” in a news story about local jurisprudence, nor watched The Osbournes to gather that people can’t communicate perfectly. But we can manage a lunch date or all get to class at the same time. We can fuss over yesterday’s ball game or the latest political gaff with fair confidence that we mean the same politician, the same game. Likewise, even in a universe of demonstrable relativism, we can usually distinguish between informed and uninformed opinion; brilliant, evocative eccentricity and plain goofiness; received opinion and blind conformity. Often we can even agree on “fact.” Of course, there ain’t no ‘ccountin’ for taste. Groucho Marx himself waffled on whether Duck Soup was better than A Night at the Opera. As to why we “like” or not… that’s easy—sometimes. People reared with Dumb and Dumber as their icon of comedy will not be amused at the ironies of Ann Beattie nor the allusive rants of Dennis Miller. Those enwrapped in the sounds of Ludacris or Notorious B.I.G. (God rest his soul) will not likely “get” Beck or Iris Dement, much less the nuances of Ralph Ellison or Carol Shields. We know that American white people prefer Everybody Loves Raymond to The Bernie Mac Show. We know that “chick flicks” generally appeal to women. We know that John Travolta’s Swordfish attracts young males from eighteen to twenty-four who like to see things blow up. We know that our various reactions to “The N Word” depend on experience and ideology. Preferences emerge mostly from friends and family, from society, despite our bray about “being ourselves.” As South Pacific has it, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” Groupthink rules. Tawana Brawley springs to mind, as does “We’re Number One!” at thousands of mediocre football games. Palpably silly “received opinion” may even press upon us as official policy. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Governor-elect Sonny Perdue opined, “Creationism, simply because it came from the Bible, is still accepted in society… and I think kids ought to be exposed to that, … not from a proselytizing standpoint, but from a standpoint that much of society subscribes to it” (24 Nov. 2002: A11; italics mine). As for “personal opinion,” an English major whom I’ll call “EM” recently assailed baccalaureate foreign language requirements: “I have never been good with other languages, so why should my GPA have to suffer…? Why make me take something I just do not understand…?” EM has a point. Of course, don’t we all? I understand and practice the pedagogy of suspending normative judgment. One can learn about movies from good and bad ones, about novels from exciting and boring ones, about poems from skillful and clumsy ones, about essays from Gerald Early and EM (above). One can learn by parsing out “gut” responses to a play. But that’s not to maintain that Memento is as good as Do the Right Thing because it “really makes you think” or worse than The Sound of Music because it is “so negative, so depressing.” As a long-time teacher, I am simply unwilling to accept just anything as valid, or as knowledge. For instance, I find EM’s tautological opinion both vapid and
repulsive, that “everyone has an opinion.” But EM learned
that mantra somewhere. In fact, pursuing the genuine virtues of openness,
respect, creativity, innovation, etc., our national academy has often
neglected to convey this common-sense notion: All opinions are truly
opinions, but not all opinions are truly… well… true. There,
I’ve said it. Actually, I’ve uttered three faith-statements
at once: In fact, I have little faith that human beings can be certain about what is true. But, as a teacher with a sense of the future for my students, I believe that something better than pure relativism is possible, that we can reach consensus, determine communal authority beyond personal whim, and, consequently, make valuable assertions that lead to safety, pleasure, and order without oppression. It does make sense to trust, however tentatively, a preponderance of evidence at the same time as we continue to fill in the gaps, test the assumptions, try as honest scholars to figure why, for instance, evolution remains the best life-science theory we’ve got although it doesn’t answer all relevant questions. Intellectual anarchy is not automatically virtuous because it’s outside every box in the store. Then I hear my Libertarian brother Jim say, “You mean follow the crowd? Don’t think outside the box?” I quail before his sudden heat, remembering and forgiving his bumper-sticker, “Charlton Heston Is My President.” (He is my younger brother by two years, after all.) But I disagree with his infinite extension of my point. Being cranky in a fluxile time of pusillanimous public apologies for bigotry, epidemic face-lifts, “complete make-overs,” and “expressing oneself” (and being aware of Il Duce’s authoritarian vices), I grow semesterly more convinced of the virtues of the authoritative. Skeptical, self-reflexive authority. My first wife once told me I was “just a rebel.” She did not mean that I was a Son of the Confederacy but that, by her standards, I was a rule-breaker. I had just walked a short way on the grass at a public rose-garden, forsaking the marked, manicured, shaved, and paved path, so that I could look more closely at some flowers off the regular way. (This was not the only time she and I disagreed about what was offensive.) When Theodore Roethke writes, “The edge is what I have,” he calls us to be “free in the tearing wind” of discovery and creation, not to pretend—or to believe—that “anything goes.” During my four-decade career, among the greatest shifts in the World
of Education are these. I have found them intellectually and aesthetically
invigorating and—yes—truer than what had previously
sufficed for academic knowledge: I name these changes in the “situational context” of my profession** mostly to say, “Look, the academy has always—over time—sought new ground on which to stand more firmly, new ideas to supplant the outworn and wrongheaded.” By that example, the academy urges its students (us all) to the same civilized task, that is, to discover and make public whatever is more likely true than not. Most ideas worth their salt evolve, or (if that term’s offensive) they “develop” over time and under many hands. God rest his soul, too, even the “opinionated,” “self-inflated” Stephen Jay Gould (I quote students, not the New York Times)—even that Gould knew when fresh or reconfigured evidence made it more honest to revise than “arrogantly” to defend what he had published. To pursue truth in the belief that there is such a thing doesn’t mean to hold relentlessly to particular ideas or “facts.” It’s not enough to protect false self-esteem among adults, whether they’re in college or not. It’s not enough to hope that an infinite chatter of bad opinions will produce miraculously true, even workable, ideas (like those proverbial chimps at their infinite typing project). Here’s a shocker: Some ideas are better than others. Espérance! Postscript: We’re a new creature now, fifteen years after our first hardcopy issue. Obviously, the Kennesaw Review is indebted to its many contributors, without whom the thing would have been literally unreadable. But I want personally to thank the following people who come readily to mind as editors, assistants, KSU administrators, and other colleagues who have supported and fostered the Kennesaw Review during my time with it: Melanie Angle, Bob Barrier, George Beggs, Helen Bisesi, Maren Blake, JoAllen Bradham, Lori Buechling, Judy Burch. Jeff Cebulski, Yvonne Culpepper, Laura Dabundo, Vivien Davis, the late Shirley Dean, the late Don Forrester, Tony Grooms, Jane Hill, Greg Johnson, Madeline Miles, Linda Noble, Ann Pullen, Helen Ridley, Ed Rugg, Don Russ, Lesia Schnur, Betty Siegel, Cheryl Stiles, Craig Watson, Debbie Whitehurst, Amy Whitney, Paula Yow. There are others, I’m sure, who haven’t come readily to mind, but whose contributions happen for the moment to be at the mercy of my flawed memory. Therefore, this public evidence of my gratitude will no doubt remain “under construction.”—RWH ** Another change, about which I am not sanguine, is the increasing intrusiveness of business, government, and religious groups in the work of public educational institutions, including more boilerplate managerial strategies and a coincidental (though perhaps not causal) erosion of respect for academic faculty.—RWH
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