While many of the great writers and thinkers of the middle twentieth-century defended the Soviet Union, or gazed upon it with hope, one of the most important figures who effectively killed all of that type of talking once and for all was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn’s stories, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, gave Western audiences a clear look behind the so-called “iron curtain,” ending any speculation that USSR was a regime that any reasonable person could possibly endorse. He was, as Christohper Hitchens once said of George Orwell, a poweful writer because he “had the courage to tell the truth.” Solzhenitsyn passed away over the weekend. I have on occassion explained to classes of mine who have never heard of him who he was and why I think it i important that we rememebr him. Solzhenitsyn is a symbol of the importance of telling the truth in dark times, and in the power of language in its ability to reach people. I hope one day to have a way to wedge him into my teaching for years in the future. Many criticize the idea of their being a literary canon and worry about its flaws – but I hope that in on hundred years there is such thing as a literary canon – and I hope very much that Denisov, The First Circle, and Gulag are in that canon, still being read by future generations of young Americans.
The Times Higher Education has an article from a part-time instructor teaching at Harvard. What I found interesting about the piece is not the specific claims of Mr. Summers’ discontent, but the general nautre of them. The discontent expressed is with “the game.” The fact that graders, students, administrators and parents all appear to be, in ever-growing numbrs, caught up in the game of educaiton and social status rather than the educating, liberating, self-strengthening character of what I would think most sincere university teachers would call “real education.” If one flips through the pages of the classics on education, from the Greeks to Locke and Rousseau, you will not find anything resembling the general aim of education in our nation today – the conferrence of particular status. This probably has, at least in part, to do with the fact that status was fixed in the “olden days,” which is probably not a desirable state of affairs either. Is there anything that can break the spell? I often doubt it. There has never been some golden era where most people loved learnign for their own sake – perhaps Mr. Summer would feel better comforted with a Strauss-like outlook that we should just make the world safe for our own kind and let the shallow bury the shallow… and pay for our private universities, art museums, and symphony halls. We should also remember that people are not often as serious for caring for themselves as young adults as they are when they get older and confront their responsibilities on more serious grounding. I would imagine that many of my high school and undergraduate (and probably even graduate) would be shocked to know just how much of the ideas that I said I wasn’t interested in or did not like have come back to me as important later in life, and have been absolutuely essential in my pursuit of doing the right thing in my own life. As teachers, we don’t get to witness these critical moments in the ife of our students, but I have a faith that they happen far more than we would dare to expect.
UPDATE: I’m an idiot and I forgot to link the piece to “The Wire” Season 4: where Former Major Colvin learns that troubled kids in the Baltimore School Pilot Program he is working on in retirement are learning in school, but what they are really learning is how to “game” authority.
I would say that one of the reasons that the entertainment industry tends to be left-leaning has nothing to do with hideous motives, but from the fact that the left tends to have stories about human life that have a compelling, sweeping dramatic arc that a radical free market capitalist just can’t tell because he or she would think it wrong to rpesume they know the “right way” that human story arc ought to be told or how it should end.
This flashed through my mind while I was watching the trailer last weekend for a forthcoming Greg Kinnear movie, called Flash of Genius. Since I was then subjected to Mama Mia! following the trailer, I had plenty of time to continue my thoughts.
Flash of Genius is about a college professor who invents the modern windshield wiper and, as it turns out, they steal his design and do not credit him with his invention. So he sues them by himself, acting as his own counsel. My first reaction to this was that it was one of many “proudly leftist” message movie trailers we saw, and that the Hollywood that was too scared to give Brokeback Mountain a Best Picture Oscar was striking back now that their critics influence appears to be receding.
My second reaction was to think that the film, and films like it, always seem to be intended to be anti-Hayekian or anti-Schumpeterian (I cannot tell which, probably neither are specifically targeted at this point, as the tropes are quite old now) stories about how unfettered capitalism, its powerful organizations with greedy, soulless elites plunder the little man and the little man fights for justice when justice wants to abandon them. We root for the person crushed about to be crushed by capitalism, and at the end of the day, we cheer for Mr. Little Guy.
However, my third reaction (Mama Mia! was not Indiana Jones IV bad, but close, so I had time) was is that really what stories like this prove out? I still think its intended as the trope above, but the story actually seems to vindicate (I’m assuming the little guy wins) a strong exceptional person who contributes substantially to the specialization of knowledge, is resourceful enough as an individual to fight for what he is rightly entitled to, is a college professor (Hayek and Schumpeter believe that intellectuals are hugely important for social order), and ultimately, since the state has the right property laws already on the books and enforces them correctly, the resourceful, well-developed individual defeats the once-great corporation who no longer is populated by the great but is a shadow of its former self because it leans to heavily on its ability to project power to get what it wants rather than being innovative and resourceful by its own devices.
I believe the second story to be the more accurate life-lesson, but I have a feeling the movie will try to pass off the first version of the story – presumably because praising the power of resourceful intelligentsia does not put enough people in seats. Still I wonder what people think about message movies like this if we make the leap and treat their messages as worth considering.
Posted by stevenmaloney 
Posted by stevenmaloney 
Posted by stevenmaloney 
