I might as well confess up front that I am a good friend and admirer of Gideon Rappaport and his work. We shared in the extraordinary experience of being early students at Cowell College of the University of California Santa Cruz, just at the time of its founding. The teachers we encountered there embodied a deep commitment to their students, and to the humane ideals that Gideon affirms in these talks, reviews, and essays. It gives me great pleasure to review this book, and to invite the reader to share in its riches.
DO THE YOUNG NEED EDUCATING?
The High School Homilies are talks that Gideon gave at various times during his teaching career at two college-prep high schools in southern California. In reading them I was reminded of the time that my husband was serving as Chargé d’affaires in the American Embassy in Kathmandu, Nepal. We had received no RSVPs to an invitation sent to Embassy staff. I asked Lew in exasperation, “Do the young Foreign Service Officers need educating?” He replied, “Ann, the young always need educating.”
ROMANTICISM AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
These talks are lively, thought-provoking, and go a long way towards educating the young. In “Ceremony,” Gideon talks about two “chips on the shoulder” that young people carry. The first is the idea that anything that is not spontaneous, arising from immediate visceral instinct, is artificial and therefore false. This comes from Rousseau’s doctrine that man is naturally good, and it is society that corrupts him.
We experience any ceremony as a compromise of our sacred individuality, a succumbing to corrupting external pressure, a surrender. And so we resist. …The romantic enters the place of ceremony believing his best (natural) self is under attack by society in the form of artificiality.
The second chip is the assumption that anything that cannot be scientifically demonstrated to our rational intellect is likely to be at best inadvertent error and at worst intentional deception. This comes from the Enlightenment premise that
given time and sufficient experimentation, we will eventually comprehend all things that have in the past seemed to be mysterious. …The rationalist enters the place of ceremony believing that his true (rational) self is under attack by the past in the form of superstition.
And yet, despite these chips, we go on participating in ceremonies—weddings and funerals, prom and commencement, the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve. We willingly participate in ceremonies in order to find meaning—which lies in the experience of being or becoming part of something bigger than we are.
We crave the meaning of being taken up and absorbed into something even more real than ourselves. And we simply will not live without it.
MEANING VS. DESPAIR
Throughout this book, Gideon affirms the human need for meaning and examines many of our modern prejudices about it with wit and precision. He refers again and again to the peril, the solipsism, of Rousseau’s doctrines, and the failings of the Enlightenment faith in reason to address what makes us fully human.
The intellectual trends of the 21st century all too easily push us into the assertion that everything is predetermined, and humans have no real agency, no free will. Some of the tempests of our current political scene may be driven by despair at the loss of meaning, and a desire to assert that something matters. Yet,
a belief in materialistic determinism, that all events are physical, is itself an act of faith that cannot be proved…Belief in the absence of human free will goes against the mainstream of Western intellectual and religious tradition, and the question of the precise relation of free will to determinism is a profound mystery that cannot be solved by the human mind. …My teacher Mary Holmes said, “It doesn’t matter whether we actually have free will; we think we do.”
INSPIRATIONAL ADVICE
The talks are broad in scope, often unexpected, and inspirational. In “Senior’s Chapel,” speaking about the work that the seniors face, he quotes Rabbi Tarfon, from the 2nd century:
It is not yours to finish the task, but you are not free to desist from it.
Gideon writes:
It is your duty to study and to work hard and to be good, paying the right kind of attention to your conscience, to your parents and teachers, to others, to nature, and to God. But it is not your duty to know what cannot be known, to be excellent at everything, to invent yourself, or to judge your soul.
Gideon goes on to quote Mary Holmes, who said,
There is no excellence without discipline, but there is no such thing as self-discipline. There is only being disciplined by what we desire.
This turns the whole 21st-century cult of self-improvement on its head, and gives a new orientation, and new hope, to all of us who are striving to become better people in the world.
In “To the Class of ’93,” Gideon talks about making a leap of faith.
You cannot make yourself leap into faith, any more than you can make yourself fall in love. You can only be moved to do so. …You are responsible for looking, not just with your eyes, but with all that you are.
The article “The Educational Downside of Technology” describes how sophomore English students are finding it increasingly harder to read even the first chapter of The Tale of Two Cities. Accustomed to being able to comprehend something instantly, they balk at Dickens and turn immediately to online Cliff Notes.
Low English grades cause them to ask what they can do for extra credit. My response is often to suggest an experiment: For a month turn off all screens and beeps when doing homework; let’s see whether your grades improve. They react as if I were asking them to give up oxygen, but, mirabile dictu, in the ones who dare to try it, it often works.
THE HERITAGE OF THE PAST
In all these talks and essays, Gideon is affirming the heritage of the past and the wisdom of the ages. It’s difficult for many moderns to believe in the heritage of the past and the wisdom of the ages. As Gideon writes, in the present time,
We find it impossible to believe that anything can be innocent—not government, not society, not the founding ideals of the nation, not the founding ideals of the civilization, certainly not the rebels against those ideals, and especially not ourselves.
And yet, our present convictions, our social movements, our critique of the unjust aspects of our society are all based on the heritage of the past:
The very idea that we should treat other cultures justly and without prejudice is derived from no other culture but the one into which we have all been born or transported: the English-speaking West. Several thousand years of Jewish and Christian teaching that all men are the children of God, a thousand years of English Common Law, and two centuries of American Enlightenment doctrine that all men are created equal and are endowed with fundamental rights—these are the only grounds we have for asserting that we should respect our neighbor’s cultural differences.
THE ABOLITION OF MAN
As part of that heritage, Gideon affirms the existence of absolute values. This argument is based on C.S. Lewis’s powerful book, The Abolition of Man. Examples of such values would be supporting our close family members, taking care of children and the aged, being generous to those in need, refraining from anger and murder, respect for the remains of the dead, fidelity in marriage, fair dealing in commerce—the list goes on.
These values occur in records of moral exhortation across the globe. Lewis quotes ancient Egyptian sources, Hindu records, the Torah and the New Testament, among others. They are exhortations because we as humans don’t always live up to these values. The particular societal rules embodying them will vary in detail. But such values are fundamental. We need to teach them to our young, and to do our best to frame a just society in which they are bedrock.
MORAL ABSOLUTES
In the essay “Moral Absolutes and Relativism,” Gideon writes:
Belief in absolute morality means belief in certain fundamental principles that are universal and unquestionable, premises that cannot be proven and are not subject to discussion. Example: Justice is good. There’s no gray there. Accept this premise, you are a moral absolutist, and then we can discuss how best to achieve justice in this or that situation. …The challenge of human life is how to apply these universals in particular situations without betraying any of them.
Set against this we have the belief held by many that
but for the accident of life the universe is a void and human beings are themselves responsible for all illusions of meaning, illusory meaning being the only meaning possible.
And yet, as Gideon writes,
All rights are built upon the same foundation: faith in the sacredness of life, the brotherhood of man, the virtues of justice, kindness, and compassion that are taught us by our religious traditions—just those values about which mere nature at its work neither knows nor cares.
It is bracing and occasionally startling to see the confrontation of these two views in Gideon’s essays and reviews. The reviews can be challenging to read. Gideon finds much to criticize in modern art and literature—and who shall gainsay him? The reviews were always worth reading and gave me a new perspective on their subjects.
HUMILITY IN THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
Note that Gideon is affirming the existence of absolute values in a humble way, understanding that we have to explore these values and work out their application without falling into the trap of righteous certainty.
We know that truth exists, even though no one person can know all truth and a lifetime is not long enough to know very much for absolutely certain. …Nevertheless, as Socrates said and exemplified, we must never give up on pursuing the truth. In that pursuit, even if we fail, we shall become better human beings than those who, daunted by the impossibility of complete success, never even try.
STUDENTS WRITE BACK
It is a pleasure to read letters from former students in this volume, with Gideon’s replies. Here is the former student who wrote about a college course on anthropology:
My big problem with the course is that it presents humans as advanced apes, and scientifically proves that fact…Another theory is that the selfish survive and prosper, taken from the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins uses compelling evidence that “selfish” people will prosper in the world. That seems very dismal to me.
Gideon replies:
Human beings depend on genes, but they are not genes. They have the freedom and capacity and duty to choose, and they have been shown what the alternatives are. They have been shown that the choice for goodness, kindness, justice, and love fulfills their nature, whereas the choice for evil, cruelty, selfishness, and hate wars against their nature.
Another student wrote:
You’ve campaigned for years on the importance of absolute morality and frowned upon relative morality. However, numerous times when your opinion is asked on something such as homosexuality, abortion, etc. you state that such are too complicated to give a yes or no answer to. It’s almost as though you are stating that one cannot see the world in black and white but shades of gray. That seems like moral relativism to me. Please elucidate.
Gideon’s response:
“Absolute morality” never meant totally clear black-and-white solutions to all particular moral problems. “Relative morality” never meant recognizing that sometimes the right moral path is not clear.
Science and religion
Gideon is very cogent on science and religion. This will give a taste of the many excellent comments in the book:
Science and religion relate us to different aspects of reality. Science looks at what things materially are and how they physically work; religion involves us in purpose and meaning. …To imagine that science disproves religion is to be intellectually confused.
I am reminded of Nicholas Spencer’s observation in his book Magisteria:
Science and religion are partially overlapping magisteria. They overlap within us.
MARY HOLMES, “THE RETURN OF AQUARIUS”
In a welcome burst of color, the book includes reproductions of a seven-panel painting by Mary Holmes, “The Return of Aquarius,” housed in our alma mater, Cowell College of the University of California Santa Cruz. Gideon describes how Mary taught that
myth was never meant to explain phenomena as science means to explain them. Rather the mythic story is the only way we human beings have to communicate effectively about the realities of the inner life, the life of the emotions, the life of the spirit, which is impossible to communicate in words.
In the face of the spiritual dryness of our modern sensibility, Mary affirmed the human spirit brilliantly and unforgettably for her students. Readers who are interested can learn more about this remarkable teacher at maryholmes.org.
THE MORAL LAW WITHIN ME
Of course, if one posits the existence of absolute values, the question arises, where do they come from? I am reminded of the famous words of Emmanuel Kant:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Gideon affirms the existence of the Divine as the source of our being. Early on he says to his students:
Every work I will teach you this year I teach because I know it can become, for a moment, a small window on the vast, unfathomable, living reality of which we are all parts—a revelation of the divine.
He closes the book with these words:
In short, if God is not the source of reason, of truth, of beauty, of goodness, of our capacity to appreciate these things, and of our own longing for them, then we cannot know anything. And correlatively, only faith in that divine unity behind what can be seen by human beings can serve as any foundation for reasonable argument.
DO THE YOUNG NEED EDUCATING?
My husband Lew’s response to this question, many years ago, is brilliantly demonstrated in High School Homilies. Gideon writes,
Students are ignorant, self-indulgent, and impulse-driven, as well as unique individuals. To leave them to their own devices as individual learners is to sell them down the river of impulse and desire and to sacrifice a shared vision of the meaning of their time, place, society, nation, civilization, and species.
It’s only fair to say that I did not agree, and the reader will not agree, with every point Gideon makes. But Gideon’s high school students, and we readers today, are fortunate to have this deep and moving book as an affirmation of what it means to be a human being, and to be passionate about educating the young, and about our human future.
Gideon Rappaport’s other books include the fascinating and wide-ranging Appreciating Shakespeare, his scholarly annotated edition William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, reviewed in this magazine here, and Shakespeare’s Rhetorical Figures: An Outline. Gideon’s Appreciating Shakespeare is now an audio book, read by the author. Available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.
Ann G. Macfarlane is a former diplomat and Russian translator who now provides education on effective meetings using Robert’s Rules of Order at her website, jurassicparliament.com. She is the author of Mastering Council Meetings: A Guidebook for Elected Officials and Local Governments.