Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education

Well known for his eccentric behavior at Dartmouth (such as sporting raccoon coats, using walking canes, sipping alcohol from a flask at football games, driving gas-guzzling cars, as well as for a wooden grabbing contraption used to great effect at faculty meetings), Jeffrey Hart here offers an eloquent defense of what others have called the permanent things. And the greatest defender of those things is education, which provides citizens the tools to recreate civilization if necessary.Hart argues, quite convincingly, that the motive force of Western civilization is the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, between secularism and faith. He devotes the first part of his book to the background of this idea and exploring it in early literary works. He compares Homer's epics, particularly The Iliad, to the early books of the Bible, which could properly be called The Mosead; Homer depicts the pursuit of warrior heroism and arete (excellence), while Moses represents the triumph of monotheism. In Socrates and Jesus (the latter of whom is given a literary reading), Hart locates shifts within the respective spheres. Socrates takes the Homeric pursuit of excellence and turns it into the pursuit of philosophy and truth. On the Jerusalem side, Jesus marks a movement from the outwardly oriented Mosaic Law toward a more internal sense of holiness. This first section--the explication of the Great Narrative--concludes with Paul, who represents a sort of synthesis between Athens and Jerusalem, bringing together Greek philosphy and Judeo-Christian religion.In the second section ("Explorations"), Hart traces these tensions throughout various works of literature, beginning with Augustine's Confessions, a work of interior exploration. Hart also treats Dante and Shakespeare, as well as the Enlightenment authors Moliere and Voltaire, who attempted to bring about a Jerusalem-to-Athens shift. Voltaire fairs exceedingly well in the analysis of this conservative writer. Hart admires in the Frenchman his wit and his energy and, indeed, acknowledges that the Englightment, whatever its flaws and ill consequences, is "indispensable." He concludes with a juxtaposed analysis of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. He offers a not entirely original argument of Raskolnikov as Hamlet ("Hamlet in St. Petersburg"), but his reading of Gatsby ("Faust in Great Neck") is both interesting and fascinating--Gatsby is a sort of magician and the work as a whole embodies magical transformation as the essence of modernity.In the Afterword, Hart presents a delightful and delicious skewering of multiculturalism and finishes on a note of optimism: that we are slowly returning to cognition rather than ideology in our institutions of learning. For that reason, and for Hart's book, we can smile through the cultural catastrophe.

As an autodidact who is often beguiled, misled, and exasperated by where my search for knowledge takes me, as well as by the poorly thought out and more poorly written books I often begin to read, I was pleased upon starting Hart's fine treatise to realize that I was holding a treasure. Hart can write, and his detailed overview of the salient works of the Western Literary Tradition sparkles with insight and knowledge, manifesting a fine mind and much careful research and deliberation of his subject. Buy it and read it; you'll be thrilled by what you learn!

Hart is obviously concerned, deeply concerned about certain trends in higher education which he perceives to be neither "higher" nor more "educational" than others. On the contrary, he views them as having resulted in a cultural "catastrophe." In the Preface, he recalls a professor of his at Dartmouth, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, who once asserted that "the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization." This is one of Hart's core concepts throughout the book. For him, the most central of narratives to explain history, "one which goes furthest, I think, in covering the facts, has been called 'Athens and Jerusalem.'" The former represents a philosophic-scientific approach to actuality, with the goal being cognition; the latter represents a scriptural tradition of disciplined insight and the aspiration to holiness.Hart was motivated to write this book because, as he explains, "....I sense that out across our nation, the dark fields of the republic as Nick Carraway called it, a growing number of students and professors long for something more serious and more lasting. Therefore my title [was selected] because of the intellectual force and civilizing energy of the indispensable works to be considered." He organizes his material within two Parts: "The Great Narrative" (focusing on the juxtaposition of "Athens and Jerusalem," Moses, Socrates, Jesus, and Paul) and "Explorations" (focusing on Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Moliere, Voltaire, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hart's primary objective in this book, as I see it, is to suggest how a rigorous consideration of what he calls the "Athens and Jerusalem" narrative can help to revive higher education from "the dark fields" in which it now finds itself. At this point, I'd like to share a few concerns of my own within the context of discussing Hart's book. First, according to substantial research, approximately 35% of public high school graduates are functional illiterates; the percentage is even higher among those who attempt to enlist in one of the military services. Second, other research studies indicate that approximately 90% of those now teaching in public schools will continue to do so through the year 2015. Finally, at least one research study of public schools in California suggests that only 35% of each hour in a classroom is devoted to completing an academic task of some kind. If these statistics are to be believed, even allowing for some variances of percentage, the "catastrophe" to which Hart refers has implications far beyond higher education. As indicated earlier, I share many of his concerns. Having taught for thirteen years in two New England boarding schools (Kent and St. George's) after earning a graduate degree in comparative literature at Yale and, more recently, being involved with the Aspen Institute's Exe

"Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe" is the summation of a career's worth of teaching for the noted scholar Jeffrey Hart. This is a cheerful book, but not in a blind, Panglossian way. Hart sees signs of revival everywhere in the academic world from the disaster of multiculturalism. It has been a disaster, and great damage has been done. But Hart demonstrates that Western civilization is big enough, *inclusive* enough, to survive and appeal to anyone who values reason and dialogue instead of hatred. The canon was never as closed as its critics contended. Both the faith of Paul and the skepticism of Voltaire can co-exist. There is a constant dialectic between Athens and Jerusalem, between empirical knowledge and the claims of faith. Hart writes clear, lucid prose; it's like you are in the classroom with a master teacher (and it's quite an contrast with the unreadable Derrida, Foucault, etc.) At the heart of this book is an examination of the power of Western thought to transform reality. He writes of Shakespeare's movement from the realpolitik and tragedy of the middle plays to the transcendance of "The Tempest", where contraries are reconciled and love triumphs. He writes about the "invention of love" in Dante's "Divine Comedy." My favorite chapter is about Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." It's a wholly original and exciting interpretation. Hart writes that "Gatsby" is a book about magic; Gatsby is a kind of sorcerer who can lift and redeem himself and the world. If you are curious about what your politically correct professors aren't telling you, pick this book up.

To Mr. Sullivan the school board member: If you had read the subtitle of the book, you would see that it refers to HIGHER ED. not K-12 ed. so the title was not misleading. You just failed to read what was written. Apparently ADD is rampant among American school board members as well as most government school attendees.Pity.