The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane at Hypocrisy.com

It’s was always a bit startling to me to hear a student from Oxford or Cambridge say, “I’m reading ancient history” or “I’m reading Victorian literature.”  A statement of that kind is light years away from the basic orientation of the typical student in an American college or university.  There one hears, “I’m majoring in recreation management.”  (“Majoring”; another noun turned into a verb.)  The image that springs to mind is that of one of those semi-professional athletes managing to take a little time away from the football field to go to the gym and practice blowing a whistle and yelling, “Hey, listen up, you guys!”  I happen to know that one superstar running back, when he was at a Pennsylvania university (not Penn State; Joe Paterno still has standards, I hear), never attended a class in his four years there.  The arrangement was that his profs would give him Cs, but that he would not graduate.  When he arrived in the NFL he had to have tutors to help him learn the playbook.

When I began attempting to teach at what was then considered one of the three best Christian liberal arts colleges in the country, and was immediately in trouble essentially for trying to impose some academic standards in my courses, an older colleague pointed out, “This is a student-driven institution, and you’re expected to mollycoddle them.”  Another colleague remarked, “Don’t lower your standards.  Just lower your expectations,” but I knew that if I followed that advice I’d give all Fs.

At the end of the academic year the vice president for academic affairs (whatever happened to “dean”?)  called me to his office to explain that the tide of student opinion was running so strongly against me that he felt I should look for another position.  He explained that I was a scholar, and that this was a teaching institution, so I didn’t belong there.

What was that again?

Here is the sort of thing that was happening:  I was teaching second-year Spanish, and one day I called on a student to do a simple transformation during a drill.  He asked, “What kind of word is that second one there?”

I answered him, “That’s an adjective.  You do know what an adjective is, don’t you?”  I almost felt as if it were unkind to ask such an insulting question; mollycoddling, you understand.  He admitted that he didn’t know one part of speech from another because he had never studied English grammar.  My head was swimming at that point, because the next topic in the textbook was “Uses of the Imperfect Subjunctive in Adverbial Clauses of Purpose and Proviso.”

When I expressed my surprise, he said, “I’ll bet almost no one in the class has studied English grammar.”  I called for a show of hands, and virtually all of them went up.  The image of a flight school for pigs sprang to mind.  My job was to teach Spanish to students who had no clue about how English works.  Oh, yes, and to teach Hispanic literatures to students who were barely capable of reading Dick and Jane.

On another day, an alleged student asked me what tense a verb in his sentence was in.  I told him and then reminded him that he had, after all, studied that tense the previous semester.  He retorted sharply that he could not be held responsible for anything presented in a previous semester.  I told him to try that one on the Math Department and then come back so we could talk about it.  In other words, the concept of actually learning something was foreign to him.

Back to those Oxbridge people.  When they said they were “reading” in the various areas, they meant that they were expected to prepare themselves, under the guidance of their tutors, for some tough final examinations.  The fundamental way to accomplish this was to do copious readings of the pertinent texts.  Lectures on the various topics would be made available by professors who were first of all research-oriented scholars.  In the beginning, a university was a place where scholars got together to offer guidance to young men, and later women as well, who wanted to become educated.  (And yes, I’m well aware of the wild partying that went on the Middle Ages too.)

Actually, I believe it was Socrates who said education was a student on one end of a log and a student on the other.  So much for billion-dollar campuses.

Become educated?  What an antiquated notion.  In chapel at the above-mentioned college, one speaker asked the seniors in the front rows why they were there.  To a person they answered, “To get a degree.”  I was assured by a more experienced faculty member that anyone answering, “To get an education” would have been disgraced.

As a corollary, faculty members are expected to be oriented towards getting passing grades from their students in the form of evaluations.  At a university where I taught, I was on the Promotion and Tenure Committee when a friend of mine came up for promotion.  His student evaluations were stellar, but another professor, who had taken over a popular linguistics course of his, pointed out that his course was set up so that the students could cheat, and that he gave all A’s.  Ironically, the professor who pointed that out had a course of her own that ran on a point system weighted so heavily in favor of class attendance that someone noticed that a dog could be enrolled and, if it wandered into the classroom each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, would pass the course.

I can’t confirm it, but I have read twice of a study in which it was determined that only 30% of US college graduates can even read a label and understand what it says.  Surprised?  Come, now; these are the future leaders of America?  Or are they the present leaders?  Maybe this explains why our Congress gets a satisfaction rating of 9% and some of us wonder how it got that high.

It is highly hypocritical of us even to keep calling these diploma mills “institutions of higher learning.”  The reason we were instructed to mollycoddle those synthetic students at that student-driven institution was that if we didn’t they would go to another school where they would be mollycoddled, and take their parents’ money with them.  Our school would fold and we would be out of a job.  And that’s the bottom line.

I retired early.

Frustrated over a student who was bewildered on account of her bad grade and even more bewildered upon being told it was because she hadn’t read the text or taken notes in class, a colleague of mine in sociology remarked, “These kids don’t even understand process.”  That was in 1972, and it looks to me as if the phenomenon is a good deal more prominent now.  For that matter, back in 1927 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (now almost forgotten because he was overly conservative) predicted that succeeding generations would enjoy the benefits of a liberal democracy without taking into account what it had cost their forebears.  Ortega said they would take it for granted that the benefits of democracy were theirs in the course of nature.  Ominously, this was nine years before the unspeakable horrors of the Spanish civil war.

He was right.  This postmodern generation tends to reject history in general, and is thereby in danger of fulfilling the prophecy of Will Durant:  “Those who do not know history are forever condemned to repeat it.” History is written by the winners, we’re told, and the implication is that it is therefore invalid.

Colombian author Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal once said, “History is written by the winners.  We losers write poetry.”  Shortly thereafter he was thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge and barely escaped with his life.  I’m anxious to see how the winners, i.e., the Colombian oligarchy, write that up, and what his “poetry” on the issue looks like.

So for this generation the lessons of the past are not lessons at all.  As a San Francisco high school instructor put it, “We don’t teach facts.  We teach concepts.”  The problem is that in such a case any idea of the past whatsoever is as good as any other.  A mind-boggling case in point is that of a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara who remarked to my hypocrisy.com colleague Richard Cochrane that he was going to vote for Obama because he could be counted on to change the policies that caused us to drop atomic bombs on Japan so Japan had to retaliate by bombing Pearl Harbor.  These, he said, were the same policies that led England to invade Germany and cause World War II to break out in Europe.

Well, at least the chowderhead believes in cause and effect.  Just has it backwards is all, but you can’t expect too much these days.  Many in his generation have lost touch with that esoteric concept.  (Why doesn’t someone put billiards in the curriculum?)  Also in Santa Barbara, I noticed a large banner in a private school that read, “Actions have consequences.”  What a novel concept to teach the kids!  Living in the South as I now do, I marvel at the number of people, and mostly people who can’t afford it, who smoke.  The facts are out there:  cause, smoking; effect, early death.  But facts don’t have much impact on this generation.  As another professor put it, there are no facts.  There are only opinions.  That goes for process and cause and effect as well, one presumes.

Perhaps this is why a writer in the Atlantic a few years ago introduced the term “apocalyptic nihilism” to the magazine’s readers.  He had heard it voiced by social workers dealing with a rash of senseless teenage killings in Vermont around that time.  The kids said they were murdering people just to get their names in the news.  They felt that the world has no future, and therefore they have no future, so why not at least attract some attention?

We’re getting chillingly close to the attitude of Albert Camus’s protagonist, Meursault, in The Stranger.  Meursault sees no continuity, no process, no cause and effect in one’s acts.  He makes love to the same woman once a week, but is mystified by the question whether he loves her.  He is equally bewildered when people are offended by his lack of emotion at his mother’s wake.  Finally he kills a man in cold blood on a beach, and when he is put on trial he has no idea why.  But then, a couple of decades later, Thomas Pynchon’s narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow deals with the case of the classic paranoiac, who feels everything is connected and organized with regard to him- or herself.  Then he offers, “There is . . . also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

I’m not so sure.  In this election campaign it looks as if millions are in love with one image or another, without considering what the real issues might be, which means a lack of consideration for the effects that might follow the cause of electing only an image.  Both presidential candidates are promising change, but that’s just a bit hypocritical.  It’s a little like saying, “I promise that if you drink Liquid Plum’r you’ll get a real flavor sensation.”  In either case you just might not like it.

Me?  When I’m watching the World Series on television and a manager goes out to confer with his pitcher and catcher I’m afraid they’re talking about me.

“Calvinist by Free Choice” is a sign illustrating my last entry at this website. It’s a clever little piece of tomfoolery, because everyone knows Calvinists don’t believe in free choice, right?

Wrong.

As the conundrum is expounded by Jonathan Edwards, whom many even in the secular world hold to have been the greatest of all American philosophers, we humans have freedom, but not free will.

Got that? Think it’s double-talk? I once angered a hyper-Calvinist pastor by challenging his statement, “You don’t have any choice about whether you’re saved or not.” The fact that John Calvin was abundantly clear on the biblical doctrine that “whosoever will may come” failed to move him.

In any case, Calvin only wrote about a page and a half in his Institutes of the Christian Religion on predestination, which comes as a shock to many who, never having read him, take him to be the ogre of determinism. Calvinism might be the most misunderstood ideology in the world. Calvin’s view, as expounded by Edwards in his masterful Freedom of the Will, holds that every person has the ability to make choices, in other words, possesses the freedom to choose, but that each choice is determined by all the influences working on that person.

John Calvin, who had been expected to become one of the greats of French jurisprudence, laid down a principle for winning an argument:  Determine the most essential point of the issue under dispute and hammer away at it until your opponent has nowhere left to stand. In Freedom of the Will, Edwards does exactly that. The entire text consists of a close examination of a single act of the will. Edwards asks whether the person in question can be said to choose A or B without anything influencing that choice. In other words, is that will absolutely free to choose either alternative, without being moved in one direction or the other by anything at all, internal or external? He attempts to demonstrate that an affirmative answer is patently absurd because the free will advocate is postulating an effect without a cause. It is fairly obvious to most of us that any decision is moved by all the factors within the chooser’s psychological makeup.
Nevertheless, the person facing a choice is free to make that choice, and as such is responsible for it. Yes, says Edwards, this leaves us in an unresolvable mystery involving how a person can be condemned for making a choice determined by all the factors that have influenced his or her tendencies, but any other approach to the problem leads to difficulties which are as bad or worse.
Recently an individual with apparently solid credentials as an American historian made the statement that Calvinists are the most insecure of people because they believe it is impossible for anyone to know whether he or she is among the elect.  Curiously, Roman Catholics have traditionally faulted Calvinists for believing the exact opposite. To the Catholic it appears that the true Calvinist is arrogant in declaring his or her assurance of salvation. The truth is that Calvin taught that the appropriation of salvation by faith on the part of an individual constitutes proof that the individual is among the elect. Furthermore, he answered his Catholic critics, there is no arrogance to the acceptance of such an assurance, because the believer has done absolutely nothing to merit that salvation.
Still, the truth is that in colonial times in America the Calvinism that the Puritans and Separatists had brought from England decayed into what we call hyper-Calvinism, in which people really did believe they had no choice, and that no one could know who was among the elect. They came to believe that one had to prove one’s election to oneself and the community by being a diligent, hard-working person. Since such an attitude normally led to a certain affluence, that theory in turn deteriorated into a belief that the rich were good and the poor were bad. Needless to say, an enormous amount of damage was done by this ideology, because many came to believe the poor were unworthy of being helped or even treated with dignity.
Ironically, Marxism eventually crept into American thinking by degrees, with the result that quite often we are confronted with the idea that the poor are good and the rich are bad. The film Titanic is an excellent example. About the only upper class individual who is viewed in a positive light is the one who symbolically descends to steerage and dances and celebrates with the pure and innocent proletariat.
Neither of these extremes is anything but false and dangerous, of course, and Calvinism in its genuine form rejects them. I recall my first sight of a Presbyterian church in Bristol, Tennessee, a traditional one in that its membership was largely upper middle class. As I drove up I noticed that a very poorly dressed man was walking up the stairs. He was warmly welcomed and ushered in, as I recall, by the vice mayor, a judge and the CEO of the local Coca Cola bottling plant. That is genuine Calvinism in practice.
As an Orthodox Presbyterian friend wrote yesterday, “I’m thankful that God chose me and then freed me and empowered me to choose him.”

A few years ago I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem with a group of Presbyterians.  “God’s frozen people” or not, a lot of tears were shed by those Calvinists, especially as we walked through the room dedicated to the children who were killed, whose names were continuously read through the speakers.  I dreaded hearing the name Samelson because I had heard from an older brother how their mother had chosen to go and die with her five-year-old girl rather than let her die alone at Treblinka.

One of the first “Righteous Gentiles” to be honored at the memorial was a Polish lady named Irena Sendler.  She had been a public health official in Warsaw during the Second World War, and so had access to the ghetto on account of an outbreak of tuberculosis or typhoid; sources differ.  She convinced many of the Jewish families to let her smuggle their children out and place them with Catholic families or in Catholic institutions, removing them in burlap sacks, caskets or whatever came to hand.  (Just imagine the terror of those children.)  She gave them new names and identity papers, but papers with their true identities were hidden under an apple tree in her yard.

Unfortunately, in the nature of the case not many of the parents survived to find those children.

Eventually—no doubt inevitably—she was caught by the Gestapo, imprisoned and mercilessly tortured, yet she refused to reveal the names of those working with her.  She managed to escape when a sympathetic organization bribed some guards.  One wonders how those guards managed to elude execution for letting prisoners go.  In all she managed to save some 2500 Jews, but she confessed that every day of her life she agonized over not having saved more.

One of the beautiful things that came out of her dedication was that when she was in a hospital later in life she was cared for by one of the people whose lives she had saved.

To my knowledge, hypocrisy first entered the scene when, in 1965, she was asked to visit Jerusalem to be honored at the Yad Vashem Memorial, and the Communist government of Poland refused to let her go.  Only years later was she finally able to travel there and receive the award.  Perhaps more tellingly, she was nominated for a Nobel Prize.  She did not win the prize.  It was won by Al Gore for a film he made of a slide show.

Those of us who work with the literature of Latin America are accustomed to hearing of such injustice by the Nobel Committee with regard to the prize for literature.  Sometimes it has been won by third-rate writers, and we wondered why.  Then we realized that several Latin American authors in a row who won the prize had exactly one thing in common:  they had attacked the United Fruit Company.  Yes, there were a couple of excellent writers in there, namely Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez.  But who in his or her right mind would award the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Miguel Angel Asturias when Jorge Luis Borges, who influenced the literature of much of the world, was ignored?

The fact is that Borges was relatively conservative in his political views, and thus was among those essentially blacklisted by the committee.  The same is true of a writer I have mentioned before in this column, Alvaro Mutis, who, according to García Márquez, has been writing better than he has for a couple of decades now.  Mutis, as I have noted, is a monarchist.  Don’t ask for Vegas odds on whether a snowball has a better chance in hell than Mutis has of winning a Nobel.

At some point one might come to believe that the prestige of a given prize just might be compromised by its consistent political bias when dealing with artists.  Or one of the greatest of the real heroes of World War II, for that matter.

In the Middle Egyptian language there is one verb that means “to fare upstream” or “to fare southward,” and another bears the meaning, “to fare downstream” or “to fare northward.”  Those verbs worked perfectly well in the vicinity of the Nile, but when an Egyptian general issued an order using one of them as his troops were deployed next to the Jordan River, they didn’t know which way to go, since the Jordan flows south.  Military operations require unequivocal language.

The demise of the League of Nations was caused in part by the mistranslation of an expression from French into English.  The original stated that “la France demande . . . ,” which was translated as “France demands . . . .”  Many Americans felt that if, after we had bailed them out in World War I, the French were inclined to make demands, we weren’t interested in obliging them.  Demander in French actually means “to request.”

These are just a couple of examples of foulups in language that have made some difference in world history.  It should go without saying that great civilizations must take great care with their languages, using them with precision.  In fact, it has been noted that great civilizations tend to have complex languages—the Russians, the English and the Americans, for example.  The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges remarked that he would have preferred to write in English because, with both Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots, it lends itself to more subtlety of expression than does Spanish.

But at the present time it appears that precision in language is strictly optional.  The problem with this is that language structures thought, and if language is illogical or otherwise sloppy, thought too becomes chaotic.  I’ve noticed that the phase “just might” is almost always inverted today.  “Charlie might just wear a tie to the dance” has quite different connotations than “Charlie just might wear a tie to the dance.”  Or what about the tendency, perhaps based on the song, Nobody Does It Better, to say, “No gasoline cleans your car’s engine better than Chevron with Techron”?  That leaves open the possibility that every other gasoline on the market does it just as well.  “No other gasoline cleans your car’s engine as well . . . ” is not the same thing.

And then there are those lovely dependent clauses floating in space, looking for something to hang onto.  The best one I’ve come across was in a program on Russian rocketry.  In speaking of a particular rocket, the narrator said, “Launched into space three times, the factory that built it still exists.”

“Man, oh, man!,” I said to myself.  “Those Russian factories are formidable.”

Political correctness has also polluted the language, so that singular and plural become mixed up:  “Every person has their own viewpoint.”  Again I submit that when language becomes that dull, the thought expressed in it is not likely to be any sharper.  This goofiness has gone so far that the grammatical error in question is used even when there is no PC purpose for it:  “Each individual species has their own way of dealing with this challenge.”

Oh, but it gets better.  Sometimes an egregious error is made in an attempt to sound sophisticated.  I heard a college president with a Ph.D. in English begin a speech with “This has been an interesting summer for my wife and I.”

That is about as bad as a classic I heard uttered by a first grade teacher:  “Me and her was gonna do that.”  There are four errors in the first four words.

Then there’s my personal favorite:  “these kinds of things” when “things of this kind” would be appropriate.  I get tired of shouting at the TV screen, “How many kinds of things are you referring to, idiot?”

Or how about what I call chain-link sentences?:  “That’s the problem with this team is that it has no running game.”

Many books have been sent to me with requests that I review them for one journal or another.  Some of them have interested me a great deal.  I recall one in particular, produced by a Jewish writer about the experience of his people in Colombia in the 1930s, when that country was one of two in the Americas that had concordats with the Vatican pledging that they would be purely and perpetually Roman Catholic.  I started reading the book with relish.  One image stuck out.  The narrator told of the Jews’ being so poor that the children were admitted free to a movie theater—but were only allowed to sit behind the screen.  This was their reality, the reverse of the accepted point of view in Colombia.

The problem with the book was that, despite the fact that the author was a native speaker of Spanish and held a Ph.D. degree in that language from an Ivy League university, the book contained thousands of errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation.  At one point a character wants to deny something, and says, “No, es verdad” (No, it’s true) instead of “No es verdad” (It’s not true).  I stopped reading and sent the book back to the book review editor of the journal in question.  Still, when I took a book manuscript of mine to a highly recommended typist and she introduced several thousand errors of the same kind (those kinds of errors?)  I began wondering whether that had happened to the Colombian writer as well.  But if so, where was the copy editor in all this?  Someone should have edited those errors out of the book.

Ours is an age when it seems accuracy is optional.  If “Me and her was gonna do that” gets the thought across, it’s acceptable—except in the business world, that is.  One growth industry is straightening up executives’ English usage.  Perhaps it’s time for primary school teachers to stop telling their pupils that grammar, punctuation and spelling don’t matter, that what matters is that they express themselves.  And it may also be time for university professors of English to stop claiming that there is no such thing as standard English.  Are we really to believe that “Me and her was gonna do that” is as correct as “She and I were going to do that”?  Just try speaking that way in your interview for a position in a serious business firm.

And, if I may be permitted just one business cliché, the bottom line here is that sloppy language does tend to reflect sloppy thinking.  We can’t afford that in a world of this kind.

Feel free to pick my little essays apart in search of errors in English usage.  However, if you find that I’ve ended a sentence with a preposition and call me on it, I’ll quote Winston Churchill:  “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”