The university sits in a society where it is very late. The university sits in a society that is in large committed to the triad of might, wisdom and wealth. And in some measure the university, like the church, has colluded in that triad to its great benefit. The lateness of the hour invites the university, like the wayward son in a foreign country to come to its senses, to remember its home and its belonging and its vocation to live alertly and knowingly in a very late moment amid these competing triads of control and fidelity, knowing that both are powerful and both are compelling and both are indispensable.
But because the triad of control has carried the day in our society without much critical reflection it may be the great tilt of the university to give priority to the triad of fidelity that has nearly disappeared from the public face of our society as it did from the public face of Jerusalem.
It will be my purpose here to line out in as many was as I can think of, of the interface of these two triads that concerned the poet and it might usefully concern our society where it is very late. With our conference theme of Wisdom we engage two competing notions of wisdom. The wisdom of enlightenment control on the one hand and the other ancient wisdom that is rooted in the fear of the Lord. Two wisdoms that will yield two very different worlds. The wisdom of control we may call "fast wisdom" that assumes we are free to manage and shape and administer and master the world, and the wisdom of fidelity that I call "slow wisdom" that waits and watches and receives and yields and hopes.
Fast wisdom, now paced by electronic urgency, concerns knowing and having and possessing and controlling. Slow wisdom is about serious, engaged relatedness that will not be hurried. It matters decisively if the world is imagined by fast paced control that breeds greed and resentment or by slow paced wisdom that hosts complexity and refuses sound bites.
The task of the university, I suggest, is to mediate and adjudicate between these triads and by such mediation and adjudication to expose the risks and the hazards of the triad of control that has brought our society to the brink of default that is not only financial but moral.
Typing this out, the first thing that came to mind was the hastily done confirmation of the Notre Dame Law School, Federalist Society, trad-Catholic apparatchik Amy Coney Barrett, so as to put her on the court in record speed before Trump lost the election to the most Catholic President in our history, the president of that abominable and reputable institution, known among Catholics as a sort of "our Harvard" but mostly for its football program, the fungal bloom of the enlightenment triad of might, wisdom and wealth with its fast wisdom and fast and loose morals. The infamous super-spreader event of the vandalized Rose Garden in which Trump and others infected others, including the president of Notre Dame might serve as our Balthazar's feast, the hand having recorded its message in Scripture not choosing to repeat itself but saying it with Covid-19.
It is hard to see the common ground between the vulgar materialism of Trumpian, corporate, trad-Catholic and white evangelical promoted piety and the supposed high-brow variety of it but only because of the Victorian false fronting of the high-brow stuff, something they specialize at in the universities, the scribbling profession and the commercial arts - including the kind of high art that makes records at the big auction houses. But they really are the same thing. That is why the uniformly college-credentialed journalism we have has made such an easy pivot to going from being appalled at the antics of the Trump crime gang to giving far more negative coverage of President Joe Biden who is, if anything, too eager to do things the right way and, so, risk the dangers of letting the Trump mob get away with it only to try again next year. The Supreme Court on which Coney Barrett sits as one of its more unprepared members (her question in the Maine case yesterday is breathtakingly stupid) will do its part to destroy the vestiges of American electoral democracy on behalf of the party of vulgar materialism and will do it in the most authorized of university taught language. I will be surprised if much of any of those in academia who were in on the crimes of the Trump era will suffer much in the way of lost jobs or even damaging disrepute, many of the worst criminals of the George W. Bush regime went right from giving criminal advice to them on torture to some of our most esteemed universities. John Yoo, even the man General Tommy Franks said was "the dummest fucking guy on the planet," Douglas Feith was not sufficiently stupid AND DISASTEROUSLY WRONG so as to immediately have positions at the Jesuit university, Georgetown and Stanford, though, to the credit of their faculties, not without enormous controversy that exposed the corruption of the administrations of both schools and the heads of the various hiring branches of them. Then he went into the guess-pools, the "think tank" feed lots of the contented wise men of enlightenment control. I believe John Yoo, more intellectually respectable, though perhaps even more morally atrocious and dangerous, still has his job as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Where they don't seem to mind the stench.
Walter Brueggemann often makes a point of the great Jewish Prophets, that they were all uncredentialed, in many cases blue collar types if not lower on the socio-economic scale. None were lower than Jesus who we are about to commemorate as having been born in extremely unhygienic conditions of a barn - however you want to imagine what is described in Luke. His birth attended, not by kings, but by shepherds. Matthew has the kings in it and they don't get there till January 6th. It's not surprising that the most valuable insights into their society came from those with the least at stake in its upper crust. Those at the top might tell you lots of things, some of it might be somewhat honest but the chances are it'll be wisdom so calculated as to get them a piece of that might and power.
No comments:
Post a Comment