The prostitution of thinking

On the lost idea of the university

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

C. S. Lewis, Introduction to Athanasius: On the Incarnation.

If you want to think deeply, it makes sense to set aside a little spot in the world and time to visit that spot for that purpose. If you want co-conspirators, recognising the simple insight (poetically stated) that iron sharpens iron, making that little spot in the world a bit bigger, a bit roomier, is a good idea. Why not create what the philosopher William Desmond calls a “Sabbath for thought.”

This is very roughly stated, of course, but, along these lines, we might begin to understand how reasonable it is that universities came to exist. All of us know how quickly practical living intrudes upon the mind, and how easy it is to attend to the demands of the day without giving any attention to the meaning of it all. Yes, we can delve into the history of the university; we explore details concerning how well and badly they have been set up, how they have been run, who has been allowed to participate in university life, and so on. But this is not my aim here. I want to take a very brief moment to consider something of the idea of the university.

My interest in the subject is personal. I am a professor, after all, at a large South African University. Like Nietzsche, I was given the role of lecturer when I was 24, a while before I’d completed my PhD. So while I am still relatively young, although fast hurtling towards the age at which Nietzsche lost his mind completely, I have been in the game for nearly two decades. And so I have seen how much has changed. Although the more severe changes have been recent, the seeds of these changes were sown long ago, long before you and I were born. I have in mind the many amazing gifts of this world I am fortunate to inhabit but I am also thinking of the many ways I have seen a very good thing corrupted. I don’t mean just here where I work but everywhere I encounter scholars who love learning and teaching.

Universities face a crisis of legitimacy. I am constantly surprised that my colleagues don’t notice it, both at my university and at other universities. If I ask them what they think of the various crises we face in higher education, the list will be long and involved. They’ll think of money and technology and bureaucracy, for instance. But the crisis of legitimacy, the fact that universities no longer carry much authority when it comes to presenting a sane and sensible face to the world, is invisible to most of them. When I gesture towards this crisis, many colleagues are confused or shocked. Why weren’t they told about this by upper management?

Of course, there have always been people who have denounced university professors and graduates, often for being overly pedantic in their learning and irritating in their eccentricities. The divide between university types and non-university types, as if those are the only types available, has often been a subject in many cultural texts. Dostoevsky gestures towards this, for example, in a few of his novels; and I think of the old film Educating Rita, released in 1983 and based on Willy Russell’s play of 1980, which deals with some of the ‘class’ tensions that arise when the university becomes a kind of Pygmalion-like entity, transforming an honest working-class hairdresser into an annoyingly pretentious scholar.

But it seems to me that this old division, this ‘class’ concern, has changed so dramatically that it has almost disappeared. Now that high-school kids are babbling queer theory concepts at their superiors and non-university students have adopted various other scholarly tics, thanks largely to the contribution of the internet to the democratisation of trained ignorance, it has become manifestly obvious to a lot of people that universities aren’t houses of learning but propaganda factories. The basic intuition that we need bounded spaces and times for deep thinking is no less correct but something has certainly gone wrong if universities are seen, not unjustifiably, as not just antagonistic to good thinking but also as antagonistic to good living.

I am with GK Chesterton in believing that if you want to understand what has gone wrong with anything, the first thing you need is an “unpractical” man; you need a theorist with a clear idea of what is right. You need an idealist who has an ideal by which wrongness can be measured and interpreted. One such measure would be the one offered by John Henry Newman, in his famous book published while he was the Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1852, called The Idea of the University. The book is actually a collection of two books, derived from various source materials. It deals with three main themes around university life, namely the nature of knowledge, the role of religious belief in higher education, and the importance of liberal education. 

There is an awful lot to be said for what Newman argues and I’m not here to thump you on the head with a thesis. His argument is two-pronged and concerns, first, defending a liberal education, which prioritises the development of the individual intellect over more technical concerns like institutional measurement and practical skill development; and, second, the importance of genuine intellectual diversity, which allows different perspectives to converse and collide to deepen understanding.

But let’s just briefly focus on the premise of the first line of argument. Newman defends knowledge for its own sake, as something precious over and above any utilitarian or vocational end. Knowledge is intrinsically valuable; it elevates everyone at every level, no matter how useless it ends up being. Perhaps, the more useless it is, the better because then it is about awareness which is the very means by which we are open to the world. If you want to become a well-rounded, balanced plumber, for instance, read Shakespeare, visit art galleries, keep a journal of your daily observations and reflect on the various movements of your soul as you do so. You will become a large-souled human being, who just happens to be a plumber. Very importantly, the practical value of knowledge ought to be a byproduct of its inherent value. So, let’s say your plumbing might become more aesthetically pleasing as a result of your studies of the art of Michelangelo. Wonderful! But this is not the point of attending to the work of that genius. The attending is the point.

Along with defending the intrinsic value of knowledge, Newman also argues that a university should cultivate a philosophical habit of mind. This involves teaching students not just the pesky facts but how to think about everything in general: to reason logically, to analyse, to synthesise, and to form a coherent view of the world. The aim should be integrative knowledge, not fragmentary knowledge.

Other ideas accompany these. Knowledge should aim at unity, theology ought to be a central discipline, and education should remain profoundly personal—it should involve direct encounters not just with thoughts but with real, embodied thinkers. Moreover, intellectual virtues should be developed, as should virtues in general, and scholars should aim at a gentlemanly ideal, which updates the old ideals of noble knighthood. Newman has men in mind, clearly, which makes historical sense, but the point applies to anyone now who has higher learning as their goal. We should all strive to be the best people we can be, and university education should help with this.

Implicit in all of this is Newman’s utterly correct assumption that as soon as utilitarianism takes over, we are no longer dealing with a university as a manifestation of the idea of the university. Rather, we are dealing with its counterfeit. While treasuring knowledge for its own sake prepares us for life, treating knowledge as some mere means to an end prepares us only for that end, and shrinks the aspirations of the means. The end (doing) doesn’t justify the means (knowing) but radically alters its character. To be clear, none of this is said to repudiate action. It is to place action within its right context. If I act in any way, my actions ought to manifest who I am. But in a utilitarian world, I would exist only for the sake of the action.

There is a basic principle, discussed with particular clarity in the work of René Guenon, that lower values or principles ought to serve higher ones. This seems simple and intuitive enough. The point rests on a basic fact of human nature; that we will all inevitably have some or other ultimate concern. We cannot escape bowing before something. If we do not bow to God, we will find some idol to bow to—this is the great and indispensable insight of the first of the Ten Commandments. But what happens when we adopt a lower ideal (say, the practical) is that we end up with chaos.

Here’s a silly example. Imagine you look at a tyre on a car and you notice that it has a puncture. You think, “My goodness, how terrible! How did this happen?” You investigate further. You discover, to your horror, that the tyre got the puncture because it is attached to a car. “Abominable!” you think. The car was driving around and the tyre encountered a nail. So you say, “Aha, this is easy. Let’s do away with cars! That way, tyres won’t be going anywhere that it might be dangerous for them.” Someone tells you that it’s not so simple. “You see,” says the someone in question, “people need to get around, and cars are one of the main ways they do this. “This is appalling,” you say. “Unacceptable! People have got to go! If we get rid of people, we’ll have no cars, and tyres will be fine.” Aside from the logical traps, this wildly misleading fictional version of you keeps walking into, you now have an imaginative, albeit ridiculous, sense of what happens when a lower thing (the tyre in this case) gets to have more value or weight than a higher thing (the car, and the people driving the car).

A more realistic, far more sordid example of such chaos is prostitution, which I’d take as an analogy for what happens to universities when utility trumps the depths of intrinsic value. It is a classic case of a lower thing overruling higher ideals. Sex, which ought to intensify and symbolise connection (marriage) and manifest the human contribution to the world (procreation), becomes a mere end in itself—a lower thing raised to a supposedly higher status. In the process, what should have been the outflow of the profoundest human encounter, the glorious witness of the life of another and one’s own life through another, becomes merely a way to scratch an itch. No one is humanised by the animalistic embrace that prostitution affords. No one is drawn towards their best selves when they place themselves at the mercy of disordered desires. To put it bluntly, what is meant by prostitution is not communion or contribution but a mere transaction that amounts to theft. Everyone is impoverished by it. There is nothing about this degrading thing that is good, nothing that grants dignity to anyone.

Well, the university has prostituted itself, not totally but to such a degree that it is now being noticed. It has given itself over to utilitarianism, often in the form of activist scholarship but in other merely practical endeavours as well. Universities have entire service departments geared towards ensuring their relevance and use, as well as their marketability. It is not surprising that some scholars, members and ambassadors of universities have advocated for the elevation of prostitution to the level of so-called sex work. May Freud be endlessly reviled for his part in making this socially acceptable. After tearing down the ideal, the post-Freudians elevate the un-ideal. Feminists and legal scholars use sociological, economic, and health-and-safety perspectives to say, in effect, that this is just what people have chosen and we should make it as safe as possible—as if mere choice is a good thing, as if ‘as long as nobody gets hurt’ is a solid enough guide for ethics. Questions of what a person is, what it means to be human, how we can elevate ourselves to higher excellencies and goods—such questions are not asked. Academia becomes, for many, just being busy with repudiating metaphysical concerns in the name of trivialities.

The moment you subordinate the higher thing to the lower thing, it is nearly impossible, although thankfully not entirely impossible, to correct the inversion. And this is precisely where the university finds itself now. Now that all kinds of subtle reorderings have taken place, we are left with universities everywhere that are forced to justify their existence on grounds that do not conform to the essence of what a university is. The idea of the university is widely forgotten. Universities must now be economically viable, apparently, as if money should tell me what thoughts are worth thinking or not, or they must prove themselves good for the workplace, the industry, capitalism, wokism, and the government. We need to get more students to study, to make classes bigger, to democratise education for the sake of the workforce. Form very soon starts to follow funding. If you don’t serve God, you end up serving Mammon.

The moment you submit the higher to the lower, you are choosing the lower to measure the higher. This is like choosing prostitution to measure marriage. And by the terrible standard of prostitution, marriage fails for having not nearly enough misery and self-abasement in it. By the terrible standard of economic and practical viability, to take a parallel example, the pursuit of learning for its own sake fails. No wonder humanities departments are being shut down across the world. They don’t make money! Excellence has become the slave of efficiency. Thought has become the slave of bureaucracy.

The crisis of legitimacy in universities is, of course, ultimately a crisis brought on by the simple fact that universities aren’t acting like universities. People know this unconsciously but it needs to be explicitly stated. Universities have, if not totally then at least to an alarming degree, forgotten their essence. They’re acting exactly like factories. The only real way to reverse the trend is the economically risky one, which is to demand that the higher aims are precisely the ones that remind us of our deepest humanity; and that these higher aims are so valuable that they are worth wasting money on; they are worth squandering time on. The unpractical man is valuable. The useless thought is priceless. It is the useless things that give life value.

As this would suggest, perhaps the great lesson of the crisis of legitimacy in universities is that it is symbolic of a much larger crisis. This has been named in various ways, the crisis of meaning being one of the more popular names for the phenomenon. It is a crisis of values, a crisis of not knowing what we are here for. While it is instructive to return to Newman on the idea of the university, even this act of looking back at an old text is a reminder that many of the crises we face are crises we face because we have forgotten old truths. One of the great problems in universities has been their obsession with novelty, with endlessly seeking out so-called new knowledge. In its reductive sense, which is its typical sense, this is a tragedy. Because novelty satisfies only for a short time before seeking out some other novelty becomes necessary. The deeper role of any institution is to revive and renew the old things, to “seek the ancient paths,” as the prophet Jeremiah writes.

Well, the seemingly new human problems are arisings that have become inevitable because we have forgotten the old solutions. One of the very meanings of tradition is that it is a solution to problems that we have forgotten are problems, which is why it must mean preserving fire rather than hoarding ashes. This applies to all of life, though, and not just to universities. Academies started and many are arising even now to combat the trends of institutional corruption in universities because preserving fire means feeding it and feeding it takes time and space.

If you want to think deeply, I said, it makes sense to set aside a little spot in the world and time to visit that spot to do that. But then that little spot needs to be defended so that the concerns of others who care nothing for deep understanding start to encroach and overwhelm it; so that the purity and nobility of the intention that created that spot in the world can be protected. But I suppose that if you have money lenders and money-changers invading your sacred space, like the money lenders and money-changers in the Temple, perhaps it rests on you, as it certainly does on me, to make a whip and drive them out. How this happens will require the wisdom of serpents and the meekness of doves but certainly what is vital is an absolutely clear idea of what it is that we are supposed to be doing. Before we get to the practical stuff, we need to be as “unpractical” as we can be.