Renovo: The Catholic Higher Education Blog

One of the things that concerns me about the proliferation of technology in academia is the effect it has on our ability to produce a sustained and systematic reflection on a subject or topic. We have become accustomed to reading and producing  short, pithy and underdeveloped thoughts, rather than long, complex, and carefully crafted arguments.

This concern of mine is not just abstract, but personal.  My own ability to write sustained pieces seems to have suffered in the last few years.  I started blogging in 2002.

Some schools limit the use of technology.  They emphasize  reading real books and face-to-face classroom (and cafeteria) interaction.  Others have become “laptop” campuses. It would be interesting to see an empirical study of the effect that the choice to go one way or the other has on scholarship.

Fr. Bevil Bramwell, O.M.I.,  has written an article called “Catholics & Digital Technology” for The Catholic Thing,  on the limits of technology for the development of intellectual habits.  One of the points he makes, referring to the work of Nicholas Carr, is the lack of attention to interiority in web browsing and surfing:

As Carr put is: “when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning.” Note that word “promotes” – the technology encourages this lesser kind of functioning. He says that we can operate differently but the technology makes us tend not to operate this way. A human being needs to mull things over, to think through the steps of an argument and to be in awe of the infinite horizon that opens before our search. Mary “pondering these things in her heart” is just one such example of a deeply functioning human being. She pondered to see the good in her son’s mission.

In a recent piece on All Things Considered,  Brent Baughman interviewed Charles Hill, a former high-ranking diplomat and Yale professor. Hill, advisor to the likes of Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, bemoaned the fact the world leaders rely less and less on classic literature to form their understanding of human nature, and therefore to ground their policies and strategies. As Hill said, “These works of literature do tell you about human nature. How you think about human nature is a major starting point for a grand strategist.”  As an example, he cited the ironic fact that even after the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong had and continued to read voraciously an extensive library of classic works.

The specific value that Hill sees in classic literature, from Homer to Dante to the Three Musketeers, is that it views reality as a whole, and not just as a collection of isolated and only extrinsically related entities:

Mr. HILL: Literature is pre-departmental. It’s an art form that comes before intellectual institutions began to carve up the world of the intellect and put it into categories.

BAUGHMAN: And what does he mean by that? Well, imagine you’re in a big empty room and all the things leaders need to know about – politics – they’re all separate – history. They don’t really interact with each other – just kind of off in their own little worlds – religion and psychology.

And these things, Charlie Hill says, are separated by rules of modern productivity, boundaries that say everyone should be an expert in one thing and one thing only.

Mr. HILL: But leaders recognize that the problems they face don’t have these boundaries around them. Any problem that comes in front of you is going to have all of these factors overlapping and jumbled together.

…

BAUGHMAN: And that’s what happened. That’s why not very many world leaders read classics anymore. Everything became too separate. And if you’re a leader with all the specialized experts at your feet, why bother with classics trying to fit everything together in your own head?

Here is an  essay about Hill from the Yale alumni magazine  by a former students of his, Molly Worthen.  His course, taught to freshmen, focuses on classical literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

The course is intended to train generalists who can grasp the broad picture without glossing over details and who are brave enough to tackle uncomfortable questions of power, war, and human life. The syllabus is predicated upon the belief that there are foundational ideas by which the world’s great leaders have governed states and led armies to battle, and that these ideas remain relevant today.

Many Catholic universities talk about developing leaders; their success may depend on the extent to which the university integrates these future leaders into the great conversation about human nature.

Among the values that a genuinely Catholic education can exhibit is the integration of the various disciplines (or, to use the medieval term, sciences).  Newman strongly defended the unity of knowledge.

[A]ll branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator. Hence it is that the Sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast, have multiplied bearings one on another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment. (Idea of a University, Discourse Five).

Newman calls this ability to develop a “master view of things” a philosophical habit.

The purpose of a core curriculum is not only to give students a smattering of contact with a variety of disciplines, but to help them develop this philosophical habit.

The fact that Mao was a reader of the classics, of course, warns us that a classic education is not enough. Especially in our fallen state we need the assistance of revelation to fully understand our human nature and destiny. Hence the important and central role of theology in a Catholic education.