Labor, Leisure, & Liberal Education

 In support of this thesis, that liberal education is to be understood in terms of leisure, I should like to proceed in the following order: first, to make some approximations to a definition of liberal education in terms of leisure; second, to try to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of this definition by examining more closely the distinctions between work or labor, on the one hand (I shall use the words “work” and “labor” interchangeably), and leisure, on the other; and, third, to draw from this analysis some implications or consequences for the place of liberal education in an industrial democracy like ours.

Let me begin where anyone has to begin—with a tentative definition of education. Education is a practical activity. It is concerned with means to be employed or devised for the achievement of an end. The broadest definition with which no one, I think, can disagree is that education is a process which aims at the improvement or the betterment of men, in themselves and in relation to society. Few will quarrel with this definition because most people are willing to say that education is good; and its being good requires it to do something that is good for men. The definition says precisely this: that education improves men or makes them better.

All the quarrels that exist in educational philosophy exist because men have different conceptions of what the good life is, of what is good for man, of the conditions under which man is improved or bettered. Within that large area of controversy about education, there is one fundamental distinction to which I should like to call to your attention.

There seem to be two ways in which men can be bettered or improved: first, with respect to special functions or talents and, second, with respect to the capacities and functions that are common to all men. Let me explain. In civilized societies, and even in primitive societies, there is always a rudimentary, and often a very complex, division of labor. Society exists through a diversity of occupations, through different groups of men performing different functions. In addition to the division of labor and the consequent diversity of functions, there is the simple natural fact of individual differences. So one view of education is that which takes these individual and functional differences into consideration and says that men are made better by adjusting them to their occupations, by making them better carpenters or better dentists or better bricklayers, by improving them, in other words, in the direction of their own special talents.

The other view differs from this, in that it makes the primary aim of education the betterment of men not with respect to their differences, but with respect to the similarities which all men have. According to this theory, if there are certain things that all men can do, or certain things that all men must do, it is with these that education is chiefly concerned.

This simple distinction leads us to differentiate between specialized education and general education. There is some ground for identifying specialized education with vocational education, largely because specialization has some reference to the division of labor and the diversity of occupations, and for identifying general education with liberal education because the efforts of general education are directed toward the liberal training of man as man.

There is still another way of differentiating education in terms of its ends. Aristotle often talks about the difference between the useful and the honorable. What he means by the “useful” and the “honorable” can sometimes be translated into extrinsic and intrinsic ends. An educational process has an intrinsic end if its result lies entirely within the person being educated, an excellence or perfection of his person, an improvement built right into his nature as a good habit is part of the nature of the person in whom a power is habituated. An extrinsic end of education, on the other hand, lies in the goodness of an operation, not as reflecting the goodness of the operator but rather the perfection of something else as a result of the operation being performed well.

Thus, for example, there can be two reasons for learning carpentry. One might wish to learn carpentry simply to acquire the skill or art of using tools to fabricate things out of wood, an art or skill that anyone is better for having. Or, one might wish to learn carpentry in order to make good tables and chairs, not as works of art which reflect the excellence of the artist, but as commodities to sell. This distinction between the two reasons for learning carpentry is connected in my mind with the difference or distinction between liberal and vocational education. This carpentry is the same in both cases, but the first reason for learning carpentry is liberal, the second vocational.

All of this, I think, leads directly to the heart of the matter: that vocational training is training for work or labor; it is specialized rather than general; it is for an extrinsic end; and ultimately it is the education of slaves or workers. From my point of view it makes no difference whether you say slaves or workers, for you mean that the worker is a man who does nothing but work—a state of affairs which has obtained, by the way, during the whole industrial period, from its beginning almost to our day.

Liberal education is education for leisure; it is general in character; it is for an intrinsic and not an extrinsic end; and, as compared with vocational training, which is the education of slaves or workers, liberal education is the education of free men.

I would like, however, to add one basic qualification at this point. According to this definition or conception of liberal education, it is not restricted in any way to training in the liberal arts. We often too narrowly identify liberal education with those arts which are genuinely the liberal arts—grammar, rhetoric, and logic and the mathematical disciplines—because that is one of the traditional meanings of liberal education. But, as I am using the term “liberal” here, in contradistinction to “vocational,” I am not confining liberal education to intellectual education or to the cultivation of the mind. On the contrary, as I am using the phrase, liberal education has three large departments, according to the division of human excellences or modes of perfection. Physical training, or gymnastics in the Platonic sense, if its aim is to produce a good coordination of the body, is liberal education. So also is moral training, if its aim is to produce moral perfections, good moral habits or virtues. So also is intellectual training, if its aim is the production of good intellectual habits or virtues. All three are liberal as distinguished from vocational. This is not, in a sense, a deviation from the conception of liberal education as being only concerned only with the mind, for in all three of these the mind plays a role. All bodily skills are arts; all moral habits involve prudence; so the mind is not left out of the picture even when one is talking about moral and physical training.

After this purely preliminary statement, I should like to discuss the problem of what labor is, and what leisure is, and how these two things are related. For as understanding of these two terms becomes clearer, I think understanding of liberal education and of the problem of liberal education in our society will become clearer.

Let me begin by considering the parts of a human life—and by “the parts of a human life” I mean the division of the twenty-four hours of each day in the succession of days that make up the weeks, months, and years of our lives. The lives of all of us today are divided roughly into thirds. This was not always the case. The lives of the slaves of antiquity and, until recently, the wage slaves of our modern industrial society were divided into two parts, not three. We are, however, accustomed to think of our lives as having three parts.

One-third is sleep. I include with sleep—because they belong to the same category, and I shall use “sleep” as a symbol for all such things—eating (in so far as it is not liberal; in so far as it is quite apart from conversation, eating just to sustain the body); the acts of washing and cleansing the body; and even exercise (in so far as it is indispensable for physical fitness). These things are like sleep because they maintain the body as a biological mechanism.

Sleep, then, is one-third; work or labor, one-third; and one-third is free time or spare time. I am defining the latter negatively now, as time not spent in sleep or work, time free from work or biological necessities. Now I say this threefold division of the parts of a day (and, therefore, of a human life) into sleep and the adjuncts of sleep, work or labor, and free or spare time is not entirely satisfactory. A further division is required. Free time, it is clear, may be used in two ways when it is not used, as some people use it, for sleep and other biological necessities. One of the two ways in which free time can be used is play—and by “play” I mean recreation, amusement, diversion, pastime, and, roughly, all ways of killing time. The other use of free or spare time I should like to denominate roughly for the moment—I will analyze it more carefully later—engagement in leisure activities. If you say, “What do you mean by leisure activities?” I answer, “Such things as thinking or learning, reading or writing, conversation or correspondence, love and acts of friendship, political activity, domestic activity, artistic and esthetic activity.” Just think of those list of things. They are not work, and they are not, or they seem not to be, play. Here is a group of activities which occupy time free from sleep and work and which are distinct from recreation or amusement. But the line of distinction is not clear, nor is the definition of the class of activities.

Before I push the analysis further, let me ask another question. Do these four things—sleep, work or labor, play, and leisure activities—exhaust the parts of a human life? I have two answers to the question. If you look at a human life on the purely natural plane, I think these consume all its time, but I think there is a fifth part of life, not reducible to any of these four, though I cannot fully account for it on the purely natural plane. That fifth part I call “rest.” Now you might think that rest is identical with sleep, or with recreation by which one is “rested” from fatigue. But I do not mean that when I use the word. I mean by “rest” something that is quite distinct from sleep, an activity that is specifically human. No animal could possibly rest in the sense which I intend when I use the word. An animal sleeps. I mean rest in a sense quite distinct from play or recreation or refreshment, for all these things are for the sake of work, and rest is not for the sake of work at all.

The only way I can begin to convey what I mean by “rest” is to say the most obvious thing: that it is to be understood philosophically, as the opposite of motion. The easiest way to understand the connotation of the term “rest” is to consider the phrase “heavenly rest” and to ask whether there is any rest on earth. I think there is none because by “rest” I mean not merely a terminal activity, one which is done for its own sake, but also a non-repetitive or an exhaustive activity, one that does not require repetition because it in itself exhausts the need for activity. But I must then add immediately that as I understand rest, its meaning is supernatural. It is the sense in which God rested on the seventh day, the sense in which the commandments of God bid us observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy as a day of rest. It is in terms of this conception of rest that I distinguish between contemplation and thinking. Thinking, it seems to me, is a leisure activity; contemplation, an activity of rest. Accordingly, if rest exists at all in this earthly life, it exists only, I think, in religious activity: only in prayer and worship and in the contemplation practiced by religious orders. From this point of view, all human life is either work or rest. Everything I have subdivided into sleep, play, work, and leisure becomes work, as compared with rest, though there are distinctions on the natural plane that make work just one of four parts.

Leaving rest aside for a moment, let me see if I can explain the differences of work, play, and leisure activity. Certain criteria, which are often used to distinguish work, play, and leisure, fail, I think, to define these three things. For example, persons often use the criterion of pleasure and pain, somehow thinking of work as painful and play or leisure as pleasant. It is immediately apparent, I think, that this is incorrect. Play can be quite painful. What does one mean by speaking of a “grueling” match of tennis, if one does not mean that there is often physical pain in playing a long, fast tennis match? Work certainly can be pleasant. There is actual pleasure in a skilled performance, even if the performance is part of a laborious activity. And leisure activities, if I am right in thinking that learning is a typical leisure activity, certainly can be quite painful. Note, moreover, a very common phrase, one used in school, namely schoolwork or homework. Though schoolwork and homework are study and are therefore a part of learning and belong to leisure activity, we call them “work.” Why? Because there is some pain involved? I think not. I think we call them “work,” as I shall try to show you subsequently, not because pain is involved in them, but because we do them under some obligation, under some compulsion. This is the first indication that the meaning of “work” somehow involves the compulsory.

Fatigue is a second criterion that is often used to distinguish work, play, and leisure. All forms of activity which involve both the mind and the body call for sleep to wash away fatigue. Nor is it true to say that work is difficult and play and leisure are easy, for play and leisure activities can be difficult, too. Nor do I think that the Thomistic division of the good into the useful, the pleasant, and the virtuous will by itself (although I think it comes near to it) perfectly distinguish between work as the useful, play as the pleasant, and leisure as the virtuous. Unless those terms are more sharply restricted, I think one could regard work as pleasant or even virtuous in a sense; play as useful in so far it is recreative and performs a biological function; and leisure activities, although they may be intrinsically virtuous, as useful and pleasant. Let me therefore offer a criterion which I think will succeed in drawing the line between labor and leisure and will take care of play as well.

Though it may not perfectly account for play, I would like to propose that the distinction between labor or work, on the one hand, and leisure activities, on the other, is to be made in terms of what is biologically necessary or compulsory and what is rationally or humanly desirable or free. Let me see if I can explain this criterion by applying it. Labor, I say, is an economically necessary activity. It is something you do to produce the means of subsistence. It makes no difference at all whether the worker gets consumable goods immediately by his laboring activity or wages wherewith to buy consumable goods. Let us think of this for a moment in the following way. Let consumable goods—either direct consumables or money—be the compensation of the laborer; and, further, let us assume for the moment that no man gets his subsistence, in the form of either consumable goods or money, without labor. Then the definition of work or labor is: that activity which is required, is compulsory, for all men in order for them to live or subsist and which therefore must be extrinsically compensated, that is, the laborer must earn by his labor the means of his subsistence.

Let us test this. Men who have ample and secure means of subsistence have no need to labor. This is the historical meaning of the leisure class. Provide any man or group of men with ample and secure means of subsistence, and they will not work. I do not mean that they will not be active, that they will not be productive, that they will not be creative, but they will not work. They will not labor in the sense in which I tried to define that term sharply. Anything they will do will have to have for them some intrinsic compensation. Strictly, the word “compensation” is here wrongly used. The activities in which they engage will have to be intrinsically rewarding. What they do will somehow be done for its own sake, since they are provided with the means of subsistence.

Let us consider what I regard as the great experimental station for all thinking about man; namely, the Garden of Eden, peopled by men who have not sinned. Suppose the race of man had continued to live in the Garden of Eden. Not having sinned, man would not have inherited labor, disease, and death as punishments of sin. Man would have had no need to labor; he could have lived on the fruits of the trees and the grains of the earth. He would not have played, and neither would he have slept. In other words, life in the Garden of Eden would have consisted entirely of leisure activities. Because the body of sinless man would have been quite different from the human body as it is in the world, there would have been none of the peculiar divisions of life that exist in the world.

Leisure activities, in sharp distinction from labor or work, consist of those things that men do because they are desirable for their own sake. They are self-rewarding, not externally compensated, and they are freely engaged in. They may be morally necessary, but they are not biologically compulsory. You can see the trouble with this definition as soon as you say it. You may ask at once: What is play? Is not play self-rewarding? Is not play distinguished from labor by the negative distinction that it is something you do not have to do? Something that you freely choose to do?

I think we can get some light on how to sharpen the definition of leisure, and keep it distinct from play, by etymological considerations. I must confess to being genuinely fascinated by the background of the word “leisure.” The word which in Greek means “leisure” is scole. Notice that our English word “school” comes from scole.

Now the Greek word scole has two meanings, just as the English word “pastime” has two meanings. In the dictionary the first meaning of “pastime” refers to the time itself, to spare time. The second meaning of “pastime” refers to what is done with such time, namely, play. It is this second meaning that we usually intend by our use of the word. So the first meaning of scole refers to the time; the second, to the content or use of the time. The first is leisure in the merely negative sense of the time free from labor, or spare time; but the second meaning, which appears very early in Greek literature, refers to what men should do with this time, namely, learn and discuss. It is the second meaning—what one does with time free from labor—which permits scole to become the root of the word “school.” This, it seems to me, throws a fascinating light on a phrase that was used frequently in my youth when boys of sixteen faced, with their parents, the question: “Shall I go to work or shall I go to school?” Making this a choice of opposites is quite right because work is one thing and school is another. It is the difference between labor and leisure.

When we look for the Latin equivalent of the Greek word scole, more light is thrown on the subject. The first meaning, time free from work or labor, appears in the Latin word otium. Otium is the root of the word negotium, which means “negotiation” or “business.” Otium is the very opposite of negotium or “business;” it simply means time free from work. What is wonderful here is that the English word “otiose” is not a very complimentary word—it means “unemployed, idle, sterile, futile, useless.” The second meaning of scole is translated by the Latin schola. This again is a source of “school.” Finally, the first meaning of otium has a synonym in Latin, vacatio, from which we get the word “vacation” and also, interestingly enough, “vacancy.”

The English word “leisure” comes down a totally different line. It comes from the French loisir, and from the Latin licere; it has the root meaning of the permissible and the free. The Latin licere is also the root of “liberty” and “license,” in addition to “leisure.” I think it is extraordinary to see these three words related in that one Latin root.

In the light of this etymology, I think we can distinguish leisure from play as two quite different uses of free or spare time; that is not-working time. Play may be one of two things. It may be biologically useful like sleep, just as vacations and recreational activities are biologically useful. Just as sleep is a way of washing away fatigue, so a certain amount of play or vacation or recreation has the same kind of biological utility in the recuperation of the body. Play may be, however, something beyond this. Obviously, children do not play just to refresh themselves. I often wonder whether this does not have a bearing on the role of play in adult life, that is, whether or not the role of play in adult life is not always a temporary regression to childhood.

One can admit, I think, that life involves two kinds of play: play for the sake of work, when it serves the same purpose as sleep, and play for its own sake. Sensual pleasure is admittedly a part of human life, but only in a limited quantity. Beyond that you have licentiousness; so, too, licentious play is a misuse of leisure.

Certainly, no quality attaches to useless play other than pleasure. I, for one, can see no perfection, no improvement, resulting from it. But leisure consists of those intrinsically good activities which are both self-rewarding and meaningful beyond themselves. They need not be confined to themselves. They can be both good things to do and good in their results, as, for example, political activities, the activities of a citizen, are both good in themselves and good in their results. This does not mean that leisure activities are never terminal, never without ends beyond themselves; it means only that they must be good in themselves, things worth doing even if there were no need for them to be done.

The results of leisure activity are two sorts of human excellence or perfection: those private excellences by which a man perfects his own nature and those public excellences which can be translated into the performance of his moral or political duty—the excellence of a man in relation to other men and to society. Hence, I would define leisure activities as those activities desirable for their own sake (and so uncompensated and not compulsory) and also for the sake of the excellencies, private and public, to which they give rise.

Suppose I try now to do a little of what I have just suggested. Suppose we draw a line between economically or biologically useful activities and those which are morally or humanly good, what Aristotle calls the “honorable” or “noble” activities. What results from making this separation? We get a threefold division: from the biologically necessary, we get sleep, work, and play (in so far as these serve to recuperate the body or to remove fatigue); from the humanly, morally good, the noble or honorable, we get all leisure activities; and from the superfluous, the otiose, we again get play, but here we mean play as it consists entirely in killing or wasting time, however pleasant that may be.

We see, furthermore, that the very same activities can be either labor or leisure, according to the conditions under which they are performed. Let us take manual work, again—for instance, carpentry. Manual work can be leisure if it is work done for the sake of the art that is involved and for the cultivation of an artist. It is labor if it is done for compensation. That example may be too obvious, but we can see the same thing in teaching or painting, composing music, or political action of any sort. Any one of these can be labor as well as leisure, if a person does it in order to earn his subsistence. For if, to begin with, one accepts the proposition that no man shall get food or clothing or shelter, no man shall get the means of subsistence, without earning them, then some activities which would otherwise be leisure must be done by some persons for compensation. This makes them no less intrinsically rewarding but gives them an additional character. This double character causes certain activities to be labor, looked at one way, and leisure, looked at another.

This accounts for the fact that in professors’ lives or statesmen’s lives the line between labor and leisure is almost impossible to draw. In the Protagoras, the Meno, and the Apology Socrates was horrified at the notion that anyone would take pay for teaching. That the Sophists took pay for teaching aroused a moral repugnance in Socrates. This is not a minor matter. It was the first time anyone had done so and it raised a very serious moral problem. For the first time, an essentially leisure activity, like teaching, was compensated.

Not only can the same activity be both leisure and work; but even play, or things that I would call play, can be work for some people. Professional football is work to those who play it. Think also of all the persons whose working lives are spent in the amusement business.

This leads to further interesting points about the kinds of work. I would like to abstract this discussion from the distinction between manual and mental work, and particularly mental work as preparatory for, or directed toward, manual work. Taking both manual and mental work into consideration together, I would like to make the distinction between productive and nonproductive labor. I would say that work or labor is productive when it is economically useful, that is, when it produces means of subsistence in one form or another.

Here it is proper for the mode of compensation to consist of wages (or, as they are called more politely, “salaries”), with some basis for what we call a fair wage in a relation of equivalence between the amount of labor and the product of labor. Nonproductive labors, on the other hand, are activities which may be called work only in the sense that they are compensated—such things as teaching, artistic creation, the professional work of medicine and law, and the activities of statesmen. Here it is wrong to use the words “wages” or “salary;” and it is interesting to note that the language contains other words. We speak of an “honorarium” or “fee;” but the word I like best is the word “living” in the sense in which a priest gets, not wages or a salary, but a living. He is given his subsistence. He has not earned it by production. He has done something which it is good to do, but he also has to live; and there is a sense in which he can be said to have “earned his living.” Here there can be no calculations of fair compensation. When one talks about fees or honoraria, the only thing one can talk about is the amount of time spent. Lawyers very often set their fees entirely in terms of time.

I would like to make a second distinction between servile and liberal work. I think it is difficult to draw the line between these two, except in extreme cases, because many kinds of labor or work are partly servile and partly liberal. But the extreme cases are quite clear; and it is important at least to recognize the mixed cases or the shadowy ones that lie between. By “servile work” I mean work done only because it is economically necessary and done only for compensation—work that no one would do if the means of subsistence were otherwise provided. “Liberal work” is work or activity which, though sometimes done for compensation, would be done even if no compensation were involved, because the work itself is self-rewarding. In other words, liberal work contains, at its very heart, activities that are essentially leisure activities, things that would be done for their own sake, even though subsistence were otherwise secured. The consequence of this is that the man who is a liberal worker—a teacher, lawyer, statesman, or creative artist—may, and usually does, work many more hours than are required for his compensation. He does more than is necessary to do a fair job for the person who is compensating him because he cannot determine the point at which his activity passes into strictly leisure activity, though some part of it earns his compensation. I think examples of the research scientist, the teacher, or the statesman make this perfectly clear.

Finally, in terms of these distinctions, there is at least the beginning of an order for the parts of life. It would seem to me that, by the very nature of the terms themselves, sleep and its adjunct activities and play as recreation must be for the sake of work; and work must be for the sake of leisure. Earning a living, in short, and keeping alive must be for the sake of living well. Many of the obvious disorders of human life result from improper understanding of the order of these parts—for example, sleeping for its own sake, which is at least neurotic and at worst suicidal; working as an end in itself, which is a complete perversion of human life; working for the sake of play, which is certainly a misconception of leisure; or free time as time to kill in pleasure seeking. Play for its own sake, in order to kill time or escape boredom, is as neurotic as sleep for its own sake. And perhaps I should add the error, which many of us make, of confusing leisure with rest. Among those who share this confusion are persons who think that Sunday is a day to be spent in aesthetic, speculative, or liberal activity or that going to the theater or a concert or indulging in some form of sport is the proper observance of the day. I am not trying to preach the doctrines of a strict Sabbatarian—that is not the purpose of this lecture—but, nevertheless, I keep asking myself, “What can be the meaning of the admonition ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy’?” A day of rest cannot be identified with a day of play; and a day of rest, just as clearly, I think, cannot be identified with a day of leisure, for leisure activities are not rest.

In terms of this very brief and sketchy analysis of the parts of life, and of these distinctions between work, play, and leisure activities, we now can see clearly the difference between vocational training and liberal education. Vocational training is learning for the sake of earning. I hope I step on nobody’s toes too hard when I say, as I must say, that therefore it is an absolute misuse of school to include any vocational training at all. School is a place of learning for the sake of learning, not for the sake of earning. It is as simple as that. Please understand that I do not mean vocational training can be totally dispensed with; I mean only that it should be done on the job. It should be done as preparatory to work; and as preparatory to work, it should be compensated. No one should have to take vocational training without compensation, because it is not self-rewarding. To include vocational training in school without compensation is to suppose that it is education, which it is not at all. In contrast to vocational training, liberal education is learning for its own sake or for the sake of further education. It is learning for the sake of all those self-rewarding activities which include the political, aesthetic, and speculative.

There are three further comments I should like to make on this distinction. First, professional education can be both vocational and liberal, because the kind of work for which it is the preliminary training is essentially liberal work. The work of a lawyer is liberal, not servile, work. In Greece free men who were citizens were all lawyers; there education for legal practice was liberal education. Professional education is vocational only in so far as this kind of leisure activity happens to be a way that some men, in our division of labor, earn their compensation.

Second, liberal education can involve work simply because we find it necessary to compel children to begin, and for some years to continue, their educations. Whenever you find an adult, a chronological adult, who thinks that learning or study is work, let me say that you have met a child. One sign that you are grown up, that you are no longer a child, is that you never regard any part of study or learning as work. As long as learning or study has anything compulsory about it, you are still in the condition of childhood. The mark of truly adult learning is that it is done with no thought of labor or work at all, with no sense of the compulsory. It is entirely voluntary. Liberal education at the adult level can, therefore, be superior to liberal education in school, where learning is identified with work.

Third, if schooling is equivalent to the proper use of leisure time in youth, then the proper use of leisure time in adult life should obviously include the continuation of schooling—without teachers, without compulsion, without assignments—the kind of learning that adults do outside school, the kind they do in conversations and discussions, in reading and study.

Finally, we may ask the place of liberal education in an industrial democracy. We can do this quickly by considering two basic errors or fallacies peculiar to our society: the first I would call the aristocratic error; the second, the industrial fallacy.

The aristocratic error is simply the error of dividing men into free men and slaves or workers, into a leisure class and a working class, instead of dividing the time of each human life into working time and leisure time. Karl Marx’s Capital and, quite apart from the theory of surplus value—Marx’s special notion of capitalist production—is filled with the horrible facts about the life of the laboring classes until almost our own day. We must face the fact that, until very recently, the working classes did nothing but sleep and work. When we realize that children started to work at the age of seven; that whole families worked—men, women, and children; that the hours of working time were often twelve and fourteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, then we realize that the distinction between the leisure class and the working class is something you and I can no longer appreciate because it has disappeared from our society. It does not exist in the world today, at least not in the United States. But, if we consider the past, in which workers were like slaves, the aristocratic error consisted in the division of mankind into two classes, a leisure class and a working class.

To correct this error, we must say not only that all men are free, but also that all men must work for their subsistence (which is nothing but a democratic or socialist variant on the biblical admonition that man must eat by the sweat of his brow). You will see the educational consequences of this fallacy when you stop to think how little point there would have been in talking about liberal education for all men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when much more than half the population had no time for education. It would have been just as meaningless for them to have been given a liberal education, doomed as they were to lead lives of work and sleep.

The second fallacy arises from the fact that industrial production has created an abundance of leisure time for all. I do not mean that the working classes today have as much leisure time as the leisure classes of other centuries. I mean simply that more leisure exists today, per capita, than ever existed before. Though industrial production has produced this abundance of leisure, industrialism as such has made all men servants of productivity; and, when productivity itself is regarded as the highest good, leisure is debased to the level of play or idleness, which can be justified only as recreation. The man of leisure is regarded by industrialists, interested solely in productivity, as either a playboy or a dilettante. Leisure loses its meaning when industrial society reduces it to an incidental by-product of productivity.

If these two fallacies are corrected, we reach, I think, the obvious conclusion that in a rightly conceived industrial democracy: liberal education should be and can be for all men. It should be because they are all equal as persons, as citizens, from a democratic point of view. It can be because industrialism can emancipate all men from slavery and because workers in our day need not spend their entire lives earning their livings. Liberal education in the future of democracy should be and should do for all men what it once was and did for the few in the aristocracies of the past. It should be part of the lives of all men.

But I must be asked whether I have forgotten about individual differences. Even if all men are citizens, even if they are emancipated from the complete drudgery of labor, it still is not true that all men are equally endowed with talent or have an equal capacity to lead the good life. Let me give you an un-Aristotelian answer to this objection, because I cannot help feeling that Aristotle’s opinions on such matters were affected, to some extent at least, by the fact that he lived in a slave society.

The good or happy life is a life lived in the cultivation of virtue. Another way of saying this is that the good life, or the happy life, is concerned with leisure. The good life depends on labor, but it consists of leisure. Labor and all conditions that go with labor are the antecedent means of happiness. They are external goods, that is, wealth. Leisure activities are the ends for which wealth is the means. Leisure activities constitute not mere living but living well. They are what Aristotle calls “virtuous activities” or the “goods of the soul.”

Happiness so conceived is open to all men, when all men are both workers and free men. As regards both work and leisure, each man should do the best work and participate in the best sort of leisure activities of which he is capable, the highest for which his talents equip him. So conceived, happiness is the same for all men, though it differs in actual content, in degree of intensity, according to the individual differences of men.

It is clear, I think, that liberal education is absolutely necessary for human happiness, for living a good human life. The most prevalent of all human ills are these two: a man’s discontent with the work he does and the necessity of having to kill time. Both these ills can be, in part, cured by liberal education. Liberal schooling prepares for a life of learning and for the leisure activities of a whole lifetime. Adult liberal education is an indispensable part of the life of leisure, which is a life of learning.

As a final word, let me tell you the most infallible sign of the liberally educated man. Aristotle said that the mark of a happy man is also the sure sign that he is liberally educated, namely, that you never find him trying to kill time.

An Education for the Future

 

With such a rich intellectual, artistic, and moral heritage, why among the many institutions of Catholic learning (including, of course, the Benedictine ones) are there so few dedicated to a liberating and humane education in truth, humility, and love?  

Glory in All Things: St. Benedict and Catholic Education Today, by André Gushurst-Moore (Angelico Press, 2020, 170 pages)

Controversy in Catholic education did not begin with the 1967 Land O’Lakes Declaration. How best to educate the faithful has been under dispute since St. Augustine of Hippo refuted Tertullian’s legacy by arguing that Christians had much to learn from the truths found through philosophy in the Greco-Roman pagan heritage. God is Truth and Christians are bound to pursue the truth wherever it is to be found. The quick and widespread decline of Catholic universities and colleges, however, is a recent phenomenon. In terms of their mission and in curricula, most Catholic institutions of higher learning have mirrored a general cultural decline and radical secularization that pursues truth only in truncated and insular ways. What is to become of our civilization now that it is hostile to the religion that helped form it? And what is to become of the age-old dialogue between faith and reason that so long has characterized Catholic education?

How to meet this crisis in Western culture, and in Catholic education specifically, was addressed by Christopher Dawson in 1961 just a few years before the Land O’Lakes Conference. In The Crisis of Western Education, Dawson proposed the study of Christian culture as the best means of preserving the unity of Western Civilization, promoting a truly “liberating” liberal arts education, and preventing the corrosive effects of secularization. Since the 1960s, there has been no shortage of other proposed solutions, especially since all but the most ideologically committed would still praise the Land O’Lakes approach and see it as anything other than what it has been, a damaging failure. Most of these solutions aim not so much to rebuild a Christian culture as much as they aim merely to rescue the life of the mind and the search for truth that have characterized the “conversation between faith and reason” in Catholic universities since the days of Thomas Aquinas (see Francis Cardinal George, A Godly Humanism, CUA Press, 2015, page 132).

In his turn, André Gushurst-Moore proposes a Benedictine solution: a return to the pedagogical emphases of the religious order that helped to evangelize Europe and perpetuate the best of classical learning and culture in the wake of the transformation of Roman civilization in the West. This is not Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” which Gushurst-Moore characterizes as a polemical and dismal “survivalist program.” Dreher has many times ably refuted this simplified view of his “Benedict Option,” yet it remains the case that his program is still widely characterized as a retreat from the world rather than an engagement with the culture from within a strong-knit, intentional Christian community.

Gushurst-Moore does think that Dreher correctly diagnoses what ails the West. The problem is that Dreher “seems to have little faith in the capacity of a culture to adjust itself.” Gushurst-Moore turns to Dawson to oppose this model of unstoppable declension. Dawson rejected the division of Western history into ancient, medieval, and modern, correctly noting that this is a modern, secularist way to divide history. What it does is take the high point of Western culture known as Christendom and treat it as an unimportant “middle age,” rather than the pinnacle of classical and Christian culture. This is not the Christian view of history. Dawson instead proposes six ages of the Church. In each stage the Church rises to new cultural, artistic, and intellectual heights before stagnating and declining, only to be born anew. The Church, Dawson argued, is like Christ—periods of influence and flowering, followed by suffering and death, resulting eventually in resurrection.

Like Dawson, Gushurst argues that this death and resurrection model, or “decay and renewal,” is an enduring feature of Christian civilization. Catholics are not called to enter a Benedictine bunker and disengage from the hostile culture. To do so, says Gushurst-Moore, would be an inversion of the Whig myth, only now the story becomes one of “irreversible decline” rather than unstoppable progress. So it is not that a new and different St. Benedict is needed, as Alisdair MacIntyre famously wrote in After Virtue, but rather the same Benedict, whose Rule brought order to western Europe by instantiating a “Christian realism” that produced dozens of Benedictine and Cistercian institutions of learning.

What we can learn from this most ancient of Christian educational traditions is the main subject of Gushurst-Moore’s book. Its themes will be familiar to those who are well-read on this topic—the importance of virtue and moral formation; true leisure and the “uselessness” of higher education; the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness; and the necessity of any authentic Catholic education being “countercultural.” “A Catholic and Benedictine education for the future,” he writes, “should be one that includes training in the virtues, as well as the arts and sciences, so that people can continue to find a freedom that does not destroy human nature and human potential.” This is a far different remedy than the modernization and “evolution” proposed by the Land O’Lakes Declaration, which also encouraged a lessening of the ratio of Catholic faculty at Catholic universities in order to make those institutions more “authentic” and relevant. Even with an ideal Catholic curriculum, even if professors were sympathetic to the Catholic intellectual tradition, a university without Catholic faculty would not be a Catholic university.

One thing that would have helped this book immensely is if the author had included more examples of schools that actually operate according to this Benedictine vision. Gushurst-Moore concisely tells us what Benedictine education is, and how it is “experiential” and aimed at conversion and “lifelong learning.” But where are the examples? There are a few, but not many, and those that are offered are overly general. Yet perhaps this just points us back to the problem, namely that with such a rich intellectual, artistic, and moral heritage, why among the many institutions of Catholic learning (including, of course, the Benedictine ones) are there so few dedicated to a liberating and humane education in truth, humility, and love? 

The Enchanted Cosmos With Thomas Aquinas

 

Thomas Aquinas’ cosmology and doctrine of the soul are vitalistic. Everything has a particular soul to it, and these souls have particular life-forces destined for particular ends. As a whole, the cosmos is meant to reflect and embody the graces of God: his beauty, love, and goodness. Such is to what all things are ultimately ordered.

St. Thomas Aquinas was described as the foundational philosopher for all philosophers by Pope Pius XII. There are many faces to the angelic doctor. He is the technical philosopher of realism who baptized the best of Aristotle into the Catholic faith. He is the great mystic whose writings on the Ladder of Being inspires theologies of beauty, love, and divinization. More recently, he is a thorough-going Neoplatonist who defended Neoplatonism with Aristotelian language.[*]

If people have familiarity with Thomas Aquinas it is probably in association with the phenomenon of Thomism. Inside the Thomist machine, the further familiarity with Thomas is probably associated with ontological realism and that Thomas was very specific about what it means to be human and the technical specificities of Catholic theology and doctrine. This public portrait, or understanding, of Thomas is deficient on many levels. It also distracts from his enchanted and mystical cosmos, something that—in our age of disenchantment—ought to be the primary recourse to the great church doctor rather than the ontological realism that is constantly pushed by the neo-Thomists and their followers.

*

“Different kinds of things produce in different ways, those on a higher level producing in a more interior way,” writes Thomas in Summa contra Gentiles (4.11). Thomas’ cosmology and doctrine of the soul are vitalistic. Everything has a particular soul to it, and these souls have particular life-forces destined for particular ends. To untrained eyes and ears, Thomas comes off as crypto-pantheistic; as do a great number of the Church Fathers and medieval mystics and philosophers. However, whereas pantheism sees everything containing the same one soul fallen from the Cosmic Soul, Thomas’ cosmos is made up of “different kind[s]” of souls “produc[ing] in different ways.” Moreover, the souls of created things have created souls with particular ends and are not emanated parts of the Cosmic Soul which make us depreciated instantiations of the One. By having a particularly crafted soul for a particular end, we are naturally deficient instantiations of the One as in pantheism.

In another section of Summa contra Gentiles (3.97-98), Thomas also writes that the diversity of souls “which makes things differ in species makes their behavior different too.” This variety of life “also brings with it diverse relationships to matter. . . [a]nd these diverse relationships to matter bring with them a diversity of agencies and capabilities of being acted on [by God].” It is clear from Thomas, as it is with traditional Christianity, that the wonderous and awe-inspiring, indeed, mystifying, understanding of the cosmos and Ladder of Being is not the homogenous pantheism of new age spirituality but a deeply diverse—in the truest sense—orchestra where everything is instantiated in its uniqueness but also part of a grander project. That project, per Thomas, is to “reflect and express [the goodness of God].”

Thomas’ Ladder of Being is at once hierarchal and concentric. Everything comes from God who created ex nihilo. Everything moves to God, who is the law of attraction—“That God, which ever lives and loves / One God, one law, one element, / And one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves” as Tennyson poetically put it. At the bottom of the hierarchy, furthest from the center of God, is non-living matter. Non-living matter has no soul, no anima, but is still essential for anima, because it is in non-living matter that the lowest level of life is rooted in: plants. “The living things closest [to matter] are plants, in which there is already some interior production, turning the inner juices of the plant into seed which, committed to earth, grows into a plant.”

Following from Greek philosophy, Thomas gives all plant genera the vegetative soul. The vegetative soul is defined by its ability to generate. While the plant-soul has no awareness, and is not made in the image of God, it has a distinct soul to it; thus, Thomas’ cosmic Ladder of Being is thoroughly vitalistic. After all, without vitalism there can be no diversity and distinctiveness to the cosmos—something that reductionist materialism must necessarily exhaust to.

“There is another level of life above that of plants: that of animals endowed with sense awareness so that they have a form of production peculiar to themselves, starting indeed from outside but up inside, and getting more interior the further it progresses.” The animal soul stands above the vegetative soul for its sense-awareness. And within the animal genera, as we can see from Thomas, there is complexity to the diversity of animal life. Some animals are simpler and further down the animal chain than the more complex, “more interior,” and “further progress[ed]” who are higher on the animal ladder. In other writings Thomas further elaborates on, and classifies, the distinctions in animal life between soul-activity, the levels of sense-awareness, motive power, and affective and aggressive emotions.

The distinguishing characteristic of animal life, the animal soul, is sense awareness and what sense awareness aims for. The animal soul aims for enjoyment through the realization of affective emotion. The “capacity for affective emotion,” Thomas writes in Quaestio Disputata de Anima, “empower us to enjoy things delightful to the senses.” Humans do share this with animals, but this is not the end for humans though it is for lower animals.

“So the highest, most perfect level of life is that of the intellect, for intellect can reflect upon itself and understand itself.” Humans, being made in the image of God—who is Truth, Wisdom, and Love—therefore possess the intellectual soul which is aimed at understanding. Human cognitive capacity to understand notions, judgments, and, ultimately, the moral law, is that which distinguishes us from the rest of creation. This distinguishing from the rest of creation is not a separationist atomism but akin to the steps of a ladder. Humans exist as the top step of the material world, though the ladder itself is an integrated whole. Humans are perfected by participating in Truth, Wisdom, and Love—a freedom which only rational souls are capable of as Thomas explained in a much earlier section of Summa contra Gentiles.

Yet, humans are most like God in that they also possess the tripartite soul which mirrors the Trinity. The human soul is not merely a rational soul, but it subsumes the animal and vegetative souls as well. Love generates. Love feels. Love understands. The Godhead generates. The Godhead feels. The Godhead understands. So it is that humans generate, feel, and understand. When St. Augustine explains the effects of sin as turning man into the beasts of the fields, it is because humans reject their fundamental rationality; that is, they reject what makes them human (the rational soul). Sinful humans descend (fall) to live like animals. Fallen man lives for mere sensation and bodily pleasure. But the rational soul that defines man thirsteth after the Lord and desires to dwell in the House of the Lord.

“God’s providence,” Thomas maintains, “orders everything to a goal—his own goodness.” The goodness and beauty of God is what the whole cosmos, and each instantiated form of life in the cosmos, aims for. Everything is also interconnected in this Ladder of Life reaching up to God and coming from God. To reflect and embody the graces of God, his beauty, love, and goodness, is to what the whole cosmos is ultimately ordered, according to Thomas.

The variety of lifeforms, each with their role to play in magnifying God’s beauty and goodness, come together in Love, “that unitive force” which binds the whole creation together in a grand song of life. Thomas’ cosmos, his Ladder of Being, can best be understood like a grand waltz or symphonic orchestra where everyone in their uniqueness has a part to play. But each instantiated form of life does not exist on its own island. Everything is intertwined with one another. If a flutist or harpist performs poorly, the rest of the performance suffers. If a single dancer in a dancing unit performs poorly, the rest of the performance suffers.

*

In our sterile and mechanical age Thomas’ cosmos of life is enchanted and enchanting. Indeed, it is mystical, mysterious, and mystifying. It is cosmos that wholly and totally came from the mouth of the God of Love. Modern man is starved for beauty and goodness; modern man is starved for substance. Substance is offered in Thomas and the full Christian vision—not the cliff notes version of “be kind” and disorderly consumer-oriented worship.

God’s love extends to all created things. And all created things are ordered to a goal. Thus, the cosmos, with man at the head, is directed toward God in a grand chorus of praise. All things truly do move to Love, “That God, which ever lives and loves . . . To which the whole creation moves.” This Thomas is just as much part of the Christian tradition, and an essential part of the angelic doctor that is often overlooked. The rainbow of Thomas Aquinas is not the empty rainbow of modernity. In fact, this side of Thomas is so perfectly situated to help reenchant our dead world and bring it back to life, should it be the Thomas more people become familiar with and find a friend in.

Serving the Good, the True, and the Beautiful

 Reverend Fathers, President Arbery, members of the Board of Governors, faculty, staff, parents, family, friends and students of Wyoming Catholic College, and most especially, the graduates of the Class of 2018. It is a joy, a privilege, and an honor to be here today; it’s good to be back!

I was actually supposed to be here yesterday. Instead of joining President Arbery, board and faculty members, and the students at last night’s President’s Dinner, however, I found myself spending seven hours at Denver International Airport. Yet as I sat there in Denver, I realized that my experience was capturing something very fundamental to the nature of Wyoming Catholic: inconvenience. As G.K. Chesterton once said: “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered,” and coming out here to the beautiful remoteness of Wyoming, to undertake a rigorous academic program at this faithfully-Catholic college is truly a great adventure—an adventure I am grateful to be a part of, even if only very occasionally, because this is a very special place. Please know that you are greatly admired throughout the English-speaking world—by those who love the Church and by those who love education and love what a truly Catholic, truly rigorous institution like this can mean for the world. It is so very good to be back.

Today, I’d like to ask you a question: “Quid est veritas?  What is Truth?” That’s Pilate’s question, of course. But there are two ways of asking that question, aren’t there? You can ask it as a question that you genuinely wish to be grappled with and answered. Or you can say it with a shrug, implying that truth is fundamentally unknowable (if it even exists at all), so what’s the point of asking the question?  The sad fact is that in the vast majority of today’s (so-called) “places of learning,” the question I just posed is being asked in precisely that lazy, indifferent, and relativistic manner.

But not here; not at Wyoming Catholic. Because here we know that question has been answered! It has been answered by Christ himself: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” And because of that answer, we know that a true education has to be an education as if truth mattered, an education as if Jesus Christ mattered. Those who do not believe in truth cannot breathe life into education, they can only kill it. That’s why this project, here in “Middle-of-Nowhere Wyoming,” is truly a matter of life and death.

A true, life-giving education, like the one that is offered here in Lander, is an education that recognizes and embraces a world filled with goodness, truth, and beauty. It is also an education that requires virtue from those who undertake it. In the secular educational system today, the word “virtue” is essentially banned, because it is seen as judgmental. So, I regret to say, is the word “sin.” Not only has secular academia lost any sense of education as the pursuit of virtue, they refuse to even speak of it.

It is easy to see why an education in pursuit of truth—of He who is the Truth—will include formation in a range of intellectual disciplines: theology, philosophy, history, literature, and the other liberal arts. (Yes, even Euclid.) So often, though, beauty is left out of the conversation, or seen as something of a poor cousin. In many genuinely good Catholic schools, this aspect of education is sadly neglected. It’s as though the beautiful is thought of as a trailer that you hook onto the back of the truck in a great hurry; if you leave it behind, it’s not a big deal. “As long as you get the truth and the goodness right,” they seem to say, “the beauty will take care of itself.” And I think that way of thinking is a grave mistake; a sadly lost opportunity. An engagement with beauty awakens and enlivens the virtue of humility; a virtue which, in turn, opens our eyes to wonder. And it is wonder that leads us to contemplation and to a recognition of the fullness of reality, which is God. Wonder is an essential part of true education!

Yes, a good education requires an education in love and an education in reason—philosophy, theology, virtue, and the rest. But it also requires an education in beauty; an education that does more than just look on beauty with the eyes of wonder. We need an education that comes to experience and to understand beauty by engaging with it; that learns of beauty by doing beautiful things.

Now, one of the reasons I’m passionate about good education is because I had a bad one. In fact, I tell anyone who will listen that I went to the worst school in England—a school whose failure was perfectly captured in its motto: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” That’s William Shakespeare, right? Correct. And also, of course, radical relativism. But what I failed to recognize (even as I and my classmates were embracing this relativistic phrase as our personal motto) was that Shakespeare never said that. He wrote it, yes, but Polonius said it. And Polonius is a blithering idiot. And so was I and so were all my classmates—blithering, relativistic idiots, the lot of us, because we didn’t know the difference between Polonius and Shakespeare.

Having experienced for myself the grave harm that can be done by a bad secular education, I know how desperately we need a restoration of true education, both in America and in the world. It is crucial to the future of civilized life on Earth. That which is rooted in the past will blossom in the present and will bring forth beautiful fruits in the future, but that which is rootless withers and decays. The culture of death is more than just dangerous to our present; it is deadly to our future.

One of my favorite ways of thinking about education is a metaphor given by the poet, Roy Campbell. A convert to Catholicism, he likened civilization to a car. There’s technological and educational and societal progress, which is the accelerator of the Car of Civilization. But there is also tradition, which acts as a brake. And there is wisdom, the steering wheel. Today, we live in a world that refuses to use the brake and has thrown away the steering wheel. Such a society is doomed to destruction.

Your job as graduates of Wyoming Catholic College is to go out and teach the world what you’ve learned here. Teach them how to drive through life, guided by wisdom. Teach them (by your example and your leadership) that they can and must become more fully human. To be fully human is to love the Good and to know the Truth, and when knowing and loving become the same thing, we will be truly rational and truly beautiful. This is the ultimate goal of a true education, as it is the ultimate goal of life.

Graduating class of 2018, you’ve had a good education. Now go forth and live a good life that is true and beautiful and in the service of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Thank you, and God bless you.

Christmas With Capra: Classic Films for Our Troubled Times

 

If you want your children to know how one can discern his God-given purpose and calling in a self-centered world, be a patriotic American in a corrupt world, and be a man or a woman in a genderless world, then you need look no further than these three Frank Capra masterpieces.

Frank Capra

This Christmas, in addition to putting presents beneath a glowing tree, why not give your family the gift of your presence with them before a glowing screen. No, not to watch an action movie or binge a Netflix show or simply pass the time. Watch, and discuss, with them a classic Hollywood film that was made to entertain and edify parents and children alike but that does not shy away from struggle, heartache, and pain.

Particularly, since we live in troubled and confusing times, select films that can speak to our unique historical moment with the kind of maturity, wisdom, and clarity too often lacking in modern Hollywood fare. Thankfully, the Golden Age of the 1930s and 40s produced hundreds of such films. Among those, many of the best were directed by a Sicilian immigrant who understood the fullness of the American dream—with all its joys and sorrows, successes and failures—better than any politician living today: Frank Capra.

For Christmas 2021, I suggest a Capra movie marathon for the whole family that will thrill and awe, even as it guides and instructs. If you want your children to know, and yourself to know as well, how one can discern his God-given purpose and calling in a self-centered world, be a patriotic American in a corrupt world, and be a man or a woman in a genderless world, then you need look no further than these three Capra masterpieces.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

The best place to start is with Capra’s best film, which also happens to be the best Christmas movie ever made and one of the ten or fifteen best films of all time. It concerns a bright, honest, hard-working young man named George Bailey who dreams of leaving his small town of Bedford Falls, traveling the world, and building bridges and airfields and skyscrapers a hundred stories high. But he never does those things because his father dies, he takes over the Building and Loan, and marries the girl next door.

For the next decade, George carries on a one-man crusade against Potter, a cruel, joyless miser who has milked the townspeople dry, forcing them to pay exorbitant rents to live lives of quiet despair in his broken-down tenements. Only Bailey’s Building and Loan provides the means for the working people of Bedford Falls to afford a home of their own. Then, the first Christmas Eve after the end of the WWII arrives and disaster strikes.

Eight-thousand dollars meant to square the books of the Building and Loan accidentally end up in the clutches of Potter, causing George to fall foul of the bank examiner. Things quickly spiral out of control, driving our innocent hero to suicidal despair. Only the intervention of a bumbling angel named Clarence saves George from taking his own life. But it is not enough! In order to restore George’s faith and hope and prevent him from a second attempt, Clarence is forced to take drastic measures.

To prove to George the value of his life, Clarence allows him to see what the world would have been like had he never been born. Without the ministry of the Building and Loan, Bedford Falls becomes the twisted creation of slumlord Potter, a dark, hopeless, soul-crushing world of smoky bars and seedy dance halls, pawn shops and peep shows. As for George’s family, without him there, his mother becomes a bitter old woman, his wife an old maid, his uncle an inmate in an asylum, and his brother, whom George had saved from drowning when he was a boy, a corpse.

One life, George learns, touches so many other lives. Far from a failure, his life was the glue that held together his family, his business, and his community. In the end, George embraces life, and the people of Bedford Falls gather around him in love, donating the money to restore the Building and Loan that had helped them to achieve their own simple dreams of freedom, independence, and dignity.

I hope you will discuss with your family what It’s a Wonderful Life teaches us about the value of life, service, and community. But this Christmas, I would urge you to focus on something else, something our society, especially the young, desperately needs to hear.

When George Bailey gets to see what the world would be like had he never been born, he becomes, for a moment, what a growing number of people in our society would like to be: a radically autonomous person with no obligations to bind him or social expectations to define him. He can brush the dirt of old-fashioned, bourgeoise Bedford Falls off his feet and live the individualistic dreams he has always had for himself.

But he doesn’t. He goes back to the life which he had come to believe was a cage, but which he now sees was both a calling and a blessing. He never got the chance to build skyscrapers a hundred stories high; instead, he provided the means to build countless homes for real people living real lives. He built no grand bridges over mighty rivers; instead, he united an entire town, empowering them to rise above the destructive flood of Potter’s all-consuming greed.

I can think of no more important message in an age where behavior that would once have been deemed selfish, narcissistic, and self-destructive is praised as an expression of “healthy” individuality. George Bailey neither does that which feels good nor asserts his own narrow vision of himself and his role in society. He accepts the responsibility that is placed upon his shoulders and allows himself to be shaped and defined by the needs of others around him. Rather than change the world to suit his own self-centered desires, he changes himself to adapt to the true calling that is upon him.

George Bailey does more than delay gratification. He embraces his true and essential identity and purpose and is strengthened to perform the work for which he was created.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

Seven years before he played George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart took on the role of another innocent, hard-working, selfless young man: Jefferson Smith. Through a political fluke, Smith becomes the junior senator of his state and is sent off to D. C. Brimming over with idealistic dreams of serving his country, Smith proposes a bill to build a boy’s camp that will train up young Americans in the democratic values of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Instead, he runs head on into backroom deals, political expediency, and graft.

As it turns out, the senior senator (Paine), who had been friends with Smith’s crusading father and whom Smith idolizes as a man of integrity, has long been colluding with Taylor, a corrupt businessman who owns all there is to own in Smith’s state. When Smith’s boy’s camp threatens a lucrative political deal that Taylor has made with Paine, Smith is bribed to drop his bill. When he refuses, Taylor’s machine crushes him, falsely accusing him of the very graft of which Paine and Taylor are guilty.

With the help of his secretary, Clarissa Saunders, whose cynical shell is punctured by Smith’s honesty and sincerity, Smith mounts a filibuster in the Senate to expose the lies. Alas, Taylor’s web of deceit proves too thick and strong for Smith to wrestle himself out of. Exhausted by his seemingly fruitless struggle, Smith drops in a swoon to the cold, stony floor of the Senate.

And that is when the miracle happens. Smith’s courageous zeal and willingness to give all he has for truth and justice wakes up Paine from his moral slumber, and he confesses publicly before the Senate that Smith is innocent and that he is the guilty one who should be expelled.

Once the full weight of this timeless and timely film sinks into the minds and hearts of your family, you can begin a much-needed discussion about patriotism. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is no sentimental work of naïve optimism and primitive jingoism. It looks reality square in the face and uncovers the two truths about man on which our Founding Fathers built our political system: we were made in God’s image and thus possess inherent worth and dignity; we are fallen and depraved and thus need laws and limits.

Because they believed the first truth, they believed that we had the ability and the right to govern ourselves. Because they believed the second—because they believed, to borrow a key line from The Federalist Papers, that men are not angels—they believed that checks and balances had to be inscribed deeply into our constitution.

Capra’s paean to our great experiment in self-government is one of the most patriotic, pro-American films ever made. It also offers a searing critique of political corruption in the very heart of our nation. The film does not teach us to deny the truth of man’s depravity (political or otherwise), but to meet that depravity with decency, integrity, and a willingness to fight with all the means at our disposal. Innocence, it teaches us, need not mean weakness. To the contrary, it provides clarity, hope, and the strength to endure.

And it teaches one more thing that every American who cares about the future of our country must hear: though there are many ideologies out there that are wholly corrupt, there are very few individuals who are. Yes, there are a handful of Taylors out there, but most of the people who serve in our democracy are like Paine and Saunders. They may have compromised, they may have acquiesced to business as usual, but they are redeemable. They can be won back by citizens who will stand up for truth and justice and who will appeal to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

Cynicism, polarization, and demonization are not the answers to the political corruption of our day. We need Smiths with the courage to filibuster—but only if their ultimate motivation is to build rather than tear down, redeem rather than slander, restore rather than lay waste.

It Happened One Night (1934)

Capra would become most famous for his movies with a message, but the one that made him a household name—the first film to win Oscars for best picture, director, actor, actress, and script—was a far lighter film, a screwball romantic comedy that would establish the conventions for hundreds of movies to come.

The film concerns Ellie, a run-away heiress escaping her constrictive, artificial life, and Peter, a cynical, down-on-his-luck reporter fed up with the artificiality of his own career. They meet by accident on a bus and cut a deal: Peter will help Ellie get to the ne’er-do-well playboy she wants to marry, while Ellie will allow Peter the exclusive story of her elopement. Though they are as opposite as two people can be, they manage to fall in love.

I won’t recount all the wonderful adventures they go on, but as they make their way through the heart of America, they each learn to let down their masks and be vulnerable before the other. Ellie learns that she is a spoiled, sheltered brat cut off from the real sufferings of depression America, while Peter learns that he is not as much in control as he would like to think: that he is, in fact, a know-it-all who knows very little about himself and who is out of touch with his feelings, his needs, and his desires.

It Happened One Night, for all its entertainment value, is a film that all families in America should be watching and discussing together this holiday season. This generation of young people has been forced to grow up in a world of rampant gender confusion where no one seems able or willing to acknowledge the differences between men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Masculinity and femininity themselves are under attack as nothing more than social-political-economic constructs.

Capra’s romantic comedy is about the age-old battle of the sexes, but not in the way that misunderstood phrase is used today. The real battle of the sexes—as it manifests itself, for example, in Shakespeare’s comedies—is not over jobs or salaries, political power or educational opportunities. It concerns, rather, the radically different ways that men and woman communicate, prioritize, perceive, and interact with themselves, with the other sex, and with the world.

With great energy, drive, and humor, It Happens One Night lays down the rules and dynamics of seduction and courtship, but in such a way as to promote real understanding between the sexes. While modern films and television shows offer either no or false

insight into the complementary nature of masculinity and femininity, Capra conjures up for our amusement and instruction a dual journey of enlightenment that simultaneously teaches his hero and heroine the uniqueness of their male and female natures and the greater strength and wholeness they can achieve when they join together as one flesh.

That enlightenment brings reconciliation to the lovers and to their respective sexes. It brings reconciliation as well to the wider society, bridging the gulf between rich and poor, haves and have nots, the leisured class and the working class. Our age, fueled by politicians and media people who use hate to exacerbate differences and bring further division, desperately needs such visions of enlightenment and reconciliation.

So dim the lights, break out the snacks, and let Capra’s films light the way to a future driven by gratitude rather than envy, integrity rather than the bottom line, the celebration of difference rather than the enforcement of a dull and unnatural sameness.

Moral and Public Policy Problems in “Spider-Man: No Way Home”

 Don’t set your public policy or moral clock by the newest superhero movie. It’s got some flaws. But first the good news. Congratulations are in order for the Disney Corporation’s subsidiary, Marvel Studios. Despite a promise earlier in the year from Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige that the increasingly politically correct studio would be making the Great Leap Wokeward and a partial fulfillment in the form of a fall box office bomb called “The Eternals,” Spider-Man: No Way Home appeared a few weeks ago and bears no signs of going woke. And, with over $1.1 billion in global sales already, it is definitely not going broke.

That’s not to say that some didn’t try. The Daily Wire reported that Marisa Tomei, who has played Peter Parker’s Aunt May in the current series, lobbied to make her character a lesbian. Apparently, the love of money is not only the root of all evil; it may also be the rooting out of dumb ideas. Aunt May is not that good of a moral guide in the current movie, but at least we don’t learn anything about her sexual appetites.

Instead of preaching or in-your-face displays of LGBT+ virtue-signaling, the current movie allows one to pleasantly munch one’s popcorn while enjoying what made the Marvel Cinematic Universe great in the first place: humor, action, and a sense that the studio doesn’t hate its own fans.

Tom Holland’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man is the delightfully dorky and awkward figure we all love, interrupting Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange incessantly as the latter attempts to weave a spell making everyone forget what the evil Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) had revealed in the previous movie, Spider-Man: Far From Home: Spider-Man’s secret identity. The humorous scene is the trigger device for some sort of disturbance in the multiverse, bringing supervillain opponents of Spider-Man from several parallel universes (aka previous Marvel Spider-Man franchises). That gives us the opportunity for action and humor, as Spider-Man must collect and imprison these figures so that Dr. Strange can send them back.

It is also the opportunity for rewarding fans who are delighted to find all the old villains: Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Jamie Foxx’s Electro, Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, and Rhys Ifans’s Lizard. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man ends up being no match for these figures, so we are then treated to the coup de fan service: the appearance of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, Spider-Men from those parallel universes/series, to help fight these figures. It’s a rollicking good time with plenty of action scenes culminating in a wonderful fight around and on the Statue of Liberty.

I don’t want to reveal too many of the details, but I will say that in the end a good time is had by all. Except, I suppose for those wokescolds who are only content to destroy other people’s cinematic universes. This is not a “film” but a movie-movie that makes for a pleasant diversion.

All the same, however, and at the risk of being an imagino-conserva-wokescold, I must register problems with the movie’s moral compass. It’s only fair, after all. There are more possibilities of going agley than gay and more ways to wend astray than woke. One might object that if it’s only diversion, why judge a bit of escapism? But as Tolkien observed, we judge the good of escapism by whether it simply helps us escape for a few moments from the burden of our duties or whether it helps us escape for good from the ideas of our age that imprison us.

The problems with Spider-Man: No Way Home, as one might expect from a movie about heroes and villains, are in the nature of fighting evil and the nature of evil itself. The first we might call the problem of progressive perfectionist activism, while the second is the problem of evil as external.

The first problem we might consider as less serious, given that many adventure plots begin with the fevered stupidities of youth being brought to action through the sympathy of adults. That spell of Dr. Strange’s that, with Holland-Parker’s hilarious interruptions, is designed to make everybody forget that Peter Parker and Spider-Man are the same but ends up importing supervillains from parallel universes to wreak havoc on Holland-Spider-Man’s, was cast in service of problems getting into top-tier universities. That’s right. Though he’s not guilty, and the feds won’t charge him for, the murder Mysterio tried to pin on him in the last movie, all this multiverse mayhem is because Holland-Parker, his girlfriend M.J. (the earnest and beautiful Zendaya), and his best friend Ned Leeds (the endearingly schlubby Jacob Batalon) are suffering from the bad publicity and . . . having trouble getting into MIT.

If Holland-Parker is not guilty of the murder, can we at least say that he might owe a little time in the slammer with Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, and other celebrities who were indicted after the Varsity Blues investigation? All these real-world people did was fake a few test scores and, through ivory tower Svengali Rick Singer, pay off some admission flacks, coaches, and deans to get their kids into college. Parker-Holland has convinced Dr. Strange to try a dangerous spell that ends up releasing supervillains who cause millions of dollars in damage and no doubt shed a bit of blood in their rampage through New York City.

As I say, I don’t want to make too much of this. Teens gonna stupid and all that. But it gets worse. Dr. Strange, having done no due diligence before the spell, realizes how ridiculous Parker’s agreement to such a spell was (given that the crisis is college admissions and Parker’s friends didn’t even appeal MIT’s decision before agreeing to mystical mind-control magic) and then discovers what his spell has wrought. He angrily tells Holland-Parker to collect the supervillains in order that he might dispatch them to their home universes lest we have the usual comic book problems of possibly breaking the fabric of reality. After snatching up these characters and putting them in force-field prisons under Strange’s mansion, however, Holland-Parker discovers that the assembled supervillains have been snatched into his own universe right before they are about to fight their own Spider-Men and die. After retrieving the troubled Norman Osborne/Green Goblin from the charity Aunt May works for, Holland-Parker determines upon a better-living-through-chemistry-or-computing plan to “cure” all the assembled villains. When Dr. Strange tells him, sensibly, that this is a stupid idea, Holland-Parker takes the box containing the spell with which the supervillains are to be dispatched and leads Strange on a chase that ends up with Strange stuck in the Mirror Dimension. He then lets the assembled villains out of their cells and takes them to his friend’s apartment to work the cures. As you might expect, this does not completely work out and we have a lot more destruction before the film ends.

What a perfect example of the progressive perfectionist activist. Like one of the Soros-funded district attorneys, Holland-Parker is going to let the bad guys go in order to do a bit of social work and neuropsychiatry on them. He’ll deal with the root causes, you see. In another world, especially a cinematic universe, it may be different, but this sort of activism in our world does not merely lead to lots of cool CGI crashes, but a lot of misery. In our world, this kind of thinking leads to record numbers of murders, as over a dozen cities in the U. S.—including my own St. Paul, Minnesota—achieved in 2021 about two weeks before the movie’s December release date.

This problem of how to deal with evil is not, however, the worst problem in the movie. That honor goes to the notion of what makes people evil in the first place. Holland-Parker, without knowing much of anything about these figures from their parallel universes, determines based on internal gossip that all of them are only supervillains because of the accidents, involuntary or self-induced, that gave them their powers in the first place. Thus, with the help of the two other Spider-Men who join him, all he has to do is come up with chemical or computer solutions to these figures and force them to take the cure. And then they’ll be good.

Alas, if only it were so easy. But it’s been a particular temptation of our age to believe that evil is not a matter of the will but a quirk of the brain chemistry that can be managed by technology or pills. John Henry Newman described this temptation in his 1841 essays that comprise The Tamworth Reading Room. He noted the error of “believing that our true excellence comes not from within, but from without; not wrought out through personal struggles and sufferings, but following upon a passive exposure to influences over which we have no control.”

I have no doubt that some who commit crimes are insane, but what is to guarantee that, freed from, say, the power to harness electricity or the power of sand, Max Dillon/Electro or Flint Marko/Sandman will not want a return to power over others again? Marko’s story was, after all, that of a criminal who gained superpowers—his will was already corrupt. And though Dillon only turned to crime after falling into a vat of electric eels, his own rebellion against Parker’s cure in this movie shows that the charge he gets from power over others is not dependent on electricity.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the action as much as anyone, but I couldn’t help but smile when my ten-year-old daughter told me, “He and his Aunt May caused all their own problems.” Perhaps my child could be the district attorney of Philadelphia? Chesterton says we can live without literature but not without stories. The reason to defend Dick Deadshot, Robin Hood, and Spider-Man is that they teach us basic lessons about the moral structure of life in entertaining and fantastic ways. Spider-Man: No Way Home avoids the most obvious of our contemporary lies about reality, but it too paints a flawed understanding of evil, both in how to prudently fight against it and how it attaches itself to us humans.

Is Bela Lugosi Dead?

 

Having buried the shade or shadow of Bela Lugosi with the many other ghosts of my past, I have found myself once again haunted by his undead presence in the pages of the recently-published novel, “This Thing of Darkness.”

Many full moons ago, during the decadent days and daze of my youth, I enjoyed dabbling with the diabolism of gothic horror. I especially liked a hit record and accompanying video by a post-punk gothic band called Bauhaus, the title of which was Bela Lugosi’s Dead:

The bats have left the bell tower
The victims have been bled
Red velvet lines the black box
Bela Lugosi’s dead
Bela Lugosi’s dead
Undead, undead, undead
Undead, undead, undead….

For those too young or too innocent to know the dark figure of Bela Lugosi, he was the Hungarian-born actor who became a Hollywood idol for his performance as Dracula in the 1931 film version of Bram Stoker’s novel, the latter of which had been published in 1897. Although this version was not the earliest adaptation, the German silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror being released nine years earlier, Bela Lugosi’s performance as the undead Transylvanian vampire has eclipsed every other portrayal, before or since.

Having buried the shade or shadow of Bela Lugosi with the many other ghosts of my past, I have found myself once again haunted by his undead presence in the pages of the recently-published novel, This Thing of Darkness, co-authored by K. V. Turley and Fiorella de Maria.

The novel is set in Hollywood in 1956, the year of Lugosi’s death, with the aging self-obsessed actor taking centre stage. The support acts are a couple of English expatriates, one of whom, Evangeline (Evi) Kihooley, is an alcoholic war-widow, whose Irish-American husband had been killed a few years earlier in the Korean War; the other, Hugo Radelle, himself a veteran of the Korean War, is the owner of a store selling film memorabilia. These two uprooted English exiles, eking out a life of sorts in the rootlessness of Hollywood, are brought together after Evi is commissioned to write a series of feature articles on the fading life and legacy of Lugosi. Having no interest in film in general, and horror films in particular, she relies on Hugo’s expertise to decipher the fact from the fantasy of Lugosi’s interviews with her.

Each of the characters is possessed by demons from their respective pasts. Lugosi is so narcissistically self-obsessed and self-deceived that he doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish between his real past and the past he has invented for himself. Hating the light, just like the vampire in whose typecast shadow he has been doomed to live, he insists that his interviews with Evi are conducted in the gloom of a room in which the curtains are never drawn back to let in the light of day.  As he tells his life-story, there is the suggestion that his success was bound up with some sort of Faustian pact he’d made as a young man. Although Evi is skeptical, she finds herself drawn into Lugosi’s diabolically darkened world, his demons bringing her own to the surface.

As for Evi, her dreams are haunted by her nightmare past. She had witnessed the horrors of the Nazi bombing of her hometown of Coventry during World War Two in which both her parents had been killed. She is also devastated by the death of her husband and traumatized by her lack of knowledge of how he died. Orphaned and widowed, she is addicted to the alcohol which helps her escape from the nightmare reality she lives when she’s awake and the nightmares that descend on her when she’s asleep. Her miserable existence takes place in a twilight zone between dream-reality and reality itself.

Then there is Hugo, who emerges as a sort of guardian angel, befriending and defending Evi, and helping her navigate the sinister and surreal world in which her close encounters with the shadow of Count Dracula have plunged her. Yet Hugo, for all his polite and gentle English decorum, is haunted by the demons of his own past. Why does he refuse to speak of his own experience in Korea? What does he have to hide? What are the secrets that he refuses to divulge? What intolerable trauma or unbearable sense of guilt is keeping him tongue-tied?

The final character, whose role is crucial to the dramatic tension and mystery of the plot, is already dead. This is Christopher Kihooley, Evi’s deceased husband, whose absence from Evi’s life and his presence in her dreams and nightmares, makes him very much alive. A devout, if not particularly pious Catholic, he had brought Christ into Evi’s godless life, even as his death had crucified her. Somehow or other, the aptly named Christopher serves as the Christ-bearer throughout the story and we know that, in some way or other, his death, and the facts surrounding it, will prove to be an epiphany, revealing truths that had been hidden and casting light where there had only been darkness.

This Thing of Darkness is one of the finest contemporary novels that I’ve read in a very long time. It walks into the night, stepping behind the silver screen to the delusional twilight zone between hell and Hollywood, where dreams become nightmares; yet it also walks into the light at the end of the tunnel, where the lie of the silver screen makes way for the truth of the silver lining.

Is Bella Lugosi dead? The real question is whether he was ever really alive….