On Human Perfectability (And Other Such Nonsense)

When I was a graduate student at the University of Leuven and had to decide on a period of philosophy in which to focus, there really was no question in my mind that it would be late antiquity. I had always found this period of history—which begins with the death of Alexander the Great and goes until the fall of the Roman Empire in the West—to be one of the most fascinating and underappreciated in European history.

But it was the intellectual thought of the period that really grabbed me. It was during late antiquity that all of the major schools of philosophy—Epicureans, Skeptics, Cynics, Stoics, Peripatetics, and the Neo-Platonists—were engaged in a mighty philosophical battle to determine whose philosophical system would come to dominate. Now, the approaches of all these schools differed dramatically, but they all shared one basic presupposition: that human perfectibility in this life was indeed a possibility.

For a young man in his 20s with more than his own share of emotional baggage, this idea naturally was quite appealing to me. All you had to do, it seemed, was have the right understanding of the nature of reality and live your life according to some well- defined principles and you were set. Happiness, self-realization, moral perfection, the good life—what ever you want to call it—could be yours for the taking. And once you attained this state of ultimate perfection, as exemplified by the great sages of all these traditions, you’d never again have to be bothered by anger, fear, despair, loneliness, anxiety, and the like. You’d essentially be impervious to the vicissitudes of chance and fortune.

It was a sweet dream, but, as I get older, I have begun to realize that this dream is actually more like a dangerous fantasy. And, unfortunately, it’s a fantasy that most Americans buy into to one degree or another. We think that, if we can just change our outlook on life, or get the right kind of job, or marry the right person, or have a bit more money, or find the right religion to belong to, our lives will suddenly become perfect. We would be walking around on a cloud of bliss, never again to know the tortuous pangs of unhappiness.

So, we spend our lives going from therapist to therapist, from medication to medication, from guru to guru, looking for the magic pill that will dispel the inner demons that plague us. But what we find, more often than not, is that we “flee into the desert” hoping to escape our problems, only to find that our problems follow us right into the desert (to paraphrase John Cassian). The desert, of course, is a metaphor for that secret cure that will end our unhappiness. In the early Christian Church, the desert represented escape from the wickedness and temptations of the city. But our own personal desert could be just about anything: it is basically the delusion that we have that everything in life will become just fine, if we can just change ourselves or our outlook on life just a little bit.

St. Augustine, the great Doctor of the Church, saw that this incessant question for perfection was a dangerous tendency that would actually rob one of the little happiness that was possible in this life. As a young man, he flittered from sect to sect trying to find the magic cure for his own misery. In the end, however, he discovered that the very quest for perfection was his greatest sin and that what he really needed to do was just accept his own fallen nature and muddle through life as best he could. The rest, Augustine came to believe, was in the hands of God.

I used to think that Augustine’s approach was insufferably cynical and pessimistic. But now I think that he actually was on to something. If we can just recognize that we’re not perfect and never will be, and try to accept who we actually are, with all our foibles, neuroses, petty character traits, and gross imperfections, we might actually find the modicum of contentment that may, in fact, be quite realizable in this life.

As the great philosopher, Clint Eastwood, once profoundly said…



So I say, start delighting in your own limitations. Your life may not be filled with apple pie and sunshine all the time (Whose life really is?). But you may just find that you are perfectly adequate for the ample challenges involved in living out your day-to-day existence.

And please don’t knock mere adequacy until you’ve given it a good try!

Occupy Wall Street Forum at Molloy College

Here are a few shots from the Occupy Wall Street forum that was held at Molloy College on November 16th. The event probably raised more questions than it resolved, but it definitely got people talking about the issues driving the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The Five Funniest Works Ever Written

Every now and then you need to read a really hysterical novel to take your mind off the fact that the world in which we live is basically doomed. None of us individually can do very much about the world financial crisis, climate change, mass species extinction, the genocide in Tibet, or the dubious popularity of Lady Gaga. But we can do what great men and women throughout the ages have done when confronted from the insanity of the human condition: retreat into the world of a seriously funny book.

Here are my personal recommendations for the funniest works of fiction ever written:

5. Tie: The Decameron & The Canterbury Tales - Who says a great work can't be a laugh riot? I was forced to read both these works as a student and couldn't believe just how nasty, crude, vulgar, and tasteless they are (in a nice kind of way).

4. Pride and Prejudice - I know that some people find Jane Austen prissy, but I'm definitely not one of them. I love this book, reread it almost every year, and always laugh out loud when I do (especially when I come to any scene involving Mr. Bennett or Mr. Collins).

3. Catch 22 - See previous post.

2. Tom Jones - Joseph Andrews is also a hoot-and-a-half, but this is definitely Henry Fielding's comic masterwork. Sure its smutty and cynical, but that's what makes it so much fun!

1. A Confederacy of Dunces - Ignatius J. Reilly...That should say it all. If you are a guy between the ages of 35 and 50, you know damn well that this is the funniest work ever written. The rest of you just don't know what you're missing!


“I refuse to 'look up.' Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.” (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)

Catch 22

I'm reading Catch 22 again for the fifth time. In the event that you're not into mid-twentieth century absurdist fiction, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller centers around the lives of a group of World War II fliers, whose job is to bomb targets in Italy. The man character, Yossarian, has decided early in the novel that he has had enough and wants to be grounded. The only problem is that, in order to be grounded, you have to be crazy. Yossarian, whose nerves are shot from the stress of warfare, seems to fit the bill, but there's a catch, of course -- Catch 22:

Yossarian...decided right then and there to go crazy.

"You're wasting your time," Doc Daneeka was forced to tell him.

"Can you ground someone who's crazy?"

"Oh, sure. I have to. There's a rule saying I have to ground anyone who's crazy."

"Then why don't you ground me? I'm crazy. Ask Clevinger."

"Clevinger? Where is Clevinger? You find Clevinger and I'll ask him."

"Then ask any of the others. They'll tell you how crazy I am."

"They're crazy."

"Then why don't you ground them?"

"Why don't they ask me to ground them?"

"Because they're crazy, that's why."

"Of course they're crazy," Doc Daneeka replied. "I just told you they're crazy, didn't I? And you can't let crazy people decide whether you're crazy or not, can you?"

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"

"He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.

"Can you ground him?"

"I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."

"Then why doesn't he ask you to?"

"Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."

"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"

"That's all. Let him ask me."

"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.

"No. Then I can't ground him."

"You mean there's a catch?"

"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane then he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

When I first read this book at the age of 20, of course I found it hysterically funny. But a 20 year old foolishly believes that he has ultimate control over his destiny, and this delusion prevented me from understanding just how damned profound this book actually is. Now that I'm a world-weary, middle-aged cynic, I realize that there are Catch 22s at work around me all the time.

For example:

1) You have to keep consuming to keep the economy alive. But if you keep consuming you won't have any savings. If you have no savings, this will mean that you have no disposable income to spend. And, if you have no disposable income to spend, this will seriously hurt the economy.

2) Republicans and Democrats are both responsible for the mess we are in and both parties have sold out to special interests. We should, therefore, vote for politicians running on some other party line to break up the monopoly that these parties have on the political process. But, if you "waste" your vote on a third-party candidate, you are all but ensuring that a candidate you really hate--who by coincidence will either be a Republican or a Democrat--is certain to get elected.

3) It is wrong for the Chinese to adopt a way of life that will cause harm to the planet. But the Chinese are simply adopting the American way of life that we continually argue should be the norm for every country. So every country should do what we do, but, if it did, the planet would die.

4) Of course, the members of Occupy Wall Street have the right to protest. This is America, after all, and Americans are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech and assembly by the United States Constitution. However, if protests are effective, then they create a public nuisance, and therefore must be stopped at all costs.

5) If faculty member X would just stop criticizing the administration and do his own thing, he would no longer be the object of retaliation. But, if faculty member X stops criticizing the administration and does his own thing, he can't be living up to his contractual obligations as a faculty member, and, therefore, has to be "corrected" (i.e., retaliated against)....Ok, this one is a bit personal, but it does seem to fit the theme, doesn't it?

What Joseph Heller understood is that capricious autocrats don't simply want compliance from those they seek to control. They have to break their wills as well. And the best way to do this is to increasingly remove any sort of freedom that individuals have -- especially the freedom to protest or dissent. If no matter what a person does the are going to suffer for it, eventually you have a situation in which people become so neurotic and insecure that simply in order to survive they turn into mindless cogs in the machinery of the bureaucracies in which they serve.

I've always known that Catch 22 was a wonderfully written novel, but only now do I grasp that it also provides a template for understanding the human condition in the 21st century. If you haven't read this book, I'd urge you to pick it up immediately. It may not help you to escape from the Catch 22s at work in your own life, but it will definitely make you realize that to be considered insane in a totally insane world is actually quite an amazing achievement.

They're Watching

THE MAN says that you are paranoid for thinking that he is spying on you.

But if THE MAN knows that you suspect that he is spying on you, how did THE MAN discover this information in the first place?

By spying on you, of course.

Therefore, your supposed paranoia is technically not paranoia at all (Remember, if you they really are out to get you, then you are not paranoid...just observant.).

So don't ever let THE MAN accuse you of paranoia without first producing evidence of this. And once he produces evidence of this, you know for sure that you are definitely not paranoid. Of course, you still could be obsessive compulsive, depressive, perverse, antisocial, megalomaniacal, and even border-line psychotic....

But you are most assuredly not paranoid.

quod erat demonstrandum.

Life is Suffering

I had the privilege--or the grave misfortune, depending upon how you look at it--to spend six years of my life studying the problem of happiness as part of the research for both my master's thesis and my doctoral dissertation. I explored the most profound ideas of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world on the subject, and almost drove myself insane in the process.

What did I discover as a result of this laborious process, you might ask? Only that everything I really needed to know about happiness, its cause, and the possibility of its attainment could be discovered by watching the following one minute scene from Woody Allen's Love and Death:

The Tigers and the Strawberries

Last year Dr. John Yanovitch of the Molloy College Department of Philosophy agreed to let me videotape him giving one of his inspiring dharma talks. If you're not into Buddhism, a dharma talk is a bit like a Buddhist homily, imparting wisdom about the right way to live and practice. John has been giving talks like this for as long as I can remember, and those who have experienced them always leave incredibly inspired.

The talk that he chose to give this time was on the famous zen parable of the tigers and the strawberries. This was an excellent choice on his part because this parable gets to the essence of what Buddhist practice is all about. You see, unlike certain theistic forms of religion, the goal of Buddhism is not to flee from this world and all its difficulties and uncertainties, but to remain firmly rooted within it. There can be no life-denying sensibilities at work in Buddhism because the NOW--the very moment we are in at any given time--is all we have, and we ever will have.

So settle in and enjoy John's dharma talk. You won't find any fancy special effects or guest appearances from the cast of Jersey Shore. But if you open up your mind and put aside your critical judgments for just a short while, you may actually learn something quite valuable about how to live your precious human life.

Dare to Disagree

Hey, my friend,
you're not supposed to come here
and just look around
like some kind of idle tourist
on vacation in Disneyland.
That's not what this scene is all about.

On my turf, I'm THE MAN,
and you are never--
and I mean never--
supposed to agree with THE MAN,
at any time,
about anything,
no matter how insignificant it might be.

THE MAN, after all, expects you
to agree with him
(or at least be afraid to disagree):
that the source of THE MAN's power.
But when you challenge THE MAN,
and tell him that he's
full of [insert expletive here],
and explain exactly why
he's so gosh-darn wrong,
then THE MAN
looses all of his power
and you see that he's just like
the guy behind the curtain
in that old movie about
Dorothy and Toto:
he's all bluster and no substance.

So I really do dare you to
to knock my arguments down
(if you can),
and maybe I'll return the favor sometime.
After all,
that's supposed to be why
we're in this wisdom-seeking business
in the first place,
isn't it?

The University as Corporation

If you took a stroll through the small Catholic college where I have been working for the past 16 years, you probably wouldn’t guess that what is going on here is indicative of a very disturbing trend in higher education—the relentless corporatization of American education. As you walked through our campus, you’d probably think to yourself that surely Catholic colleges like this at least must be immune to the pressures that other colleges face to compete as business entities, pursuing the ever dwindling numbers of students who can afford to pay their bloated tuitions.

But you’d be wrong.

My college, like most other colleges in the United States, has bought into the mistaken notion that the students at our institution are customers whose whims must be catered to at every turn and that the faculty are troublesome laborers who really don’t know what’s best for the students (but who are arrogant enough to presume that they do). The trend towards corporatization has been going on for some time now in our country, but never has it been so intense as it is right now. The economic crisis that has hit the world, and is beginning to impact higher education, has provided college administrators with all the justification they need to run their institutions according to business models that ultimately will do little more than make college education in this country even less effective than it already is.

This corporate approach to higher education plays out in practical terms in the daily life of the academy in a number of key ways:

1) Since the academy needs to ensure ever increasing enrollment numbers, it promotes only those programs that are marketable. Unfortunately, programs like philosophy, art, theology, sociology, history, and most other liberal arts disciplines don’t fit the idea of what a marketable discipline is and so basically these programs are left to die like unwanted step-children. They are drained of funds, marginalized in the academy, and generally treated as burdens, rather than as assets.

Just to give you some idea of just how unimportant the liberal arts are considered these days, a colleague told me recently that at his institution (No names, please…Let’s just say that it’s a very tidy Catholic College in Rockville Centre) the Director of the Library made a decision to cull the philosophy section of books that she deemed uninteresting or irrelevant to make room for more important materials. She didn’t consult the members of that department or ask for their input in any way. She just had one of her employees—a staff member who knows absolutely nothing about the discipline—chuck any boring old philosophy books that he thought should go. Since he apparently thought that all philosophy books were boring, he gleefully tossed boxes of books in the most capricious manner possible (For some reason, he seemed to have it in for poor Emmanuel Kant). On the positive side, at least there was more room for more “relevant” materials for students.

2) Since the students are the customers, their interests—however ill-defined these might be—drive the curriculum. In the old days, when getting a college degree actually meant something, faculty determined what general education courses were necessary in order to produce graduates who could read and write at fairly high levels and who had some degree of cultural literacy and critical thinking abilities. In practice, this meant that students at most reputable colleges and universities in the United States were required to take healthy doses of literature, art, philosophy, history, and the like. And the result was that we produced the “greatest generation” of Americans—those men and women who went to college in the 1940s-1960s and who made the United States the economic envy of the entire world.

Today general education requirements are determined by college administrators, many of whom know very little about real pedagogy, because they are so far removed from the classroom, and who are motivated solely by what will get students to attend their institution. Since most students want to (1) graduate as quickly as possible, (2) take courses only in their major area of interest, and (3) have little use for—or at least think they have little use for—classes in the humanities, there is pressure placed upon administrators to prune their general education requirements down as far as possible to try to attract these students.

Even when they are allowed to exist, humanities programs often become service programs for more “marketable” professional programs. So instead of taking a class in Shakespeare or Chaucer, students take more “practical” liberal arts classes like “Writing for Business” or “The Literature of Healing” or “Children’s Literature for the Teaching Profession.” In effect, what this means is that American college students are no longer receiving liberal arts educations at all; rather, they are receiving the shallowest kind of vocational training imaginable. And this kind of training—despite what college students themselves might believe—won’t serve graduates well when they get out into the real world and discover that they are really not all that marketable in their chosen field and ill-prepared to do anything else.

3) Since faculty are basically treated as laborers, they must be controlled by management and prevented as much as possible from “corrupting” the rest of the academy with their foolishly naïve ideas about education. Faculty are therefore left out of discussions about the mission and direction of their intuitions, and are paid lip-service when it comes to curriculum issues. What administrators do—and I’ve seen this at work in far too many institutions—is magnanimously ask faculty for their input on vital matters, and then proceed to do exactly what they planned to do anyway. “Well, we did consult with the faculty,” these paragons of democracy will often reply when confronted by angry faculty. “What more could they possibly want from us?”

College and university administrators are also trying to kill off tenure—an important, but misunderstood tool in maintaining the integrity of higher education. I’m sad to say it, but my own college seems determined to lead the rest of Long Island’s colleges in attempting to institute post-tenure review policies that ultimately will destroy real academic freedom. You may not realize this, but tenured faculty members are usually the only employees at a college who can argue with senior administrators about the direction the institution is taking. If tenured faculty, however, have to worry about being put on an administrative hit list—and, believe it or not, these do exist at many colleges and universities—then there will be no one left who will have the courage to argue with senior administrators about policies that might ultimately harm students or diminish the quality of classroom instruction.

So what’s the solution to this problem, you might be wondering? If this really is the inevitable trend in higher education in the United States, what hope do any of us have to save our colleges and universities?

Occupy Wall Street presents one model, and, in fact, college-aged students are playing a leading roll in this movement. You see, what Occupy Wall Street shows us is that corporate institutions really only respond to conflict and tension. You can make all the speeches you want and write all the newspaper editorials your heart desires, but this will not make a corporation change its practices one iota. It’s only when the bottom line of a corporate entity is threatened—or when it receives such bad press that its bottom line might be threatened—that corporations like Exxon or Walmart eventually are forced to do the right thing. The same is true with colleges and universities. The corporate mentality that drives these institutions will only begin to change when the real stakeholders at these institutions—and this basically means students and faculty—apply so much pressure that the administrative bureaucrats who run them are forced to change course.

This natural alliance between students and faculty to reclaim higher education won’t happen any time soon, but it will inevitably happen. Students are becoming more and more disgruntled by the high costs of higher education (see my previous post on this subject) and their inability to find decent-paying work after graduation. At the same time, many college instructors are becoming increasingly embittered by how marginalized they’ve become in recent years in participating in decision-making and shared-governance at their institutions. Eventually, students and faculty will come to see that they need each other to achieve their mutual goals and will be forced to work together in ways that we haven’t seen since the late 1960s.

When this happens, the direction of higher education in this country will change, and change, I believe, for the better. Until then, the corporate model of higher education will prevail throughout the United States, and generations of college graduates will be forced to pay the price for our negligence.

A Pleasant Surprise on Black Friday

Read the article on EcoBlog