I'm struggling to find a "hook" to get into this week's column on Princeton's intellectual climate, since the traditional weekly football report would be too dreary even for this page of lugubrious opinions. On the Princeton side we sat there as the shadows lengthened and the temperature dropped, watching warm and brightly sunlit Penn fans throw petrified toast in our direction, shouting out the while that "Princeton still sucks" — a judgment barely contested by the empirical evidence of the gridiron.
Fortunately I had had the better part of my day before I got to the stadium. Whatever our university's efforts with regard to current students may be, the Alumni Council is doing its best to guarantee that our ex-students need suffer no fatal divorce between their intellectual and social lives. On football Saturdays they have been sponsoring a pre-tailgate lecture, and I went along to hear my colleague Lee Mitchell on "Does Reading Good Books Make You Better?" As I have been teaching good books for forty years in uncertainty, the suspense was beginning to get to me, and here was a chance to find out. It was a terrific lecture, as you yourself can experience should you elect English 376 ("Topics in Literature and Ethics"); but of course he was asking the question, not answering it.
Perhaps this conversation about whether our common life is or is not sufficiently "intellectual" is desultory because it is insufficiently prepared. We may need to ask what purpose "intellectuality" is supposed to serve anyway. Pose Professor Mitchell's question to yourself, but first broaden it. Does any aspect of your intellectual experience at Princeton make you a better person? By "intellectual experience" I mean all your reading and writing, all your scientific and technical investigations, all your research, all encounters with the arts, all your meaningful conversations; and by "better" I mean something different from better connected, better employed, or better compensated. I mean what the Latin inscription above the portal of the Graduate College means when it says "Enter good; leave better."
There is of course nothing contemptible about seeking to be well-connected, well-employed and well-compensated; and there is pretty solid social science data to suggest that a Princeton degree will help out with all three. On the other hand there is precious little evidence that a Princeton education or indeed "education" pure and simple will make you a good person. One of the best educated national governments of modern times was that of the Third Reich, whose functionaries included many Ph.D.s.
Yet the founders of this university and many others like it certainly believed in the ameliorating efficacy of sweetness and light, and they placed explicitly named "divinity" or "moral philosophy" at the very center of the curriculum, the subjects around which they arranged the ancillary study of the arts and sciences, and without which liberal studies lacked focus.
No Calvinist would be likely to think that education could make you good, but it could make you better. Of course invocation of the "founders" in this regard is a captious business, as we have long since discarded their theological premise; but don't believe for a moment that we left its place vacant. The irony is that while most academics claim a secular liberation from religious superstition, many of them are in fact the slaves of Pelagianism, an ancient Christian heresy that maintained that human beings are essentially good by nature, wicked only by social conditioning, and therefore easily perfectible through education.
My neo-Pelagian colleagues seem truly to believe that education can make people good. They tend to get all bent out of shape when they learn that the philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi, or that one of the founding gurus of current literary theory, Paul de Man of Yale, once published vile anti-Semitic essays in the fascist press. Such revelations inspire in the Augustinian neither astonishment nor denial. Augustinians are grateful for modest graces. The English novelist Evelyn Waugh was a vociferous Roman Catholic. He was also, by the lights of many people who knew him, a real son of a bitch. Once, when challenged as to how he could reconcile his Christian profession with his notorious hatefulness, he answered "Just imagine how much worse I would be if I weren't a Catholic!"
Princeton is a great institution with staggeringly opulent human and material resources — a very paradise of "good books." Of course if you are here you are already one of life's winners, and that's not even taking into consideration the seal of approval of first-rank rating awarded by America's thirdor perhaps fourth-ranking national news magazine. We may, perhaps, simply want to declare preemptive victory, as having arrived so near perfection as to make further effort otiose; but I must say I doubt it. No one who has truly "entered good" should greet the challenge to "exit better" with defensiveness or indignation, let alone with self-congratulatory mental sloth. Whether reading good books will make you a better person depends more on you than it does on the good books. As Dorothy Parker famously remarked, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her learn." I believe that the gardening allusion was meant to suggest that you might spend more time on the cultivation of your mind, and less on its irrigation. By all means go to the tailgate brunch, but go to the lecture first. It may afford you something a whole lot more stimulating to talk about than the likely outcome of the game. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.
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