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EDITORIAL: The Rhodes less taken: What is truth?
WELL, CALL the Hogs and pass the
Platonic dialogue. We're not sure which news would have surprised us more earlier this
year--that Arkansas was going to the Cotton Bowl, or that a student from Atkins, Ark.,
without a college or even a high school diploma would be chosen for a Rhodes
Scholarship. Sometimes the news is just one big surprise, especially in Arkansas.
This small, wonderfully surprising state keeps producing diamonds. One of them is
Rhett Martin of Atkins, Ark., 23, the only student from a small state university--the
University of Central Arkansas at Conway--to be chosen as a Rhodes Scholar this year.
All the other 31 scholars chosen this year came from Ivy League schools and
similar fonts of prestigiousness. Young Martin, who has been going to UCA since 1997,
is doing a hitch at Harvard for the moment. He hopes to graduate from UCA next May if
he makes the grade, that is, successfully defends his honors thesis. Snagging a Rhodes
is one thing, but getting a degree with honors from a school in Arkansas ... that's
the real challenge. Which is the way it ought to be in this small, and sometimes still
wonderfully demanding state.
Here's another surprising and hopeful bit of news in our shallow times, when the
curriculum at our more inflated universities/factories has degenerated into
grievance-collecting and faddism: Rhett Martin is a student of the classics. Remember
them? That's why he went to Harvard, he says--to hone his Latin and Greek. (His honors
thesis at UCA is concerned with the Platonic dialogue Parmenides.)
It is a sign and wonder that a Rhodes Scholar from Atkins, Ark., would choose to
study the classics, but only a sign and not an auspicious one that he should go out of
state to brush up on his Greek and Latin.
How strange that our Rhodes Scholar should be a student of the classics. Doesn't
this young man have any respect for fashion? Why isn't he majoring in one of those
"disciplines" that have Studies attached to them--as in women's, black, gay,
trans-gender, film? Doesn't he realize that Education is now a department, a
specialty, a technique, a credential, a career rather than a lifelong vocation? He
seems unaware that education will be perfected only when Every Classroom is Connected
to the Internet!
Only 23, and Rhett Martin is already hopelessly old-fashioned, seeking wisdom and
not just information, content as well as form. A student of the classics will
understand that facts and technique, while indispensable, are only the beginning of an
education. It's what a being does with the facts, with the techniques and skills of
our computerized world, that makes him human.
It is in another Platonic dialogue, the Phaedrus, that Socrates warns that it is
only "a boorish sort of wisdom" that would attempt to replace the mythic with the
factual. Much like archaeologists debating the exact location of the Garden of Eden.
Or engineers determined to climb Olympus with ropes and pulleys.
The notion that education is a kind of soulcraft long ago was replaced by the idea
of education as content-free technique, as essentially concerned with developing
(politically) correct attitudes.
In these post-classical, indeed post-modern times, when meaning has been
deconstructed, how strange to find a Rhodes Scholar of all people concerned not so
much with power or preferment as with the sources of what we call the West--despite
all the pervasively advertised forms of hemlock now available in such crass abundance.
Today, around the world, the West is synonymous with the materialistic, the
technical, the soulless. Maybe that's because those who have come to represent the
West have forgotten whence we sprang--from Athens and Jerusalem. The wisdom of the
first is largely neglected, the awe of the other trivialized. And the message of both
is reduced to pat answers instead of searching questions.
So we go on atop the ruins, largely heedless of what treasures we have been
bequeathed, unacquainted with the rock from which we were hewn. With the failure of
education and its replacement by 101 faddish alternatives, from adjustment to
self-esteem, the past has dimmed for us. It is no longer a light but a sealed chamber,
and not enough of us are interested in opening the door. So the past remains closed to
us, and we find ourselves present-bound, unequipped to face the future.
It is easy enough for someone in a polemical trade to come out foursquare for
justice, for democracy, for liberty, and, on the appropriate days of the year set
aside for their celebration, love and patriotism. It's something else to say what
justice and democracy and liberty are, and what truly constitutes patriotism or love
or education. What are their demands and what are their rewards? Rather than dwell on
such things, it's so much easier to settle for greeting-card philosophy and reflexive
rhetoric.
It is in answer, or at least in response, to questions all too seldom asked in our
society that we turn to the classics, or what we can still understand of them. It is
the Rhett Martins we're depending on not so much to provide those answers but, like
Socrates, to ask the penetrating questions.
This article was published on Thursday, December 13, 2001
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<font face="Arial, Helvetica">Letters to the editor: Letters of preferably no more
than 250 words are accepted from Arkansas residents through our online form. Not all
letters can be published in the newsprint space available. No anonymous letters or
pseudonyms can be used.
<font face="Arial, Helvetica">Editorials, opinions and cartoons: The Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette strives to keep opinions out of its news coverage and welcomes a
variety of opinions in the Voices section. Only unsigned editorials express the
opinions of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The editorial writing staff includes Paul
Greenberg, Kane Webb, Christopher Battle and George Arnold. Columnists and cartoonists
express only their own opinions.
Copyright 2001, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, Inc.
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