On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing by James V. Schall

Author:James V. Schall [Schall, James V.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781497649088
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Published: 2014-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

III

Now, I do think that the poor can be “opted” for, but only if we keep a clear distinction between the classical ideas of charity and justice, only if we keep in mind a principle of subsidiarity that insists that the poor be largely helped to help themselves, and not be seen merely as objects of some all-caring state or state institution’s pity, a pity that justifies everything in their name. Ironically, we are often very close to reducing all our social thinking to “charity,” in which we conceive the people to be helped to be themselves helpless but for our own concern. “Bureaucratized social programs,” Jennifer Roback Morse has written, “are no substitutes for the giving from one person to another that is the true meaning of caritas. And the modern state, which leads us to believe that there are shortcuts, that we can have the results of charity without the personal reality of charity, deceives us. Or perhaps I should say, we use the instruments of the modern state to deceive ourselves on these vital matters.”1 There is a common “guilt” that places the condition of the poor entirely in the hands of the state or the rich, as if that were sufficient. This move thereby gives to the state an identifiable social, even transcendent, purpose, but leaves the poor as merely the objects of someone else’s benevolence or philanthropy. The Good Samaritan in the New Testament did not keep the man who fell among robbers forever dependent on him so that he could boast of his good deed. Rather he saw to his being taken care of so that he could soon return to his work.

But my topic here is “intellectual poverty.” In recent years, our universities have often been structured so that students could be directed to various programs in the city or overseas wherein they could learn, firsthand but still vicariously, what it was like to be poor. This awareness of dire poverty was designed to waken the consciences of economically privileged students so that they would not merely desire wealth as their sole end in life and learning how to achieve it as their sole purpose in the university. We might call this the “service-oriented university.” Behind this “service” concept, however, is often found an implicit picture of the world, sometimes marxist or socialist, often liberal and anti-religious, frequently heavily tinctured by environmental and anti-population ideologies. The poor really need none of these things.

Service-oriented programs have most often, in practice, been directed by and allied with what might be called the “intelligentsia university.” It is quite clear that universities, almost of their very nature, are enclaves of privilege and leisure. They are designed in principle to be havens whereby the relatively young can be protected for a time from the pressures of life, of making a living, so that they can at least become aware of the higher things. The “service-oriented university” is often a thin veil worn by a kind of activist anti-intellectualism.

The

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