Further Thoughts on My Review of Alan Jacobs' The Year of Our Lord 1943 at Marginalia

Marginalia, an arm of the LA Review of Books, has published my extended review of Alan Jacobs’s The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. I wrote a “Briefly Noted” review earlier this year for First Things, but wanted to say much more about the book, and am grateful for Marginalia for giving me the space.

One of the things I love about Jacobs’s book is that it is largely reportage; he rarely inserts himself in the debate about what Christian education should look like in the modern world. Though he’s writing about some of the same topics that Rod Dreher and Patrick Deneen and Anthony Esolen have written about recently, he did not seek to write a polemic. Polemics are not necessary bad, of course, but insofar as their aim is to stake out intellectual territory, the effect, at least in this day and age, is largely to invite ripostes on Twitter. Jacobs has different goals. He is a teacher, and like a good teacher he wants to spark discussion.

At least that’s the effect the book had on me, and that’s what I attempted to do in the review. I decided to pursue a polarity I noticed that emerges as Jacobs charts how his five thinkers (Maritain, Lewis, Eliot, Weil, and Auden) attempted to respond to the horrors of totalitarianism in an authentically Christian way. What does such a vision of education look like? On one hand, you have the error of a technocratic pedagogy, which Jacobs associates with John Dewey. The error here is focusing on practical matters to such an extent that the big questions of human purpose and the good life are rendered unintelligible. To use Jacob’s image, they are “bracketed” out of such an education. Erroneous though it may be, this is certainly the path modern education (both Christian and secular) has taken, which has led us to our present moment, where we seem only to be able to speak of things like “data” and “skills.” It’s a pedagogy that, not coincidentally, turned out to be tailor-made for Silicon Valley. Case in point: see my review of Nicholson Baker’s Substitute from a few years ago in Commonweal. From a Christian perspective, a technocratic pedagogy fails because it entails reason without faith.

Yet the opposite is also dangerous, perhaps even more so. This is theocracy, or what we might call faith without reason. In actuality, this looks more like faith before reason. I begin my review with an example of this that I witnessed while I was tutoring a homeschooled high school student. The religious curriculum his family required him to arrive at a specific conclusion in his senior term paper, one that reflected the curriculum’s distinct politico-religious identity. Quite literally (I remember reading the assignment sheet) the curriculum gave him a thesis statement that he was to copy, word-for-word, into his final paper. This theocratic strain is more subtly delineated in Jacobs’s book than technocracy is, yet it is there without a doubt, especially in the examples of Maritain and Hutchins and Adler’s Chicago project.

I wanted to tease this out more than Jacobs does, and went to the original essays and lectures he cites in the book, which are almost all from 1943. There I found some quotations that Jacobs did not use but that nonetheless flesh out this strain that I wanted to explore more fully in the review. Most of those quotations have to do with teaching—with actual teaching practice, not theory. The most striking to me was Auden’s passage on the disposition necessary in educators to arouse what he called “subjective requiredness,” the inner calling or vocation in each student: 

Moreover, it is only thus [by discovering our vocation for teaching] that we shall be able to restrain our natural lust for power and approval, to exhibit in our relation to our pupils that careful indifference, that conscious refusal to help (which is, of course, only genuine in the degree to which we wish to help, in the degree to which refusal causes us suffering), which is, I believe, the proper educational obstacle to arouse subjective passion. The gifts of the Spirit are not to be had at second hand, and until a child has discovered his vocation, it is neither the traditional birch nor the progressive lollipop that we should offer him, but a vacuum. Once he finds it, he is no longer a pupil but a colleague who teaches as much as he learns, and who knows that every human relationship, in work, play, or love, is a marriage of two solitudes.

 The passage, from Auden’s lecture “Vocation and Society” at Swarthmore College (which you can find on their library website), articulates something that, from my own teaching successes and failures, I know to be exactly right, but had never been able to explain precisely why. The insight relies on Auden’s recognition that the teacher-student relationship involves two subjects, or, to use Martin Buber’s language, teacher and student ideally interact as an “I” and a “Thou,” not an “I” and an “It.”

One might say that the twin extremes of technocracy and theocracy, at least in education, prove inadequate because they fail to account for this reality. Technocracy fails because it turns education into a teaching of skills for the mastering or manipulating of the world. The personhood of the instructor does not matter, really; she is a delivery device. She is an object. On the other hand, a theocratic education, by starting with revealed truth, accessible only to those with faith, rather than observed reality, accessible to all with reason, fails to recognize the student’s identity as a subject. The student is therefore the object, the “it.” As I stressed in the review, in this view the student is an empty vessel for the depositing of truths, rather than one already filled with sight, as Plato puts it in The Allegory of the Cave, who needs to be led by desire.

To be completely clear, stressing the importance of subjectivity is not the same as advocating for subjectivism. The former recognizes the simple fact that we all experience the world as thinking, observing individuals with free will. The latter, starting from the reality of subjective experience, extrapolates to deny our ability to speak of any truth beyond our limited viewpoint; truth does not exist except for each subject. It’s a close cousin to relativism. It’s also patently absurd; by positing a claim about reality subjectivism/relativism contradicts its own premise. But that’s a different discussion for a different day; I simply wanted to clarify what I mean.

In this book, as I mentioned, Jacobs remains a consummate teacher, not a lecturer or pundit. He cracks the egg, so to speak, and leaves us to deal with the yolk as we will. His book provoked me to dig further, to dive down into what I thought to be a powerful undercurrent in this story about religious education, and one that bears much relevance to our time, in which the status of the liberal order seems more in question than at any time since 1943. Thanks to him for a great read that continues to turn my thoughts.