By leaving the beaten track in my way through academia thirty-five years ago, I got to see something about the real nature of America's academic institutions. It was painfully disillusioning. And I now believe that it was one little glimpse into the moral rot that's advanced through American society in recent generations. Here's the story.

::::::::

Last week, I posted here the first chapter of my book ,The Parable of the Tribes. (It can be found at www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andrew_b_060731_the_parable_of_the_t.htm
.)

The main idea for this book came to me when I was twenty-four, and the experience of that vision proved to be the pivotal point around which the course of my subsequent life turned. It turned out that, at that young age, having something to say that I felt was important, and that I was completely committed to articulating to my fellow human beings, was a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it was wonderful to have a sense of purpose, a calling; on the other hand, it led me into encounters with the world that were rather different from what my upbringing and my image of the world led me to expect.

It was as if, after some years of walking into some establishment through the front door, and seeing things as they are set up for the customers of the place, I was suddenly coming in through a different entrance, into a less public part of the business, and thereby getting some unexpected glimpses of what really happens in the guts of the place.

In my bio posted on my own website, it says simply that "Schmookler went on to earn his doctorate in 1977 at the University of California at Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union in a program specially created to accommodate his comprehensive theory of human history." It really was not that simple.

My commitment to developing and communicating a big idea that I still regard as the most important thing I've ever written brought me into a whole series of surprising discoveries concerning those institutions of "higher learning, "devoted to "the life of the mind."

The first step in this adventure of discovery was my experience as a graduate student in American Studies at Yale University. And that is the story told in the piece offered here, below, for your weekend reading. Entitled "Weltanschauung," this piece was written in the mid-1980s, about fifteen years after the experience it describes.

*****************************************************************************

Weltanschauung
by
Andrew Bard Schmookler

There's a story I've been wanting to tell for a long time. It's about my disillusionment, and the tale begins with my father. No, it's not that my father disappointed me. Far from it. But in a strange and wonderful way, he set me up to be disappointed.

My father was a scholar, and I grew up with my thinking sanded smooth by coming up against his critical mind. Whatever I could defend, he would respect. Whatever he could not defend against my arguments, he'd gracefully abandon. His positions were important to him, but he would surrender them to the truth. Such was his integrity.

I grew up assuming that my father's spirit was characteristic of all scholars, and that it would be my destiny to work in academia with men and women like him as my colleagues. It was around 1970 that I learned I had committed the fallacy of over-generalization.

This was a time when the social fabric was unraveling in a way that laid bare some fundamental questions about order and justice, about freedom and civilized society. The cities in the U.S. had been burning, the war in Vietnam continued to grind on, and I was tormented with the question of why civilization brought forth so much destruction and pain.

My searching brought me to a searing moment of epiphany in which I felt I'd been vouchsafed a part of the answer. It was a vision that brought together all that I'd learned before about the world. And I committed my whole being to articulating what I had seen.

I was then about to begin graduate studies at one of our great Eastern universities.

Fortunately, I thought, my project would serve the declared purposes of the program I was entering, so immediately upon my arrival I began to seek the freedom to carry out my work under its aegis. My requests, however, fell upon deaf ears until I sent my message in a language that administrators could not ignore: for the second semester, I signed up only for independent studies.

That got their attention, and led the heads of the program to request the meeting I'd vainly been seeking since my arrival. It was decided that the two men in charge --both world famous scholars-- would come to my house for lunch.

After the hardboiled eggs, I brought out my file drawers and made an impassioned presentation of my project. The chairman's eyebrows knitted in puzzlement. Then a light came into his eyes. "It sounds," he said, "like you're developing a Weltanschauung." (That's German for a worldview.)

"Yes," I answered, "you could say that. I do feel I've found a way of putting the pieces together."

He paused a moment, and then spoke up in the tone of one who has found a solution to a problem. "Well, how about Emerson?" he asked, referring to Ralph Waldo, one of the established gods in the American pantheon of thinkers. "Emerson was also interested in a Weltanschauung. Why don't you do your graduate study on Emerson?"

I looked at his face for signs of humor, or even malice. Surely he was joking. But no, he was dead serious. It's great to study the likes of Emerson, the implication seemed to be, but it's hardly thinkable to try to do the likes of what Emerson did, to see the human condition whole for oneself.

When I balked at taking up his suggested "modification" of my plan, it was suggested that I write up a proposal for them, explaining what I wanted to do and why they should let me. Over the next weeks, I took up this task with passion and, when I handed in my brief I felt a surge of hopefulness. So carefully had I addressed all their stated concerns that it was hard for me to imagine on what basis they might defend any refusal of my petition.

As things turned out, however, the challenge of defending their refusal proved no obstacle. Two months went by, and they didn't even answer. When at last I accosted one of them on the street, all he could say was, "We couldn't let you do that." That was all the reply to my arguments I ever got.

So much for their integrity.

As far as I could tell, the positions that mattered to them had less to do with the truth of their arguments than with the power of their place in the hierarchy. To defend the latter, they had no need for the former to be defensible.

I left the great university and traveled west, back across the continental divide. Eventually, I completed my book. Eventually, it was published (as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution).

My book was not, of course, about Emerson's Weltanschauung. But Emerson does appear once in it. I quote a passage where he laments how the organization of society has weakened "this great fountain of power," the whole person. "The state of society," Emerson writes, "is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about, so many walking monsters-- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, but never a man."

Authors Bio:
Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. His previous books include The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, for which he was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.