To Yearn for Sincerity Amidst Doubts
To Yearn for Sincerity Amidst Doubts
by Thomas Harrington at Brownstone Institute
In the Fall semester of 2018, I was given permission to teach at my college’s campus in Barcelona, a program that I had founded nearly two decades before and visited quite frequently in my roles as its academic director and frequent leader of its summer programs.
Needless to say, I was excited, as the city and its culture had been a prime focus of my research for several decades. That I would be there at a time when the independence movement was still strong and my book in Catalan on that subject would be released, with all that that would hopefully entail in the way of press interviews and book signings, only added to my sense of anticipation.
But most of all, I looked forward to sharing some of what I had learned about Spain and Catalonia over the years in situ with my students.
At the risk of sounding immodest, I can say that I never had much problem connecting with my students. Of course, I never reached them all. But I almost always managed to get the majority to engage seriously with historical ideas and events and to ponder their possible links to their own lives and cultural circumstances.
That was until that Fall semester of 2018 in Barcelona.
Under pressure from the college to increase Study Abroad enrollments, we had lifted the Spanish-only requirement for the program. While it did increase our numbers, it brought us a very different type of student than that I was used to working with (courageous enough to attempt serious intellectual work in their second language), ones much more like the indifferent seat-warmers I had heard my colleagues from larger and less demanding departments serially gripe about back in Hartford.
A week or so into the course, a million-person march for Catalan independence filled the streets of Barcelona (a city with one of the higher population densities in Europe) in a way that was absolutely impossible to ignore.
In the days preceding that September 11th Diada, I had given the students a brief explanation on why this was happening and had encouraged them to go out and observe the always remarkable and highly photogenic mass spectacle.
The following day—in a class centering on the history of Spain and Catalonia—I immediately opened the floor for questions and comments on what they had seen.
No one had anything to say. And no one, and I mean no one, was the least bit curious about what had taken place in the streets of the city the day before in terms of its relationship to politics, history, social esthetics, or anything else. Pure silence and pure indifference.
And things continued in this manner for another several weeks as I presented documents that had, in my classes’ long elicited intense curiosity and lively questioning about the social dynamics of identity formation in general, and the historical particulars of such phenomena within the city of Barcelona and the various “culture nations” (Castile, Catalonia, Galicia, Portugal, and the Basque Country) of the Iberian Peninsula. .
Fed up, I finally decided to break the fourth wall; that is, to open up a discussion on the meta-dynamics of the classroom theater in which we were all engaged.
I started things off by saying that it seemed to me that we were playing a game in that they had decided beforehand was essentially vacuous and insincere, in which their role was to politely listen to me and what they had decided would be my boring and uninspired pro-forma murmurings and, when it came time for papers and exams, to repeat back to me a reasonable summary of my own words in order to get a good grade.
When they got over the initial shock produced by my naming of the game, their tongues suddenly loosened, and one by one they began telling me, each in their own way, that what I had said was more or less spot on.
They then went on to tell me that this was what went on in almost all their classes back on the home campus with what they understood to be the full, if tacit, complicity of their professors, and that they saw no reason that things would be any different here. This was, they made clear, what “everyone knew” that education and college were really all about.
Indeed, they were shocked that I was shocked by their abject cynicism.
After hearing them out, I explained that I was not there to pad my ego and had no interest in their clever regurgitation of my own words. Rather, I wanted to share what I had spent long years mostly joyfully coming to know, and above all, to help them develop their abilities to engage critically and mindfully with new ideas in real time as they went out into the world.
After that, the class turned on a dime and became the serious and lively experience I had hoped it would be.
Last weekend, I went to Brooklyn to have dinner with my adult children. It was a splendid night, and we sat outside at a Korean restaurant across from a beautiful park.
As the dinner was coming to its end, a young couple dressed in a tastefully sexy way showed up and began passionately, but not exhibitionistically, kissing and hugging on the sidewalk not far from where we sat.
Seeing their intensity and joy, I could not help but reflect upon how little of that same energy I had seen on this and my other visits to this area, which, given a demographic very heavily weighted to the 20-35 age cohort, would have been a veritable cauldron of erotic ardor a generation earlier.
And it got me thinking further how, as with those students in Barcelona, calculations of a coldly transactional nature, so antithetical to the spirit of true companionship, and what was long viewed as the connatural abandon and boisterousness of youth, seemed to now exercise a deeply inhibiting effect on our country’s newer generations.
And given their increasingly dim economic prospects, the enormous cynicism and coarseness of the country’s political, economic, and academic leadership classes, and the fact that they have been surveilled and subject to the constant threat of mob “justice” being wielded against them online from their earliest days, perhaps it is only fitting that they are this way.
Putting yourself out on a limb for someone, a deeply held dream, or simply an idea and getting burned is never fun. Doing so in a time of rampant imposture and organized cruelty makes the eternal challenge of doing so even more forbidding.
And yet it’s also clear that by ceding to one’s fears of being burned one is also beginning the slow process of dying on the vine, of drying up psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually like a raisin in the sun.
I was never particularly interested in Charlie Kirk. That said, from the first time I saw clips of him in action, I sensed he possessed an absolutely fearless sincerity.
Through his unguarded and good-humored candidness it seems he gave the young who followed him hope that maybe it was still possible for them to take down the iron cladding that they had been progressively erecting around their psyches since a very young age and live free and in peace with their own instincts and drives, and their own personal takes on the reality of world around them.
And I believe it was for his ability to project sincerity and inspire the pursuit of it in others that, much more than any of the particular political or religious ideas that he espoused, got him killed.
Confronting one’s fears about being used, playing the fool, or simply being inadequate is an essential part of the process of becoming more confident and hopefully more humane over time.
A population filled with defensive, hyper-sensitive, and fear-corseted young is the tyrant class’s fondest dream. One made up of young people possessed of a sense of their essential worthiness, and the inherent legitimacy of their own unique ways of actively exploring and coming to understand the world, is that same group’s biggest nightmare.
I pray that our often tentative and overcalculating under-35s of today discover these key truths before it’s too late.
To Yearn for Sincerity Amidst Doubts
by Thomas Harrington at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society