From
The February 2002 St John's Eagle
“My Hidden Agenda" - By John Harcourt
Some day
a full study will be made of the contributions that Washington bureaucrats
make to our language. These politicians and their speechwriters are
always eager to find some new and striking phrase to define a particular
moment or issue; most of these soon disappear, while a few become more
or less permanent. From “at this point in time,” (administrative
jargon for “now” or “at this time”), down to Mr.
Bush's “axis of evil” the list might include “parameters”
(in a sense unknown to mathematicians), "ikon,""parse,"
(my teachers at the Providence Classical High School would have guffawed
over this), “inappropriate” (meaning downright wrong), and
“hidden agenda.” The last mentioned suggest that sometimes
we conceal what we really intend in a fog of words that seemingly addresses
some quite different point.
“Hidden
agenda” has been widely adopted by educators, and as I look back
upon my teaching years after almost two decades of retirement, it has
a certain wry appropriateness to how most teachers really operate. We
are, of course, officially dedicated to a calm objectivity, just as
scientists are supposed to be. Yet neither professors of the humanities
nor scientists can ever succeed in suppressing their intensely subjective
personal views. We can only become more successful in concealing them
from public notice.
Back in
the 1950s, I was told that a group of students had been trying to determine
the “real” point of view that lay beneath the surface of my
lectures. The range was impressive “from atheist to Roman Catholic.”
Clearly, I was up to something, but the students were not certain as
to just what that something was.
Personal
bias expressed itself, of course, in what I chose to study and teach.
My field at first was American literature, which easily lent itself
to the interests of one who infuriated the more conservative members
of the Brown University English Department by sporting a Henry Wallace
button. But after joining St. John's in 1951 and the Ithaca College
faculty in 1953, my focus shifted to Renaissance and medieval writers
and remained with Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante until my retirement
in 1985.
Shakespeare,
Milton, and Dante — what was I really trying to do with them? All
three were figures from the distant past. In part, I was seeking to
combat the tyranny of the contemporary by showing that writers from
other centuries were just as “relevant” (and often far more
so) than the most recent popular novelist. But there was more than that.
My students
were taking courses in science, in psychology, and in the social sciences.
Almost without exception, they were being indoctrinated with a pervasive
deterministic perspective. The dominant model of reality in our time
is a vast concatenation of cause and effect relationships; from at least
the time of Newton, the universe has been conceived of as a gigantic
world machine. Note how naturally words like mechanism, mechanical,
engine, circuitry, hard wired, come to our lips.
Embarrassingly,
many of our basic intuitions, such as consciousness, the conscious self,
and especially freedom cannot easily be fitted into the mechanical model
and so must be denied, ignored, explained away. Even in my freshman
psychology course back in 1939–40, every truly interesting question
about human behavior got lost in vague references to “the higher
brain centers, about which little at present is known.”
Yet machines
are extremely rare occurrences in the world we know. They are organizations
of matter designed by human intelligence to do a specific job. Even
if we imagine machines of the future able to choose among several options,
to adapt themselves to new circumstances, to reproduce themselves, these
are capabilities programmed into them by the human intelligence that
designed them in the first place. For all of our fascination with AI
(Artificial Intelligence), consciousness, selfhood, love, freedom, remain
as mysterious as ever. Banished by science, they remained alive and
will in the course of earlier centuries.
Dante and
Milton are, of course, supremely the poets of freedom — that radical
human freedom that cannot be reduced to any simplistic pattern of cause
and effect. No one is in Dante's hell except those persons who have
freely chosen to be there: they have become what, at the deepest level
of their being, they wanted to be. Milton defied his Puritan-Calvinist
traditions (one shared by the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Prayer Book)
by affirming, almost alone, that we
have been
endowed with true freedom of choice. His announced purpose” to
justify the ways of God to man” was to demonstrate, in epic proportions,
that Adam and Eve could not love and obey God unless they were really
free to defy him if they chose.
Shakespeare’s
view is very similar. In virtually every play, it can be shown, I believe,
that we humans live in a world where destiny, chance, and freedom are
all operative, in varying ratios. Take Romeo and Juliet. Its two main
characters are in part determined by their astrological destiny (“star
crossed loves”) and by some larger plan, of which they are largely
unaware, to effect the reconciliation of the two feuding families through
the sacrifice of their lives. Chance is certainly a reality in a play
in which critical information fails, quite by accident, to arrive in
time to be useful. And in this complex pattern, freedom plays its part:
Romeo and Juliet freely choose one another, freely elect to defy their
families, freely choose to die.
Or consider
Macbeth. Banquo freely relinquishes his weapons, lest he yield to the
dark temptations of power. Macbeth, similarly tempted, greedily reaches
after the air drawn dagger.
This tripartite
image of human existence is, I think, fundamentally true. Fate is real:
we perhaps see it most clearly in our genetic inheritance. Chance is
likewise real: some things just “happen.” But, at least sometimes,
we freely choose our course of action and thus assume a measure of responsibility
for its outcome. Freedom, like consciousness, cannot be reduced to molecular
interactions: both are brute facts in our kind of world.
To present
three of our greatest writers as poets of freedom is to undermine the
petty determinism of our culture. Vital religion can assert itself only
with a profound conviction of our individual worth and of our ability,
at least sometimes, to choose without constraint. Perhaps our freedom
is more important to God than our salvation.
To open
up such counter-cultural possibilities (without specific mention of
religion) was the unstated objective of most of my lectures — my
“hidden agenda.”
What’s
yours?
Professor
Harourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of
English English Emeritus at Ithaca College.
