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PARTISAN REVIEW
Jerry Martin:
The core curriculum represents an answer to the question:
what should every educated person know? Some colleges fail to answer
that question in a meaningful way.
It
behooves each faculty to address it in
a thoughtful, intelligent, and disciplined way.
In today's curricular debates one of the major fault lines is between
those who respect the past and those who prefer the preoccupations of the
present. I want to explore this issue. Last year I participated in an interest–
ing conference marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of St. John's College
in Santa Fe. The title was the question, "Does the Past Have a Future?"
What struck me as I pondered that question is what an odd question it
is-in effect, "Does the past matter anymore?" It's really quite a shocking
question and what struck me is that the very fact that we would ask such a
question almost convicts us of arrogance and impiety, and the pride that goeth
before a falL For thousands of years in cultures across the globe, ancient wis–
dom has been the most prized and the old ways the most revered. Confucius
warned many centuries ago that the harmonious order of society unraveled
when people strayed from the ancient ways. The authority of the constitution
was rooted, Sir Edward Coke said, in practices holding "since time out of
mind." The African oral epic
Sundiata
celebrates wisdom handed down from
one generation to the next over many centuries. The Cherokees thanked their
ancestors for a successful hunt. One could go on and on. Even advances over
the past were once accompanied by the recognition that, as the medievals put
it,
"If
we see so far, it is only because we stand on the shoulders of giants:'
Today, like insolent teen-agers who think the world began with them,
we wonder whether the past shouldn't just be discarded like last year's fash–
ions. It's an extraordinary change of attitudes and not a very old one, dating
back perhaps two hundred years or so to the time when enlightenment
intellectuals decided that no one had ever been nearly so enlightened as
themselves. They divided history into ancient, medieval, modern. They
began that tripartite distinction. They launched a propaganda campaign
that was highly successful, branding their immediate predecessors as having
lived in a terrible time called the "Dark Ages."
And so we began discarding, as the kids now say, "dissing," the past.
But, once you peel away the past, there's not much left. Augustine, who
gave us the most profound analysis of time, notes that the past is by defini–
tion past, gone. It is no longer present; it is no longer real. By this logic,
Augustine observes, only the present is real. What then is the present?
It
is
what is happening "now"-at this moment, this second, this nanosecond.
But he points out, that as soon as you say "now," that "now" is past. In fact
everything you can focus your mind on has already fleeted past you, and so
you slice away all of the past to the point where you ask what's left. Maybe
nothing.
