Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

December 14, 2004

Dear Colleague,

It's strange that universities should claim truth as its primary value, for what are the consequences of its dedicated pursuit? From the time of Plato, austere thinkers in the Western tradition have linked it with suffering and death. Kierkegaard writes: "Man, every man, has some feeling for truth, but truly he is not willing to suffer for it, nor is he willing to understand that suffering is bound up with the truth" (The Last Years: Journals 1853-55). "To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, accept death. Truth is on the side of death," says Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace). "No one," says Bertrand Russell, "can view the world with complete impartiality; and if anyone could, he would hardly remain alive" (Portraits from Memory). Truth, if only because it shatters illusion and cramps hope, is not on the side of life. "From the standpoint of practical experience," Michael Oakeshott opines, "there can be no more dangerous disease than the love and pursuit of truth in those who do not understand, or have forgotten, that man's first business is to live" (Experience and Its Modes).

Jesus says "The truth shall make you free" (John 8:32) and "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 11:25). The first remark sounds reassuring until you realize that what the truth frees you from is worldly success and the good life; thus freed, you are better prepared to enter the Kingdom of God, which is not "out there" but within you. As for the second remark, those who seriously follow Jesus end up--more often than not--ostracized, in prison, or dead. Despite what the televangelists say, the way of Jesus is not a red carpet to a condo in Florida.

Universities are against stupidity, yet stupidity does two things most of us consider desirable. It undergirds cultural and social conservatism, without which life can become anarchic; at the same time, it allows for and indeed may encourage rosy-hued action. True, the action is mindless, but then what action--large action--isn't? Let me quote anthropologist Jules Henry; what he says may sound at first unduly provocative, yet, when we pause to consider it, isn't it just common sense? "Within limits--the limits of congenital idiocy or economic incompetence--stupidity is strength and intellect a weakness in all cultures... The strong anti-intellectual strain in [American] character was at one time a national strength because it stimulated attacks on the kind of egghead thinking that might have interfered with the emergence of the United States as a muscular, capitalist, expansionist nation. To every historic epoch belongs its own brand of stupidity because that is the strength it needs, and that what is strength through stupidity in one era becomes weakness in another... In order to exist, every culture must know when to reward weakness and when to punish strength" (Pathways to Madness).

Universities have wised up since the 1970s. "Lux et Veritas" have begun to peel on college crests for lack of care. Publicists for the university now boast that students can have the comforts of home on campus as well as academic courses that are self-affirming, non-judgmental--very far indeed from the cold wind of truth and its foreboding of death. A degree of stupidity, never in short supply, makes the transformation possible.

Does this letter sound sour? Well, chalk it up to the fact that, as of December 5, I am a curmudgeon of 74!

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu