Newspapers / Salem College Student Newspaper / Nov. 20, 1972, edition 1 / Page 3
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Monday, 3 1972 ifeAnlilv speaking by W\il Framk TH« SALtMITt Campus Page Three oqyy WE’VE QCJTTEN THROUGH ID THE ^ trapped student ski tour... .TUEVRE RUmiM6 DESPERAteLV lOIN ON BEER ^ PRETZEL'S!' ^TraNKLY speaking Post Olllc. Box 1523 East Lansing, Michigan 48623 “Age of Candor” Is a Liberal Education Relevant? by Paul A. Freund (Paul A. Freund is perhaps America’s most distingu' ':ed le gal scholar. Professor And, a constitutional lawyer Ui histor ian of the United Si. es Su preme Court, is the author of The Supreme Court of the Uni ted States, and On Law and Jus tice. He is past president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is presently in his thirty-first year as Professor of Law at Harvard University.) by Karen McCotter According to numerous self- appointed experts, we are now experiencing a sexual revolution. Actually, only recently have peo ple been willing to discuss what they have been doing for years. In fact it seems that some are too willing for discussion; and thus, the subject has been very I effectively over-worked. The . amount of verbal and written repartee on SEX, (and I capita- Mze each and every letter of I the word to avoid accusations of reticence or of having a sexual i hang-up) is phenomenal. Also it I seems to be exerting undue and rather tiresome pressures on some people. 1 With the publication of so many books on the subject of sex, it would seem that everyone should be an expert by now. I anticipate daily the appearance of Cliff s Notes on The Sensuous Woman, The Sensuous Man, and The Sensuous Couple, for those who desire a shortcut to guaran teed pleasure. These books and their extremely vocal adherents. usually of the male sex, are par tially responsible for the sexual pressures felt by many young people today, especially women. Repeatedly informed of the “new” importance of their sex ual role, I expect that more than a few young women are certain that if they cannot emulate J’s success every time, they are hopelessly frigid. And if a young woman refuses to have sex, her next stop should be Masters’ and Johnson’s Clinic. In my opinion the free sex supporters could not, even intentionally, have found a more efficient me thod of cutting down on the sexual activity in the United States. By demanding perfection, they have instilled fear into the inexperienced, as an “A” for ef fort no longer can be desired. I think that many people have forgotten that sex is a personal and private matter in which we desperately need to regain our perspective. So therefore I say unto you, put away the Reddi- Whip, girls, and remember that sometimes it is the thought that really counts. Director Aids Campus Affairs by Julie Bartan Randy Williams, Director of Art Exhibits for the Fine Arts Center, is also an instructor for pottery and sculpture for the Winston-Salem Arts and Crafts Council. He considers himself very fortunate to have two jobs involving art; whereas, most art majors either teach art in pubhc school or have a job in a totally , unrelated field. Randy graduated from Western Carohna Universi ty with a Bachelor of Arts degree after having spent two years in the Army. He especially enjoyed the mountains of Western Caro lina, and still enjoys camping and traveling. Having toured the United States during previous summers, Randy plans a trip to Europe for this summer. He finds traveling and meeting peo ple intriguing, and is searching for a place to settle down. New England, Canada, and the Smo- Eey Mountains are his favorite spots. He considers urban areas a place to visit, but wants to five away from people. At Western Carolina, Randy took a few music courses, and is now an amateur folksinger and composer. He performs here m Winston-Salem at the coffee house sponsored by Knollwood Baptist Church and Wake Forest University. In Chapel HiU, he has performed at the Student Union, and in Forest City at the Bang ladesh Moratorium. Leon Rus sell, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen are among Randy’s favor ite professional performers, bu he enjoys classical music as well. Randy’s primary artistic inter est is sculpture which he does in marble and limestone. His style resembles that of Henry Moore and his favorites are Turner and Michelangelo. As a teacher in the area of art, Randy is very dedi cated and enjoys his position. He states emphatically that he is happy about living and enjoys living each day. Education was once defined by John Maynard Keynes as “the inculcation of the incomprehen sible into the ignorant by the in competent”; but we know that this is a gross canard, because students today are far from ig norant. Are they wise as well as knowing?The student generation insists that learning must be pertinent to their immediate per sonal problems, to their search, in the current phrase, for their self-identity. This attitude, it seems to me, is one of maturity insofar as it rejects the self as the center of the universe. For we learn to know the self by trans cending it. We apprehend the im mediate in all its fullness through the light of perspective. To put the issue more con cretely, how can we justify our immediate immersion in the arts and the humanities as something more than a taste for the decora tive embellishments of life which are as irrelevant and incongmous at this hour as Victorian bustles would be in a crowd of mini skirts? How can a liberal educa tion help to cope, for example, with two of the principle domes tic crises of our time — the crises of the power of confrontation and the crisis of the power of technology? First, consider the power of confrontation as a form of pro test, a reflection of the spirit that demands which have not been heard can be made to be felt, that rational discussion is no longer fruitful and the way to achieve ends is by the force of physical coercion. I do not mean to pursue the theme of civ il disobedience, beyond observ ing that direct disobedience of a morally repugnant law on ground of conscience (“I can do no other”) is a less complex mor al problem, for all its anguish, than a decision to disobey unre lated laws as a form of political pressure, where the purdential aspects of the choice become highly important. Nor need I la bor the point that society will not condone lawlessness wheth er it occurs on the campuses or in the streets. But there is a deeper ques tion. Although to suppress these movements is not too difficult as a matter of physical force, this by itself is not an exercise of the highest art of government. The !role of government is like that of art itself - to impose a mea sure of order on the disorder of experience while respecting and not utterly suppressing the under lying diversity, spontaneity, and disarray. For civilization itself is a continuous tension between tradition and change, between heritage and heresy. The best statement I know of this is by Alfred North Whitehead, in his little book on symbolism, where he says “It is the first step in sociological wisdom to recognize that the major advances in civili zation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur, like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code, and secondly in fearless ness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes vdiich satisfy an enlightened rea son. Those societies which can not combine reverence for their symbols with freedom of revi sion must ultimately decay from anarchy or from the slow atro phy of a life stifled by useless shadows.” To appreciate this truth re quires more than intellectual commitment. It requires the un derstanding that comes with feel ing, the capacity to imagine what we know and observe, to re spond not out of fear or ven geance or pedantic imitation of the past but out of understan ding in the way that a musical performer understands a score - not only cerebrally but kinaes- thetically. It is as true today as when Shelley wrote his Defense of Poetry that “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know. We want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine. We want the poetry of life.” Because a liberal education means, or should mean, that we have learned to exercise our imagination in a dis ciplined way against a resisting medium, whether it be language or numbers or canvas or metal; because it teaches us that true understanding is a tension be tween the frenzy of an insight and the discipline of an equa tion, a liberally educated per son can best understand with sensitivity, and judge with com prehension, the moral crisis of confrontation. The second great crisis to which I have referred, the power of technology, is quite different and yet interrelated, for 1 believe that the disaffection of the stu dent generation is due basically to the great gap between the potentiality and the actuality of technological civilization. A French scientist said some thirty years ago that science had taught us how to become gods before we have learned to be men. Science and technology promise us in the forseeable fu ture that we shall be able to manipulate genetic inheritance, that we shall be able to control human behavior through chem ical substances the implant of electrodes; that we shall be able to prolong human life through the transplantation of organs; and that computers will deliver up at our call a host of stored in formation, much of which could be of the most intimate and per sonal sort, for a computer, though it may know all, does not have the capacity to forget or forgive. Someone, the story goes, fed a tape into a computer with the question “Is there a God? ” and after the wheels clicked and whirled, the tape came out with the message, “There is now”. But I don’t want to be understood as anti- scientific. Quite the contrary.. My point is rather that we suffer from the default of the humani ties and the social sciences in preparing us, as the French bio logist said, to be men. Philosophy has too otten de teriorated into a branch of math ematics or linguistics. Political science has become quantified so that the questions being asked are those trivial enough to be answered by the capacity of present-day computing machines. Somehow the old questions of the meaning of justice, the legi- timancy of authority, the obliga tion of fidelity to law - these questions if they are considered systematically at all seem to be consigned to the preserve of the law schools, but these are ques tions far too important to be left to the professionals. The scien tists themselves are appealing to the non-professionals to guide them in resolving those moral questions which their own ef forts have inescapably raised. If a liberal education does not address itself to these basic issues of the proper uses of tech nology, then technology will by default become a frankenstein. We are told by scientists that we are now able to accomplish vir tually anything we seek and so the question is necessarily, now and in the future - what should we seek? For the first time in history the pressing question be fore society is not what can be done, but what ought to be done, and so the relevance of the moral teachers of the past is surely not less than ever before. Socrates is as relevant today as Sartre. We will have to live in creasingly with moral ambigui ties. The often conflicting rights of the living individual and the claims of posterity, the obliga tion of law observance and the duty of private conscience, are themes that mn through the greatest literature from Antigone to Hamlet to Billy Budd. It will not be an easy world in which these moral ambiguities will be pressing, if not for solution at least to be lived with under- standingly, and yet they are not different from the problems which the minds of the past have wrestled with save in their ur gency and pace. To adapt a phrase of Justice Holmes - “when you take off the lion’s skin of jargon, you find the same old jackass of a moral problem underneath”. The beckoning task of the liberal arts is to give us a look beneath the skin. Thanksgiving Observance 6:30p.m. Monday, Nov. 27 Club Dining Room Sponsored by the Y.W.C.A.
Salem College Student Newspaper
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Nov. 20, 1972, edition 1
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