“[O]ur colleges and universities have resisted the demand to make themselves over in the image of the democratic values of the culture as a whole. Even while striving to make the process of admission more open and fair, they have held to the idea that part of the work of our most distinguished institutions of higher learning is to preserve, transmit, and honor an aristocratic tradition of respect for human greatness.
This is important for two reasons. The first is the preservation of a cultured appreciation of excellence in human living, as distinct from vocational success. The latter produces inequalities of wealth, status, and power. But it is consistent with the democratic belief that no one’s humanity is greater than anyone else’s. This is true if we are talking about political and legal rights. It is false if we assume that the universal powers of enjoyment, expression, and judgment that all human beings possess are more developed in some souls than others — that in some they are particularly subtle and refined, especially when it comes to the most intellectually, aesthetically, and spiritually demanding exertions. This is an aristocratic assumption. In a democracy like ours, it is in constant danger of being derided or dismissed. But if it is, we lose something of value. Without the idea of greatness of soul, human life becomes smaller and flatter. It becomes both less noble and less tragic. Protecting this idea from democratic diminution is the first reason our colleges and universities need to nurture the aristocratic love of what is brilliant and fine.
The second is that this love itself contributes to the strength and stability of our democratic way of life.
Every adult in our country gets to vote. Each has the right to decide for him- or herself which candidates and policies are best. But the forces of conformity are great. The principle of universal equality, and its corollary the principle of individual self-rule, in fact make these forces stronger. The freedom to make up one’s own mind is a large responsibility. Many ease the burden by embracing the opinions of others with little or no independent reflection. The result is a kind of groupthink, partly the result of ignorance and partly of fear. This makes it easier for would-be tyrants to manipulate the democratic masses and eventually deprive them of their freedom. Tocqueville’s greatest concern for the future of America was that conformity of thought would ease the way to despotism.
There are many counterweights to this, of course. Tocqueville puts special emphasis on the role of a free press. An education in human greatness contributes to democratic life as well. To some this will seem paradoxical. How can the cultivation of a spirit of aristocratic connoisseurship make our democracy stronger? The answer is by developing the habit of judging people and events from a point of view that is less vulnerable to the moods of the moment; by increasing the self-reliance of those who, because they recognize the distinction between what is excellent and common, have less need to base their standards on what ‘everyone knows’ or ‘goes without saying’; and by strengthening the ability to subject one’s own opinions and feelings to higher and more durable measures of truth and justice. In all these ways, an aristocratic education promotes the independent-mindedness that is needed to combat the tyranny of majority opinion that, in Tocqueville’s view, is the greatest danger our democracy confronts.
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[Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.] used the expression [‘effervescence of democratic negation’] in a talk he gave to the Harvard Law School Association in 1886. The subject of his talk was legal education, but in the course of it he made some striking observations about the nature of education in general.
Education, Holmes says, ‘lies mainly in the shaping of men’s interests and aims. If you convince a man that another way of looking at things is more profound, another form of pleasure more subtile [sic] than that to which he has been accustomed — if you make him really see it — the very nature of man is such that he will desire the profounder thought or the subtiler [sic] joy.’ The ideal of education is threatened by a form of aggressive egalitarianism that Holmes descries. The passage is worth quoting in full:
‘I think we should all agree that the passion for equality has passed far beyond the political or even the social sphere. We are not only unwilling to admit that any class or society is better than that in which we move, but our customary attitude towards every one in authority of any kind is that he is only the lucky recipient of honor or salary above the average, which any average man might as well receive as he. When the effervescence of democratic negation extends its workings beyond the abolition of external distinctions of rank to spiritual things — when the passion for equality is not content with founding social intercourse upon universal human sympathy, and a community of interests in which all men share, but attacks the lines of Nature which establish orders and degrees among the souls of men — they are not only wrong, but ignobly wrong. Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.’
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Where it is a question of the weight or worth of different ‘souls’ — by which Holmes means, roughly speaking, the intellectual and spiritual life of human beings, insofar as it is directed toward the great questions of existence and finds expression in the works of science, philosophy, and art that constitute the realm of culture or cultivated experience — the principle of equality is not merely misplaced but destructive.
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Holmes chooses his words carefully. ‘Democratic negation’ is a program of leveling; of knocking down what is ‘subtile’ and ‘profound’; of denying the greatness of exceptional souls; of making their greatness look less conclusive, comprehensive, or significant than the ‘lines of Nature’ declare. It is a campaign of belittlement that draws its energy from the language and mentality of politics and law, where equality is the norm. But when, like the froth from a bottle of champagne, it giddily overspills its proper domain and invades the province of college and university life, it belittles what it ought to revere: the greatness of the highest and best things that attract the finest souls and afford them a ‘joy’ that coarser ones never know. This is the ‘effervescence’ against which Holmes warns.
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We live in an age that prides itself on its aspirations to overcome every form of prejudice. But there is one that remains so strong we hardly notice it at all. It is the unspoken belief that, by comparison with the morally enlightened position we occupy today, those who lived before us dwelt in darkness and confusion, groping to find truths we now securely possess. Many believe that we are no more obliged to take their backward views seriously than we are to endorse the beliefs of the medieval astronomers who put the earth at the center of things. We are free, they say, to refashion the past according to our contemporary moral scruples. Indeed, they insist we have a duty to do so. Until we have scrubbed our inheritance clean and brought it into conformity with what we now know to be the truth, the world remains disfigured by emblems of unrighteousness that spoil its integrity from an ethical point of view. The passion for renaming that is sweeping America’s campuses today springs from this demand.
It is a dangerous demand. It destroys our capacity for sympathy with the very large number of human beings who are no longer among the living and therefore cannot speak for themselves. It obscures the truth that we are no more able to see things in a perfect light than our ancestors were, even if we judge their morality to have been, in certain respects, backward or incomplete. It encourages a species of pride that blinds us to the greatness of what was said and done by those whose values correspond only imperfectly to ours.
Our colleges and universities have a special duty to resist this. They are, in an obvious sense, the custodians of the past. Their libraries preserve the works, and their departments the traditions of learning, on which the continued existence of civilized life depends. But beyond this they have a particular responsibility to foster the tolerance for ambiguity and dissonance that is the best antidote to the spirit of righteous conviction that confines the soul within narrow bounds by conferring a moral authority on its existing prejudices and exposes it to the danger of blindly deferring to the opinions of the group or tribe to which one belongs. Many campus monuments need supplemental commentary. But few if any ought to be torn down or erased. Whether one should, in any particular case, is a question that calls for the most careful judgment. How it is made depends on the spirit in which it is approached. To approach it with the evangelical conviction that the past must be remade to look like the present violates an educational duty of the first importance.
What I am calling a ‘tolerance for ambiguity and dissonance’ Learned Hand described as the ‘spirit of liberty.’ It encourages doubt and self-reflection and breaks the tendency to go along with what ‘everyone is saying.’ It is therefore an essential condition of democratic life. It is also a condition of the refinement and growth of the individual human being. Those who succeed in acquiring it take in more of the world and of themselves. They achieve a spaciousness of outlook and feeling that others never reach. Their souls are larger, freer, more developed. They are aristocrats of the spirit, in a sense that both Freud and Whitman would have understood and approved. This is perhaps the most credible sense of aristocracy to which we can still aspire in the ‘democratic centuries’ that Tocqueville forecast.
The campaign for renaming aims to level the distinction between the present and the past. It too is inflamed by the spirit of ‘democratic negation’ that inspires the current understanding of diversity and the demand that campus speech be cleansed for the sake of creating a community of inclusion…[W]e must resist [such aims], for when the egalitarianism that is vital to our political well-being is extended to those islands of aristocratic sentiment that Tocqueville wisely viewed as precious in their own right, and as a needed balance to the excesses of democratic life, it does great damage not just to our colleges and universities but to our civilization as a whole.”
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