Learning requires that a student place trust in a teacher, or in an authoritative text, without yet knowing if the trust is warranted. One has to trust that the teacher knows what he is talking about, or that the text contains riches that are not yet visible through a thicket of strangeness and obscurity (as is often the case with books written in another century).
The necessity of trust in education is not much appreciated because it sits uncomfortably with our public creed of individualism. Individualism tacitly posits a kind of epistemic self-sufficiency that everyone has by default, or can achieve simply by following a clearly stated method of reasoning (“critical thinking skills”), applied to “information” that is readily available. This flattens the hierarchical relationship between student and teacher, or between student and text, and such flattening is one instance of Americans’ fraught relationship to the idea of authority.
The paradoxical thesis I wish to consider is this: Real independence of mind can be won only by a sustained process of submission to authority. There is a related paradox: A democratic society, precisely because it requires such independence of thought if it is to be something other than mob rule, requires education conducted with an aristocratic ethos.
Our best guide to these paradoxes is Michael Polanyi, a prominent physical chemist in the middle of the twentieth century (and brother of Karl Polanyi, the economic thinker). He became interested in the process of scientific discovery as a philosophical problem, not least because his own experience of doing science did not match the account given by the logical positivists, who had the then-prevailing theory of how science works. He was also a refugee from both the Communists and the Nazis who at various points laid claim to his native Hungary. He saw that a misapprehension about the way scientific understandings progress could have disastrous consequences, clearing the way for science to become subject to pressures of social utility and political ends. He saw as well that, like totalitarian regimes, liberal democracy also posed a threat to scientific learning and, by extension, to all transmission of knowledge and culture.
Polanyi understood the transmission of knowledge on the model of apprenticeship, as in the manual trades. As a student, one must submit to a teacher’s way of doing things without yet being able to give an account of why it is the proper way.
In the chapter “Conviviality” from his 1958 book Personal Knowledge, Polanyi addressed the conditions for the transmission of culture—in particular, the conditions that sustain deference to the idea of truth. To begin with the primitive, animals learn by mimicking. “A true transmission of knowledge stemming from conviviality,” he explained, “takes place when an animal shares in the intelligent effort which another animal is making in its presence.”
Polanyi then cited the example of one chimpanzee watching another trying to pull off a difficult feat and “revealing by [its] gestures that [he] participate[s] in another’s efforts.” Since Polanyi wrote this, we have discovered “mirror neurons” that are dedicated to this kind of imitation. We have also learned that use of the hands and body to mirror the actions of another is not a merely incidental accompaniment to learning but integral to the cognitive processes that take place. The recent psychological literature on “joint attention” has vindicated, and further elaborated, Polanyi’s insights.
Notice, then, that with imitation we have a nested set of dependencies: Learning is relational and it relies on an intimate connection between body and mind. Polanyi continued by noting that “all arts are learned by intelligently imitating the way they are practiced by other persons in whom the learner places his confidence.” That included the acquisition of language by young children. Confidence or trust is the key idea here. And this remains the case in adult society: Without such confidence, the transmission of culture comes to a halt. Polanyi elaborated:
This kind of communication can be received only when one person places an exceptional degree of confidence in another, the apprentice in the master, the student in the teacher, and popular audiences in distinguished speakers or famous writers.
The first act of what Polanyi termed “affiliation” occurs when a child entrusts herself to education within a community—the primary rite of passage which is then reenacted and thereby “confirmed” every time an adult “place[s] exceptional confidence in the intellectual leaders of the same community.” Polanyi went on:
Just as children learn to speak by assuming that the words used in their presence mean something, so throughout the whole range of cultural apprenticeship the intellectual junior’s craving to understand the doings and sayings of his intellectual superiors assumes that what they are doing and saying has a hidden meaning which, when discovered, will be found satisfying to some extent.
We live within a horizon that continues to be shaped by Enlightenment thought with its highly individualistic picture of human knowing. According to this understanding, to place trust in the testimony of others is to substitute mere hearsay for knowledge. As John Locke said in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, it makes no more sense to rely on other people’s opinions, and call it knowledge, than to rely on other people’s eyes for one’s own vision—even if those opinions happen to be true. Locke’s epistemological point served a political purpose: It was directed against ecclesiastical authorities. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it, “The whole Essay is directed against those who would control others by specious principles supposedly beyond question.”
According to the new liberalism that Locke helped to articulate, political freedom requires intellectual independence. This is the anti-authoritarian mindset Tocqueville was struck by as he traveled around America. He said that Americans were Cartesians without having read Descartes. Descartes, like Locke, insisted on a kind of epistemic self-sufficiency, rejecting all established customs and received opinions. I myself should be the source of all my knowledge; otherwise it is not knowledge. This is the positive image of freedom that emerges when you pursue far enough the negative goal of being free from authority.
But this brings with it a certain anxiety: If I have to stand on my own two feet, epistemically, how can I be sure that my knowledge really is knowledge? An intransigent stance against the testimony of tradition coupled with a fundamentally Protestant stance toward religious authority leads to the problem of skepticism. Tocqueville’s great observation is that the way Americans resolve the anxiety that comes from a lack of settled authority is to look around to see what their contemporaries think. The individualist turns out to be a conformist.
How does that happen?
In the Lockean or Cartesian dispensation that Americans tacitly adopt, tradition is subject to a hermeneutic of suspicion. Our default is to think that inherited wisdom does little more than perpetuate forms of oppression, offered in bad faith as so-called knowledge. But cutting ourselves off from the past in this way, out of a determination not to be duped, we find that we have little ground to stand on to resist the tyranny of the majority. Intellectually, we find ourselves trapped in the present. This amounts to a kind of anti-culture, if we understand the word culture to imply something that grows over time; and witnessing such a cultural deficiency in America led Tocqueville to worry that Americans would be prone to a creeping “soft despotism.”
How so?
Becoming increasingly susceptible to new forms of authority that announce themselves as anti-authoritarian, we flatter ourselves by imagining that we are individualists. Consider one example: The New Left of the 1960s was no doubt sincere in its attack on “the establishment” as an ossified system of authority. But even after completing its long march through the institutions, it continued to “speak truth to power”—even, on occasion, from Air Force One. In this instance as in others, the authoritative stature of anti-authoritarianism resulted in the prolonged if not permanent adolescence of those who were eventually charged with leading and governing. A mismatch between their dissident self-image and their power resulted in irresponsibility.
As a refugee from both Soviet communism and Nazism, Polanyi placed independence of thought at the center of his political vision. He offered us an account of how intellectual competence, and therefore real independence, is achieved. And he exposed the threat to such independence not only in the totalitarian systems he narrowly escaped as a Hungarian Jew but also in the theory of knowledge that underwrites liberal individualism.
Polanyi’s treatment of the role of authority in education reveals a fundamental tension between learning and democratic culture. Many have noted higher education’s gradual embrace of a commercial ethos and its attendant transformation along the lines of a service industry. The professor’s role is to provide a service for pay, and to do so congenially. Plato’s Socrates anticipated such a development in Book 8 of the Republic, in which he describes a tendency of democracy to degenerate: “As the teacher in such a situation is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Socrates goes on: “The old come down to the level of the young; imitating the young, they are overflowing with facility and charm, and that’s so that they won’t seem to be unpleasant or despotic.”
In the journal The Mentor, one observer who attends meetings of college administrators reports the following: “The first person to speak was a senior dean from a distinguished university. He announced proudly that he and his colleagues admit smart students and then make a special effort to ‘get out of their way.’ ‘Students learn mostly from one another,’ he argued. ‘We shouldn’t muck up that process.’” Students learning from one another is a respectably democratic-sounding formula, though one wonders why parents keep paying those aristocratic tuitions.
The basic model for intellectual life today is commerce: Just as markets free of interference are said to produce ideal outcomes by the workings of a mysterious hidden hand, so truth will prevail in the open competition of the “marketplace of ideas” among students who aren’t yet educated. But can an opinion be taken as true merely because it prevails? As a practical matter it is not clear how the college administrators’ conviction about the robustness of truth differs from simple deference to public opinion.
Polanyi says you need a prior act of affiliation to kick start the kind of apprenticeship through which culture comes to be transmitted. But such acts of affiliation, or “granting of one’s personal allegiance” to an authoritative figure, no longer seem routine. When a student shops for a professor, he may consult Rate My Professor Dot Com, that sophomore panopticon by which teachers are held to norms established by students: easiness, availability outside class, hotness, etc. Laura Kipnis describes how some students seek, and find, real coercive power over their professors by enacting a self-infantilizing melodrama of victimhood, with the acquiescence of administrators whose first concern is for public relations.
And then there is the ressentiment toward authority that is common among professors themselves, notably in the humanities. In her essay “When Nothing Is Cool,” the English professor Lisa Ruddick writes,
Decades of anti-humanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole.... Bruno Latour has described how scholars slip from “critique” into “critical barbarity,” giving “cruel treatment” to experiences and ideals that non-academics treat as objects of tender concern. Such objects include the great works of the mind. Undergraduates learn this hermeneutic of suspicion well and direct it against their teachers.
If Polanyi is right that education, the transmission of culture, consists of apprenticeship in devotion to truth, then it seems the institution ostensibly dedicated to education risks becoming instead the locus of an anti-culture of disregard for, and ressentiment of, one’s intellectual superiors: students against teachers, and teachers against the great works that might have instructed them (in a moment of lapsed vigilance).
It is worth thinking about the significance of ressentiment. (In using the French word, I follow Nietzsche and all who are instructed by his account.) Max Scheler, the early-twentieth-century German philosopher, suggested that this emotion could best be understood through the old Aesopian fable of the fox and the grapes. Driven by hunger, the fox tries to reach a cluster of grapes hanging high on the vine but is unable to, even after leaping with all his strength. Walking away, the fox remarks, “Oh, you aren’t even ripe yet! I don’t need any sour grapes.”
To indulge in ressentiment is to deny that something is good. It is one way of responding to one’s inability to achieve that coveted goal or status. Instead of accepting one’s limitations and preserving one’s admiration for what cannot be achieved, one’s vain smallness of soul leads one to tear down what is high, placing oneself above it. Notice that this is the opposite of becoming large by first becoming small, as the apprentice does in the act of submission to a teacher. Ressentiment instead turns the objective order of value upside down.
One variation on this is the insistence that all values are merely subjective anyway: There is nothing truly higher that stands in judgment of my own character and capacities. This is to collapse the vertical dimension of reality in order to protect a fragile self-image. This seems to be the upshot of a thoroughly democratic education, and we witness its fruits in the steady erosion of competence.
Liberal democracy, as distinguished from democracy simpliciter, is a mixed regime that includes aristocratic elements. It needs to protect the zones of intellectual and moral formation—in particular, the family, the school and the university—the must rely upon rank and authority if they are to do the work of creating citizens capable of self-government.
This essay first appeared on on Matthew B. Crawford’s Archedelia Substack. It was written with the support of the Moral Ecology Trust of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and will appear in its edited volume, The Necessity of Character: Moral Formation and Leadership in Our Time.