Civilization, an Astronaut, and Me

I am a history teacher, and despite the frustrations inherent in teaching teenagers – something akin to herding angry, greased cats – I love my job. Where else could I get paid to explore a subject I’m so interested in, interact with talented and intelligent colleagues, and help guide ambitious and driven students? My school offers these benefits in abundance. So when I was approached about giving this speech, I immediately accepted, eager for the opportunity to put my thoughts on several subjects together. Then it occurred to me that I had to have thoughts to put them together. A challenge indeed! So I ransacked the dark corners of my brain for where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and what I’ve seen that may be of some interest and have some meaning to someone other than myself. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Today I’m going to talk about three topics that, although apparently different, explain a perspective on life grounded in my experience as a student, teacher, and historian: first, a subject near and dear to my heart, me (or, where I’ve been); second, civilization – perhaps the only topic large enough to encompass the ego of my first topic (what I’ve done – as in study it); and last, an astronaut; because what’s cooler than an astronaut (what I’ve seen)?

So, Part One: Me

When I graduated from high school I thought I knew what I wanted to do. I had a plan – college degree, maybe an MBA, make lots of money, and, therefore, be happy. Easy, right? I had spent the past four years of my schooling in advanced math and science classes, not giving much of a thought to literature or history – despite the fact that I had been reading two books a week since the fourth grade. For some reason lost in the archives of the Williamsville School District I was placed among the counters and measurers, not the readers and writers. While I have no immediate insight into why this was the case, it seems to me that at the time the smart kids were those ahead in math and science. Reading skills seemed to disappear as a matter of educational pride when Reading class turned into English class in the seventh grade. This decision, made when I was twelve years old, ended up dictating the direction of my academic life through my first year and a half of college.

So off I went to The Johns Hopkins University to study chemical engineering and play basketball. Once there I discovered three things: 1) I wasn’t into math and science as much as I though; 2) I was really into basketball; and 3) I really enjoyed not having my parents around. My first discovery resulted in me not being very interested in my classes – intro physics (which met at 8 AM four days a week!), intro chemistry, calculus II, a freshman writing course, and one other I can’t even remember. The second discovery meant more and more of my time was spent in the gym. Collegiate sports are a serious commitment: we began conditioning the first week of classes in the fall, and in my senior year played into March. The third discovery led to a variety of activities my parents should definitely not have known about and made those 8 AM physics classes a real drag! Needless to say I didn’t do very well. But I was stubborn, and I buckled down and pulled out a very mediocre end to my freshman year, still slaving away in intro math and science courses. I even managed to get through the first semester of my sophomore year in these courses: Thermodynamics I, Differential Equations, Matrices, and Macroeconomics!

I entered the fourth semester of my collegiate career with a GPA barely above the Mendoza Line, completely lost but without any clue what else to do. Finally, Thermodynamics II put me out of my misery. On the first day of that class, I came in and sat in the back – like most students of my ilk – and saw the professor scrawling a long list of homework assignments on the board. The last of these was a computer programming problem. I was confused. I didn’t know any computer languages. Was I in the wrong class? No, this was Thermodynamics II. I turned to the kid next to me, and asked if he knew any Fortran (the computer language required). He shook his head no, looking as dumbfounded as I was. After class I went up to the professor and asked about this seeming contradiction – between the assignment and my ignorance. He simply said “so learn it.” It turns out that although the university didn’t offer any classes in it, the engineering school simply assumed students would teach themselves the required computer skills. Right – one homework problem delivered a coup de grace any executioner would be proud of. I walked straight to academic advising. Little did I know that my inability in Thermodynamics II would change the course of my life.

Now I need to rewind a little. In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years I took a few summer courses to boost the academic shortcomings of my first year. One of these courses was Western Civilization I. Up to this point in my life I had never considered history as a serious field of study. I had hated the textbook-driven, memorization-heavy history classes of my high school days, and assumed college would offer more of the same. The summer course was taught by an older retired professor who introduced me to Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne. Sounds boring, right? I was hooked and didn’t even know it yet.

Back to academic advising … After my Thermodynamics II experience, I immediately dropped out of my core engineering classes, signed up for a cross-section of humanities courses, including history, and decided to change my major. I set off to the history department to procure the signature needed to switch majors. I vividly remember walking into the noted Renaissance historian Richard Goldthwaite’s office and timidly asking for the requisite ink to paper. He looked me up and down and said simply, “Really?” When I responded with a nod he signed the slip and waved me out of his office.

There were many twists and turns yet to come in my life, yet this series of events led me to where and who I am today. The choices involved were not easy ones to make. Not many math and science people switch over to history. Most historians have to take off their shoes and socks to count past ten! My difficulties as an engineering major and the decision to switch to history were filled with doubt and anxiety. It upset long held assumptions about my future and forced me to rethink many things. I had had a plan, if you remember. But the Ph.D. in history I hold today is directly attributable to classes I took and professors I met at Hopkins and, therefore, to my struggles as a would-be chemical engineer. And here I am, teaching history, coaching basketball, and a dean no less! Believe it or not, this leads me to my second topic.

Part Two: Civilization.

In Requiem For A Nun, novelist William Faulkner observes that “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” What? The past isn’t past? If “history” is substituted for “the past”, Faulkner’s observation, while counterintuitive to most, is actually something that most historians would accept without hesitation. The phrase history of civilization, the title of countless history textbooks, is rich with meaning when examined closely. While Faulkner’s error in terminology can be excused, technically history is not the same as the past. The latter signifies everything that has come before us – yesterday, the Middle Ages, dinosaurs, the big bang – all in the past. History is something more specific, typically associated with the origins of writing and the rise of civilization – two things that historians see as necessarily related. History did not start, therefore, when humans first evolved (around, say, 100,000 years ago or so) but when they figured out how to relate their thoughts across time (from generation to generation) and space (from place to place) through writing roughly 5,000-6,000 years ago. It is this skill then, writing, that marks us as and makes us civilized. Our ability to express ourselves, to set down our thoughts and not have them disappear with the moment or with an individual life, that is what separates us from barbarism. Moreover, writing, and reading, is what connects us to past experience. In this sense, there is no history without our present reading of it – a kind of negotiation between a remote and dead time and our own living present.

Of course there are other elements that define civilization – the rise of cities, the mastery of settled agriculture – but it is writing that made these things possible and defines the past in the eyes of the present. After all, do we say “hey, those Mesopotamians were sure great at growing their own crops!”? or “wow, those Greeks sure made good food!” … well we do say that, but not when we’re talking about Greeks of the ancient variety. I think you get my point. It is the mythologies, epic tales, plays, and philosophy they left behind that interest us so.

It was writing as a component of early civilization, then, that separated our ancient forebears from their nomadic, even savage brethren. So what did they have to say? What can we glean from their scribblings that informs the present? It seems to me that we aren’t so different from the people of the ancient world. When it came down to it, they were attempting to decipher and understand the universe and our place in it just like we are. We use physics to understand the material world, biology to understand our bodies, and psychology to comprehend our minds. Ancient thinkers had neither our advanced technology nor scientific knowledge. What they did have was religion, philosophy, and literature. After all isn’t the basic question the same for all these fields: what is all this craziness that we call life about? They had different answers perhaps, but the same question, and their explorations of the human condition are amazingly profound.

What seems consistent to me in the literature of the ancient world (and I have to admit here that I am a European historian, so I pretend no expertise in non-Western traditions) is not a single approach to life or unifying principle other than this. Life is struggle: a struggle to survive, a struggle to find peace in a world full of turmoil, a struggle against the forces of nature, a struggle to do the right thing. The epics of the ancient world are replete with stories of struggle, embodied in the frustrated hero – the superman who just can’t seem to get home, find his prize, or just get the gods off his back.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest of ancient literature at almost 5,000 years, offers us a nearly divine king whose arrogance and abuse of his people is tamed by friendship. He and his friend, Enkidu, have adventure after adventure until they challenge the gods themselves. In this last instance, Gilgamesh survives the confrontation that follows, but Enkidu does not. The great king falls into a terrible depression, not only over the death of his great friend, but over the realization of his own mortality. Tempting fate itself, Gilgamesh goes in search of everlasting life in the form of a magic plant that grows only in the underworld. Gilgamesh eventually finds the plant, only to have it snatched away at the last second as he returned from the land of the dead.

Ultimately Gilgamesh fails. But the message is not in his failure. In the underworld Gilgamesh meets the only immortal human being, Utnapishtim, and seeks his aid. Utnapishtim chastises Gilgamesh and asks him,

Why, O Gilgamesh, do you prolong woe …
You strive ceaselessly, what do you gain?
When your strength in ceaseless striving,
When you torture your limbs with pain,
You hasten the distant end of your days.

Gilgamesh replies,

As I look upon you, Utnapishtim,
Your limbs are not different, you are just as I am.
Indeed, you are not different at all, you are just as I am!

Gilgamesh’s answer to Utnapishtim’s pessimism is a simple “why not? If you can do it, I can too. So stuff it!” Of course he doesn’t do it, but the hero’s tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds is a constant feature of ancient tales. Pain and suffering were part of life, the gods surely offered no comfort, quite the opposite. Only love and friendship offered relief, however temporary or fragile.

We see this throughout ancient Greek mythology as well. In Hesiod’s Theogony we see the creation of the Earth as the result of a divine rape. Homer’s Ilaid paints a picture of human greatness at the whim of divine caprice. Again, the only possible shelter from the death and destruction of life are the waiting arms of love and companionship: Hector and Andromache; Achilles and Patroclus (not just friends, but presumed lovers, no matter what Brad Pitt has to say about it).

Later Greek philosophers sought sophrosyne, which means balance or moral sanity. For them this meant walking a fine line between the rational and irrational. On the one hand we have the foundation of Western philosophy and science in Plato and Aristotle. On the other we have the plays of Euripides such as The Bacchae which emphasize human powerlessness in the face of our own irrational drives (if you aren’t familiar its worth reading – cross-dressing, filicide, cannibalism – good times).

Like the Greeks, the Romans assumed both reason and emotion influenced the human mind, and therefore focused their education on rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintillian emphasized oratory, reflecting the importance Romans placed on public life.

Christianity turned the Roman focus on emotional life inward to the soul. The addition of the confessional impulse to the Roman interest in rhetoric resulted in the creation of an autobiographical self. The purpose of prayer was not to speak with God in conversation, but to reach God through understanding oneself. If God is everywhere, he is in us too. Therefore understanding ourselves is understanding Him. “Unless you believe,” says Augustine in his On Free Choice of the Will, “you will not understand.” While Augustine may have had a narrow purpose to this statement, it can be equally applied to his stance on ancient knowledge and the necessity of a thorough education.

The inward turn of early Christianity, grounded in the teachings of the ancient world, produced a culture that defined its purpose as contemplation. Where early Christians found this philosophy liberating when confronted with the endless frustration of a polytheistic world-view, a thousand years later it was too confining for the commercial and artistic explosion of the Renaissance. The focus shifted back to human life and even religious thinkers embraced the idea that human capacity could not only lead to salvation, but earthly accomplishment. “What a great miracle is man,” exclaimed Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Humanity alone had the power of dominion and creation within them – a chameleon of sorts, but one greater than the angels themselves. In The Tempest William Shakespeare recognized the power inherent this new confidence in the voice of Miranda (whose name itself means “worthy of admiration” from the Latin),

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t! (5.1.183)

This attitude laid the groundwork for our own modern assumptions. The voyage of life, once seen as inevitably finite and beyond human control, now hinged upon human talent and capacity. The frustrated heroes of antiquity and the inward gaze of medieval Christianity gave way to a world of possibilities and life.

In my view, this entire evolution, from ancient to modern, assumes two things: 1) life is a struggle, and 2) the only way to understand and withstand this struggle is knowledge. Faulkner got it right. The past is indeed not dead. We need it with us. We need to understand it to understand ourselves. It only has value when it informs our own decisions and actions.

On to Part Three: An Astronaut

A few weeks ago, on Earth Day, astronaut Gene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to walk on the moon, addressed my school. I’ve always been a huge fan of space exploration, being just old enough to remember the final Apollo missions. So I was excited to hear what he had to say. I was also, to be honest, expecting a full endorsement of scientific discovery and education, especially given the other cause he was on campus to promote – the new science building. As a member of this community I am excited by the opportunities such a committed undertaking will offer us. However, as a teacher who spends much of his time in Albright Hall and as a historian, I have also seen math and science education constantly addressed in the public eye as something that needs attention and improvement with little or no notice of the plight of history education. In a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress survey, only 43% of graduating seniors have a basic understanding of US History. Another study funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation found high school students woefully ignorant of basic elements of US Constitutional history and civics. Three-fourths of the over 100,000 students surveyed either did not know what the First Amendment was or responded that they did not care. As discouraging as these facts are, from my experience student knowledge and interest in world history and affairs is even lower. Moreover, in those studies tracking history knowledge of students over time, these numbers have not significantly changed in at least fifteen years. Compare this to science education where the same NAEP study found 53% of graduating seniors at basic proficiency or better; or mathematics which has witnessed double digit increases since the mid-1990s, with the most recent study finding 71% of eight graders with at least a basic understanding of that field.

So, like I have said, as a fan I was interested in what Mr. Cernan had to say, but as a humanities teacher I was skeptical of the presumed message. Mr. Cernan proved a delightful speaker, obviously energized by his cause and expansive in his storytelling. But I took special notice when a graduating seniors asked him THE question, in my opinion, for any proponent of space exploration: why spend all the time, money, and energy it takes to put people on the moon, or on mars, or beyond, when there are such pressing problems back here on Earth? Here was the astronaut’s opportunity to tout the scientific advancements made possible by the space program – everything from baby food to Velcro, from computing technology to better golf ball aerodynamics (really! Look it up).

His answer, while certainly including these things, surprised me. “I could point to technological advance or scientific discovery,” he said (and I’m paraphrasing), “but that’s not really it.” He spoke eloquently of his experience on a spacecraft exiting Earth orbit, and standing on the surface of the moon looking back on our planet, and this astronaut, trained as an electrical engineer, said the important discovery was not scientific at all. It was metaphysical, beyond the boundaries of math or science. He spoke of beauty, spirituality, the sublime. What an unexpected outpouring of romanticism! What an interesting combination of the sciences and the humanities.

Now he was on my territory. I have always found it interesting that for all the meaning, importance, and centrality of math and science in our modern lives, they cannot capture or describe those things that are most central – at least in my opinion – to human existence and endeavor: beauty, love, hope. Certainly math and science have their own types of sublimity and beauty, but it is not the same as that related by great art or poetry. Math may make a student cry with frustration, or even accomplishment, but not in the same way as a great novel or beautiful sunset. Science brings great understanding of the universe; but it does not explain our place in it, our purpose. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, answering the big question, that is “why are we here?”, has long been the arena of religion and philosophy, not science as we define it.

So what this astronaut brought to us, at least for me, on a day celebrating our planet and our plans, went beyond science to the very spirit of discovery. He left Earth a pilot and scientist and came back a prophet of the imponderable, a man changed forever by his experience.

* * *

Now let me bring all these things together. The second law of thermodynamics (thought I’d forgotten all that didn’t you? I got a C+!) states that disorder, or entropy, always increases. In other words, order in not natural. All things ordered, organized, or certain will eventually fall victim to this principle. All glass eventually breaks, biological tissue breaks down, stars die, the universe will end (this will happen, of course, many billions of years in the future, but still … ). Historically this means all civilizations will fall just as they rise. Change is inevitable.

Some people respond to this reality with paralysis. Why act if any action is ultimately temporary? Why strive only to strive again? One could ask the same of my thesis on civilization, why struggle if the struggle is perpetual?

Let me put entropy in a more modern context. Today, China’s top 25% by IQ is larger than the population of the United States. In other words, they have more honors kids than we have kids. Today there are roughly 540,000 words in the English language – five times those available to Shakespeare. 3,000 new books are published daily. A week’s worth of New York Times has more new information than that experienced in a lifetime in the eighteenth century. More new information will be produced this year than in the past 5,000. Yet our government spends $70 million dollars annually on educational research and innovation. Nintendo spends twice that on video game development. According to Labor Department estimates, our graduating seniors will hold ten to fourteen jobs … by the age of 38! In many ways, we are educating children who will have jobs that don’t even exist. That means the skills and technology they will use have not been thought of yet.

Wow! Entropy indeed! So what do we as a school do – both teachers and students? How do we respond to changes that haven’t yet occurred? I think its something we already do. How do we deal with the rapidity of technological change, the shifting realities of the job market? Learn how to think. Teach students how to think. Too many times I’ve heard student say “Well, I won’t ever use that in real life” when talking about an academic subject they’re having difficulty with. I say they’ve missed the boat. When Gene Cernan went to the moon and realized the profound truths he spoke of here a few weeks ago, he didn’t just carry with him his knowledge as an electrical engineer or astronaut. If that was the case he would have just flipped switches, monitored his equipment, and reported his findings. Instead, his experience gave him a broader perspective, one articulated best as a combination of art and science, of discovery both practical and wondrous.

Just as history is not the past, education should not be about material or immediate utility. The way to embrace the struggle of life rather than become its victim is to learn to think. It took me a while to realize this, and I almost missed it. The best way of learning how to think, in my opinion, is to master the very thing that makes us civilized human beings – writing, true literacy, and the knowledge of self that comes with it.