Teach the Conflicts

In 1992, Gerald Graff, a distinguished English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published a book called Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. His aim was to enrich the teaching of literature by making it a ground for intellectual contention. I admired the book, and still do, but for one reservation: when two critics put forward differing interpretations of a text, the text too often recedes into the background. The critics themselves take center stage. So a dialogue between, say, Walter Jackson Bate and Paul de Man on an ode by Keats might well bury the poet beneath professorial gab. With a bit of adjustment, however, a turning of the gear a half inch or so, we can adapt Graff’s method to the present. Doing so would, I think, revitalize college education, which I fear has sunk into conformist doldrums. It could put an end to classroom silence based on fears students have that they might be saying the wrong thing. It could likewise revitalize how we in the larger culture talk about political and social issues. Teaching the conflicts won’t solve all the problems of the world, but it might help us crack the dogmatic crust that seems to inhibit us almost everywhere.

As it is, people who disagree often find that they cannot talk to one another, especially about sensitive subjects. Abortion, race, immigration, trans rights, Israel and Palestine, electoral politics—many of us are unable to exchange ideas about these matters with anyone who disagrees with us. Still, our future would look a lot better if we could, and teaching the conflicts might help us get there. Every assignment we professors make should allow students to see matters from at least two sides. No Karl Marx without a generous helping of Edmund Burke. No Michel Foucault–style determinism without exposure to an articulate apostle of human freedom. Ralph Waldo Emerson would be my choice. His observation that he hates “the builders of dungeons in the air” is a good place to start a dialogue with Foucault. I’m not endorsing conflict of interpretation, the way Graff did, but rather conflict between contrasting visions of what life is and how to live it well.

For my part, I follow William Blake’s 1793 declaration of prophetic independence, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he writes, “Without Contraries is no progression.” Blake was a proponent of what he liked to call “Mental Fight,” the peaceful contest between ideas, images, voices, and values. The opposite of this Blake called “the war of swords.” He abhorred violence and believed that we should work out our differences through strong intellectual contention. He wanted to see contraries in conflict with each other: that was the road of peaceful progress. He would have liked a phrase that the American literary critic Kenneth Burke used to characterize his intellectual aspirations: ad bellum purificandum, or “toward the purification of war.” Burke and Blake both feared that a society that fails to work out its contraries peacefully, through intellectual struggle, ultimately will resolve them through warfare.

Blake believed that the culture of 18th-century England had gotten stuck. It had become inert, sterile, and bland because the dialectic—the play of opposing intellectual forces—had gone dead. The greatest literary minds of the past generation were prone to the belief that all the major questions had been settled, and that what was needed most was affirmation. The ruling sentiments of the period were perhaps embodied in a line of Alexander Pope’s: “True wit is nature to advantage dress’d / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.” We know what’s most worth knowing—we know Nature; we know God. The objective now is simply to express what we know—what everyone knows or should—in the most artful and memorable terms. Pope takes up this task with true genius. Samuel Johnson, who adored Pope, wrote that we do not need to be informed so much and so often as we need to be reminded. What is it that distinguishes the work of Shakespeare above all other dramatists? He gives us what Johnson called “just representations of general nature.”