Hole in Your Head

When the dentist took that molar out of my left lower jaw he left me with a new hole in my head. I asked him about filling it up with some kind of “store-boughten” tooth, but he didn’t think so. “You’ll probably be losing some more teeth pretty soon,” he said jovially, “and then I can make you a nice bridge.” Dentists sure know how to hurt a fellow.

So I learned to live with that abhorrent vacuum. But it took a while. At first my tongue was always falling into it. Later I sort of got used to it, and most of the time my tongue stayed away. Finally it stayed away all together, but by an act of will I could put my tongue there when I wanted to. My life is full of small victories.

This is a parable of my worry life. For a time I keep falling into the deep chasm of a particular worry. After a while it is only now and then, especially if I have some new worries. Finally, there is victory, and I can worry about that thing only when I wish to.

Let me pass some of my worries around. These are the kind over which I have some measure of victory: I don’t spend all my time on them, but then I do seem to spend too much time on them.

It worries me, for example, to hear educators expound on the theory that one learns by doing. Well, one does learn by doing; but I can’t keep from thinking that there is more to learning than that. Something crucial seems to be missing. This is what leads to discussion groups in which uneducated people “swap ignorances.” I have been on the learning side of the educational process several times myself, and I would much rather hear one person talk for an hour if he knows what he is talking about than listen to all kinds of people, even brilliant ones, sharing views when they don’t know what they are talking about.

If people learn anything by doing, about the only things they learn are (a) how to talk, (b) how they can get away with nonsense if they talk enough. Just what is my opinion on atomic physics worth? I might make same contribution like, ‘I just don’t see that,” “No one I know has ever thought things like that,” or “What’s the good of all this anyway?” So it goes in much so-called education. Learning by doing is the practice that comes after you learn something to do. Joe Namath put the Colts down by calling what has been termed “a coach’s game.” I take it that this means there is a right way strategically to run a football team. I don’t think the Jets talked much over in the huddle. My basic cynicism suggests to me that a lazy professor can kill a lot of class hours in discussion when he has nothing to offer from his own preparation.

This particular worry creeps over into another one, also in education and maybe more serious. Let’s talk over with the students how to run a university. As a first approximation, I think that students who think they are smart enough to run a university disqualify themselves from being smart at all; they are naive beyond repair. College freshmen are three months away from being high-school seniors. How did they suddenly become so dependable and mature? They didn’t. But college and university administrators are afraid of the students, or afraid of a bad press, or afraid of the awful over-hang after a tough discipline case. So they try to draw off the fire by endless, senseless, feckless “let’s-talk-it-over” sessions.

An educational institution is a terrifyingly complex structure—finances, a faculty of prima donnas, vast hotel and restaurant establishments, labor gangs on buildings and grounds, million-dollar enterprises down around that good old stadium, dance bands, research labs, extensions of the national government. “Well, son, how do you think we ought to run this thing?” You might as well ask my opinion on how to run a jet plane; I could come up with some excellent suggestions on how to open and shut the door on the galley. Not knowing what it is all about, feeling frustrated because they don’t like the hard and endless discipline that any real education demands, students have no resources except animal spirits. So they start to tear the place down, which I suspect is about where the barbarians were when they tore Greece and Rome apart. Of course, young people should be listened to, but what does age have to do with it? You listen to any man only if he has something to say. Maybe a little learning first would qualify them for having something to say.

And that leads me to my last worry. I am worried about what has happened to censorship. Now don’t give me that stuff about how censorship somehow stultifies the arts. Of course it can, and often it does, and certainly it shouldn’t. But that’s not the problem. The wise and good Chesterton said it this way: “Morality, like art, consists in drawing the line somewhere.” I think this has to do with the art of living in every aspect. You have to draw the line somewhere. There surely must be something called “decent behavior,” and I know all the arguments from the anthropologists on this, too. But every society has its own decencies. Its members know how to protect their young; they expect a man to be a man. Cultures have designs; if they didn’t take some kind of recognizable shape you wouldn’t even be able to talk about them. They draw the line somewhere. So where? And who draws the line? There’s the real ache in our society. Everyone is blaming everyone else because everyone is afraid to draw the line because of the “censorship will destroy art” syndrome. Meanwhile we spoil the youth of our land. And the whole thing is not sophistication but naivete. Surely no one in his right mind believes that everyone can do as he pleases.

Take sex, for a nice, interesting, and constantly vivid example. God likes sex; he invented it. He said that there are marvelous ways to its delights and fulfillments. He also suggests that where a man can climb higher he can also fall deeper, as any classic tragedy will tell you. Roses make sweet perfume and finally rot in the worst of stenches; somewhere a line is passed on the way to decay. So maybe the wisdom of the ages and the sages has something to say to this generation on where to draw the line.

Shall we ask the young people how they “feel” about it, or what they think about it, or what the other kids are doing? It is about as silly as having a six-year-old boy take vows of chastity for the rest of his life; he doesn’t know what the rest of life is like, but maybe over the “generation gap” (wish I had time for that one!) somebody could actually tell him not only what the score is but even what the game is. Does no one love him enough to say, “Thou shalt not”? Should the sophistications of a bored adult become the starting place for a child?

Sex out-of-bounds usually moves to fancy sex, then to perversion, then to cruelty. Can nothing be found for movies or book stalls or homes or schools to stop the slippage? Pierre Van Paasen in That Day Alone tried to analyze how Germany hit the skids that brought on Hitler. He called it “the abdication of the decent.” There’s a worry for you.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.