Drudge linked to an article describing a commencement speech recently delivered by Pres. Obama:
"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said.
It's a little ironic that I should have found that quote on a site like Drudge and that you are now reading it on this blog.
Anyway, the quote makes me a little sad inside because it is precisely exemplifies the problem that English Departments are facing right now...only not in the way Obama might imagine.
To Obama, information is a tool of empowerment. This is a classical Marxist approach to the humanities. Information is only good so far as it is useful...so far as it is a political tool.
I don't think this is a completely invalid approach to literature, and, in fact, Renaissance authors might have agreed with the president to a certain extent. Sir Philip Sidney, after all, famously argues that the ultimate goal of art is to produce virtue which ought to yield moral action. An art that influences action surely has a political component to it.
Yet, Sidney also understand that art out to delight as it instructed. That art, which is after all, a medium to convey information, cannot merely be about conveying information. Art is more than just a vessel for data -- which is precisely one of the reasons why it can lift a man towards virtue when done well.
Now, if Obama wants to argue there is too much bad art in the country, I'm fine with that. But when has such a claim not been true? There's always a preponderance of bad art to good art -- the scarcity of good art drives up its value.
But Renaissance artists aside, is diversion and distraction so bad? Is...for lack of a better word...fun and play really what is destroying the nation?
Obama comes off sounding like a robot, a computational machine, that only seeks data to process to complete a program.
Haven't we reached the point in our post-modern world that we can value enjoying information for its own sake? Is entertainment really such a bad thing?
There's a country western song that was popular last year or so, I think it was called "Chicken Fried." It was practically a send up of Epicurean philosophy -- not of the hedonistic sort -- but of the purer sort: the idea that pleasure could itself be a good and worth defending and striving for. It may well be that American freedom is not founded wholly in lofty philosophical notions of liberty and rights or human dignity. It might well be that American freedom is rooted firmly in the ability to squander that freedom in simple pleasures. Remember, the original Tea Party occurred because of...well...tea. I'm sure historians can argue over the various ideological underpinnings of the protest, but I wouldn't be surprised if a good number of revolutionaries really were just annoyed over tea.
I'm not about to launch into a long defense of Epicureanism--I'm certainly not going to advocate it as a life philosophy as it leads to easily into materialism--but I think it is also a bit too easily dismissed by the more Stoic thinker, as Obama would profess himself to be in this speech.
Worldly pleasures are passing. The are divine goods far better.
But something tells me that Obama isn't nudging his audience towards the divine. Rather, he wants them to exchange their worldly pleasures for worldly political activism. But if you remove worldly pleasures from the equation, what exactly was worldly political activism worth?
Perhaps Obama misunderstands how entertainment itself becomes a means of empowerment and emancipation.
I don't want my students to read Shakespeare so they can be inspired to be political activists. I want my students to read Shakespeare and say, "Wow! That was awesome!" That would be real liberation.
Comments