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A review by blackoxford
The Devil and Webster by Jean Hanff Korelitz
4.0
Existential Storms in Monastic Teapots
The modern university started life in the 13th century as an extension of the medieval monastery. Its mission was to train functionaries, mainly in Ecclesiastical Law and associated writing skills, to serve the needs of the huge international clerical state. Times have certainly changed: the Church is in decline; the Law is still with us but rather more corporate than ecclesiastical; and the young people who participate in it are likely not as rigorously celibate as their predecessors.
Nevertheless, despite the secularisation of the world, its function, and its denizens, the university maintains much of its monastic origins. It remains a place apart from worldly affairs, that is to say, economics and its demands to make a living. Like all enclosed communities it intensifies familial tensions - among surrogate siblings and with the in loco parentis staff members - so that otherwise trivial conflicts become worthy as the focus for the commitment of one’s young life. And because the monastic organisational ethos is one of voluntary cooperation not hierarchical direction, it is almost impossible to manage.
The university is the institution that Korelitz knows well, in its modern form to be sure, but also in its monastic temperament. She knows that behaviour in the university isn’t governed by political correctness but by monastic mores. One’s fellow monks/students, no matter how annoying, are required to work out their own salvation. Besides, they may end up being one’s superior one day; no sense in alienating a prospective abbot or abbess.
The essence of monastic/university life is routine, everything occurs at its set time and season. As Korelitz says about her protagonist, a university president, who confronts the university as “a phenomenon that would return to bedevil her life again and again over the following years: institutional tradition.” Korelitz’s Dartmouth-like descriptions of these institutional traditions are not much different from similar descriptions from Oxford, Paris, and Bologna from 800 years ago. Term times, lecture times, tutorial protocols, examination rubrics, all constitute a liturgy which is more rigid and more rigidly defended than any other formal regulations. Weaving one’s way through such a swamp of ‘the way we’ve always done things” is as difficult for an administrator as it is for the students and teachers. Disrupting routine is the only real tool of protest available, but it’s usually effective.
Monastic establishments depend vitally on benefactors. Traditionally these were the local nobility but corporate donors have slid easily into the role. The latter exercise their influence subtly but decisively, particularly through their influential power of appointment. It is this power indeed that connects the monastery, ancient or modern, to the worldly realities of economics and meaningful politics. The issue of lay patronage over church appointments was a major issue of the Middle Ages. The Church won the battle around the end of the first millennium but lost the war by the end of the second. The result is the modern university’s tenuous formal independence. Influence not power rules. And influence is very quiet about itself.
The issues addressed within the modern universities are different in name but not in substance from those that were popular in ancient monasteries: who is to be saved and how. Perhaps the most urgent focus for this issue over the last several decades has been gender - only partly because gender touches on sex; much more because gender is a surrogate for the question of the orderliness of the universe - followed closely by race, largely because it too has been such a source of privilege, and consequently order.
Two genders (three if one includes the neuter but this has never been problematic since it refers to non-sexual beings) is the ancient presumption upon which most sacred scriptures are founded. What happens when gender is considered a spectrum rather than binary? There are also two races - white and all others. So what happens when the subtleties of race confront the meritocratic rules of white liberal society?
Monastic eruptions and explosions are what happens. Very quickly everyone becomes a fundamentalist. The fight is ostensibly about what constitutes reality: ‘Gender abnormalities are just that - abnormal’ vs. ‘Gender abnormalities are the norm.’ Similarly ‘Race distinctions are misleading’ vs. ‘Race distinctions are unavoidable.’ Students believe they know the way really is and they never like it.
The fights, conflicts, protests at university, however, are actually not about reality, what’s really there, but about the the attitude toward whatever there really is. The issues, that is, aren’t ontological but ethical. This is what gets worked out in the monastery/university environment. Problems that previously have no name are articulated and argued. It’s messy, beyond rational comprehension, and only temporary since the population is in flux. But it’s somehow effective.
Thus a university experience is inevitably moral. All concerned - students, teachers and administrators - eventually find they are challenged to look not ‘there,’ in the objective world for solutions to problems, but ‘here,’ in themselves for how they are complicit in whatever is occurring. The students are formally instructed by their in the objective realities of the cosmos, while they all are socially indoctrinated in the acceptance of the subjective responsibility for their own psychic stance towards it. It looks chaotic, sometimes nonsensical, but Korelitz understands what it’s about and she tells the story well in The Devil and Daniel Webster.
The modern university started life in the 13th century as an extension of the medieval monastery. Its mission was to train functionaries, mainly in Ecclesiastical Law and associated writing skills, to serve the needs of the huge international clerical state. Times have certainly changed: the Church is in decline; the Law is still with us but rather more corporate than ecclesiastical; and the young people who participate in it are likely not as rigorously celibate as their predecessors.
Nevertheless, despite the secularisation of the world, its function, and its denizens, the university maintains much of its monastic origins. It remains a place apart from worldly affairs, that is to say, economics and its demands to make a living. Like all enclosed communities it intensifies familial tensions - among surrogate siblings and with the in loco parentis staff members - so that otherwise trivial conflicts become worthy as the focus for the commitment of one’s young life. And because the monastic organisational ethos is one of voluntary cooperation not hierarchical direction, it is almost impossible to manage.
The university is the institution that Korelitz knows well, in its modern form to be sure, but also in its monastic temperament. She knows that behaviour in the university isn’t governed by political correctness but by monastic mores. One’s fellow monks/students, no matter how annoying, are required to work out their own salvation. Besides, they may end up being one’s superior one day; no sense in alienating a prospective abbot or abbess.
The essence of monastic/university life is routine, everything occurs at its set time and season. As Korelitz says about her protagonist, a university president, who confronts the university as “a phenomenon that would return to bedevil her life again and again over the following years: institutional tradition.” Korelitz’s Dartmouth-like descriptions of these institutional traditions are not much different from similar descriptions from Oxford, Paris, and Bologna from 800 years ago. Term times, lecture times, tutorial protocols, examination rubrics, all constitute a liturgy which is more rigid and more rigidly defended than any other formal regulations. Weaving one’s way through such a swamp of ‘the way we’ve always done things” is as difficult for an administrator as it is for the students and teachers. Disrupting routine is the only real tool of protest available, but it’s usually effective.
Monastic establishments depend vitally on benefactors. Traditionally these were the local nobility but corporate donors have slid easily into the role. The latter exercise their influence subtly but decisively, particularly through their influential power of appointment. It is this power indeed that connects the monastery, ancient or modern, to the worldly realities of economics and meaningful politics. The issue of lay patronage over church appointments was a major issue of the Middle Ages. The Church won the battle around the end of the first millennium but lost the war by the end of the second. The result is the modern university’s tenuous formal independence. Influence not power rules. And influence is very quiet about itself.
The issues addressed within the modern universities are different in name but not in substance from those that were popular in ancient monasteries: who is to be saved and how. Perhaps the most urgent focus for this issue over the last several decades has been gender - only partly because gender touches on sex; much more because gender is a surrogate for the question of the orderliness of the universe - followed closely by race, largely because it too has been such a source of privilege, and consequently order.
Two genders (three if one includes the neuter but this has never been problematic since it refers to non-sexual beings) is the ancient presumption upon which most sacred scriptures are founded. What happens when gender is considered a spectrum rather than binary? There are also two races - white and all others. So what happens when the subtleties of race confront the meritocratic rules of white liberal society?
Monastic eruptions and explosions are what happens. Very quickly everyone becomes a fundamentalist. The fight is ostensibly about what constitutes reality: ‘Gender abnormalities are just that - abnormal’ vs. ‘Gender abnormalities are the norm.’ Similarly ‘Race distinctions are misleading’ vs. ‘Race distinctions are unavoidable.’ Students believe they know the way really is and they never like it.
The fights, conflicts, protests at university, however, are actually not about reality, what’s really there, but about the the attitude toward whatever there really is. The issues, that is, aren’t ontological but ethical. This is what gets worked out in the monastery/university environment. Problems that previously have no name are articulated and argued. It’s messy, beyond rational comprehension, and only temporary since the population is in flux. But it’s somehow effective.
Thus a university experience is inevitably moral. All concerned - students, teachers and administrators - eventually find they are challenged to look not ‘there,’ in the objective world for solutions to problems, but ‘here,’ in themselves for how they are complicit in whatever is occurring. The students are formally instructed by their in the objective realities of the cosmos, while they all are socially indoctrinated in the acceptance of the subjective responsibility for their own psychic stance towards it. It looks chaotic, sometimes nonsensical, but Korelitz understands what it’s about and she tells the story well in The Devil and Daniel Webster.