Learning

Just finished Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography, by Bruce Chilton. I'm a little embarrassed that I read so much about religion in my free time. You'd think I might need something ELSE to strike a balance in my life. Beth is always bugging me to pick up fiction.

But I instantly felt vindicated as I started my next book, The Death of Adam, a set of essays by the novelist Marlilynne Robinson. She begins the introduction with the observation that learning is an increasingly discredited art in our culture. She wrote it in 1998, long before recent anti-George Bush screeds decried the rise of anti-intellectualism. Robinson is even-handed. She writes:

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it. I miss civilization, and I want it back (The Death of Adam, 4).

She laments what she believes is the loss of an art of learning--learning for it's own sake, or for the sake of the cultivation of the soul. Not just the practice of gathering degrees, but reading widely and deeply, being a student of life, believing that there is such a thing as human potential, and choosing to pursue the development of our capacities for empathy, love, honor, courage, creativity.

Interesting that I feel embarrassed about reading a book simply because I find the subject matter fascinating and I want to know more about it.

There's got to be some kind of balance I can strike between embracing the virtue of the pursuit of learning, on the one hand, and recognizing that the persistent inequities in opportunities for learning in our world do not render the "learned" superior to those who aren't.

In the end, all learning points toward ethics. What is learning for, other than to know what is good, and to do it?