We ought not need Aristotle and Horace to teach us of the importance of the aurea mediocritas -- the golden mean. The evil effects of running to extremes are everywhere legion and manifest. Yet sometimes we are inclined to forget just how universal the undesirability of all extremes is, so that we incline to immoderation in our enthusiasms on behalf of some noble-sounding idea: Liberty, for example, or Progress -- which we then set up as an idol to be worshipped in its own right, severing the abstraction dangerously from the men and women it is supposed to benefit. Here we will discuss one of these unexceptionable concepts, that of Egalitarianism, as it pertains to American society and to Dartmouth.
Recently the author was contemplating a large slab of snow which had fallen into a puddle before his eyes. The lower portions of the slab absorbed the moisture instantly; then the process slowed progressively, so that the entire mass was only soaked through and through after a good many minutes. Here in miniature, he reflected, is a model of the progress of this abstraction we call egalitarianism through the history of many nations. Its ideals are absorbed by a small minority, and often put into print early on in the form of a high-minded and noble-sounding constitution. Yet its progress through every level of society and from an abstract to a concrete mode is generally a slow and painful process accompanied by ferocious resistance on the part of those who will not acknowledge the connection between the abstract notion and its practical applications: say, respecting the equal rights of the sexes. Most would acknowledge, probably, that the United States has now moved very far along the egalitarian path. It is perhaps now prudent to ask whether the road of egalitarianism is a road without end, where every step means a happier and more desirable society, or whether it is possible to have too much even of this good thing.
It seems likely that there are entire realms of society where the notion of egalitarianism is actually an evil, as pernicious as it is destructive. Such notions which have arisen recently in this country as the Egalitarian Family, or the Egalitarian Church, where all decisions on questions of rules, strictures, and actions would be democratically arrived at, based on the preposterous notion that everyone's opinion is equally valid, and that the ephemeral will of the majority must outweigh custom and tradition, are examples. Fortunately, these utopian ideas are as yet rarely found in practice; but it is disconcerting to think that such ideas are sloshing around in people's minds, for we know, because Mr Weaver told us so, that ideas have consequences.
Those who argue for an ever-expanding equality, applied to ever more intimate areas of human experience, will find ultimately that they run up against some rather essential prejudices which cannot be uprooted from humanity. We simply cannot be made egalitarian in the sense of seeing nothing to choose between life and death, or between youth and old age, or between beauty and ugliness (even allowing for latitude of definition). In fact, our very mental processes are hierarchical and authoritarian in their functioning. We make authoritative decisions in putting one foot in front of the other to guide our steps; we are constantly giving priority to certain actions over others, ranking all manner of objects, ideas, and people in orders of like and dislike, nobility and baseness, chalk and cheese, if you will. Humans have always thought in this way. It is inconceivable that we should ever do otherwise. Therefore, most of the exercises in extreme egalitarianism currently being attempted, far from being innocently quixotic, both bring about needless feelings of guilt and inadequacy in people who cannot abandon their natural modes of thinking, and must be considered symptoms of a rather stunning arrogance with self-satisfaction as its only end.
But of particular concern is a powerful tendency we can discern in humanities and social science courses, which we might call the Egalitarian Classroom. Here, the professor is curiously anxious to assure the students that he is one of them, (cozy "discussion sections" are frequent symptoms), that all theories and topics are equally worthy of debate and study, that objectivity and therefore all truth, goodness, and beauty are fictions. The danger we face in the teaching of these fields is that of a wide rift developing between two cultures quite different from those envisioned by Sir Charles Snow. We might come to distinguish ever more sharply between the hazy, amiable, extremely relativistic and nihilistic atmosphere dominant in so many classrooms, and the outside world, where decisions need to be taken all the time, where every question cannot be debated from ten thousand different angles, where reality, though it might be just a subjective fiction, seems far more immediate and pressing than anything in the classroom. Despite all the talk of relevance, then, the humanities and social science courses might in such a scenario become supremely irrelevant to their students, in the sense that we will utterly dissociate how we think and act while in these classes and out and about. To avert this danger it might be suggested that professors shuck some of their apparent fear of asserting intellectual authority in class; that they imitate those dignified Continental professors who instinctively teach as though they were speaking ex cathedra; that they wield their scepters lightly, but wield them well.
