Yale, The Demise Of Excellence, And The Race To The Bottom - A National Metaphor

Athena Phillips was a graduate of Wellesley College, one of the Seven Sisters, a group of women's colleges on an academic par with the Ivy League when Yale and Harvard were not yet co-ed.  She took her education and her privilege seriously, marrying well (Harper Davenport was a descendant of John Davenport who, in search of a more disciplined, rigorous, and faithful Calvinist environment than that of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded New Haven), establishing herself in New York and Palm Beach society but never losing her patrician noblesse oblige spirit. 

She was known for her elegant dinners, her equally well-bred circle of friends, and her collection of Greek bronzes. She had wealth, taste, and privilege but never retreated into that insular, hermetic community of the rich, remained active in civic and community affairs, and felt a duty to serve. 

She was not unlike George H.W. Bush, who before becoming President of the United States was a loyal two-term Vice President to Ronald Reagan, head of the CIA, Ambassador to China, and former Navy combat pilot in WWII.  Wealth hath its privilege, said Bush, but also its duty; and Athena Phillips was cut from the same cloth. 

Her husband, equally well-placed in New England society, Yale graduate, member of the prestigious Skull and Bones society, captain of the baseball team, and Rhodes scholar was not unlike the elder Bush. He entered J.P. Morgan, Wall Street's premier investment bank immediately after college and had made a small fortune before he was thirty. At the same time he set up a trust which, managed with vision and discipline, encouraged the best and the brightest - entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators. 

So it was with some concern that Harper Davenport saw the changes taking place at Yale and the Ivy League itself and the disturbing erosion of the of early American foundational values espoused by Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and his own Davenport family.  This heritage did not begin with the founding of the American republic.  Honor, courage, honesty, compassion, intelligence, and duty were enshrined in Ancient Greece and were the core values taught by Cato the Elder to the future leaders of Rome, and now they were not only dismissed but disparaged. 

 

Davenport and Athena wrote to the Presidents of Yale and Wellesley expressing their dismay at the rapid decline of academic excellence in the name of 'diversity'.  It was one thing to admit students of color who met the highest standards intellectual achievement and who would be valued members of the university community, another thing altogether to disregard ability in the name of 'equity'. 

The response Harper received from the President of Yale who replied in person out of respect for the Davenport family and their storied history, was courteous, respectful, but little more than polemic.  'The black man', he wrote, 'has for too long suffered under the yoke of white privilege and exclusivity, and it is time for Yale to acknowledge its role in imposing this entitlement and to open its doors to the underserved and marginalized'.  

 

To accommodate these newcomers, Yale revised its curriculum to both include a series of remedial classes and to provide courses that would 'meet the cultural needs and expectations of black students'.  The courses Harper had taken at Yale - 'Aeschylus, Sophocles, And the Greek Dramatic Episode' and King Lear, English Prehistory, and The Invention of the Human (this taught by the young Shakespearean eminence Harold Bloom) were gone, replaced by 'Slavery, Feminism, And The Heroic Journals of Enslaved Women', 'Incantation of Blackness - The Supremacy Of Tribal Consciousness'. 

Courses in philosophy, sociology, psychology and seemingly all the liberal arts reflected this same cultural bias.  The historic achievements of European civilization reflected in the arts, science, and literature were being erased and replaced by dogmatic recanting of received wisdom - European civilization was little more than a 'regional cabal of white supremacy'. 

With little investigation, Athena found that the situation was repeated at Wellesley, the other Seven Sisters, and throughout the Ivy League.  Administrators tripped over themselves to justify this race to the academic bottom, this 'closing of the American mind'. as scholar Allan Bloom wrote, and this racial idolatry.  The Dean of Students at Princeton wrote in a letter to all alumni that the university had finally shed its patrician, Southern cavalier image, and was now home to 'the real America'. 

'We have eliminated all traces of patriarchy and discredited notions of excellence', he wrote.  'SATs will no longer be required, high school transcripts and grade performance will be optional, and emphasis will be placed on 'social performance', essays recounting personal struggles and triumph'. 

Everything is subject to the Bell Curve, the normal distribution of people and events. Einstein, Kant, and Shakespeare are at one asymptote representing those with intelligence so rare that it is shared with very few. Severely mentally retarded adults are at the other end of the scale, doomed by crossed and defective genes to never advance beyond the age of a child; and the rest of us are in the middle, under arc of the curve, sharing modest intelligence with millions.

Artistic talent, practical genius, and religious insight all are subject to normal distribution.  There are just as brilliant Jivaro Indians in the Amazon as there are Descartes or Picasso. One only has to know where to look. They are the best hunters, the most accurate prophesiers, and the most charismatic priests.  They have been gifted with native abilities and the particular energy and ambition to use them. 

The Harvard Red Book, a journal written by Harvard graduates five years after they graduate and every five years thereafter was a good example of the pre-affirmative action ethos of excellence at the university. The initial five- and ten-year editions display the intellectual energy and drive of former students.  They may have started off as lawyers, doctors, or architects; but when they found that their chosen career paths were less rewarding than they had expected, they changed them; and went on to perform well and succeed in them.

The racist epithet, 'white supremacy' stuck in Harper's craw.  It was insulting, ignorant, absurdly reductionist thinking - an intellectual corruption thought only to have been experienced in the worst of Stalinist Russia, the Eastern bloc, and the brutal dictatorships of Africa.  A profoundly self-serving, facile, and unimaginable irrationality. 

Athena was no less livid.  To see her storied family history - one of English nobility, American talent and enterprise expressing the best of European descendancy and New World energy and individualism - derogated and dismissed as if thousands of years of cultural excellence meant nothing; and to see the tribal, Paleolithic culture of Africa lionized and instituted as a cultural ideal - was sickening at best. 

How did this philosophy - one that ascribes the same socio-economic and cultural value to the former slave, the migrant farm worker, and the assembly line worker as to the investment banker, the CEO, the cyber-startup genius, and the Frank Lloyd Wright - ever gain traction and currency?  And most importantly where did this profoundly revisionist view of history ever come from? 

It is not a matter of principle, but a matter of fact - privilege and elitism had been an essential, ineluctable, permanent aspect of human society since its first settlements. Human communities from the most remote Amazon tribe to Imperial Europe have been divided by ability and the power and influence which that confers. 

American public schools focus their investment and their attention on 'the disadvantaged, the underserved, the socially needy' at the expense of the gifted and talented.  Public education should be focusing its attention instead on the best and the brightest, those who will contribute most to their communities and America at large. Taxpayer money should be spent within this perspective of promised accomplishment, not invested in the unpromising. 

Harper and Athena continued to do their part, and gave millions to their private foundations to promote excellence, achievement, talent, and innovation.  The both stopped supporting Yale and Wellesley. 

No Country For Old Men - Time To Make Way Before Your Soul Is At Hazard

Ed Tom Bell, sheriff in the film version of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men in an opening soliloquy says:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willin' to die to even do this job. but I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet somethin' I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say: "Okay, I'll be part of this world." 

It is often hard in this divided and contentious age to take life's measure - what is going on?  How did the world get so complicated, so unequivocally complex? It seems like only yesterday that life was far simpler.  Family, faith, neighborliness, Sunday dinners, easily understood values; and now not only has that idyll disappeared, but an almost incomprehensible nightmare has replaced it. 

Things are not as they seem in an AI-mediated world.  Reality, as Browning, Kurosawa, and Durrell portrayed it decades ago - a matter of perception, personality, and interpretation - has become even more a conundrum. Metaphysics - the philosophy of what is and what isn't - has to be rethought.  In an advanced computer age where where the possible replaces the actual and where the individual creates his own reality, Bishop Berkeley's question, 'If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?' has been rendered meaningless.  Such intellectual probing - or any attempt to pin down reality - is irrelevant. 

 

The post-human generation is within a few decades of existence. Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly.  It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification. 

Even more impressively such genetic engineering will be able to replace unwanted genes with more desirable ones. Once that happens, parents will be able to purchase the genes of beautiful, talented, brilliant celebrities and create the infant of their choice.

At the same time, engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

What soul is at hazard, ask theologians? Without clear, unmistakable, and unchanging signposts no individual can be expected to keep a steady course towards God.  Deviations, detours, dead ends, and roads leading back on themselves not only make spiritual travel difficult, but create a confusion that can only lead to despair.  

In the pre-transformative times in which we live life has become more and more relative. Limits of credibility have been so pushed that even the very basics of life, the DNA structure which inalterably determines and distinguishes between men and women, have been subjected to perception, choice, and convenience. 

John Paul II was the first pope to speak out against Protestant fundamentalism - a circus act, he called it, a magical mystery tour included with the price of admission, an impossibly fanciful episode and an equally imaginary end.  Spiritual evolution can only be achieved through faith and reason. Understanding the thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, and Athanasius is as important as prayer.  

The beautiful complexity of the Trinity, discussed and argued over for more than two centuries, can only be appreciated through rational thought and logical conclusion; but once it is understood for all its divine architecture, faith in God is strengthened. 

All that will be irrelevant once human beings are untethered from reality - from a 'real' world that must be subjected to logic, reason, and disciplined thought to be understood.  'Taking its measure', figuring out what life is about and why, and placing oneself in relation to it, will be soon outdated, archaic, and of no use. 

We are now observing the last throes of reality where we are not trying to make sense of things as Ed Tom Bell is, but to change them, to make things better, to progress, to proceed to a better world.  A fanciful enterprise under any circumstances, but with the very foundation of 'reality' shaking beneath our feet, a foolish, desperate enterprise. 

In preparation for a Sixtieth class reunion at Yale University, organizers sorted through the many requests for speaking time.  The Class of 1964 had among its members former scientists, professors, industrialists, and senior government officials who wanted to be heard.  They had much to say about race, the environment, social equality, politics, and much more.  These important men squabbled and jostled for screen time, a lesson in one-upmanship, status, and importance. 

Only a few demurred and suggested that since they were all in perhaps the last decade of their lives, wouldn't it make more sense to talk about this, the final existential question of their lives? Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy's novella of the same name, is unprepared for his impending death, and remains stubbornly in the past.  Only near the very end of his life does he let go, face the unimaginable future, and accept his fate. 

It is quite amazing, although understandable why old men hang on to the present - why they are convinced that their lives actually meant something, that positive change is not only possible but inevitable, that goodness always wins out over evil, and a whole raft of other febrile dreams.  Why must they go kicking and screaming from a world which will soon do quite well without them and on which they have had only desultory, insignificant effect?  Isn't facing eternity the only real issue?

The reunion went on as they all do - speaker after speaker made their way to the podium, took out their prepared notes, and lectured their classmates on doing the right thing.  In a time and place where old men are irrelevant if not supernumerary, shouldn't they have their sights on the limitless reaches in front of them?  

Jews have a saying, 'Too soon old, too late schmart' - wise in Talmudic, rabbinical ways that gentiles can only intimate.  

Harry Angstrom in John Updike's Rabbit at Rest likes to play golf with Jewish partners.  They seem to have a hold on past, present, and future that gentiles can only hope to have.  Rabbit is in the depressive throes of assessing his life, sees little hope, and clings to the wisdom of these old men as his only refuge. 

No country for old men indeed.  Ed Tom was right to be concerned that it was hard to take life's measure in changing times, and that his soul was at hazard.  Few of us are there. 

The Fountain Of Youth - Older Men Don't Want To Be Younger, They Just Want Love With A Younger Woman

'I'm past my sexual pull-by date', Cohen said to his internist who as a married late middle aged man with a young lover wanted nothing of it.  

'Bullshit', said Dr. Rubinstein in his customary blunt way - the forthrightness that his patients had come to expect and appreciate.  No patronizing, patriarchal sugar coating - facts are facts, diseases are diseases, all of which pick their victims at random.

'Why me?', Rubinstein heard every day as he went over blood results.  'The luck of the draw', he said, never considering an evasive answer; and so it was with Cohen who in good health was in low spirits and sought his physician's advice. 

 

Cohen said, as his sexual expiry approached - although actuarily he had many good years left, death had its macabre persistence - that he felt despondent.  Not that he had not had a good, productive, and fulfilling life, but the pall of enforced celibacy was diverting his attention from everything else.  

All he could think of was his last love, a lovely young woman half his age. Lisa was not the most beautiful girl in the world, but she was the most complaisant, the most willing, the most needy of his patience, understanding, and sexual enthusiasm. 

As Coleman Silk says in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain about his young lover, 'Granted, she's not my first love; and granted, she's not my best love; but she certainly is my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?', Cohen said, ‘It certainly does’.

Nelson Rockefeller, heir to to the John D. fortune, Governor of New York, and a mature man in his prime, died of a heart attack caused by a historic orgasm with his young lover in a Manhattan hotel room. 

 

All older men want to go out that way.  What could be better, more fulfilling, more existential than that? A simple, ordinary death in bed surrounded by loved ones? Dropping dead in the Governor's mansion or the Oval Office? 

None of the above.  Men, the best and the brightest to the Walmart greeter have the same dream and all were united in their oneness with Governor Rockefeller.

Cohen's affair with Annette of course ended, but not badly.  Both knew that it was destined to end, so there was no intimation of manipulation, extortion, or accusations of exploitation. Yes, they had talked of a future and even had agreed on the name of their first child, but both knew it could never be.

‘One last time', pleaded Annette about lovemaking as Cohen was about to leave; but as much as he was tempted, he had had just enough of the elixir to sustain him, at least for a while. 

Now Cohen was bereft, alone, and becoming depressed over the fact that he was still more than sexually capable but consigned to his rocker well before his time. 

He was reminded of the Konstantin Levin reflection in Anna Karenina, that God had created Man, an intelligent, sentient, creative, willful and enthusiastic being; allowed him but a few decades of life, and then consigned him to an eternity beneath the cold, hard ground of the steppes.  God's irony - having created men with a lifelong passion and desire for women but granting them a similarly few decades was a far worse irony.

Dr. Rubinstein, doctor and amateur Talmudic scholar reminded Cohen both of the Biblical injunctions to love God no matter when, how, or under what conditions; and of Solomon's many wives and concubines, both well into old age.  

‘Contradictory?', the doctor asked rhetorically.  'Far from it', and went on to suggest that life, even a religious one, was not meant to be lived in emotional and sexual penury. 

'Get a hooker', Dr. Rubinstein suggested. 

At first Cohen was shocked by the proposition.  How could a doctor in good standing in an age where AIDS had not totally been eradicated, when adultery still destroyed the most stable and solid of marriages, possibly have even intimated such a remedy? 

'Because I am a doctor', Rubinstein replied, 'and my first, foremost, and only preoccupation is for the welfare and wellbeing of my patients'. 

The thought had never occurred to Cohen.  He had always been a msn about town, a Casanova of sorts, an attractive desirable man well into his sixties.  He had never paid for sex, and never thought he would. 

'Suspension of disbelief', said Rubinstein , a popular philosopher in his own way.  'Remember what Dominque Strauss-Kahn (former IMF high functionary and candidate for the French presidency) said when he was accused of solicitation. "I didn't know they were prostitutes. All women look the same with their clothes off". Don't be such a prude'. 

Now doctors are not supposed to be procurers, and Cohen was taken quite by surprise at Rubinstein’s suggestion.  He was about to ask him for a reference when the doctor, seeing his surprise, concluded, 'Or try someone fiftyish, more in your league and still many years younger.'

But the doctor, younger than Cohen and without the existential need for a soft, warm, pliant body in bed with him, had no idea of the epiphanic nature of a truly December-May affair.  Fiftyish simply wouldn't do it at this stage in life.  A post-menopausal lover, as sexually excitable as she might be, would not fit the bill.  It was young women he wanted, not younger women. 

And so it was that Annette from Accounting fell into his lap - a perfect storm of heritage, frustration, emotional need and passing age.  

Annette was from an Iowa farm family but not the idyllic, variety.  Her father and brother were both in federal prison and she by the skin of her teeth had escaped the same fate. 

She made her way through community college, junior college, and then the University of Iowa but after ten years in Washington was no better off than when she left the prairie. She was nearing midnight on her biological clock, when she fell for Richard Cohen, a senior executive at her firm, many years her senior but attentive, kind, solicitous, and passionate. 

 

Their Saturdays in her third-floor walkup were memorable - orgies of drunken, drug-addled, inimitable sexual adventure previously unknown to either of them.  

D.H. Lawrence was right, thought Cohen after one particularly heady Saturday.  Sexual mutuality is indeed the be-all and end-all of human experience, and at its best, epiphanic.

The affair went on for months.  Annette fell in love with this marvelous loving, considerate, and understanding man. 'You love women, don't you?', she said to him one day after sex, a woman truly appreciative of a man who loved everything about her, for who she was and who she could be. 

Cohen was in seventh heaven, saved from sexual dereliction by this simple farmgirl from Iowa, awakened from marital torpor, energized and given new life.  Thank God for Annette, he said not often enough. 

Esther Cohen knew what was going on, or at least surmised the real reason behind his 'working late' and 'weekend workshops' but her complaisance was equally predictable. She was brought up in a patriarchal age, and although she matured into a new world of female independence, she was only on the cusp of radical feminism.  Daddy was still king. 

More importantly Cohen was a good provider and a good father, and in these days of irresponsibility and venality, she was not about to give up a good, rare thing.  Men were simply this way and as long as there were no complications -  Aidan Jones, for example, a colleague and classmate, had had a child by his lover and his marriage had come to an expected, precipitous, calamitous end - she could overlook her husband’s depredations and soldier on. 

This was the conundrum, the puzzle faced by modern women.  Despite decades of feminist hectoring and misandrous aggression, men had not changed an iota.  Except of course for those intimidated, uxorious men like progressive Bob Muzelle who attended women's conferences on equality, who deferred to their wives on questions of dinner menus and portfolio adjustments; and for whom their wives and all women had nothing but scorn and hilarious laughter. 

No, Richard Cohen was none of the above.  He was simply both a man who loved women and who saw the younger of them as the answer to his existential angst. 

Nelson Rockefeller, heir to to the John D. fortune, Governor of New York, and a mature man in his prime, died of a heart attack provoked by a historic orgasm with his young lover in a Manhattan hotel. 

All older men wanted to go out that way.  What could be better, more fulfilling, more existential than that.  A simple, ordinary death in bed surrounded by loved ones? Dropping dead over an office memorandum? None of the above.  Men, the best and the brightest to the Walmart greeter have the same dream and all were united in their oneness with Governor Nelson. 

Cohen's affair with Annette ended of course, but not badly.  Both knew that it would end; and so there were no recriminations. Yes, regret, and yes they had talked of a future and even had agreed on the name of their first child, but both knew it was not to be.  '

‘One last time', pleaded Annette about lovemaking as Cohen was about to leave; but as much as he was tempted, he demurred.