Esotericism in the Classroom

 

As someone who works in the American educational system, I find that I need to avoid openly stating my beliefs. Students ask me what I think of Donald Trump and I tell them that I do not discuss politics on school grounds. It may very well be that my students have as low an opinion of Trump as I do. If I agree to talk about the issues where I agree with them then I will be trapped in those situations where I disagree with them. Not talking about politics in school is a matter of principle. I honestly believe that it is not appropriate for adults to use the platform they have been given as teachers to advocate for their own political preferences. Kids deserve the space to be ignorant and not know how to solve the big issues of the day without someone trying to recruit them to some cause. 

The fact is, though, that I have another incentive to keep my politics to myself. Unlike the many teachers who can afford to openly plaster their leftwing politics on their classroom walls, I know that I risk my job if I were to ever openly talk about my politics in front of students. This reality has helped me appreciate the esotericism of Leo Strauss. Central to Strauss' narrative of intellectual history is the idea that pre-modern philosophers hid their views from the masses. One did not want to end up like Socrates, executed for challenging the gods of Athens. Of particular interest to Strauss was Maimonides, who openly admits, in The Guide to the Perplexed, that he contradicts himself in order to conceal things from certain readers.    

Having to be careful about saying my opinions has taught me something else about esotericism, it helps you become a better teacher and thinker. Part of the danger of having strongly held beliefs is that they become a form of identity. You believe less in the idea and more in the community of people who hold them. The idea becomes a password to show that you are a good person. For those who have started reading my dissertation posts, this is an essential feature of the military model with its social ideology. If you cannot simply pontificate your beliefs wherever you want but have to limit yourself to a personal blog, it gives you a space to examine your own ideas. Clearly, your ideas are not obviously true otherwise there would not be people who want to silence you. Are your opponents bad people; maybe, even if you are right, there really is something dangerous about what you believe?

In truth, arguing with students will not win them over to my side. As Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay argue, if your goal is to convince people that they are wrong, perhaps the most counterproductive thing you can do is argue with them. Whatever arguments you make are almost certain to simply demonstrate that you are on a different team and cause your interlocuter to become defensive. They will then respond with their own tribalistic reasoning and all meaningful discussion will break down. 

Recognizing that you are not going to be able to convince people that they are wrong, it is far more productive to let other people simply talk. This has the advantage of developing a relationship with the person as they do not perceive you as a threat. Furthermore, while you may not be able to convince them that they are wrong, there is still one person who can. However resistant people might be to outsiders telling them that they are wrong, they are perfectly capable of converting themselves if given the chance. Most people do not get much opportunity to really listen to themselves talk about what they believe so give them the chance. 

The proper setting for someone to change their own minds is while sitting by themselves reading a book. This was something that Protestants understood very well. It is the Bible that has the power to convince people that they are totally depraved sinners who can rely on Jesus and not anything else, including their own good deeds. After listening to people's arguments, rather than arguing, it is more productive to suggest a book (or a blog) for them to read. 

Being by yourself with a book has the advantage of not having to worry that the author is right. The author very well might live on the other side of the world or even be dead. Furthermore, disagreeing with the author does not break the connection. You can continue to read the book and the arguments might stick around in your head for years until you wake up and realize that you do not have the same opinions as you once did. The more this process is simply going on in your head the better as there will be less social pressure to conform to whatever your group tells you that good people believe. 

As a teacher working in a system in which just about everyone is to the left of me, I have had no choice but to follow the advice of Aaron Burr in the Hamilton musical: "Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for." 

It turns out that this is good advice and if I did not fear for my job, I would not have the discipline to keep to it. Students should feel free to talk about their beliefs and not worry about whether I think that they are right. As kids, they are most certainly wrong about nearly everything and that is fine. They do not need to hear my slightly less ignorant views. Instead, I can then serve as a librarian to suggest books for them to read. Who knows how they might be affected years down the road by an idea that has been bouncing around in their heads.   

What I wish to give over to my students, above all, is the spirit of skeptical inquiry. This is not a system of belief that I can ever argue them into. To be a skeptic means to be willing to attack your own ideas as vigorously as your opponent's. You become a skeptic by experiencing having your own mind being changed in subtle ways over many years of thinking and reading. Skepticism also has the virtue of helping people become more tolerant. Maybe that person I disagree with is actually right? Let me listen to them. If nothing else, I am honestly curious as to what they actually believe and how they came to their conclusions.

 

The Buckeye Christian Political Club

 

Zayid and Umar live in Columbus, OH. They hear that on Saturdays in the Fall, a group of cool people meet in their secret club to drink beer and yell at a television screen. These cool people are keen to make sure that only other cool people join their club. As such, they only allow people who wear the right kind of clothes and say the correct password to enter. Zayid wears scarlet and grey and says something very ungentlemanly about a woman named Ann Arbor. As such, Zayid is deemed to be cool enough to enter. Umar wears blue and maize and sings "Hail to the Victors." He is chased away.  

It turns out that the cool people also have a meeting on Sundays where they sing songs and listen to a sermon, followed by cake and socializing. Zayid makes sure to wear a cross and tells the people that Jesus is his Lord and Savior. Umar wears a turban and says "Allah Akbar." Once again, things go well for Zayid and poorly for Umar. 

The following Tuesday, these cool people have their biannual go into a booth and fill in the circle next to some politician get-together. Zayid wears red again and tells the people that we need to ban critical race theory. Umar wears blue again and declares that the year 1619 was the true founding of America. Perhaps Umar's luck finally turns around.

It is clear that the cool people hanging out in the first instance are simply fans of Buckeye football. There is nothing ideological about their opposition to Michigan. Even if Umar was the world's greatest expert on football and could talk for hours with charts about the superiority of Wolverine football, it would do little good. If anything, Umar's intellectual defense of Michigan would backfire and convince the Ohio State fans that Michigan represents empty intellectualism rather than the instinctual embrace of the "soul" of football. 

If pressed, the Ohio State fans would likely concede that there is nothing intellectual about their choosing of Ohio State over Michigan. It is equally reasonable for Michigan people to choose Michigan. That being said, they will still want Michigan people to stay in their place "up north" and not force Ohio State fans to hang out with them. Michigan people may only be pretend stink but that pretend stink still carries a whiff to it. 

Once we understand that fandom exists as something real where people are incredibly passionate about something completely vacuous, it is hardly obvious that the fandom model is not in operation in areas that make intellectual claims that sound like they should be taken seriously such as religion and politics. Do the Buckeye Christians really have a well-thought-out theology that allows them to reject Islam or does their clubhouse serve the same function as a church on Sunday as it did as a Buckeye hangout on Saturday? It is hardly obvious that there is a meaningful difference between the claims “Jesus is Lord” and “Ann Arbor is a Whore.” The fact that people around the world might proclaim the former with enthusiasm and without the benefit of alcohol should matter little. If the Buckeye Christians do not talk about Jesus with a greater level of enthusiasm than their denunciation of Ann Arbor, why should we not assume that both of them are equally meaningful to them?     

The same goes for politics even though politics deals with objective facts as opposed to metaphysics and there are real-world consequences to politicians of one party or the other winning elections. (This is distinct from whether your vote actually matters.) Despite the fact that people regularly make statements in politics that should be subject to refutation, we should not take these claims seriously as something the people actually believe. Their claims likely function not as truth statements but as signaling devices to show what team they root for.

From this perspective, the more a claim is clearly false, the more politically useful it becomes as a signaling device. Claiming that Trump really won the election or that American police are the moral equivalent of the Gestapo are both ridiculous. But the fact that they are ridiculous makes them good signaling devices. Only a true-believing Trumpist or leftist, who had no interest in being accepted by mainstream society, would ever say such things. 

Peter Boghossian engages in a useful exercise where he has people line up along a spectrum indicating not whether they support a statement or not but how strong their position is. One of the things that comes out strongly from these exercises is that people who take the most extreme positions are not there because they really have done significant research into the topic. Instead, their positions are marks of their identity. This causes them to take challenges to their positions very personally and lash out when someone questions them. It is almost as if they were sports fans confronting fans of the opposing team.