Safety in Monologues

Towards the end of Emma, the heroine of the title is thunderstruck by a revelation: Her protégé, Harriet, informs her that she has developed romantic feelings for Mr. Knightley -- and that the feelings appear to be reciprocal.

Why is this a jolt? Because the revelation sparks Emma's realization that, unbeknownst to her own silly self, and despite her open flirtation with Frank Churchill, she herself has been in love with Mr. Knightley for a long time. Or as Jane Austen puts it:

Emma sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes. A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart. A mind like hers, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress. She touched -- she admitted -- she acknowledged the whole truth. Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley, than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet's having some hope of a return? It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!

[This and other excerpts slightly edited.]

To Emma's dismay, however, she gathers from further discussion with Harriet that Harriet's "hope of a return" is well founded. The painful news leads Emma to scrutinize herself:

The rest of the day, the following night, were hardly enough for her thoughts. She was bewildered amidst the confusion of all that had rushed on her within the last few hours. Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be matter of humiliation to her. How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under! The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart! she sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery -- in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly; that she had been imposed on by others in a most mortifying degree; that she had been imposing on herself in a degree yet more mortifying; that she was wretched, and should probably find this day but the beginning of wretchedness.

To understand, thoroughly understand her own heart, was the first endeavour. How long had Mr. Knightley been so dear to her, as every feeling declared him now to be? When had his influence, such influence begun? When had he succeeded to that place in her affection, which Frank Churchill had once, for a short period, occupied? She looked back; she compared the two -- compared them, as they had always stood in her estimation, from the time of the latter's becoming known to her -- and as they must at any time have been compared by her, had it -- oh! had it, by any blessed felicity, occurred to her, to institute the comparison. She saw that there never had been a time when she did not consider Mr. Knightley as infinitely the superior, or when his regard for her had not been infinitely the most dear. She saw that in persuading herself, in fancying, in acting to the contrary, she had been entirely under a delusion, totally ignorant of her own heart -- and, in short, that she had never really cared for Frank Churchill at all!

This was the conclusion of the first series of reflection. This was the knowledge of herself, on the first question of inquiry, which she reached; and without being long in reaching it. She was most sorrowfully indignant; ashamed of every sensation but the one revealed to her -- her affection for Mr. Knightley. Every other part of her mind was disgusting.

With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody's feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody's destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing -- for she had done mischief. She had brought evil on Harriet, on herself, and she too much feared, on Mr. Knightley. Were this most unequal of all connexions to take place, on her must rest all the reproach of having given it a beginning; for his attachment, she must believe to be produced only by a consciousness of Harriet's; -- and even were this not the case, he would never have known Harriet at all but for her folly.

(Incidentally, it is one of Austen's humorous touches that even here, Emma has an exaggerated view of the power of her influence to bring about feelings for Harriet in Mr. Knightley.)

Why do I recur yet again to Emma? Because I'd like to posit the question: Does such self-scrutiny happen with today's under-30's? Therein may lie an explanation for the monologue phenomenon.

"Insufferable vanity," "unpardonable arrogance," being "universally mistaken." The stricken Emma's phraseology is hyperbolic. But let us agree at the outset that crimes like these are the natural order of the day for human beings who, like Emma, are young and therefore immature.

But that was 200 years ago. Don't young people today mature much more rapidly thanks to their information-rich environment?

Please. That's not even funny.

So. Such crimes on the part of the young obviously continue unabated. But what about the sort of enlightenment, repentance, growth we see in Emma?

They say of drunks that the first step in overcoming their problem is to acknowledge it. But is a mindset riveted to the conviction that "I am allowed to have my opinion just as you are allowed to have yours" capable of acknowledging its own errors?

It's not just that today's young have an ardor for the idea of universal opinion legitimacy. In their adhesion to the viewpoint, they also exhibit an eerie uniformity -- one that seems to violate the ordinary heterogeneity we would expect to find in normal, free-thinking cultures.

It cannot come from the air or the water. I think this remarkably pervasive ideology comes via that technology which, for the first time in human history, permits the driving of mass culture from a central source; namely, electronic media -- TV in particular.

An ideology of universal opinion legitimacy does not seem to directly serve any sponsor's interests. But it is a side effect of the constant pandering I've previously mentioned. The immature Emma's inclination to see her own views vindicated is a timeless feature of the human psyche. What's new is the lavish project of flattery and cajolement aimed at all modern young Emmas, assuring them that their every caprice is laudable.

You deserve a break today.

Consider Emma's lamentations as she foresees a union between Harriet and Mr. Knightley:

If Harriet were to be the chosen, the first, the dearest, the friend, the wife to whom Mr. Knightley looked for all the best blessings of existence; what could be increasing Emma's wretchedness but the reflection never far distant from her mind, that it had been all her own work?

When it came to such a pitch as this, she was not able to refrain from a start, or a heavy sigh, or even from walking about the room for a few seconds; and the only source whence anything like consolation or composure could be drawn was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.

Could such unequivocal acceptance of the fact and consequences of one's own errors happen in modern times?

I don't deny that in exceptionally shocking circumstances, involving severe outcomes and widespread social censure, a young person may be driven to serious reappraisal. The impaired driver who has maimed half a dozen friends and is hauled off to prison, to universal condemnation: OK, I fucked up.

But the response to less extreme setbacks is highly, amazingly, uniform. Even the words with which you hear it articulated will scarcely deviate from precisely this incantation:

I think everything happens for a reason.

Television. It's the only explanation.

Further bolstering the sense of opinion entitlement is the natural tendency of the media, an industry dedicated to representing information through pictures and sound, to champion superficiality, spurn nuance, and minimize abstraction. The repeatedly driven message is that insight is achieved through visceral reactions and gut instinct, rather than by intellectual processes.

TV-land's intellectualizers are typically unsympathetic villains. The good guys are generally uncomplicated. And as for intellectual argumentation, it's primarily portrayed as a mode of trickery.

If teachers have arrived at a sense that class discussion just doesn't work very well and that monologue is the way to go, then these properties of the media teat may help account for it.

In class discussion, when students express ideas, they may well say things a teacher will perceive to be ill-conceived, unfounded, wrong. It's natural enough -- the students are young; relatively undeveloped intellectually; and opining on the teacher's specialty.

The teacher's natural duty is to correct ill-conceived ideas. But this flies in the face of the students' ingrained conviction of their opinions' legitimacy. Some heat can result.

A teacher's conscientious efforts to counter misconceptions are liable to provoke, in modern students, the sentiment that the teacher disrespects them; that he's denying the value of their viewpoint, violating their personal legitimacy, trampling their self-esteem, being patronizing and arrogant.

Perhaps never before in history have the young had such a passionate, aggrieved regard for their right to their opinions. It's terrible to behold -- as I continue to do with some of my younger squash partners -- how the new generation we have spawned has a system of thought in which incoming words do not even have the potential to pose a threat to existing beliefs. A young person's conviction is in no way dependent on his ability to defend it, or even a willingness to try. If it's a conviction to which he's attached, an opponent is already condemned, in his eyes, by the very act of opposition. The opponent's disrespect for someone's sovereign opinion marks him as an outsider to youth culture's value system, a trespasser, a deviant.

The ideology of universal opinion legitimacy has reached as far as China, where -- as I saw when my own teaching incited a rebellion -- it has touched at least some relatively modern and affluent urban youth:

The students were terribly peeved about sometimes being told that answers they gave to questions in class discussions were wrong.

"There's no unique right answer!" they said. "You say an answer is wrong just because it's different from your idea. There's never only one right answer!"

[From Inside China's Diplomacy School, chapter 31.]

At Cambridge, as we have seen, perceiving the world through the prism of self-delusion was not only the conventional practice. It was also stoutly defended as perfectly normal and inevitable. We may infer that there were fragile belief structures aplenty, and an abundance of unacknowledged zones of sensitivity. To confront student error in such circumstances was to invite the risk of explosion.

Monologue was the politic alternative.

There must remain a few teachers who are prepared to take a stand, confront wrongness, fight for principle and true enlightenment. But I would guess that most teachers, including at the university level, regard all those battles as lost. Professors' prestige, status and independence have been downgraded -- analogously to medical doctors in the U.S., who have become ensnared in corporate bureaucracies. To an extent, professors are now sales representatives, obliged to please the customers (which, again, involves more pandering). In their constricted range of motion, they are now closer to corporate worker bees -- and just like them, when they smell trouble, they duck. They want no part of it.

Irrational folly has swept the world, and they are resigned to it.

(Continued....)

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