Why Education Is Useless

Chapter Two: Love

CHAPTER TWO Love PROFESSOR LOVELESS Jokes about the folly of education have a long and distinguished history. Prior to the Renaissance, the preferred slurs for the learned emphasized their unfitness for warfare and practical business, their ignominious poverty, the generally ridiculous figure they cut, and the cloudiness of their interminable debates. These images have continued to thrive right up to the present day, and who would dare predict that they are coming to an end in the new millennium? They still make us laugh; we still seem to need the conviction oftruth they excite in us. Intellectuals themselves often go out of their way to encourage this kind of mockery. Over the last few centuries, however, an even more popular stereotype has come into being. It tells of the man who has been rendered impotent by his learning, incapable of pleasure and romance. (For reasons that I will note in what follows, the learned woman is a separate case.) In some instances the emphasis falls more on romantic haplessness , in others on sexual incompetence, but the one generally suggests the other. It would seem that in love or in sex, and commonly in both, learning makes one a loser. Innumerable stories, jokes, wisecracks, and asides establish the point. Surely everyone in my own profession has heard of the maids at a hotel who gaze out upon the passing conventioneers from the Modern Language Association (MLA) until one mutters to the other, "''ve never seen a convention with more talking and less fucking in all my life." But even ifyou have never before come across this particular urban myth, you get the joke-and so you understand the context for my reflections here. The character ofCasaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72) is this image of the learned man wrought to perfection. The Rev. Mr. Casaubon is a scholar so dessicated in body and soul that his marriage to the young, beautiful, and ardent Dorothea Brooke is an utter horror. As a wedded couple, these two join the stark clarity of a medieval emblem, a danse macabre, to a modern sense of irony that verges on farce. Causaubon is a pathetic lover both emotionally and physically. In his unlovely body he illustrates all too well the advice given by Rondibilis, a physician in The Histories ofGargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34), about the damping effect of study on semen: "For by this means the spirits are so dissolved that not enough is left to impel this generative secretion to its destined place, and so to inflate the cavernous nerve whose office it is to ejaculate it for the propagation ofhumankind.... So in such a studious person you will see all the natural faculties suspended, all the external senses blocked."1 Even though it is turned to all sorts of satirical ends in the works of Fran~,;ois Rabelais, that well-schooled physician and exuberant author, the scientific theory voiced by Rondibilis was completely serious. It was a commonplace of early modern medicine that one finds also, for instance, in Robert Burton's Anatomy ofMelancholy (1621-25), and it continued to enjoy cultural currency into the Victorian period. From the Renaissance on, this scientific perspective on the incompatibility of learning and love has been welcomed into the more impressionistic convictions on this subject communicated through other areas of culture. Erasmus provided us with a good example ofthis popular sense ofthings in his Praise ofFolly (1511-16): Imagine, ifyou please, ... a man who has wasted his whole childhood and youth in mastering the branches of learning and has lost the sweetest part of life in sleepless nights and endless painstaking labors, a man who even in the rest ofhis life has not tasted the tiniest crumb ofpleasure, always frugal, poor, gloomy, surly, unfair and harsh to himself, severe and hateful to others, wasted away into a pale, thin, sickly, blear-eyed figure, old and gray long before his time, hastening to a premature grave-though what does it matter when such a person dies, since he never really lived at all?2 More recent times have seen the scientific theory, grown outmoded, wither away from the stereotype ofthe learned man. (In Eliot's novel, for instance, it shows itself mostly in the uneducated prejudices of persons such as Dorothea's failed suitor, the splendidly healthy and equally dull SirJames Chettam.) But this science is no longer necessary, if indeed it ever was. Other grounds have been sufficient to nourish the stereotype. When Thomas...