The Death of Conviction

The Blessings and Pitfalls of Liberal Education

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin's first reading

An Essay by Rabbi YY Jacobson

Open-Mindedness

Much has been written about the apparent absence in our society of passion directed toward any ideal beyond our personal needs and pleasures. Nothing in the contemporary secular conversation calls on us to give up anything truly valuable for anybody or anything else. Even marriage and the family unit, once considered sacred institutions worth sacrificing for, are easily discarded when they conflict with one's personal comforts.

The original cause of this condition, it seems, is the gift of liberty that our generation has been blessed with. Our open education has endowed us with openness to a sundry of cultures, races, ethnic groups, and belief systems, liberating us from many a phobia caused by single-minded tribalism and religious or social dogma. This in itself is healthy:

Open-mindedness diminishes bigotry and advocates tolerance and respect for groups and people different than we.

Yet like all blessings, this one, too, does not come without a challenge.

Liberal education is not a goal in and of itself; it is a means to an end. Emancipated from dogma and indoctrination, you are empowered to choose a path with inner conviction and zest. You can embrace a vision that is truly yours. Relationships, morality, faith, goodness, sacrifice and love can now emerge from the depth of your soul, rather than from social conventions and external pressures. But for this to occur, children and students need parents, mentors and educators who can show them how to utilize the blessings of open mindedness to build character, to develop an idealistic personality and achieve moral greatness.

To our dismay, the opposite has occurred.

The Russian Novelists

I raised this issue with Russian literature Professor Dr. Andrew Kaufman Ph.D., co-author of the renowned Russian for Dummies. He wrote to me: “I have found that people whose lives are infused with clear injustices are less wishy washy on moral questions. That's what has fascinated me about the great Russian writers, whom I have studied for many years. They had no problem taking clear moral stands on issues, because they had stark evidence in front of them of the differences between justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, morality and corruption. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky among others, had no difficulty taking a clear moral stand on issues. These issues weren't intellectual abstractions to them. They were painfully real.

“The American universities, on the other hand, have done my generation a real disservice. They've skewed students' perspectives, and only enhanced their naturally sheltered state. This generation of students has to it an internal softness.

The newly enlightened young Americans have lost their moral nerve.

They don't believe in absolute truths and higher ideals, because they are told in the universities that to do so would be ‘insensitive,’ or ‘undemocratic.’

It's a real problem, because when we cannot define evil as evil, we make sure it continues to exist and grow.”

The remainder of Rabbi Jacobson's insightful essay can be read here.

More on Pushkin here

Great Russian Writers (influenced by Pushkin)
Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, Henry James, Aleksandr Blok, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov, Stanislavski

A viewer's response to the full essay:

I would like to applaud you on your clear and concise critique of the American college-campus mindset, which deprives its students of any solid intelectual or moral convictions upon which to construct their personality and world perspective. Liberal thinking is not about searching for the truth, but rather the idea that there are no truths worth searching for.

Being a student myself, I feel the great loss inflicted upon thousands of innocent students in the American college campus, that bastion of liberalism that does not recognize the existence of objective evil. What a tragedy for the future of our children!

What bothers me most, however, about the worldview of these college professors and students, though, is not their moral relativism, but how they automatically misinterpret the philosophers of old in order to gain credence for their ideas. This is especially true with regard to the ancient Greek philosophers and the latter day American Founding Fathers. Thus, while Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Franklin, and Jefferson all believed in a moral dichotomy between good and evil -- though I often disagree with their standards, especially with regard to the Greeks -- somehow modern-day academia feels correct in transposing their own ideology of ethical ephemerality into their mouths, which is surely a great disservice.

As you well know, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, a scholar of non-Jewish literature in his own right, was well-known for his view (published in a 1997 essay) that the non-Jewish wisdom of years past could be used as a means to fortify the moral and ethical character of Jewish students. Nowadays, however, the university has abdicated its mission of instilling wisdom and virtue in its pupils so as not to offend those of the Marxist, Islamist, and anarchist camps (to name a few).

Once again, G-d bless you for your clear moral voice,