The Secret Knowledge (4 page)

The Liberal Arts graduate student has stayed too long at the fair—as the once-nubile career woman finds that her marriage prospects at forty-five are not the same available to her twenty years previously; and as the middle-aged roué discovers that the possibility of domestic love and security have receded with habits formed by decades of dating and “freedom.”

Conservative reasoning asks, “What
actually
is the desired result of any proposed course of action; what is the likelihood of its success; and
at what cost
?” (The last, importantly, including the costs of possible failure.) These are, to the social tinkerer, unknowable, their sum being expressed, euphemistically, as “the law of unintended consequences.”

School shootings and the increased enrollment in postgraduate Liberal Arts studies may be seen as two unconscious attempts at adaptation of a culture evolving away from the exigencies of staffing a trained workforce. For though much has been made of the necessity of a college education, the extended study of the Liberal Arts actually
trains
one for nothing. And the terrified adolescent, abandoned by society, coddled by society, may, if unbalanced, turn to rage and (a) kill; or, if merely clueless, (b) hide in college, as he does not possess the strength to grow up and leave.

Which brings me to the elevator.

A group of strangers enter an elevator. They arrange themselves according to not only conscious, but
unconscious
patterns of deference. Contributing to the arrangement are unconscious recognitions of size, gender, age, wealth, social status, and education (as evidenced by dress and attitude), vocation (as suggested by dress and appurtenances), sexual desirability, perceived threat (a function of size, age, race, demeanor)—not only of the individual, but of the individual in that particular group
.
For an individual will be given preference, deference, or the lack of same based not solely on the above per se
,
but in consideration of the admixture of persons in the elevator, the time of day, the likelihood of many or few stops; a pattern which changes with each new arrival and departure from the car, at which point the entire company redistributes itself.

This, the preverbal, pre-intellectual process of accommodation, is the basis of all culture. It evolves through the accomplishment of shared but unconscious small objectives, which may be collectivized as the preconscious understanding that “We must get along.”

Civilization is preceded by culture, which is worked out by innumerable interactions over ages.
¹⁰
Culture may be obliterated by revolution (at which point it is, predictably, superseded by Terror), but it will and can evolve only at its own speed, and in a direction shaped by its own countless interactions—neither in response to individual nor to communal will, but through the mechanism of unconscious interaction and toward an unknowable end.

Tolstoy, in the epilogue to
War and Peace
, wrote that the savage, on seeing the railroad train, believes that the train is caused by the puff of smoke, for he sees the smoke first.

But the smoke, he wrote, does not cause the locomotive, and five million Frenchmen could not have marched into Russia because Napoleon suggested they do so. Obviously, then, there must be some deeper force at work, a force we cannot ever understand.

The actual operations of a culture are
deeply
mysterious.
¹¹

Those of us in show business spend our lives trying to understand, subvert, and predict the actions of the audience. It cannot be done.

Not only will the audience endorse what it chooses irrespective of cajolery, but it will communicate its preferences instantly and without apparent intervention of traditional forms of discourse or of cogitation. For the audience reacts preconsciously; it will laugh, cry, fall asleep, gasp, or leave, without reference to reason, as a conjoined entity making its decisions in an unpredictable fashion, according to unstatable goals.

The choices of the audience, of Napoleon's army, of the folks in the elevator, are the working out of a mystery. It may be glimpsed, it cannot be understood, and to tinker with its processes is to court great risk.
¹²

I was in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, looking out of a big picture window at Alcatraz. I asked my ten-year-old, “Do you know what Alcatraz is?” He said, “Yes, it is a tourist attraction, but it used to be a federal prison.”

Things change. Isn't it interesting how kids learn? I got my information from Warner Bros. movies; where did he get his information from?

In my racket, show business, one learns through doing and through watching. The second assistant cameraman spends years watching the shot being set up, lit, and prepared. Eventually he learns and advances toward the day he will be director of photography.

There is no way to approximate the experience of failure in front of an audience. It has nothing to do with the censure of teachers who are, after all, paid to be nice to one, or at least, to keep one's custom. Actors and writers stay in school to spare themselves that lesson. And they stay in school because they do not know any better.

Temple Grandin, an animal behaviorist, cattlewoman, and designer of livestock systems, is autistic and writes extensively about the similarities between autism and animal thinking. Both think in pictures. Both learn through observation. A hand-reared animal does not know how to behave in the wild, what is food, what is threat, and how to behave toward its superiors. Stallions, she writes, have a reputation for viciousness but are not vicious because they are stallions, but because they, being valuable creatures, have been raised in isolation. They have never learned the submission and dominance patterns of the group.

College, while it may theoretically teach skills, also serves to delay the matriculation of the adolescent into society. He, thus, does not get a chance either to submit to nor to observe unfettered human interaction. This student, not surprisingly, develops a sense of immunity which, after graduation, often results in either a string of failures and rejections, or in his retreat to the exclusive coterie, and extended college-like atmosphere of protection, this last if he is blessed with the crippling curse of not having to make a living.
¹³

As we live by our brains, and as our brains function best through observation, the absence of actual experience of the world opens the student to formation of some conclusions which have no or only harmful application outside the halls of ivy. If he is rewarded by pleasing the teacher, that is, by repeating an endorsed behavior, he, like any other animal, is going to take his learning out into the world. “George Washington, Father of our country—have a pellet of food . . . Thomas Jefferson, third President, but owned slaves and kept a mistress—have an appointment as a graduate instructor.” Light comes on, pull lever, get pellet of food. This is fine for the rat, for the rat lives in the lab. In the wider world, however, the path to food is more demanding and its signals cannot be learned inside the lab. To keep pulling the lever when the technicians are gone is called the Cargo Cult.

The Trobriand islanders profited from the presence among them of the Allied Forces in World War II. The forces left, but the islanders kept building driftwood airplanes in the hopes of luring back the food and support.

“Thomas Jefferson, third President, adulterer, slave owner.” In the lab—get a pellet. Out of the lab—no pellet. Obvious answer—never leave the lab. But the Left may supply the pellet for the ex-student. It is now not a grade, but the protection of the herd.

The problem for the ex-student, however, may be different from that of the rat. The rat pulls the lever, but the college student has to supply a
phrase
, and the phrase has semantic content.

Semantics is the study of how words influence thought and action. “Sit down” will have a different response than, “Sit right down,” “Sit the hell down,” “Oh, sit down,” “Please sit down,” and so on. The college student is not merely pulling a lever, but repeating ideas. He, of course, comes to prize the ideas whose repetition rewarded him. He thinks these ideas themselves are good. How could he think otherwise? For they have brought him food, and so are good. And so unquestionable.

But like the rat in the wild, looking for something shaped like a lever, the released student/intellectual will and must look for opportunities to exercise his learned behavior, and win a reward. The reward may be status or position. It is, more usually, safety in the group.

Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever.

Why, then, should the student, raised in captivity, examine either the content or the consequences of this connection?

He is of that group, and rewarded for being of that group which knows that slave-owning is bad. But everyone knows that slave-owning is bad. The owners did as much as the slaves. There is no actual wider benefit or merit in being able to repeat it, so its repetition is useful only as a recognition symbol, allowing its utterer access to those whose thinking process is similarly limited.