John Daniel Davidson writes for The Federalist on why novelist David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech wouldn’t sit well with today’s dogmatic student activists:
In a now-famous commencement speech delivered nearly a decade ago at Kenyon College, the late novelist David Foster Wallace unpacked the old cliché that a liberal arts education isn’t about teaching you what to think but teaching you how to think. Wallace said the cliché is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
We have to do this, he said, because it’s the only way to get free of our “natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.” Throughout the speech, Wallace evinced an almost Roman Catholic understanding of human nature and the way that passively moving through life on our “default setting” can leave us “uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.”
The danger in such profound isolation is that it warps our perception of reality. Specifically, Wallace cautioned against a kind of selfish, arrogant intellectual dogmatism that takes the form of “blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.”
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.