BY GEORGE A. KENDALL
Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father, contains a revealing passage detailing how he chose his friends in college:
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.”
He seems to have gone through the whole rogues’ gallery of the far left, looking for people worthy to be his friends, apparently seeking out those who could be most helpful to him in his quest for power.
I must say, I can’t imagine choosing friends that way. First of all, I don’t remember ever actually “choosing” any of mine. It was more like this: Someone would show up on the scene, we would get talking, maybe find out we knew some of the same people, were in some of the same classes, and then hanging out with each other became a habit for both of us.
(Sometimes, of course, there was a kind of negative selection, where I would meet someone so obviously obnoxious that I would decide I didn’t want to associate with that person if I could possibly avoid it.)
In my experience, groups of friends sort of come into being without any planning or organization, like atoms floating around in space and forming chemical bonds. Sometimes I would meet someone whom I would not ordinarily have thought of as a likely friend, but who seemed to gravitate toward me, causing me to begin to realize that this person needed a friend, and it looked like maybe I was nominated for that role.
This became more explicit after I returned to my Catholic faith, and at some point I would at least suspect that God had some kind of purpose in bringing that person into my life — perhaps for his or her salvation, or my own (or both). In effect, I started trusting in Providence to choose my friends.
Back in the 1990s, when I first moved to Grand Marais, Mich., where I lived for many years, I met a guy named Charlie. Charlie obviously had something wrong with him mentally, though I’ve never been able to figure out what diagnostic label a shrink might pin on him. Charlie was fairly intelligent, but his reasoning processes just seemed different from mine or anyone else’s. Something was just “off” there. He had his own unique logic, one that Aristotle doubtless would not have recognized.
A neighbor used to say that his elevator didn’t go all the way to the top floor. I preferred to say that he marched to the beat of a different drummer. Charlie didn’t have a regular job, but did do odd jobs for various people, including me. He also volunteered to go along when I took a drive out of town to shop. He was very helpful on these trips, and refused to take money for his assistance, so I made sure I paid when we stopped for food. He used to joke that between his mental handicap and my physical one, due to polio, we added up to one complete person.
Charlie was a lapsed Catholic, partly because he felt that the Catholics in Grand Marais rejected him (which I think was in part at least delusional), but he had an interest in religion and used to start many conversations with me on this subject. Unfortunately, he used to pick up questionable ideas. He told me once that we don’t really know whether Jesus ever actually existed, because the Gospels weren’t written until about AD 400, so I had to spend some time re-educating him on this question, as well as making some comments on the kind of people who said such things on talk radio (which was where he heard them).
Charlie was ridiculed by a lot of people, but I came to realize that he needed a friend and who that friend was. Not long after he died of a sudden heart attack, I ran into his brother, who thanked me for treating Charlie with respect, when so many people disrespected him. For me, that was a moment of grace, one I was deeply grateful for.
One thing for certain is that, according to both the Church and pagan thinkers like Aristotle (who said that without friendship no man would want to live), friendship is a form of love. Compare this to Obama actually bragging about choosing his friends based on their likely utility to him. For him, a friend is someone to be used, not loved. Obama would never have chosen Charlie to be one of his friends. If he had, he might have become a better person.
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There seems to be a universal or near-universal tendency for human beings, as they begin to come into adulthood, to distance themselves to a greater or lesser degree from their origins — families, communities, churches, etc. This can be a fairly benign thing, or it can be a major disorder. Children, as they grow up, naturally begin to differentiate themselves from their parents. They are not, after all, meant to be carbon copies of their parents, and they need to establish their own individuality. Normally, they do not abandon their family or their community or the religion they were raised in, but do manage to find or carve out a place for their individuality within these inherited institutions.
But when “things fall apart” and “the center does not hold” (Yeats), the whole thing becomes malignant. Young people begin to hate the persons and institutions that nourished them in childhood. Instead of differentiating themselves from their parents, they reject them and rebel against them. Instead of finding their rightful place in the community, they reject it, stigmatizing it as a hell-hole, full of ignorant hicks and bigoted rubes.
Instead of cultivating his own unique appreciation of his Christian faith, and his own unique vocation within that faith, a young person rebels against God and the order of God’s creation.
In my youth, I chose the path of rebellion, or tried to, though I never carried it to the extremes that many of the “new left” types that I encountered did. I stayed on decent terms with my family, though privately seeing my parents as “bourgeois,” whatever that means (they were wonderful parents, and certainly didn’t deserve it).
I left the Catholic Church, and for some years saw myself sometimes as an atheist or agnostic, sometimes as some sort of nondenominational, non-dogmatic Christian (one not believing, of course, in primitive superstitions like the divinity of Christ, the Resurrection, Heaven and Hell, and all that stuff).
Yet I was never wholly committed to this nonsense, and by the grace of God, eventually came home. My roots in the faith, going back to childhood, were very deep, and I don’t think I could have escaped it even if I had really wanted to.
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In a recent article, I spoke of the need to rid ourselves of the college for everyone paradigm. There are undoubtedly numerous things we need to do toward that end, and I would like to discuss a few. First, we should abolish college degrees. These degrees were established by medieval universities which were in the business of educating a tiny minority of the population for elite roles in society — in areas like medicine, law, and divinity.
Today, we have extended this paradigm to nearly the whole population. Our obsession with trying to send everyone to college is clear evidence of this.
The most basic idea of a university is to have a place where learned people gather together and form a community, and where as yet unlearned people can come to learn from them. These unlearned people will have the opportunity to interact with the learned people (professors), attend their lectures, as well as reading in the areas they want to be educated in.
To me it makes perfect sense to let the student decide when he is ready to use the knowledge he has acquired (though he might want first to consult with professors he trusts). If he concludes, after a spell in the school of hard knocks, that he was not ready after all, then he could always consider returning for more study. But the role universities play today — being the gatekeeper for the whole world of work or much of it — would be, if not wholly done away with, at least greatly diminished, if we eliminated degrees.
I have many times opined that most of our colleges and universities should be shut down. This is obviously not something to be accomplished by orders from on high. People are going to have to do this for themselves by withdrawing their demand for the often questionable services of these institutions.
The thing is, everyone needs marketable skills so they can make a living. Universities have set themselves up as the providers of these to a very large part of the population, but they do this in a not particularly satisfactory way, teaching things abstractly, through textbooks and lectures, that ought to be taught in a much more concrete, down-to-earth way, much closer to the places where they will be practiced, often right in factories and workshops.
There is much that people outside Academia can do to bring things like this about. For instance, a skilled welder contacts a community college and offers to teach a course in welding. Community colleges do a lot of practical training like this and are often a good alternative to universities, though they too should stop awarding degrees.
We need to greatly increase the number of vocational schools, as well as apprenticeship programs. Beyond this, there are doubtless many other practical measures we could take to enable young people to acquire the skills they need to make a living and to do good work in their vocations. Readers who have suggestions are most welcome to contact me: gkendall819@gmail.com.
(© 2018 George A. Kendall)
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