A Colossal Pain in the Bowel
— the seat of sympathy.
The Underground Grammarian
May 1984
The most serious objection raised by those who wrote in opposition to the idea is that government-mandated service is an infringement upon individual freedom—that … mandatory service is servitude. In response, I would note that while there obviously have been problems related to the mandated military draft, the requirement of mandatory education … is widespread in contemporary societies.
David S. Saxon
If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, — for that is the seat of sympathy, — he forthwith sets about reforming the world.
Henry David Thoreau
The whole history of our versatile and diligent species reveals not a single example of an outrage committed or an abomination practiced by a person who has taken upon himself the stupendous task of making the world a worse place. Sincere and dedicated Do-badders may well be, for all we know, as cunning as the serpent, but they are surely as harmless as the dove. With sincere and dedicated Do-gooders, it is just the other way around. Abomination and outrage are their specialties, in fact, but always in a really swell cause.
The David S. Saxon quoted above is an unmitigated Do-gooder, whose words we found in The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 1984, exactly the right year, in an essay titled “It’s Time for a New Look at an Old Idea: Mandatory Universal Service,” in which the word “universal” turns out to mean absolutely everybody of an age that is not Saxon’s.
So mightily stirred up in Saxon are the writhing bowels of compassion, that he wants some of the rest of us to force some others of the rest of us to interact effectively with all in desperate plight, and to gather rubbish in the streets. The others are young people who would be “provided with access to higher education … on the basis of enlightened quid pro quo” for that degree to which they can get their own bowels into an uproar over “conversation projects, community activities, and health care activities, among others.”
Although Saxon’s job as chairman of the corporation at MIT obviously leaves him more free time than he ought to have, we don’t suspect that he would be willing even to administer his mighty project for the moral improvement of other people. But he would surely be glad to provide wisdom and counsel. Perhaps he would let his light so shine before men that they might—well, not see his good works, since he is not in that age group in which virtue consists of gathering up other people’s trash—but so that they might at least get some idea of what he imagines that he means by that “enlightened quid pro quo.” Sounds like a pretty neat arrangement for somebody.
In one respect, Saxon is right. The idea of some “service” that the individual owes to the state is indeed an old one. It is so old, in fact, that anyone who wants truly to test its merits can readily find thousands of years of both record and speculation as to both its roots and its fruits. Like any idea, it is always worth a new look, but a look requires some looking. He is no looker, but only an irresponsible and dangerous trifler, who climbs up on the soapbox of expediency and blats out his belief that an idea which the framers of the Constitution found abhorrent might really be a great idea anyway.
The emperor Xerxes, like his father before him, had that same old idea fixed firmly in his mind. In his time, too, it was old. He expected an easy victory over the outnumbered and disunited Greeks, who were unruly, and and who would serve no master. When Demaratus explained that the Greeks were volunteers who had chosen to serve an even sterner master than Xerxes, and that their master was Law, he was making a distinction too subtle for the Emperor of All the East, whose mind was in servitude to an old idea. And what Darius failed to learn at Marathon, Xerxes failed to learn at the Hot Gates, and failed once more to learn at Salamis, where his vassals fled and his vessels went down. He never did learn the difference between laws and Law, by whose virtue the Preamble precedes the Constitution.
And what can it be that Saxon has learned? Has he discovered some hitherto unnoticed meanings in the stories of Xerxes, of the Bourbons, of the Third Reich? By what line of reasoning has he refuted Jefferson, and so many others? In his extensive meditations on that stern old idea, how has he evaded the fanged horror that any prudent thinker would expect to meet in that dark wood—the simultaneous justification of “mandatory universal service” and enslavement to the state? How is it that he sees no peril there? Does he really think it enough to say, as though it were an answer to the charge that the has proposed “servitude,” that there is “mandatory education” in the world? Does he imagine that he is talking to babies, who will accept that “answer” as though it were reasoning, or is that just the way they reason at MIT?
In fact, though, there is no path of logic in Saxon’s piece, no analysis, no refutations, no demonstrations, none of the elements of thought that even the freshmen at MIT ought to know enough to provide in the course of argument. Saxon excuses himself from tiresome restraints to self-expression by assuming a pose of insouciance. Answering criticism of one of his earlier “looks” at this old idea, he now explains: “I was only calling for a comprehensive study.” And to that plaintive demurrer, he provides an unintended contradiction by pre-empting that very “study” and going blithely on to enumerate the pressing social problems that would be “solved” by a national scheme of mandatory universal (for some of the people some of the time) service.
If we remove from Saxon’s essay his remarkably uninformed call for a “comprehensive study” that has been going on since Plato and that a conscientious scholar would review lest he call for a new look out of ignorance of the old look, if we ignore his facile praise of the scheme that he pretends only to want studied, and if we skip over (what chagrin!) the weasel words like “enlightened quid pro quo” in his managerial designs, we are left with almost nothing. It is, however, a very important almost nothing. It is Saxon’s one little stab at logic, his circular false analogy (quite a stunt) about what he calls “mandatory education.”
It was a fascinating process in Saxon’s mind that brought him to say, in effect: Well, since we already enforce education, we can also justify enforcement of other kinds of service to the state. We would not, of course, accuse Saxon of having paused to ponder the meaning of what he says, but only of jerking his knee in the approved educationistic twitch. The idea of “education” as a service to the state is also an old one; in fact, it is the same old one. To justify forced service to the state by pointing to the existence of forced service to the state is not rational argument, but it is an interesting revelation about the ideas of education unwittingly (we hope) held by most of our educationists, and, indeed, by most Americans.
There can be no such thing as mandatory education. But there is no lack of unthinking people who do believe that there is such a thing, and no lack of scoundrels who find it remarkably convenient that unthinking people can be brought to that belief.
Any thoughtful understanding of education will show it, regardless of the particulars of time and place, an attribute that can not exist except in the inner life of a person, and that can no more be “mandated” than love, or honor, or truthfulness, or wisdom. But to know that much, there isn’t even any need to form a thoughtful understanding of education. It can be learned just as well from the silly understanding of the educationists.
Is their basic, minimum competence, which they call “education,” enforced by law? Are conventional spelling and accurate arithmetic mandated? Are those students in danger of prosecution, who have not appropriately related to others, or who have appreciated less than sufficiently the plight of the elderly or the Cultural Heritage of the Month? Do district attorneys seek the indictment of the ignorant and illiterate, who stubbornly remain, quite contrary to law and mandate, utterly unable to compete with the Japanese?
What is mandated? Only one thing: the physical presence of one certain class of citizens, and only that class of citizens, in certain buildings at certain times.
And, by that mandate, what results may sometimes be achieved, and what results will always be achieved?
Some children will form some part of the foundation upon which an education may someday be built. That is inevitable. It happens where there is schooling, or where there is none, and, often, in spite of schooling.
But, while the benefits that may fall to any given child are matters of luck and circumstance, and hardly to be guaranteed, the mandated presence of that child is indeed a guarantee of survival and prosperity to a colossal agency of government, and to all who prosper because it prospers, including all who live by the countless services and industries that a massive government agency requires.
That is an interesting arrangement. A truly impartial observer from another planet might amaze us with his judgment of it as a supposed virtue in a “free society.” How would he be wrong to describe it as a system that exists because of its power to enforce the presence of children, and that guarantees some advantage to all who are associated with it, except for the children? He might report to the creatures back home: These Earthers do many such paradoxical things, and always out of what they imagine the best of motives, especially that one great motive that they can no more resist than they can examine—the passion to bring about the moral improvement of somebody else.
The repeal of forced attendance laws would surely bring us years of painful disorder, but so too did the American Revolution. And what our Saxons have in mind is more than the King would have dared. Furthermore, should our Saxons simply speak the truth, and point to the many “problems solved” by nothing more than the enforced presence of children in the schools, they would drag us by logic into the just, and dismal, consequences of our folly—a government that solves its problems by restricting the choices of its citizens.
So far, of course, the children are not forced to labor — they have just to sit there, serving the state. They are too young, anyway, for truly useful labor. Later on, when they are bigger, we can send them into our filthy cities to pick up the rubbish scattered in the streets by others. And maybe those others will stand around and watch.
Richard Mitchell
