Flowers Are Useless: In Praise of Inutility

Teaching English, like most vocations, comes with certain recurring challenges which define the job. In my line of work, convincing teenagers to read is perhaps the most fraught.

Certain practices work to increase buy-in: dedicate time daily, in class, allow students to pick what they read, give a grade for reading if you are okay with making the entire exchange nakedly transactional.

I find the best results when we read outside. This is by its nature a tactic that can be employed only sparingly, but its effectiveness is proportional to its infrequency of use.

Given a nice spring day, there are some lovely spots on campus where approximately two dozen high schoolers and I can plomp down, enjoy the wildflowers and have the sibilance of the swaying trees and tall grass serve as the sound carpet while we read. After 20 minutes of reading in these conditions, returning inside can seem grim indeed.

Reading outside works so well, in large measure, because it pulls students away from the siren song of their Chromebooks. The screen holds their minds in thrall; so much so that just the presence of a closed device on or near their desks is enough to stop them from engaging with the printed word. The algorithm is a ruthlessly engineered and relentlessly self-improving weapon that both fragments and captures attention. It is pollyannish to think anything as inert as a book will have the same hold over the inchoate adolescent brain.

Escaping the grasp of the screen, even in a small way and for a brief period, is a victory. It is also pointless, an unconscionable waste of precious instructional time.

Stop Arguing

I’m no mere prattler when it comes to the practice of reading. Free time is a precious commodity and I devote as much of mine as I can to tackling the best of what has been written. As of this writing, I am in the midst of my third reading of Ulysses in roughly 18 months; a tough mountain to climb no doubt, but worth every step.

However, when one is in a more utilitarian frame of mind, it is hard to see why trying to convince anyone to read, reluctant teenager or otherwise, is worth the hassle. After all, the practice of reading anything beyond what is needed to navigate one’s interface with a computer is utterly inutile. Doubly so for reading anything as outmoded as the “Great Books.”

Given my liberal arts education and my occupation, I have heard myriad arguments as to why English, philosophy, et al., are actually super practical subjects of study. These arguments range from the straight up mercenary — “Employers want to hire creative types who communicate well,” “Philosophy majors score well on the GRE” — to the more nebulous and humanistic claims that reading increases empathy and prepares one for citizenship in a pluralistic society.

The validity of such arguments will here go uncommented on, besides my encouragement to go read Avery Lin’s “Books Are Dead, And We Have Killed Them.” Rather, my claim, counterintuitively enough, is that when it comes to reading we should stop making claims, at least claims of a pragmatic nature. Reading those works which have endured — to take part in the “Great Conversation” — is an end in itself. It requires no external validation and is therefore noncontingent and more valuable by virtue of that fact.

Perhaps one can be a successful and dynamic member of current society without ever grappling with Plato or Dickinson; that detracts not a whit from the Western canon. It may well be the case that reading old, difficult books will never have a measurable impact on your earnings, employability, chances of getting a date, ability to win friends and influence people etc.; glad to hear it, long may it be so.

Examine The Proposition

Let’s look at the “stop making claims” admonition in more detail. We can state our reasons for engaging in an activity with a proposition in the form of “I do X because Y.” The more nuanced and complex the activity that constitutes the “X”, the more abstract and difficult the true “Y” will be to verify in a quantifiable way.

The example of taking distracted 17-year-olds outside to read The Great Gatsby illustrates this point well; “I take my students outside to read because Y.” There are plausibly measurable benefits that can stand in for “Y”: extensive reading has been shown to increase working vocabulary, replacing screen time with reading has a positive impact on mental health, exposure to sunlight promotes the synthesis of vitamin D, etc. All of the proceeding is accurate to the best of my knowledge, and I sincerely hope these benefits accrue to my students, but none of them are the real reason why I take them outside to read. At best, they are ex post facto justifications for something I am going to do in any event.

The true “Y” is something like, “it nourishes the soul” or “it is a pleasant experience in an educational environment that is often unpleasant.” Such motivations, such “Y’s”, are of monumental importance, but they cannot be empirically verified. I defy you to devise the experiment in which you compare the “soul nourishment” of my students versus some control group that reads inside. If reading in the great outdoors becomes the next hot trend in education circles, you can safely bet the justification will not be “it is pleasant.”

The qualitative nature of the motivation for reading does not detract from — nay, in my opinion, enhances — the value of reading Great Books, but it does make it kind of silly to argue about it. I would no more try to justify reading by way of inductive logic than I would make some sort of sophisticated argument about why it is sensible to look at flowers. Flowers are useless; all hail flowers.

Genealogy

The seeds for this fixation on utility were planted during the Enlightenment. The Renaissance brought to the fore the classical, Protagorean conception of “man as the measure of all things,” while the Reformation torpedoed the idea of institutional authority and dogma; both of these events cleared the playing field for the individual application of reason, and the Enlightenment was under way.

Once set free, the capacity for reason to alter man’s living conditions became quickly obvious and impossible to deny. Even the most cursory enumeration of the byproducts of Enlightenment thought bare this out: Newtonian physics, modern medicine, the Industrial Revolution, liberal democracy, the steady increase in both the standard of living (considered economically) and life expectancy, etc. As the proverb goes, nothing succeeds like success. It is not hard to see how the notion that “to be useful is synonymous with making a quantifiable, empirical impact” gained traction.

This notion, however, is woefully myopic. Human wellbeing is not reducible to a set of data points. Running a caloric surplus, being healthier, having more stuff and living longer are all fine and well, provided this longer, more resourced life has some meaning underlying it. Elsewise, you are simply extending the period of dissatisfaction and ennui.

Two subsequent historical phenomena, democracy and capitalism, reinforce and intensify this reliance on utility as the arbiter of value.

In the case of the former, democratic discourse reliably falls back upon appeals to utility. Value judgements — by which I mean convictions regarding morals, lifestyle, the ultimate goals of a society, etc. — vary greatly between and among people; any positive view of how the world should be (note the use of the subjunctive mood) will alienate a substantial portion of the electorate. Rationality, however, is far more uniform. We can all agree that a lower tax rate will leave more money in our pockets, or that, contrarywise, increasing taxes to pay for infrastructure (or social programs, or public schools, etc.) will better fund those programs; the difference lies in what we prioritize — lower taxes or more spending — which is ultimately a value judgement. For a rhetorician in the democratic arena, it is simply good tactics to give the impression of being the practical choice while implying adherence to a set of values that is never clearly articulated.

What makes this default, utility-seeking nature of democratic discourse all the more insidious is that it holds true despite today’s incredible polarization. True, both sides will make claims to the moral high ground, but neither dispenses with the claim that their agenda will have a measurable, positive, and practical impact. “Illegal immigration bids down the price of labor, hurting native born workers” and “undocumented workers contribute more to the economy than they receive in benefits” are just flip sides of the same coin; appeals to utility in service of a political agenda. Even when trust in institutions is in the basement — think Reformation, mentioned above — “practicality” and “utility” still garner wide respect.

Likewise, capitalism obscures any claim to value that does not neatly fit a cost/benefit analysis. Money is supremely quantifiable; indeed, being a “unit of account” is one of the three criteria a medium must satisfy to be considered money at all. This clarity makes economic decision making blindingly obvious in some respects: If I can invest a certain sum of money and either a) lose my principal, b) break even, or c) enjoy some positive rate of return, the most efficient way to grow my wealth takes no consideration. Reading deeply, while just as valuable as a decent ROI, is entirely resistant to this type of analysis.

There are also democratic elements to capitalism, which likewise privilege utility-bearing activities. Friedrich Hayek famously argued that the efficient allocation of resources requires so much localized and discrete information that the best economic decision making is necessarily decentralized. Therefore, in a market economy, information and the choices that are made based on that information are essentially democratized; nobody can see the whole puzzle, but we all carry a few of the pieces around in our minds. This dispersal of economic agency, much like the earlier example of democratic rhetoric, rests upon and flatters our ability to determine the practicality of a decision. This has led to a marked increase in per capita GDP over the centuries since the onset of the Enlightenment, but it has crowded out considerations of the nonpractical sort.

In a more vulgar vein, market economics uses metrics such as profitability and popularity to determine utility. Consumers vote with their dollars; their revealed preferences denote value. Honestly, I have no reason to doubt the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to consumer goods such as toilet paper or automobiles; but my confidence in the crowd does not extend into matters of beauty or the best use of one’s leisure time. Keats’ odes are beautiful irrespective of their popularity.

The Kantian Allegory

The battle to carve out space for something as impractical as the liberal arts in a world that incessantly claims that for an activity to be worthwhile, it must be practical, is not without a rough precedent.

Anybody who has taken an intro ethics course knows that ethical systems are commonly divided into a handful of broad categories. Two of the major categories are consequentialist and nonconsequentialist. Consequentialists view the moral rightness of an action to be mostly or entirely based upon the consequence of that action. The prime example of a consequentialist moral theory is utilitarianism, as true a child of the Enlightenment as one may wish to meet.

The major nonconsequentialist alternative is deontological ethics, of which the most important theorist and propagator is Immanuel Kant. His work in ethics, his entire oeuvre in fact, is famously abstract and dense, but is replete with profound insights that reflect mundane human experience. (As a side note, Kant’s philosophy is well worth the considerable time and effort it takes to contemplate, and, as an added bonus, I promise it will in no way make you more marketable. Read some today!)

The work most pertinent to the present discussion is Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. In the first section of the first chapter (pagination 393), Kant lists several seemingly good qualities falling under various headings: intelligence, wit, and judgment as “talents of the mind”; courage, temperance, and self control as “qualities of temperament”; and power, wealth, and health as “gifts of fortune.” As desirable as these qualities are, none of them are good in themselves. According to Kant, they have no unconditioned, inner worth. This lack of intrinsic value even extends to happiness, the sine qua non of human flourishing on some accounts.

The only thing good in and of itself is a ‘good will’ (H.J. Paton translation). Take any of the attributes enumerated in the previous paragraph: intelligence, wealth, courage, they could all be dangerous when possessed by someone bent to evil ends. It is the, usually unstated, supposition that these qualities are exercised by a ‘good will’ which lends them their luster.

In case you are inclined to believe a ‘good will’ derives its value from some effect it brings about, disabuse yourself of that notion. “Consider this case,” Kant invites us:

Through bad luck or a miserly endowment from stepmotherly nature, this person’s will has no power at all to accomplish its purpose; not even the greatest effort on his part would enable it to achieve anything it aims at. But he does still have a good will—not as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in his power. The good will of this person would sparkle like a jewel all by itself.

A ‘good will' is good by its nature, not because of what it produces.

We can think of reading The Great Books — or any other activity in which we experience beauty, reflect on the human condition, and commune with ourselves — analogously to nonconsequentialist ethics. Examining either ethics or the life of the mind as though they are the answer to a mathematical equation or the conclusion to be deduced from a group of premises is to bring the wrong faculty of understanding to bear on the subject, tantamount to using the wrong tool for the job, like trying to hammer a nail with a frying pan.

Kant gave us the concept of the ‘good will’ in ethics as that which is not only valuable in itself, but as the thing of supreme value. All other qualities or attributes are only good when in service of the ‘good will.’ Let us propose a corollary in the realm of liberal arts (taken to mean the earnest, intrinsically motivated engagement with the quintessentially human, not the department in a college where English and history majors congregate) called the ‘humane will.’ The ‘humane will,’ even if entirely inefficacious, is by its nature supremely good. Other qualities in the same constellation such as eloquence, logic, insightfulness, et al., are good only insofar as they are employed by an ‘humane will.’

Know Why You Play The Game

As near as I can tell, there are two competing yet overlapping purposes that animate education. One sees education as a means towards the end of preparing individuals to participate in society. From my vantage point as a high school teacher, this pragmatic view of education mostly takes the form of ensuring students are ready to go to college or the workforce upon graduation, but also entails training up the next generation of citizens for civic engagement.

The other view of education aims at betterment of the soul. This conception of education is far less concerned with tangible outcomes such as employability or citizenship and is instead focused on things such as beauty or decency.

The pragmatic view of education certainly has much to recommend it, but by itself it is inadequate as a means of encouraging human flourishing. Earning enough to live comfortably and obeying traffic laws, without something more, without useless things like daffodils and Romeo & Juliet and The Brandenburg Concertos, leaves one bereft.

So read the Great Books, and do so unashamedly. But never justify the practice, least of all in terms of practicality. To do so is comparable to playing chess with checkers rules; it doesn’t work and simply spoils the game. Read just because.