Promoting the humanities, or: How to make the poor dangerous

POOR PEOPLE WHO STUDY THE HUMANITIES WILL BE READY FOR THE LIBRARY. WILL THE LIBRARY BE READY FOR THEM?

Views on why the poor become poor:

They are immoral (underclass theorists, welfare reformers).

They are unequal (racists).

The game is unfair (leftists).

The game is unfair and the poor are flawed (liberals).

It is the rich who are flawed (monks, saints, etc.).

This fall, about 600 students will enter the Clemente Course in the Humanities, an unconventional educational movement begun a few years ago in a nontraditional setting in New York. All will be poor, many will not have completed high school, some will be homeless, others will have spent time in prison, and there will be many single parents among them. Most will speak English, although the course will also be taught in Maya, Yupik (an Inuit language), Kiowa, and Spanish. The students will consider the courage of Socrates, examine the philosophical antecedents of the Declaration of Independence, delve into the well-said woes of Antigone, marvel at the art of the Renaissance, and write and write and write until the discipline of the page and the excitement of the humanities merge in a new view of the role of a person in the world. They will, if the rigor of the dance with the humanities succeeds, become political persons, as Pericles defined the idea of the citizen at home, in the community, and in the state.

In the course of this course, the students will, inevitably, become more familiar with one of the great resources available to them almost everywhere, and always free: the public library. There's no question that when they finish the course, they'll be ready for the library. Will the library be ready for them?

Seen from the vantage of the classroom, the Clemente Course has been a modest success; but the ideas that gave rise to it-- the distinction between force and power, the game of poverty, the unending practicality of the humanities-have yet to gain a place in the American imagination. The very name of the course is a reminder that the academic world even in the early 1990s was not ready to sanction such an undertaking-the course found its first home at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in New York.

That's because old ideas about poverty die hard, especially those that favor the majority. Many people still hold to the notion of a culture of poverty, even though the idea of a culture that seeks to destroy itself by propagating the suffering, disease, and early death of its adherents is absurd. Another common idea holds that there is an underclass, an amoral population best managed by imprisoning as many of its members as possible.

There are other ideas, of course, but there are always winners and losers, because modern society functions like a game. In a game we begin as equals and end up as unequals. One may hold that people become poor because:

1. They are immoral (a view held by underclass theorists and welfare reformers).

2. They are unequal (racists).

3. The game is unfair (leftists).

4. The game is unfair and the poor are flawed (liberals).

5. It is the rich who are flawed (monks of many denominations, saints, etc.).

The way we understand the game determines our attitude toward the poor. No matter how the game appears to us, the situation of the poor begins to look different when we view it through their eyes. As poor people know, they live within what I have learned to understand as a surround of force; i.e., they are beset by so many forces that they have no time to do anything but react. Imagine, if you will, life under constant attack by greedy landlords, brutal police, criminals, alcohol, drugs, disease, bad luck, hopelessness, filthy surroundings, threatening graffiti, hunger, prison, cruel employers, preying salesmen in person or on television, family violence, racism, disdain, cold, rats, roaches, and so on . . . and with no sign of relief from the pressures of the surround.

Jason deParle, who has been reporting for the New York Times on the effects of Wisconsin's draconian program to move people from welfare to work, found that at the end of the century few people in Wisconsin still collected welfare but that those who had gone on to miserable jobs still lived with all the problems of poverty-the surround of force. As everyone now knows, the welfare reform bill had as its purpose the end of welfare; it said nothing about an end to poverty.

Another argument now being made about poverty in the United States is that the poor here live better than the middle class or even some of the rich in the rest of the world. That is true and also utterly wrong, for it does not take into account one of the most important aspects of poverty, which is that it is only unbearable when it is relative. During the Great Depression, FDR made it clear in his famous fireside chats that everyone suffered together, and this allusion to the absolute character of poverty served to unite the country because it made the Great Depression appear to be the poverty of equals.

Poverty in our time is relative; in fact, the distance between rich and poor is greater here than in any other industrialized nation. As if they needed reminding, every day, all day, and through the night, television, the salesman's medium, tells the poor what they must own in order to be complete persons, worthwhile, admirable, and if not admirable at least not despicable. It is the drumbeat of despair for the poor, an irresistible force, proof of their failure in the world of things, and it is intolerable; it separates the poor from the rest of society, leaving them nothing but loneliness and rage.

Throughout the history of the United States, the poor have been excluded from citizenship, not de jure, as in ancient Greece or in the pre-Civil War United States, but de facto. How does this manifest itself? One has only to look at the history of recent uprisings by the poor in the United States. Invariably, the poor burn and destroy and loot the very communities in which they live, for the poor have no home in America, no place where they hold the legitimate power of citizens. They are aliens in the streets where they live. A surround of force, it should be said, cannot be a home, just as a prison cannot be a home.

A common response to the problem of poverty has been work. Put the poor to work, and they will no longer be poor. Work! shouted Mickey Kaus in The New Republic, even if it paid less than the minimum wage. Work itself was the answer to poverty; but in fact work at poverty wages solves nothing for the poor; it merely provides low-wage labor for the rest of society.

Surely there must be another answer. Unemployment rates in the country are at the lowest point in decades, there are fewer people on welfare, yet deep poverty is as bad as it was when the work reformers began their most recent calumniation of the poor. The number of poor people in the United States is about the same as that in Mexico. Granted, Mexico has only 100 million people, but we are comparing a developing nation to the richest country in the history of the world. In Mexico, about 15 million people suffer from hunger. In the United States, about nine million people, most of them children, go to bed hungry at night.

How could such a huge number of people in a democratic society not be able to improve their situation? Clearly, the poor in America have na legitimate power; they do not live what Pericles defined as the political life. They can become political, and many have. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. brought huge numbers of poor people to the public life. Unions once served that function for many people. Churches have done it: Before the civil rights legislation of the '60s, a church-centered virtual polis existed among black people in the South. so that the moment the law changed, great numbers of people moved into the middle class and continue to do so.

The problem in America is that the vast majority of the poor are not political and have no means of entrance into the public life, the vita activa of a political person. Legitimate power, which validates the person as fully human, is not available to the poor.

It was from Viniece Walker, a prisoner at the Bedford Hills maximum security prison in New York State, that I learned to think of another way out of poverty for Americans. When I asked her why people are poor, she said, "Because they do not have the moral life of downtown," by which she meant Manhattan south of Harlem, where she grew up. Asked to clarify the idea of the "moral life," she said, "You know, concerts, museums, lectures, plays."

"The humanities."

"Yes, Earl," she said patiently, "the humanities."

In Athens, the humanities gave rise to reflective thinking, which enabled people to consider the polar opposites of human society-order and liberty-and find the middle way as a solution: auto nomos, self government. It was the birth of democracy in the world, the beginning of legitimate power.

Could it happen in the United 31, no. 5 (May 2000): p. 46-48States?

A priori, yes, but I had to test the thesis. Could the poor learn the humanities? Would it lead them to a new sense of citizenship, legitimate power? Was it possible for people who had been homeless or had spent time in prison, the multigenerational poor, to replicate the experience of Periclean Athens? And if I could prove the thesis in a classroom, would anyone care?

The Clemente Course in the Humanities began a few months later at a neighborhood center on the Lower East Side of New York City. The curriculum was borrowed from Petrarch, who defined the humanities as philosophy, literature, art, history, and logic. The faculty included novelist Charles Simmons, New York Times art critic Grace Glueck, M.I.T.-educated logician Timothy Koranda, and me.

The course was rigorous, but we were unable to promise the students Bard College credit until its final week, when the Bard faculty had evaluated the curriculum. The winter was cold, we offered nothing but subway fare, cookies and milk, books, and thinking; yet the students came, night after night, to admire Socrates and wrestle with Aristotle, to learn why sculpture in Rome was so different from the work of the Greeks, to be astonished by Jefferson and Sojourner Truth, to fall in love with Byron, see the world through Emily Dickinson's eyes, and laugh through tears with Langston Hughes.

Having followed them now for nearly five years, I am confident that those who completed the course were changed by it. When I recruited them, I said, "You have been cheated. The humanities have always been reserved for the elite in this country. But I think you are the elite; the humanities are for you." After all, as Robert Maynard Hutchins said, "The best education for the best is the best education for all."

The Clemente Course is growing now, thanks to Bard College, the state humanities councils, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, and many private foundations. The humanities are available to more and more poor people. The task now is to spread the idea that the poor are human and thus to bring them into the public world, to spare them the life of loneliness and reaction instigated by the surround of force, to give them the opportunity through the humanities to think reflectively, to enjoy their own innate humanity to its fullest.

Can this also be done in the thousands of libraries across America, where the access to the humanities at no cost awaits the poor? How? Where would we find the faculties? Who would be responsible? Where would the money come from?

A new version of my 1997 book New American Blues: A Journey through Poverty to Democracy, concentrating on the Clemente Course and including details of management, recruiting, and sample syllabi for each of the five sections, will be published in late summer. Out of those details perhaps we can find a way to extend the humanities to thousands of poor people through America's libraries. But can we do it with sufficient rigor so that they begin to think reflectively, to become political persons?

As that happens the poor become citizens in the truest sense: They do not merely have power; they are power. Will they then turn to the left or the right, or will they choose to sit with the great majority of the American political middle? It is not the task of the humanities to decide that question. The object of coming to legitimate power through reflection is not to be mobilized but to become autonomous, free in the sense that only people in the fullness of their humanity may know. And then the poor will become dangerous, as all citizens in a democracy are dangerous; they will share in the rule of the public world. It is a risk, of course, but democracy is a risk worth taking.