The happiest people on the face of this earth ought to be university professors. For there is absolutely no one who can go on about the merits of rationality like these folks. More to the point, there is no one who can be more dismissive of others on the grounds they are not acting rationally than professors at a university. So judging from their “mouths”, you would think that they had an absolute lock on happiness. Happiness here; happiness there; happiness everywhere.
And don’t get me started on the way in which professors at a university denigrate folks who believe in God, even many in religion departments do. So, in particular, a one-to-one comparison between professors at a university and religious folks ought to turn up one college professor after another who is happier than the typical religious person. But, of course, nothing of the sort is true. Most religious people with all their irrationality, to hear college professors tell, are generally much, much happier than the torch bearers of rationality—college professors.
Now, to be sure, most professors will insist that religious folks are delusional and that their happiness is not true happiness. After all, only rational folks of whom college professors are the archetype can be truly happiness.
But happiness is a very simple notion in that if a person acts happy and looks happy time and time again across a wide range of circumstances, then in the absence of a very long and unobvious story the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that he is happy. Likewise, if a person acts in a grumpy manner and looks weary time and time again across a wide range of circumstances, then the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that he is unhappy. Or so it is in the absence of a long and unobvious story.
If I wanted to show happiness to a Martian, I would pick a typical religious person any day over a typical college professor. For what I see among college professors is meanness and anger and hostility and grumpiness and massive discontent.
What I do not see generally is a sense of joy and appreciation. I do not anything that resembles self-contentment and inner-peace.
More poignantly, I do not see anything that would incline me to wish that my way of being in the world was like theirs. I cannot think of a college professor whom I would hold up to my students as a beacon happiness. Or let me put the point another way: I don’t recall ever hearing any student say that, in addition to professor’s Schmitt’s marvelous intellectual abilities, Schmitt seems so happy with herself or himself.
To be sure, professors have been known and admired for their intellectual agility and their command of this or that subject matter. But professors are persons, too. And admiring a professor for her or his intellectual gifts is no bearer to admiring her or him for the joie de vivre that the professor displays. Nor is there any incompatibility between intellectual excellence and marvelous contentment. Alas, the very point is that few, if any display that.
The point is particularly telling because many professors have tenure, which is life-time appointment, and are well-paid. One would have thought that having very decent salary with a life-time appointment would have occasioned mountains of happiness. To be sure, if one takes ones commitments seriously, being a professor can quite demanding. Still, a well-paid life-time appointment is one incredibly security blanket.
So the fact that it is rare for anyone to speak of professors as happy is I believe rather telling. Few, if any, would have any difficult grasping why a coal minor is disgruntled. It is hard work that is often rather risky. And there is sense in which it can be said that it is intrinsically rewarding. Yet, I have met many a coal minor or assembly-line worker who strikes me as exuding more happiness or at least contentment than what I find among college professors.
My own view is this. Professors are often too smart for their own good. They have argued themselves out of appreciating the majesty and the wonder of life. And I hold that there is an inevitable emptiness that invades a life when a person is no longer able to appreciate the majesty and wonder of life.
Undoubtedly, no adult can have the sense of wonderment that is characteristic of a child’s marvelously sense of discovery with respect to one thing and then another. Yet, there is a profound lesson to be learnt from the child, namely that there is a joy that comes with wonderment that has no other equal life.
And I should like to think that wonderment and rationality are not at odds with one another but masterfully compliment one another, which is marvelously captured by the expression “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
Day in and day out, I see wonderment in one thing and then another. I see wonderment in the fact that we can be so different while doing exactly the same thing—speaking, for instance. I marvel each day of my life at the fact that so much is revealed by so little, namely the eyes—and it is revealed so quickly. The most furtive glance often tells more than a string of well formed sentences ever could.
As I write these words, there is in the Department of Political Science a picture of my former colleague Fred Frohock holding one of his grandchildren. With his eyes closed, he is holding his grandchild against his chest. But that simple gesture is none other than contentment personified. And I marvel at the fact that I who was not there can see this majestic moment in a mere photograph.
I do not know how to account for all of this rationally. I do not know how to explain how so little can mean so much. But I do know that there is nothing irrational in recognizing the beauty and majesty of this fact. There is nothing irrational in embracing it. These simple things constitute one affirmation after the other that the whole is greater than the some of its parts.
We, if only we should attend to it, are surrounded by the majesty and beauty of reality. A transcendent reality that gives a richness to life that defies rationality in the sense there is no way informative way to explain it.
Courage at its best is often none other than the willingness to try yet again what others have long since supposed was not rationally feasible. There would be far fewer instances of this marvelous moral good if everyone simply followed the dictates of rationality alone.
And this brings me back to professors. It is very telling that the most extraordinary instances of moral courage tend not come from those whose who have no shortage of claims to make about what is or is not rationally acceptable, namely professors. Indeed, few professors have ever inspired courage.
This should come as no surprise. Courage is rather like love. It goes beyond what we can claim is warranted on purely rational grounds. And the academy is rather schizophrenic about in just this matter. For when we look at what is called for on purely rational grounds, it turns out that what we get is considerably less than the excellence of which we as human beings are capable.
Quite simply, humanity at its best has a transcendent character to it. We are better off for recognizing it. And we are too smart for our own good, when we insist upon being rational to the exclusion of the transcendental.
