BAKER: They provided us with comfort amid sorrow.
CHARLIE: Remember Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech! Honor, pity, pride, love, guilt, redemption--something like that. It sounded obsolete, even then!
ABLE: Say what we may, such themes adhered to the exemplars like barnacles from the culture that continuously came down through a measurable past. It began its great journey in ancient Greece and ancient Judea. We got the message that the history of which we now were becoming a part finally derived from some inscrutable power.
BAKER: It had the ability to communicate veritas to us humans. Our project was to emulate the exemplars of the culture. Every good citizen aspired to be an examplar. The list was almost endless, composed of the real and the imagined. Their flaws were not omissions but meanings, pointing to the Good and to the verities upon which they grew. From Ulysses to Arthur to Jesus to Augustine to St. Francis to Hamlet to Bacon to Milton to Mozart to Washington to Natty Bumpo to Arthur Dimmesdale to Captain Ahab to Victoria to Tennyson to W. E. B. Du Bois to Ghandi to Albert Schweitzer to Jay Gatsby to James Thurber to Tom Joad to--and so on.
ABLE: Values manifested in the particular became ascertainable as values in the abstract.
CHARLIE: Not to mention the "ETERNAL."
ABLE: We were to join the colorful parade with a dignity to be constructed from discipline in the verities and hard work.
BAKER: Sometimes we were able to see reward for the hard work, sometimes not. It did not matter one way or the other. We still learned to work hard. We still knew there was a system of rewards.
ABLE: We had assurance that reward would come in the long term if not in the short term..
BAKER: In the face of overwhelming evidence that life was cruel and unrewarding, we learned that there was something large and enigmatic that would take care of things somehow, somewhere, someday.
CHARLIE: We called it FAITH.
BAKER: Even when rewards did not come in the material goods of everyday life, we had assurance that they would come in forms unimaginable in mere earthly existence. Even if this were not so, we learned that something redemptive could happen to us, here and now, in the aftermath of a denial of rewards, in the aftermath of unimagined suffering. It would ennoble us. We would be better for our suffering.
CHARLIE: We would be exemplars!
ABLE: The entire project was especially adapted to the transmission of meaning and value to the young. It compelled young persons to see themeslves as persons responsible for their individual behavior.
BAKER: Responsible, finally, to the intricate systems. The system of rewards had its mirror image in a corresponding system of punishments.
CHARLIE: Right--fail to brush your teeth and risk going to hell with cavities.
BAKER: From the forthright balance of those mirroring systems, we took an absolutely clear representation. ACTIONS ALWAYS HAVE CONSEQUENCES.
ABLE: Or, in the long haul, YOU CAN'T GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING.
CHARLIE: Conscience! It rang the bell of developing youth every time they swerved.
BAKER: Conscience, from the point of view of the systems, enabled them to survive. Without it, they would be defenseless. They would be destroyed by the reward-punishment process.
CHARLIE: Because in the long term they could not get away with anything.
ABLE: So--the only way they could survive in this dire situation was to have a highly functioning Conscience at the very core of their being. It would define them as a right-acting person. It would enable them to behave consistently with the verities exemplified in all the good lives they studied.
BAKER: We have to stress that all of this was REAL to us. It was not a "text."
CHARLIE: Now it is.
BAKER: Yes--the story of our lifetime is about the mountain of evidence amassed to prove the contingent nature of this marvelous definition of the meaning and purpose of a person's existence on earth. Even if we want to go on behaving as if it were "real," we have to do so with the knowledge that it passes through a phase called "text." So even our purportedly new believing is not our old believing.
CHARLIE: That is, all has changed.
ABLE: Now that we see it as "text," we can marvel at its wondrous construction more than we ever did when it was "real."
BAKER: Savor the irony of that. We did not appreciate it as much when it was "real" as we do now that we see it differently.
ABLE: Now that we see it through an ironic scrim.
BAKER: We see a fallen Roman arch. The whole encyclopedia of verities pointed to the keystone of the arch. It was the individual self. The arch stood because the keystone of responsible selfhood fitted into its slot. It accommodated the pressure from both sides of the arch. The self had the fateful duty to hold up the entire arch of western civilization. The whole thing could be seen as a harmonious interlocking set of discreet parts because the human self-conscious self, carved with the sharp edges of the eternal verities, took its proper shape and did what it was designed to do in its keystone position.
ABLE: A marvelous story.
CHARLIE: A striking metaphor.
ABLE: The proud self was not only the keystone but also the engineer of the arch as a whole. In classical Rome, the engineer stood under the arch when the workers took down the scaffolding. If the arch fell as a result of his handiwork, he paid with stones on his head. The individual, independent, liberal humanist self, like an erring Roman engineer, has been crushed by its own failed arch.
BAKER: That is right: the arch does not stand as it once stood. Something changed the keystone and the arch as it really was--fell. The solid self turned to powder.
ABLE: Therein lies the other tale.
CHARLIE: The tale of the postmodern subject.
BAKER: The liberal humanist self could be thought of as existing because of the foundation on which it stood. There was a something other, out of ordinary experience, of which the self was representative. A whole world without end could be said to lie behind, or beyond, the self we saw, or were. And that made it enduring, a stable pole through time, even as change surrounded and engulfed it.
ABLE: In the postmodern, that is a mere story, without substantiation. The story is entertaining, but it is not true in any fundamental sense. We lose the self in the tellling of the narrative and our discovery of its seductions as a story.
CHARLIE: But we gain an intensity of experience. We are able to be multimorphs. We have the power to encode and recode. This is skateboarding as opposed to mountain climbing! Or spelunking!
ABLE: Something of the self does persist, however. As a single organism a human being resembles an entire ecological system. That system is under the laws of evolutionary biology. Its mind as well as its body. What he or she is today is the outcome of the evolutionary process since birth.
CHARLIE: That was true in modernist times too. The difference now is not in the biological construct but in the social construct. Our sense of self is socially constructed, and now we do not construct it in terms of a representation. It is what it is.
ABLE: If one was born at a certain time in this century, that change can be deeply disorienting.
CHARLIE: If one was born at a later time in this century, that change is the only orientation.
BAKER: At bottom, the ethical problem is that the old self was held to be responsible to values that were thought to come from a permanent source of truth. The new self has no apparent imperative to be or do anything defined by anything other than the consensus of those who choose not to kill one another. That may be an adequate basis; it is radically different, however, as a basis for the behavior of the individual organism.
ABLE: Whither faith, hope, and love?
CHARLIE: We invent them ourselves. They are functionally justifiable because they give comfort. They drive out fear. They allow us to be creative, to be adventurous.
ABLE: Even though the plane we perform upon is as slippery as a wet photographic negative.
CHARLIE: And as deep!
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