About An Empty Man

    Once I knew a man who was a model of cheerful cynicism.
    The cheer was genuine. He liked his job and his home life. He enjoyed his fellow human beings.  He had a lively sense of humor.
    The cynicism also was genuine.  He knew all the angles and answers.  He was confident that he discerned every motive, every attitude in others. Life was a long contest for comfort and advantage. That was about it.
    At the time I felt a little sorry for him. I thought a part of him must be, despite his cheer, not really  happy. With the perspective of years, I've decided I was off the mark. I think a part of him was simply vacant.
    He had no capacity for reverence. By this I do not mean religious sensibility. I mean that he could view a great painting with interest but never with awe.  He could look at the stars without a twinge of wonder. He was numb to the difference between fun and joy.
     I thought I glimpsed his profile in an essay by the late anthropologist Loren Eiseley.  He worried that 20th Century western culture was trivializing the human spirit. He feared the result could be imagined as a new category of homo sapiens. He called it Asphalt Man.
    I leave the term to imply what it will to others. I am not competent to elaborate on Dr. Eiseley's elegant thinking. In  my own imagination, Asphalt Man takes several forms. Some of them annoy only me. Some amount to more -- and worse.
    I hear his voice in politicians who set out to meddle with great universities. This is happening in my state among others. Politically connected policymakers have trimmed liberal arts programs deemed to be under-used. During subsequent controversy, one policymaker was quoted as saying, "We are capitalists.  We have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand."
    What to say of a statement that is at once so silly and so revealing? We should begin with first principles:  Education curricula are supposed to shape students, not vice versa.
    People now in control of our legislature want a turn toward job preparation in the university's mission. The talk of supply and demand is window dressing for a sharp change in policy. And it is a dodge past the truth that, had mere marketplace utility been their guide, great universities would not now be great.
    My state has a history of systemic rural poverty. In levying and spending the taxes to build the university, leaders of yesteryear wanted to offer their constituents a path of escape from life behind a mule. And they wanted graduates equipped to do more than earn a buck. They knew that fine minds are as likely to be born into plowboys as anywhere else. They hoped graduates would build an economy, but they knew graduates would -- for better or worse -- build a society.
    They would not have wanted their university to produce Asphalt Man. They would have recognized in him the heart of my former friend's cynicism: He valued only what he himself could understand. This was not merely an attitude. For him it was an ethic. Anything beyond his personal ken was not worth knowing.
    He would have sniffed that programs of arts and letters were about frilly and superfluous notions.  But in fact they are about the inner light that makes the human species unique.
    Dr. Eiseley feared that Asphalt Man was capable of pawning treasures to improve the roads.
    I fear that leaders in my state are offering to prove him right.