July 2022
Jean-Luc Currie | 20 Minute Read | Volume 1. Issue 2.
I recall a vivid moment from that time period that encapsulates my ambivalence.
Dining at the Naval Academy is a spectacle. The Midshipmen eat at the same time in one large hall. Food is served on matching plates with Naval Academy insignia and real silverware. Tables seat 10 to 12 students, and most tables are a deliberate mix of classes. Topics range from the serious to the absurd, but on that day the Russian invasion of Crimea dominated the conversation. A sophomore turned to me and asked what I thought about the whole thing. I writhed inwardly, seeking a way to avoid answering the question. What if I answer incorrectly? What if I’m wrong? What will they think? I had spent years developing an image of someone smart, well-spoken, and accomplished. Put-together, you might say. An image constructed so delicately that any misdirected whisper would irrevocably shatter it.
The truth of the matter was that I knew very little about myself. I thought the more accolades and achievements I earned the more educated I became. Even at this point it had yet to dawn on me that a numeric scale or a piece of paper conferred empty promises. They were not an education, and they did not inherently teach me anything about myself.
I spent my four years of college running on the hamster wheel of grade point averages and letter grades and the praise of professors. Learning meant less to me than achieving, than proving to myself and those around me that I was smart and educated. So I worked diligently to ace every test. I turned in every extra credit assignment. My GPA soared. However, I lacked curiosity and imagination. Meanwhile, I had a roommate who spent his days reading various articles, pursuing bits of an idea, performing experiments. He was a Max Fischer, choosing to major in chemistry because it would be interesting. I chose engineering because it was practical and other people said it was the best choice.
By my senior year, I was academically successful but was a moral and intellectual basket-case. I had no original opinions and was afraid to offer one. I saw learning as black and white instead of a spectrum of color. I saw learning as something to be acquired instead of a state of mind. For all the good my formal schooling did me, this is something it did not: it did not help me build a coherent sense of self. It was a system designed to reward achievers and discourage adventurous curiosity. I had spent so many years driving, striving, and jumping through all the hoops put in front of me that I failed to understand why I should jump, or when, or how, or asking if jumping even made sense.
Some years ago, I read former Yale Professor William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep. In it, he describes people like me—people desperate to do things right but somehow missing it along the way—and suggests a simple definition for a real education. The point of an education, he argues, is to give one the capacity to think and an opportunity to build a coherent sense of self. (You, the reader, being an educated person yourself, point out that the first of these principles seems self-evident. Thus, we won’t dwell there.) But what about the second point he makes? How does one build a coherent sense of self? And does our educational system give us that opportunity?
During my formal education, I was so busy protecting myself from failure that I declined to take risks. It is ironic that someone who meets the definition of success can be such a miserable, self-conscious sycophant on the inside—scared to venture into life and find out who he is and what it all means. And now I can’t remember how to calculate for flux or solve a differential equation. My programming skills staled with time. I definitely cannot recall how to calculate the response time of a first order control system. But the real tragedy was emerging from America’s Delphic Temple without understanding the inscription on its forecourt.
I arrived four years earlier worried about whether I could function (much less succeed) in one of the country’s premier institutions. (In my 18-year-old mind at the time, it was the premier institution.) Was I smart enough? Could I work hard enough? What if there was some defect in me that prevented my understanding what was being taught?
I wondered if I was worthy.
By the spring of 2014, you might think I had adequately answered those questions for myself. After all, I maintained a 4.0 in engineering, was selected as the Brigade Commander, and shortly after graduation would relocate to the United Kingdom for graduate school.
Why then did I still feel so inadequate and unsure?
I was a senior at the Naval Academy.
It was always the same dream.
He was temporarily released from prison. Walking a few blocks, he stumbled upon his wife and four boys arranged comfortably in a Western-style home, reclining, eating dinner or conducting the daily activities of life. They begged him to stay and relax. But he couldn’t. He had to get back to prison.
In the forefront of his mind he saw the high concrete walls, heard the shouting of the guards in Vietnamese, felt a clamminess settle over him, and his heart would race. Meanwhile his family entreated him to stay, to be a part of the family again. But he had to get back before sunset. He just had to get back before sunset.
Then he would wake up.
He was still in room 18. It was dark, a sliver of light leaking in from the window or the door. He was lying on the floor with his bedroll. The sounds of 1969 Hanoi drifted in from the outside as a guard paced the courtyard beyond the door. His stomach growled, and he remembered the hunger strike he started nearly six weeks before. He refused to eat in front of the guards, saving a bite or two of bread to devour in the middle of each night. The exhilaration from this meal was electric. He could feel his digestive fluids pounce on these morsels, and a high ‘like a shot of whisky’ go straight to his brain.
And every night he dreamed the same dream—of Sybil and the boys in a comfortable, familiar home. A family he hadn’t seen in nearly four years. A family he might never see again.
In 1965 the north Vietnamese shot down a forty-two year-old fighter pilot flying a bombing mission over Vietnam. He broke his back as he ejected from his aircraft and twisted his knee grossly out of socket, an injury that gave him a lifelong limp. Upon landing, a mob of angry villagers surrounded him, beating him brutally for several minutes before a north Vietnamese soldier stepped into the melee and dispersed the crowd. He was whisked to a small farmhouse, given basic medical care, and then transported by night to the Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, where he spent the next eight years of his life. The American POWs interned there affectionally called it the Hanoi Hilton.
In the Hoa Lo prison, a name that means “fiery furnace”, they beat him, tortured him, and attempted to use him as propaganda for the Communist cause. He spent nearly four of his eight years in solitary confinement and leg irons. During those eight years hundreds of other pilots were shot down and served as POWs in the Hoa Lo prison and its satellite camps around Hanoi. As the senior ranking military officer Jim Stockdale was saddled with the responsibility of maintaining order and humane treatment for his men—a hard thing to do behind thick, concrete walls, sequestered in isolation, threatened with punishment for communication of any kind, and routinely tortured.
Before leaving for graduate school, I worked in the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. I knew of Jim Stockdale—after all, he was a Naval Academy graduate and Medal of Honor recipient—but I hadn’t bothered to give him much thought. In fact, I walked by his statue nearly every day without the slightest glance after the first encounter. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt as much as indifference.
When I left the Center, the Director gave me an anthology of Stockdale’s essays entitled “A Vietnam Experience”. I gave it a cursory glance at the time, but I had other things to occupy my mind: grad school and London awaited. As a result, I didn’t open the book in earnest until three years later while stationed in Okinawa. There, in a lonely apartment, sequestered toward the remote, northern part of the island, I began to discover what Stockdale had to teach.
“To handle tragedy may, indeed, be the mark of an educated man or woman, for one of the principal goals of education must be to prepare people for failure.” This sounded radically different from the education I received. Stockdale believed handling tragedy meant acknowledging that victimhood is a self-imposed condition. A good education, therefore, is one which teaches us that we are not victims. It teaches us that tragedy is a part of life. That life is not fair. That bad things happen to all people, and that those who “triumph” win the personal, internal battles, above all else. It reminded me of Dickinson’s lines:
To fight aloud is very brave
But gallanter, I know,
Who charge within the bosom,
The cavalry of woe
These days it’s common for all of us to identify as victims of one sort or another.
We're victims of bureaucracy. This is never clearer than when we rant and rail against the inefficiencies of the DMV and then succumb placidly to their Catch-22 like demands of having two different kinds of documentation that prove address when we only just moved to the state and we don’t have a utility bill or a lease agreement. (And we learn all of this after we stood in line for two hours.)
We're victims of financial companies and banks, caught in disastrous situations where we're forced to refinance and take out a second mortgage in order to pay the bills.
We're victims of our self-centered managers, the people above us who don’t understand how to lead.
We're victims of our relationships and family commitments, lamenting the obligations they force upon us.
We're victims of Big Tech, and technology generally, helplessly flapping like fish out of water against the onslaught of advertisements and apps and the micro-adjustments all these things make in our lifestyles—without even the slightest protest. We live life in these victim cycles because deep down we all want to be victims. We want to crawl into a dark hole within ourselves, curl into a small ball, and allow the world to turn while we whimper our injustices into the darkness.
I experienced this firsthand in the military. I was a victim of my organization—the longer I stayed the more powerless I felt in directing my own life. However, it was not the circumstances in which I found myself but the mentality I embodied that was the issue.
This was no mere theory for Stockdale. He went from being ‘the leader of a hundred-plus pilots and a thousand men’ to a ‘helpless, sobbing wreck’ in a matter of minutes. His education was tested in what he called the laboratory of human behavior, and he emerged from the experience with insights on what works for equipping men and women for life. Not the life we’ve manufactured for ourselves in the last 50 years, insulated by our technologies and numbed by our drugs, but a life that acknowledges difficulty, strain, political distemper, struggle and tragedy. To borrow Stockdale’s phrase, it's ‘the thin veneer of civilization that coats a world of barbarism.’
Throughout his imprisonment, Stockdale returned time and again to the story-within-a-novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor.” The basis of the story is that people do not want their freedom and continually give it away, begging others to relieve them of the burden of choice and free will and responsibility. “There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either,” writes Dostoyevsky. Those who are truly educated realize they possess a small amount of agency, no matter how small, even in the cold, dark isolation of a Vietnamese prison cell.
As I continued to read Stockdale, I was struck by the breadth of his education. He once spent several months deducing why any number raised to the 0 power necessarily equals 1 by scratching equations into the dirt of his cell using an old rusty nail. On another occasion he and an adjacent cell-mate worked out the proportionality constant that relates frequencies in Western music scales. As they discovered when released, this was Helmholtz’s Constant, identified in the 19th century by philosopher and scientist Hermann von Helmholtz.
At first, I thought this meant Stockdale knew a lot. But that wasn’t the case. He possessed a sense of his place in time and space. Facts and figures and dates were not enough. He had a respect and a sense for history.
What Stockdale practiced in the prison cells of Vietnam, the academic Neil Postman wrote about in 20th century New York. “…[T]o become educated,” writes Postman, “means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to participate [in] the Great Conversation.”
Most importantly, he points out that this lends us a context in which we can place ourselves. When we understand our own history—socially, religiously, technologically, scientifically, aesthetically, anthropologically, sociologically, et cetera—and when we are able to trace the ideas that produced us at this particular moment in time, then we can more fully embrace or disagree with those ideas. We are not produced in a vacuum, nor are the ideas, technologies, and institutions that surround and support us, those guardrails we too often ignore, taking them for granted because we lack the humility to recognize that we all stand on shoulders—lots of shoulders, not just those of giants. A sense of history, as Postman points out, gives us humility, and it is precisely this humility which is the education.
We are disconnected and disaffected in the modern world, partly due to our lack of historical context. History and traditions are things that give us a sense of place, and without historical context we look for alternatives to make sense of this world. So we default to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Tik Tok. We doomscroll and lament the state of the world. We constantly intake information but never allow ourselves the time and solitude to process and contextualize that information.
As Neil Postman explains in Technopoly, we are so inundated with facts, and so many of those facts are technical and statistical in nature, and we have neither the time nor the resources to fact-check them, that we tend to believe nearly anything. He calls ‘the world we live in . . . . very nearly incomprehensible to most of us.” He goes on,
“There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.”
I was stationed in Okinawa in 2017—a mere three years after graduating from the Naval Academy—and things began to unravel. A deep bitterness took root in me. The more I contemplated my situation, the more bitter I became. The more bitter I became, the more I believed in my own victimhood. The more I believed in my own victimhood, the more helpless I felt; and, thus, the bitterness grew.
I was like that ridiculous German character, the Baron Munchhausen, who attempted to pull himself out of a bog by his own hair. What did eventually pull me out of this bog was recognizing my own limitations and grabbing onto something else, something beyond myself. I didn’t have all the answers. I had very few, in fact. I also saw that some of those answers were in obvious places. Ancient wisdom has stuck around for quite a while—maybe it was time I started paying attention to it.
Early in the year 1943, the Oxford don and literary critic C.S. Lewis was invited to deliver a trilogy of lectures at the University of Durham, a cathedral town located in the north of England. The Riddell Memorial Lectures had fourteen previous iterations, and in the midst of WWII Lewis delivered the fifteenth series on a subject that explored “the relation between religion and contemporary thought,” the prompt by which all lecturers were invited. Those talks on 24, 25, and 26 February 1943, eventually came to be bound in book-form as The Abolition of Man.
In antiquity, and even up to modern times, traditions like the Confucian, the Hindu, the Stoic, the Muslim, and the Christian, sought to conform the human soul to the natural order. Lewis writes, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self discipline, and virtue.” But in modern times, “…the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique.” Traditional values wisely make us skeptics of ourselves. Western thought has historically held that humankind possesses a fatal flaw. To protect against that self-destructive tendency they inculcated education that stressed adherence to values outside oneself and erected institutions that served as guardrails on society.
In his lecture he speaks of smart (even well-meaning) people who go about ‘debunking’ everything. In my post-college years, I deconstructed everything I thought I knew about the world. Ignorance led me to believe this ability to ‘deconstruct’ proof of my education. To paraphrase Lewis, I had seen through everything and there was nothing left on which to fix my gaze. It seems clear to me in hindsight that I defaulted to this because I was afraid. Tearing other people’s opinions down is easy compared to having one yourself. Destruction is a simple matter; construction is arduous.
In a line that described me perfectly at the time, Dostoyevsky writes in Notes from the Underground,
“No doubt you mean to say something, but you conceal your last word out of fear, because you haven’t the courage to say it, but only crave insolence. You boast about your sensibility, but you merely don’t know your own mind.”
In his lecture, Lewis advocates for the existence and necessity of objective value by surveying religions and ethical systems broadly. It is a sweeping defense of a moral education, one which recognizes the moral inheritance of previous generations and civilizations. He argues that the end result of discarding objective value results in the destruction of humanity itself. A greedy grab for the golden egg always results in the death of the goose.
Once upon a time it was thought that right sentiment could be taught and that virtue could be learned. If we're lucky it's a lesson we're taught as children but one that needs to be learned by each individual in their own manner. Stockdale’s respect for the Stoic tradition and Lewis’ respect for the Christian tradition were not just accidents of fate and birth. They were deliberate decisions on the part of both men. In the same way, I had a decision to make. I could keep pulling my own hair, like the poor Baron, or I could grab onto something else.
Funerals were a weekly routine.
My team and I performed military funeral honors in the Appalachian region of the United States as part of our official duties, often attending multiple funerals per week. In November 2019, I attended a funeral in Artie, West Virginia, a small community located in a little hollow (pronounced “holler”) in the southern part of the state. The scenic drive from Charleston to Artie wound along a two-lane country road, accompanied by a small river and surrounded by the vertiginous West Virginia hills on either side.
The entire service was performed in a small local church, an institution that the community seemed rightly proud of. (As a testament to the institution that is Colburn Presbyterian Church, we began seeing signs posted for it seven miles away, as if it was the local tourist attraction.) It was founded, so they say, “...in 1907, on a prayer in a cornfield." For a while during the 20th century, it doubled as a girl’s school. It seems that the small community thrived back in the coal-mining hey-day; the sepia photo from the mid-1900s shows dozens of young girls of all ages surrounding severe-looking teachers in black dresses.
The church itself is simple.
Dark hardwood covers the floor. The same dark wood crowns the ceilings and base boards and frames the windows. It stands roughly 100’ long by 25’ wide. A partition of dry wall was added behind the stage at some point to create a choral dressing room. It was from this room that eight septuagenarian choir members filed at the beginning of the service...followed by one young man who looked roughly seventeen, as out of place as a tuxedo at an Alabama tailgate. The men lined up on the top bench; the women on the benches in front.
The service opened with a song from the choir. The man on the top left belted the song so loudly I could hear him distinctly from the back pew. He sang in the sliding baritone only achieved by royally old men and drunken sailors; that happy journey the voice makes from one note to the next, bumping into every other note along the way instead of hopping lightly from one to the other. The man in the middle sang only from the left side of his mouth. One of the women in the front took so long to stand up they were halfway through the hymn by the time she joined in.
All of them held choir books which they used to varying degrees of success. Whether due to failing memory or an inability to read the words on the page the choir as a whole sang only two of every three words, creating a rising and falling lilt, the tune audibly drifting in and out.
After the preacher said a few words, he invited a man to the front simply with: “Matthew...”
Matthew came to the front dressed in a checkered black-and-white flannel shirt. He had short brown hair, a thick, but close-cropped beard, and was built like an American football linebacker. He closed his eyes, opened his mouth and launched unexpectedly into an a cappella rendition of a dolorous country song in a deep, barrel-chested baritone. These people knew how to mourn.
I attended another funeral two weeks before this one, for a young man in his twenties. His family, his friends and his community gathered at a funeral home to conduct the service. There was little decorum to this funeral. No liturgy. It was a free-for-all. His friends drank beers in front of the church before the service. They acted fools afterwards. They played Ft. Minor’s “Where’d You Go” during the program, sending the older folks in the room into mild moral cardiac arrest as the artist dropped expletive after expletive.
As I compared these two experiences, I drew two important conclusions. The first is that our institutions are important. Our institutions and the traditions they give us enable us to structure our civic and personal lives, providing blueprints for expression. The second conclusion is that our institutions only have as much warmth and vitality as we give them. These institutions give us traditions and ceremonies which produce outlets for grief or happiness or justice.
In the modern age, we are conditioned to view tradition as a straitjacket. But boundary-lessness does not yield a greater degree of freedom; rather we lose the ability to properly celebrate or mourn or find closure. We lose a piece of our history and therefore a piece of ourselves.
I decided to leave the Marine Corps in January 2021.
I believed (and was told by many people) that my education and experience would enable me to quickly land a job in the civilian world. It’s true—my resume opened plenty of doors, plopping me down in interview chairs for a variety of companies across industries. But I couldn’t close the deal.
I didn’t know what I wanted at the time, so I often tried to project what I thought they wanted instead. This proved a failing method. When endless rejection letters filled my inbox, I became discouraged, anxious, and, at times, emotional. I had difficulty sleeping for the first time in years. I would wake up in the middle of the night, images of my LinkedIn or a job application emblazoned across my mind’s eye, like the impression that remains when you close your eyes after staring at a lightbulb in a dark room.
At times I wavered. I called my commanding officer in April 2021, and asked him, “What would it take for me to get back in?” However, in the end, I stuck it out. I was finally exercising what Deresiewicz refers to as a moral imagination:
“You can’t study for it. You can’t compete for it. The qualities it calls upon are those of character, not intellect.”
A full education has little to do with the amount of book-learning one receives or the honors one earns through scholastic achievement. To reduce my previous points to a few words: agency, history, and objective value are the building blocks for developing a coherent sense of self, but someone has to actually build them. That someone has to be me. That someone has to be you. It requires action. It demands courage. It’s why Ralph Waldo Emerson challenged his audience at Harvard in 1837 to pursue “Books, Nature,” and “Action”.
Leaving the Marine Corps finally gave me the opportunity I needed to activate this new perspective on education. Here was an opportunity to face failure, to understand where I fit into the scheme of things, to test my moral imagination.
Building thyself, it turns out, seems the best way to know thyself.
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