The mission. (My View).

The Mission


Upon being sold into slavery,
Diogenes spotted in the market crowd
a rich Corinthian. "Sell me to him,"
he said. "He looks like he could use a master."
This story shows a universal truth:
A philosopher cannot be made a slave.

It was pirates who sent Diogenes
down the river. The slaveries of our age
are peculiar for being self-imposed.

We live our lives escaping everything.
We work so hard to live outside of nature,
to live beyond constraint, but only death
or a death in life will grant those freedoms.
Our notion of the free might bear revision:
Socrates choosing his prison, King Lear
praying for the poor, Deborah riding to war.
Devotion in bondage is what makes us free,
and man is never freer than when he lives
by the notion that his love and work are one.

I recall that Epictetus tells us
that Diogenes became the tutor
to the children of the rich Corinthian,
commanding both their household and their minds.
I believe that his title was schoolmaster.

The teacher's jurisdiction places us
to meet Democracy's most urgent need.
The calling of our time is not to give
more freedom to the young, but give the young
a lively understanding of their freedom
that they might nurture it and pass it on.
To that end I suggest a revolution,
a modest one, in which no blood is spilled
(especially my own) and so propose
an instant curriculum revision:
from now on, we offer just one major,
philosophy. Or else teach everything
as if it were its own philosophy,
its own sure way to make sense of the mind,
as of the world, a way to organize
one's life based on a new idea of love.

We must teach the young to love by leading them.
The job is simple; I came from the farm
and I know what a nose ring's really for.
You tie a rope to it and then you lead.
Consider how the young are led at present
in thought, speech, and manners by the sheer force
and ubiquity of commercial markets.
The young want guidance, and almost everyone
has abandoned them. All we need do is step
in front by giving them philosophy,
and they will come behind and with them comes
a generation and our way of life.

The teacher's work is to imagine them
leading good lives of genuine pursuit,
choosing pursuit above activity
and tedious self evaluation.
Imagine them making time for solitude,
self mastery, and the art of living,
forgoing political compassion,
which is a subtle cruelty, forgoing
political correctness, which is absurd.
Imagine them crafting a living ethic,
enriching the lives they live among their neighbors,
carrying enough of substance in their minds
that they strive for good and govern themselves,
relying on no device or edifice
so that a convenient tree might be their state house.

Our essential work is to imagine them
as we were all imagined in this place
by men whom we have seen in photographs,
standing with a shovel in palmetto scrub.

We are the living heirs of works and dreams,
dreams farfetched and revolutionary.
This dream I deliver for safekeeping
into the hands of our new President
and extend to him the highest honor
that I know: an invitation to join
this community of scholars. Join us
adding to knowledge, adding to human skill,
adding to the best of what's been thought and said,
things done for heaven and the future's sake,
as the free are continually building upwards
the great transcendent staircase of learning,
worn by feet ascending and descending.

Donald Eastman, Mr. President, welcome;
you lead a fine and noble enterprise.
Love it well and join with us as we wrestle
the Jacob of this world and change its name.

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