Masters of the culture

Moreover, we ourselves--many of us in the academy--have long since forgotten our main purpose is to teach: strictly to transmit what is already known, not as a sideline of our entrepreneurial R & D or as gurus of Change. We are neither geniuses nor apostles. We should be highly trained masters of the culture, in its variety of special respects. Unless we ourselves achieve this mastery, the chain of intellect cannot be forged in varieties of respect for unequals. How can we expect true disciples, in real disciplines, when we ourselves have never met a master, but only office managers and more less celebrated critics of whatever might be construed as reverence?

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973

A science and art of limits

We are subjected to endless breakthroughs, by hosts of mini-charismatics, intruding on our private selves, demanding that we abolish them. Against these breakthroughs, and their celebrants, revolutionary and regressive, we might try to imagine a science and art of limits; our primal feeling, if only we could reconstruct it, must be for what we have long known is not to be done.

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973

The rudeness of the primitive

Our college-trained primitives have been charmed by the idea that rudeness of manner, speech and thought is criticism personified. They express not criticism but hostility to culture in any form. Their chorused obscenities and temper tantrums are the debased liturgical form taken, nowadays, by the high nineteenth-century religion of criticism, about which they have not the slightest knowledge. Only projects--inputs and outputs, quickly made--really interest them... Good manners are protective, against the thrust of those short-term, even instant, projects that are the bureaucratic version of the quest for experience.

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973

Not ourselves prophets

...[A] concealing transfer of privileged knowledge is the unchangeable work of teachers: being mere interpreters of interpreters, not ourselves prophets, we are authorized only by the greatness that has preceded us, from which we make knowledge our own.

-Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 1973