This post is excerpted from The Necessity of Character: Moral Formation and Leadership in Our Time, edited by James Mumford and Ryan S. Olson.
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—
—Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility—”1
Emily Dickinson never fails to inspire. What does it mean to “dwell in Possibility”? Given what we know of Dickinson’s life and wide-ranging mind, I think her words allude to the moral imagination, the capacity that philosopher John Kekes describes as the one through which we picture the good life and then strive to make ours resemble it.2 To dwell in possibility is to resist the temptation to stay within the narrow course of life drawn out for us: to go to school and make good grades so that you can get the job that pays for the affluent lifestyle everyone else aspires to. Certainly, there is nothing inherently wrong with this picture. But is that all there is? Is there no larger vision of life for which we might be willing to sacrifice some comfort and security? The pursuit of any such larger vision requires, I submit, the moral imagination.
Although the imagined is often contrasted with the real, there is nothing unreal or fictional about the imagination and how it shapes our lives. Theologian James K.A. Smith puts it this way: We as human beings are “desiring, imaginative animals” who “are what we love.”3 We tend to define what we love on the basis of fashionable images of what seems to be the good life that are beamed at us from our media-saturated culture. Everyone seems beautiful and smart. Our social media feeds show us an endless cornucopia of success. And success too often boils down to financial achievement.
I teach a first-year seminar to students just starting college, and they readily—if sheepishly—admit that while they would rather be studying English, philosophy, or history, they are pursuing business or engineering because they believe that is where the money is. Their choices are in line with a mass movement of the young away from the liberal arts. A recent New Yorker essay is titled “The End of the English Major” while an article in The Hechinger Report relates that there have been eight straight years of decline in the number of students graduating with a humanities degree. In English and history alone, there have been 30 percent drops in the number of students majoring in each of these subjects.4
In our seminar, we read about Thoreau’s bold experiment at Walden and reflect on his often-cited insight that the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” in pursuit of wealth and possessions. I ask my students to engage in a thought experiment: If you knew for certain that your every need would be taken care of in exchange for a modest amount of daily work, where and how would you live? Their answers are breathtaking in their simplicity and beauty: a peaceful life in the countryside in Provence, a cottage in Maine, a life devoted to books and good food.
While thought experiments are not real life, and there are practical constraints (student loans, for example) that truly make it difficult to achieve a quiet life of beauty in Provence, there are often more options available than conventional wisdom would lead us to think. According to Forbes, Goldman Sachs, the Harvard Business Review, and many other sources, business leaders are looking for liberal arts majors and are happy to hire them.5 But that is not the message filtering down to many of our students.
It is not just my undergraduate students who feel hemmed in by barriers real and imagined. Young graduate students at the beginning of their careers come to me with questions about what they can expect from academic life. They want to know what the real possibilities are for intellectual flourishing in the twenty-first-century university. They are often idealistic, with dreams of a better world and the role education might play in getting us there. But they also see the many obstacles that modern life has placed before them, including an ever-shrinking academic job market and higher expectations for publication at earlier and earlier stages of doctoral study. In turn, such hurdles make it harder to innovate and more necessary to specialize early on. How, these beginning graduate students wonder, do they pursue fulfillment of their intellectual ideals while also advancing in today’s competitive academic system, with its often narrow definition of success?
In her wonderful book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, Zena Hitz writes of the clash between the seemingly opposing forces of academic excellence (at least as defined by the research university) and the intellectual life. At a certain point, the pursuit of accolades, prestige, and publications overwhelmed the simpler love of learning that had initially attracted her to academia.6
The rest of this essay is available in The Necessity of Character, available from Amazon.
