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Bellah on the University

February 9, 2013
  by Rick Livingston

Sociologist Robert Bellah (U.C. Berkeley) published his magnum opusReligion in Human Evolution, in 2011, a volume destined to take its place alongside philosopher Charles Taylor’s equally massive A Secular Age on my shelf of “someday I’m going to sit down and read these….” books.  It looks to be a remarkable synthesis, not least because its subtitle (“From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age”) promises to take seriously the longue durée of evolutionary time, rather than using the Darwinian trope as a bunker for potshots at credulous contemporaries.  

Born in 1927, Bellah has earned the right to take the long view.  Still, I was unexpectedly touched by his evocation, in the preface, of “three great teachers who taught me face-to-face but who are no longer living: Talcott Parsons, Wilfred Smith, and Paul Tillich,” and a bit later, of “my friends Clifford Geertz, Kenneth Burke [and] Edward Shils.” Since these were already classic figures during my undergraduate years, there may have been a twinge of nostalgia braided into the shiver of awe that crept over me on reading this enumeration.  (Yes, I was an academic fanboy—the product of too many hours combing used-book stores.) 

But it takes a master of the academic habitus to have set up the following personal-cum-theoretical anecdote in the book’s opening pages.  “Abraham Maslow once in my presence,” Bellah writes, recollected an experience he later theorized as “B-cognition:”

He was serving as chair of the Department of Psychology at Brandeis and was expected to attend the graduation ceremony in full academic regalia.  He had avoided such events previously, considering them silly rituals.  But, he said, as the procession began to move he suddenly “saw” it as an endless procession.  Far, far ahead, at the very beginning of the procession, was Socrates.  Quite a way back but still well ahead of Maslow was Spinoza.  Then just ahead of him was Freud followed by his own teachers and himself.  Behind him stretching endlessly were his students and his students’ students, generation after generation as yet unborn.

Maslow assured us that what he experienced was not a hallucination: rather it was a particular kind of insight, an example of B-cognition.  It was also, I would suggest, the apprehension of the academic procession as a symbol, standing for the true university as a sacred community of learning, transcending time and space.  He was in a sense apprehending the “real” basis of any actual university.  One could say that if we can no longer glimpse that sacred foundation, the actual university would collapse.  For the real university is neither a wholesale knowledge outlet for the consumer society nor an instrument in the class struggle, though the actual university is a bit of both.  But if the university does not have a fundamental symbolic reference point that transcends the pragmatic considerations of the world of working and is in tension with those considerations, then it has lost its raison d’être (pp. 8-9)

Whatever differences you might have with Bellah in theory, you’ve got to admit that he knows his audience.  Few readers of this 700+ page book will not have participated in such a ceremony; fewer still will have snapped the resonant cord that, vibrating between silliness and solemnity, the mall and Marx, Bellah plucks so deftly.  I don’t know how many legislators would respond to this vision of “the true university as a sacred community of learning,” but I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better example of the old-time religion.