Air University Review, November-December 1968
Writing about the value of studying the humanities is in some ways like writing about God. In any audience there are likely to be some who believe on faith alone, some who believe on faith and reason, some who are mildly skeptical, some who are agnostic, and some who simply say the whole subject has been outmoded by modern advances in science and technology. I wish to take issue with none of these viewpoints specifically, but simply to state at the outset my conviction that it is not only desirable but downright essential for the professional Air Force officer to broaden and deepen the liberal aspects of his education.
Today the military professional is so often evaluated in terms of a stereotypic image: a rigid, unthinking, tradition-bound dunderhead; an intellectual, emotional, and moral cretin whose sole concern is glorying in wars past, escalating wars present, and fomenting wars to come. His reputation among the intellectuals of our nation is often low indeed; their image of him as a narrow-minded, provincially oriented power-grabber gives rise to deep and often irrational fears that, as the military component of our national policy becomes economically more and more demanding, the military man himself may become a positive danger to our democratic institutions. I am reasonably sure that many military men would disagree with this concern for our national reputation among those generally acknowledged to be the intellectuals, but believe that we ignore such derisive or antagonistic estimates at our peril. In our national life the military profession is important; it has always been important; I can see no evidence that it will not continue to be important. We must, I believe, concern ourselves with attracting and keeping young men whose intellects are superior and with educating them not only technically in the skills of the military profession but liberally in the history and values of our open, ever changing, intellectually challenging culture.
The humanities are an indispensable part of such an education, because they concern themselves not so much with the utilitarian and practical aspects of life as with the distinctively human and individually significant problems which every man (and especially those who would lead other men) must face and attempt to resolve. For a young man to become a good officer, he must first become a good human being. Regardless of how skillful he becomes in flying airplanes, firing weapons, analyzing or designing circuits, solving war-game problems, or probing into the intricacies of astrophysics, one attribute without which no officer can become a truly respected leader of men is humanity, a quality exemplified, in John Henry Newman’s words, by the man who has “a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them.”
The military leader at his best must be a man of discipline, and discipline
often involves maintaining steadfastness of purpose in the midst of complexity
and ambiguity. Often his decisions must be choices not of right versus wrong
but of right versus right. Sometimes those decisions involve the life or death
of himself and of his men. Such choices cannot be expressed by formula, nor can
their consequences be properly measured by statistics. No single abstract
principle offers either solution or refuge to the man who spends
his life in a career that can demand of him, sometimes with
startling abruptness, the surrender of self to the
demands of service. It appears to me that any studies or
experiences which contribute to discernment, to liberal knowledge, to precision
of expression, to imagination, play a vital and indispensable role in
developing a competent military officer. I believe our humanities courses at
the
The term “humanities” is not a precisely limiting one. In its broadest sense it connotes any study or activity which relates to the distinctively human aspects of man. But for instructional purposes, it has come to mean studies in languages, literature, philosophy, history, and the fine arts. The core curriculum of the Academy (those courses which all cadets must complete, whatever their academic major) includes courses in all but one of these fields; the fine arts courses are elective.
In English language and literature, the cadet completes four courses. The first two in the freshman year are concerned with written composition and literature. As an upperclassman, normally in the senior year, the cadet takes a course in advanced expository writing and speech, in which he writes and speaks formally to the class, chiefly on topics directly related to the field of his academic major. During his last semester he takes the course, Western World Literature, in which he examines selected literary masterpieces of the Western tradition in terms of the human values they embody and the insights they provide into issues of good and evil, right and wrong, war and peace—issues which have perennially been involved in what William Faulkner has called “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
In foreign languages, the cadet takes at least two semesters of Spanish, French, German, Russian, or Chinese. In these courses, he learns to use the language in spoken and written form and to understand something of the culture and history of those who are native speakers of the language.
In philosophy the cadet takes a short course which acquaints him with several of the great Western thinkers—Plato, Descartes, and William James—and introduces him to the kinds of fundamental problems concerning himself, his values, and his world with which philosophy has dealt.
In history he takes four courses, beginning in the freshman year with
courses in
One of the elective fine arts courses, Introduction to the Arts, deals with representative works by major artists in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Another, Music Appreciation, combines a chronological survey of musical forms and styles with study of major works by representative composers. Courses are also offered in applied painting and sculpture and in the fine arts in our own American cultural tradition.
The core courses which I have summarized are offered by the four departments
comprising the Humanities Division: the Departments of English, History,
Foreign Languages, and Philosophy and Fine Arts. Each of these departments
offers a range of additional elective and majors courses, many of them required
in academic majors such as American Studies, History, Military Art and Science,
Humanities, and the area study programs in the Far East,
To illustrate: Recently in one of my freshman English classes we were discussing a book in which a fictional Nazi general had committed three sadistic and brutal murders. The general had consistently maintained a reputation for strict discipline, spartan habits, and total dedication to whatever military missions he had been assigned. His public stature was heroic, and he always evoked the concept of duty as an adequate and unquestioned justification of his acts and decisions. Throughout the book there had been repeated and insistent evidence that, despite his public image as a man of courage, valor, and strict self-discipline, he was inwardly a tortured and psychologically distorted man. In essays written on the novel, a few of my freshman cadets praised this general as a military commander. For them he embodied an image of the military hero—fearless under fire, commanding in appearance, aloof in temperament, taciturn in social intercourse. These young men had overlooked the crucial distinction between the appearance and the reality of the general; they missed the author’s point, because they had allowed an abstract and simplistic concept of the military leader to override the concrete and complex evidence that this man was a thoroughly deficient human being. Our classroom discussions, I believe, succeeded in bringing out the qualifying views of the more perceptive cadets, who saw that another general in the novel, much less publicly acclaimed and physically imposing, was in the final balance a much more farsighted and humanely effective leader.
I mention this incident to illustrate the kind of lessons the humanities can teach—lessons not in the abstract evaluation of events, personalities, and experiences, but in concrete evaluations of unique people acting in specific situations involving emotions and impulses as well as ideas and actions. Most of the courses in the Humanities Division devote much classroom time to discussing, exploring, clarifying, refining the human values with which each subject deals. By the time the cadets are First Classmen, most of them have achieved great improvement in their ability to deal thoughtfully and knowledgeably with problems requiring maturity, compassion, and humane respect for conflicting views.
Let me conclude with a few remarks about our cadets and about what I conceive to be the role of the humanities in educating them. They are collectively as fine a group of young men as could be assembled on a college campus anywhere. They all wear the blue suit, and they all have subjected themselves to a life more demanding physically, emotionally, and, I believe, morally than most young Americans experience. They are, however, individuals, persistently determined to resist the stereotypic image of sameness by which often the public and sometimes even some of us at the Academy mistakenly judge them. In ways overt or subtly devious, they resist being lumped together as identical integers in what Stephen Crane once called a “vast blue demonstration.” They are young men of their own generation, more alike than they are often willing to admit (as young men of all generations have tended to be), yet willing to learn from those they respect and to confront honest issues honestly.
It is crucially important that our officer faculty, in the humanities and in all other departments, exemplify in what we teach and by what we are those standards we wish to uphold. Many of us are—quite properly, I think—concerned about the often ill-considered ideas and demands of the “now” generation. We should be even more concerned about our own equally impatient demands for action and solutions, made often without proper consideration of the past and its pervasive and formative influence on the mind of man, on the shape of his cultures, on the image he cherishes of himself and his institutions. We have an obligation, as officers who lead men and who influence and implement national policy, not only to know the skills of war and the hardware of our profession but also to understand and place a considered value upon the ideals, customs, thoughts, and feelings of those we command, those who are our allies, and those against whom it is our lot and our duty to contend. We should know the value of what we may destroy as well as the value of what we defend. For nothing is more apparent, even in the short history of the twentieth century, than that today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s ally, that implacable and simplistic enmity toward peoples and nations is not only unnecessary but downright indefensible in the man who would be truly a leader The real professional is the officer who is most able, by temperament and by education, to view his role as ultimately a humanistic influence, dedicated to his country, yes, but aware always that what his country may demand of him. Today it may ask him to reconsider tomorrow. He must therefore be both willing to serve and aware that service in its finest and most worthy sense is always to his own intellectual and moral integrity, to his sense of those human values without which there would be nothing left deserving of his service or of his life.
It is this sort of attitude—this widened perspective on past, present, and future—that the humanities can do much to promote.
Colonel Jesse C. Gatlin, Jr. (USMA; Ph.D.,
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of
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