For the first couple of months of the school year, “Poetry and Philosophy” seemed destined to be one of my favorite classes at Columbia. It was fall 2023, and I was on track to graduate by the end of the spring. The class title caught my attention on the bulletin, and it did not disappoint, at least at first. The professor was charismatic and showed his deep love for the poetic method in every lecture and class discussion. The syllabus began with a deep dive into Wordsworth’s magnum opus, “The Prelude,” often described as one of the more philosophic poems in the English canon. I quickly fell in love with Wordsworth’s verse and ideas.
Class discussions were deep and engaging. Once, our professor spent nearly an entire lecture on a single letter. The original, 1805 edition of the so-called glad preamble that introduces Wordsworth’s epic begins, “Oh, there is a blessing in this gentle breeze.” But in the final edition of “The Prelude,” published posthumously almost a half century later, the indefinite article disappears: “Oh, there is blessing in this gentle breeze.” Why did Wordsworth make this deliberate, tiny change? Our professor suggested that this was the result of Wordsworth’s spiritual shift in his older age. In his youth, Wordsworth was more radical in his belief in an animist ontology and identified a real, animate “blessing” in the “gentle breeze,” but as he grew older, he became more conservative in his theology and modified this claim such that there was merely generic blessing in the breeze. Wordsworth’s poem demonstrated how a philosophic shift of a cosmic scale could hinge on a poetic gesture as small as a single letter of our alphabet. This served as a perfect anchor for our class.
But things took a strange turn when we moved to the contemporary-poetry segment of the syllabus. We were assigned to read Boat, an opaquely titled collection of poems written by Lisa Robertson, published in 2022. Many of Robertson’s poetic choices were not of a kind with Wordsworth’s, to say the least. I’ll let the opening lines of “Boat” speak for themselves:
I found it significantly more difficult to appreciate the aesthetic and philosophic content of these verses than that of “The Prelude.” Despite my misgivings, I tried my best to keep an open mind. I had come to respect my professor’s knowledge and experience in poetry, so I figured it would be foolish to dismiss out of hand his opinion on this work. After all, I was relatively new to poetry appreciation and surely had much left to learn. If my professor thought Robertson’s work was on par with Wordsworth’s, there must be something I was missing. There must be some secret beauty in this work that I, too, could appreciate if I were just taught how to see it.
My faith would be tested again when we read Sean Bonney’s Our Death. Bonney’s collection left me with only two clear notions: first, that this man hates the sun with an alarming degree of passion, and second, that he seems to suffer from some sort of neurosis. Next we read Alice Notley’s collection Eurynome’s Sandals. I understood almost nothing at all from her work but was nonetheless slightly disturbed by the poet’s strange and unpredictable interjections on the topic of genitalia. As I encountered each new reading, I would think to myself: “This is not poetry.” Then, later that week, my professor would lecture on the beauty of these works with the same passion he had when lecturing on Wordsworth. Now and then, after much intellectual pretzelling, I would extract an idea or line I thought might be worth remembering, but the bulk of our class discussions on these works left me more confused than edified. I again somberly concluded that, though I did not yet see it, there was some hidden treasure here for me to find, if I could just open my eyes properly.
Then, a week or two after October 7, 2023, the scales fell from my eyes. My professor, along with many of his fellow faculty members at Columbia, signed his name on a letter that delicately explained it was not anti-Semitic to refer to Hamas’s recent invasion and massacre as a justified act of resistance. In shock, I confronted my professor in a private meeting during his office hours, hoping that he may not have fully understood the letter’s implications. I explained that the letter justified the mass rape and murder of my people. He stood by his signature.
As I left that small office in Philosophy Hall, I comforted myself with an epiphany. I realized that these two intellectual aberrations in the thinking patterns of my otherwise brilliant professor—his aesthetic equivalence of Robertson and Wordsworth, and his moral equivalence of Israel and Hamas—were rooted in a single idea. He had learned, through his many years in academic training, a reusable method to blur the bright lines between good and evil, and ugliness and beauty.
The key concept that underpins these two equivalencies is the idea that all truth is relative. I had long felt the omnipresence of this idea in the general consciousness of the Columbia campus. For a while, I had noticed in several different classes how my professors and fellow classmates seemed incredibly reluctant to contradict claims made in class discussions, even when a student might suggest an absurd or demonstrably false idea. At first, I assumed that this was merely a polite mannerism they had adopted so as not to embarrass students who had not done the reading or who held idiosyncratic opinions. But as time passed, and I continued to marvel at this phenomenon, I suspected that it indicated something more philosophically significant.
On one particularly revealing occasion, I was part of a class discussion about Isaac Asimov’s short story “Reason,” which was published in his landmark 1950 collection, I, Robot. The narrative takes place on a spaceship orbiting Earth and concerns the aftermath of the assembly of an intelligent robot programmed with the ability to think for itself. The robot, using its advanced capacity of pure reason, comes to the surprising conclusion that the Earth and the entire universe outside of the spaceship do not exist. What struck me, as we discussed this story in class, was how sympathetic my fellow classmates were to the robot’s opinion. They were offended that the astronauts in Asimov’s narrative rejected the robot’s philosophy out of hand. Who were they to say that the robot’s truth was less legitimate than their own? I listened to the discussion in amazement.
Of course, I noticed certain exceptions to the dominant campus culture of relativism. Specifically, when it came to certain political issues, it was understood that there was an acceptable and an unacceptable opinion. But when it came to questions of metaphysical weight, of distinctions between absolute truth, beauty, and morality, most of those with me on Columbia’s campus were unable or unwilling to take a clear stance.
My poetry professor, like my fellow students, had been systematically trained to ignore the notions of objective truth and goodness that Western culture had embraced for thousands of years. He had been taught that an educated individual does not make affirmative truth judgments. Who are we to say that Wordsworth created works of greater beauty than Robertson or Bonney? Who are we to say that the Hamas barbarians are in the wrong when they burned Israeli children alive? The very same education that can teach a person to point at the grotesque and call it beautiful can also train a person to point at the murder of Jews and say it could be justified, depending on the context.
This educational process had already begun working on me. I had been shown ugly poems and had been told that they were beautiful. I had thought to myself, “I do not think this is beautiful; I think this is ugly. But if everyone here agrees that it is beautiful, and if they use fancy words and complex sentences that I don’t understand to explain how it is beautiful, then it must be beautiful, and I am just not sophisticated enough to understand it yet.” In time, with enough training, my aesthetic revolt would have relented, and I, too, would have pronounced that these poems were just as beautiful as Wordsworth’s epic. If I had not been fortunate enough to have been raised by parents who made sure I received a strong Jewish pre-collegiate education, I might also have trained my mind to equate Israel and Hamas, as far too many of my fellow Jewish students have.
Much has been said and written lately about our universities’ uncanny tolerance for anti-Semitic ideas and activities. Most of the discussion misses the fact that the underlying philosophy that allows these bad ideas to flourish has also deeply affected the quality of the education we offer our college students. Liberal education has historically followed a different path. Before moral and aesthetic relativism overtook the academy, students learned about objective beauty and shared moral principles. A pedagogy that is rooted in lofty and absolute principles, both moral and aesthetic, is more likely to edify and less susceptible to being overtaken by evil actors and ideas. Universities like Columbia would do well to try it out again—though, of course, the vast majority of them won’t.
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