Infectious Unrest

“Our age seeks many things. What it has found, however, is above all: comfort. Comfort, with all its implications, intrudes even into the world of ideas and makes us far more content than we should ever be. We understand today better than ever how to make life pleasant. We solve problems to remove an unpleasantness. But, how do we solve them? And what presumption, even to think we have really solved them! Here we can see most distinctly what the prerequisite of comfort is: superficiality.”

 

If this was a live class and I was reading this quote, I’d offer $25 on the spot to anyone who could guess what year this was written and $50 to anyone who can guess who said it. Want to venture a guess? (Pause for thinking).

 

I think in both cases you’ll be surprised. The speaker is the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg and the year he wrote it was 1911. 1911!!! Long before the comfort of washing machines, supermarkets, cars, Cliff notes, soundbytes, never mind so much designed for your ease and comfort gathered in a small device that fits the palm of your hand. 

 

This quote is from the introduction of Schoenberg’s book Theory of Harmony. It bears our attention that the composer whose place in Western music history was to dismantle the harmonic system and replace it with his 12-tone method of composition wrote a book about harmony. It becomes instantly clear that he knows his subject inside out and his decision to move into new ways of organizing sound came for a sound (double-meaning intended) understanding of everything that came before. It was born from a deeply-seated search, a perpetual dissatisfaction with how things had been done married to an appreciation for the beauties of the old ways. 

 

He goes on:

 

“Comfort as a philosophy of life! The least possible commotion, nothing shocking. Those who so love comfort will never seek where there is not something easy to find.…Only activity, movement is productive. Only action, movement produces what could truly be called education or culture. But comfort? Comfort avoids movement; it therefore does not take up the search.”

 

Over 100 years ago, he was concerned about a modern human concerned more with ease, comfort, pleasantness, surface understandings than the hard undertaking of questioning what is and striving for what might yet be. He goes on to make some profound statements about teaching that speak across the century to our contemporary confusions. 

 

“The teacher who does not exert himself, because he tells only ‘what he knows’ does not exert his pupils either. Action must start with the teacher himself; his unrest must infect the pupils. (boldface mine). Then they will search as he does.…It should be clear, then, that the teacher’s first task is to shake up the pupil thoroughly. “(boldface mine).

 

How we need to hear this! In these days, teachers are tiptoeing around their privileged students’ tiny traumas for fear of upsetting them with a challenging idea or incontrovertible truth that makes them uncomfortable. The students report to the parent who report to the admin who reprimands the teacher or fires him/her for “shaking up the pupil thoroughly.” But if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s clear that the best moments in the long humdrum of mild facts dutifully memorized were an occasional true and vibrant idea/ story/ poem/ piece of art or music that shook us down to our core and woke us up. Set us off down a path whose end we couldn’t see and whose purpose was only revealed in increments when it was clear we were willing to walk as long as it took. What the shaman Don Juan called “a path with heart.”

 

Wholly unattached from the toxic system of education as comfortable pleasantness, I’ll do my part to remind teachers in my workshops to keep feeding their own “infectious unrest” and to “shake their pupils up thoroughly.” That is after they sign the waiver that they can’t hold me accountable when they get fired.