Freedom Writers

In this week’s “Clarion Call,” Thomas Bertonneau argues that today’s research paper is a pastiche of the deeper levels of thought required by the traditional essay. In the era of easily googled sources, with cut and paste functions at hand, students are producing a glut of barely coherent research papers that lack the precision, logic, and discernment of their historical forbearers: the composed intellects of Plutarch, Montaigne, Thoreau, Chesterton et al.

The pre-Internet era research paper helped nourish intuition about sources. The Internet- era research paper, however, tends mainly to reinforce the already existing and intellectually debilitating notion that finding respectable material on a topic is something that digital devices are supposed to do. As the devices proliferate and the tasks become entirely digitized and non-subject-involving, the need for living, intuition-informed human judgment becomes all the more urgent and pressing.

The essay is the genre that answers to the emergency. The essay, not the research paper, best suits the desperate need of badly prepared students to come to terms with primary sources and to apply the wisdom of belles-lettres to the contemporary social, cultural, and political situation.

As Bertonneau explains, in the age of mass media, the intellectual capacity of the citizenry is greatly diminished. Though the premier essayists of history would disagree on most things, the later essayists were agreed on “the corrupting influence of journalism and political sloganeering on the collective mentality of the nations…[by which] gossip and exhortation, masquerading as discourse, would obscure the topics and discussions that were actually essential for the self-governing individual in a well-governed polity.” As such, the essay is an essential tool for arming the next generation to defend themselves against contemporary cant.

By liberating students from the present, and liberating them from the automated processes that now govern the generously named “research” that goes into the dubiously named “research paper,” instructors liberate students generally. They liberate them not into the pointless neutrality of a survey of contemporary opinions, and certainly not into any fixed position; but rather into that confrontation with reality, especially the human reality, whose ethos Heraclitus formulated twenty-five centuries ago. First one must see, and then one must say, “how each thing truly is.”

For Herclitus and our intellectual heritage: up with essays!