The Hollowdays
“We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw.”
– T.S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men,” 1925)
It is already Christmas at Starbucks. They may call it the “holidays,” of course, just one more way of extracting all the caffeine (i.e., authenticity) and profundity of the Christmas mystery, whether about Santa or Savior. We skipped Thanksgiving and gratitude. Not a big moneymaker, I guess. Peace and satisfaction are the aroma of gratitude, and smells are free, which is not good for business.
I still bought my cup of coffee because I had essays to grade, but I was reminded of Eliot’s poem—we’d read it in class just days before—about the “stuffed” men, the men who have forgotten something essential, the men who I might call “homo economicus” (“economic man”) or “homo voluptarius” (“self-indulgent man,” a “devotee of pleasure”), men convinced that genuine peace is achieved by scratching every itch. Whoever decorated that Starbucks tried to stuff me full of straw, meaningless trinkets, bells, and whistles, all manufacturing desire, luring me in like the sirens singing the promise of fulfillment.
In Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, psychiatrist Anna Lembke reveals that, paradoxically, “hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia. Which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.” This might explain why stores continue to go overboard during the holiday season. The more pleasure we experience, the harder it is to generate the same pleasure. Think “Super-Size” on the menu. Or “let’s make that a triple cheeseburger.” Our brains are primed for rewards (e.g., dopamine), and though we might complain that Sumter doesn’t have a Target yet, there is very little that, if we desire it, we can’t get here; and if we can’t get our pleasure through eating or drinking, we have an endless catalyst on our social media feeds. We scroll to generate desire and then discover what we always wanted, what will finally fulfill us, if we only press “buy now.” To what ends will people go to distract themselves from their desperate sense of emptiness? How many of us are on this “hedonistic treadmill,” sprinting to our next dopamine hit, forever wanting, forever desiring, forever seeking that which is already ours?
Historian Yuval Noah Harari recently said, “If you don’t know the truth about your life, you waste your life trying to solve the wrong problems.” If we don’t know that we are actually “homo sapiens” (“wise humans”) or that an intimate relationship with a higher power or purpose is what actually satiates the endless and empty cravings, then we will spend a lifetime focused on the transactions that we believe will satisfy.
In schools, this has looked like the traditional grading system. While it has done much for order and discipline, traditional grading has done little for developing a lifelong love of learning. In many ways, grades make schools transactional, not transformational (i.e., you do these tasks, the teacher rewards you with a treat…classic behaviorism—think carrots and sticks). For that reason, I have a love-hate relationship with grades. As an English teacher, I have seen how the threat of a grade has killed a love for reading. How can, for example, a student sit with and experience and enjoy Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” when they know, at some point, I am going to grade their understanding of the poem? There is always already a humming anxiety that precludes genuine satisfaction, the joy of being transformed by a piece of art. It’s not that that never happens, it’s just rare. And reading is one of the major, though not only, ways we can disrupt our commitment to the “hedonistic treadmill.” Reading slows us down; is not always immediately gratifying; requires us to make an effort, and if it’s a good book, points us toward the eternal truths. When you read a good book, you are confessing to the world that you take yourself seriously, not as an economic cog or an insatiable pleasure-hound, but as a seeker of the greatest on offer.
Recently, The Atlantic published two articles about reading, and they aren’t positive: “Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love with Reading” (Katherine Marsh, 2023) and “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (Rose Horowitch, 2024). Both articles cite similar problems: Common Core curriculum that pushes “informational” texts and shorter passages. As Marsh argues, “reading analytically seems to be squashing the organic enjoyment” of students. But students must prove their reading skills on standardized tests, so apparently, there’s no getting out of it. We have an education system that makes students dislike reading because their experience with reading is transactional, and they have been convinced that the greatest reward for reading or learning is a grade.
Curiously, neither Marsh nor Horowitch include the fact that for many schools, the primary mission is to prepare students for the economy (“homo economicus”), which makes reading a transactional decision (i.e., does this lead to me getting a job?), and if the school is college-prep, then the admissions standards (test scores and GPAs) precipitate the transactional nature of their educational system. Nor do they mention that if the adults teaching the books are not passionate about what they teach—if they have not been transformed by their own learning!—then it’s hardly the child’s fault for not seeing the value in reading a book. Consider Thomas Wolfe’s infamous passage about his Greek teacher:
They engaged him in long debates: as he ate his lunch, he waved a hot biscuit around, persuasive, sweetly reasonable, exhaustively minute in an effort to prove the connection of Greek and groceries. The great wind of Athens had touched him not at all. Of the delicate and sensuous intelligence of the Greeks, their feminine grace, the constructive power and subtlety of their intelligence, the instability of their character, and the structure, restraint, and perfection of their forms, he said nothing.
He had caught a glimpse in an American college, of the great structure of the most architectural of languages: he felt the sculptural perfection of such a word as γυνάικος, but his opinions smelled of chalk, the classroom, and a very bad lamp—Greek was good because it was ancient, classic, and academic. The smell of the East, the dark tide of the Orient that flowed below, touching the lives of poet and soldier, with something perverse, evil, luxurious, was as far from his life as Lesbos. He was simply the mouthpiece of a formula of which he was assured without having a genuine belief.
The reality is that our brains will suffer a transactional education system—many have done so and eventually hated their schools for it—just like they will suffer a transactional holiday season that is solely about stuffing ourselves with food and drink and gifts. The great wind of learning or the great wind of mystery does not have to sweep our skins; our brains can be hijacked by systems that promote the immediate and not the eternal. Our schools can convince students that, like Starbucks, the best things in the world are the short, dopaminergic hits we get when we decrease the space between desire and consummation, that all this life boils down to daily transactions.
Or not.
Brent Kaneft is head of school and an English teacher at Wilson Hall, Sumter, NC. He is also a writer. This article was originally published by The Sumter Item and is reposted here with permission from Brent Kaneft.
Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.