Crisis, Culture and the Education of Grownups

Our world seems to be in a state of permanent crisis. Anxieties about the climate, war, the cost of living, the lingering influence of the pandemic, issues with mental health, are all symptomatic of the experience of modern life. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that people feel lost and are re-evaluating their lives; indeed, not only feel lost individually but that the society in which they live is also lost, and the culture upon which it is based inimical to human life. In the experience of this so-called age of crisis, there is a pressing need to discover what matters to us, identifying our real needs and how to live in the light of values and beliefs that attest to these. Stanley Cavell argues that such experiences are central to what he describes as the education of grownups. Without crisis, and the confrontation with one’s world and oneself, we cannot grow as adults. This is exemplified in Cavell’s discussion of Henry David Thoreau’s decision to remove himself from society and live in the woods at Walden. An ancient gesture, the seer living on the margins of society, takes on a modern form, the writer in crisis, whose task is to measure, in words, his distance from and proximity to his culture. In so doing, he is to discover what it is for both himself, and his culture, to speak authentically about how we should live and, in Cavellian terms, what it means for a grownup to be educated.