The Entitlement of Easiness

At a particularly treacherous point in the journey of self discovery, Dante allows us to eavesdrop on his pilgrim, who climbs from one defiant boulder to the next, until “the breath was so spent from my lungs . . . that I could go no farther, but sat down as soon as I got there.” Vergil, the pilgrim’s poet guide, shows little sympathy for his charge’s fatigue: “‘Now must thou thus cast off all sloth,’ said the Master, ‘for sitting . . . down . . . none comes to fame. . . . Rise, therefore, conquer thy panting with the soul, which conquers in every battle if it sink not with its body’s weight. There is a longer stair which must be climbed.’” “I rose then,” the traveler tells us, “better furnished with breath than I felt, and said: ‘Go, for I am strong and fearless.’ ” Eventually he reaches the promised destination, but not for another 76 cantos.

One of the many topics that generate political heat is entitlements—seen by some as society’s obligation to protect its most vulnerable citizens and by others as an intrusion of unwieldy and inefficient government in personal choice and responsibility.

There is another entitlement, this one not debated in partisan politics but one for which I see growing evidence. It is the entitlement of easiness. The entitlement of easiness is a perversion of the idea of innate or God-given talents. It proposes that those who possess certain gifts develop and display them with unlabored ease. Conversely, the entitlement of easiness leads us to conclude that if something is hard we must not be good at it. As a consequence, we veer from challenge to challenge in search of unearned excellence. The entitlement of easiness promotes a revised translation of 2 Nephi 2:25: “men are that they might have fun.”

The entitlement of easiness reposes on new metaphors of knowledge. We are tempted to think of learning in terms of turning on, turning up, logging on, and downloading. The intensified form of searching called research seems old school in the face of the new transitive verb “Google.” I am not critical of the new technologies themselves. Indeed, I marvel that digital databases allow me to complete in one afternoon what a generation ago required a month of tedious labor. What worries me is the illusion of instant erudition that reinforces the entitlement of easiness. Agricultural metaphors for learning were more honest. Ground was prepared, seed knowledgably sowed, vulnerable shoots nurtured, irrelevant and distracting weeds removed, all in preparation for the harvest. In agricultural metaphors, sequence is unalterable and imposes discipline.

And patience: the agricultural cycle cannot be accelerated—a full year is required for the harvest. That year is roughly equivalent to the 10,000 hours described by neurologist Daniel Levitan: In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals . . . this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years. . . . No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time.

It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. Levitan’s conclusions happen to be one of the most persistent lessons of the Humanities. Dante’s pilgrim learns that only breathless and persistent effort will get him out of Hell, up the slopes of Purgatory and into the gates of Paradise. Cervantes’ Don Quixote described thusly the sacrifices required for mastery in the Humanities: “To become distinguished in letters costs time, sleepless nights, hunger, nakedness, headaches, bouts of indigestion, and other things of this sort.” American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson discredited the entitlement of easiness when he insisted, “That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.” And a couple of decades ago one of my colleagues reminded us at a graduation convocation that “what is easy is never satisfying very long,” a mantra my children have long since tired of hearing.

Not only a degree, not a trick or a trade, the Humanities are a specialized language that allows us to comprehend and contribute to the human conversation. Like any language, it requires years of practice toward proficiency. A humanities degree signals a basic level of competence, but life-long learning characterized by disciplined study, practice, and vocational application is required if we hope to become native speakers. Centuries ago the Italian printer Aldus Manutius appropriated a classical emblem captioned by the Latin phrase festina lente: hasten slowly. The emblem depicted a dolphin entwined around an anchor. The anchor suggests to me discipline derived from studied historical consciousness, a rootedness in grounding values and traditions, and the need for static reflection; the dolphin’s velocity points to an urgent drive to move forward and to apply the lessons earned and learned to our life’s work. Renaissance humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam described the festina lente adage in these words: If . . . to make haste slowly is not forgotten, which means the right timing and the right degree, governed alike by vigilance and patience, so that nothing regrettable is done through haste, and nothing left undone through sloth that may contribute to the wellbeing of the commonwealth, could any state be more prosperous, more stable and firmly rooted than this?

Vergil was right: there is a longer stair that must be climbed, and as the pilgrim learned, it leads to opportunities, lessons, and graces that only our Creator fully understands. In accepting His invitation to climb, we renounce the false promises of the entitlement of easiness. -John R. Rosenberg