The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  By contrast, the humanities allowed for subjective reactions and interpretations: no single analysis of the Iliad or judgment about the root causes of the Civil War would ever be universally recognized as definitive and all-encompassing; the humanities were not about data, formulas, and equations, but rather about pursuing an open-ended conversation in which there was always the possibility of fresh insights and perspectives. In the broadest sense, the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities all shared a single focus—the meaning of human existence—but while the sciences sought to quantify reality, the humanities concerned themselves with ultimately unquantifiable experiences, observations, responses, and interpretations.

  In the late 1970s I was an undergraduate English major at a large state university; in the early 1980s I was a graduate student in the same subject at the same school. Though the department in which I studied was generally considered one of the best in the country, and was indeed excellent in many respects, by my final year of graduate study I had grown cynical about certain aspects of the academy and decided I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in it. In the classroom there was noble talk about the beauty of poetry, the incomparable value of belles lettres as an ornament of civilization, and the solemn obligation of the scholar to produce and preserve reliable texts of the great works of literature and the profound duty of the critic to separate the wheat from the chaff. Meanwhile the corridors and faculty lounges swarmed with ruthless young careerist professors on the make and cynical older professors who were jaded by the whole game and desperate to retire.

  It was, in short, no golden age. But in the midst of it all there were still the humanities at (or close to) their finest—the literature, the expertise, the learning. Several of my professors were first-rate, though their critical methods varied dramatically. I took a number of courses, for example, with the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Louis Simpson, who, in one class meeting that I still recall vividly, leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk, sighed, “Ah, what to say about this book?”—the book, which he then riffed through absently, was Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—and for the next hour and fifteen minutes mesmerized us (or me, anyway) with what, for all its eloquence and incisiveness, came off as an utterly casual, effortless, and off-the-cuff account of the novel, how it affected him as a reader and how Woolf had managed to achieve that effect. Simpson (who in 1975, improbable as it sounds nowadays, had made the bestseller lists with a book about Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams) was nothing less than brilliant. This, I remember thinking, is why I came to college. I suppose you would call him an impressionistic critic.

  There were other approaches. Richard Levin, an expert in Elizabethan drama, taught us how to look at the plays of that period as if through a microscope, outlining their multiple plots and understanding how they were woven together to contribute to the works’ overall impact. And there were the New Critics, who showed us what made great poems great by going through them line by line, examining and relishing the subtleties of language. All these methods, however different, went hand in hand—for they were all about appreciating the work. None of these teachers ever forgot that we were all there for one reason: because we loved literature and wanted to understand better what made us love it. We were acolytes, not priests.

  That was what the humanities were about—then.

  There were, to be sure, warning clouds on the horizon. One or two professors in the department, for instance, practiced the chic, relatively new activity known as deconstruction, which had come over from France by way of the Yale English department. I steered clear of them. It didn’t take an extensive look at the major works of deconstructionist criticism—from its founder, Jacques Derrida, and its chief American exponent, Paul de Man, on down—to realize that this stuff just wasn’t for me. The pretentious, jargon-filled rhetoric, which seemed designed to diminish great authors and their writings while exalting the deconstructionist himself, had nothing whatsoever to do with the reasons why I had been drawn to the study of literature. Indeed the whole enterprise was entirely unconnected to the appreciation of aesthetic or literary value.

  But deconstruction was only the beginning. At some point, something called the New Historicism also entered the scene. It, too, left me cold, and for essentially the same reasons.

  Then there was feminist criticism. The idea, I gathered, was that all of Western literature had been written by authors unconsciously imbued with notions of male superiority that had warped their views of humanity—and that the literature therefore had to be examined anew through the eyes of the modern women’s movement. It was while I was a graduate student that the faculty members in my department began to debate whether it should permit the teaching of feminist criticism or not. The feminists won.

  After I received my Ph.D. I left the academy, and was increasingly glad I had done so. For as the years went by, the discipline in which I had earned my degree looked less and less like what it had been, and more and more like some grotesque parody of academic activity. The idea of aesthetic merit, which had been at the heart of the whole thing, all but evaporated: increasingly, even the greatest literary works were treated as mere texts that had no more or less intrinsic value than a phone book or shopping list.

  At the same time, similar developments were taking place in English departments across the nation. And not just in English departments; much the same thing was happening throughout the humanities. Once upon a time students had majored in English because they’d loved reading; or they’d studied philosophy because they loved grappling with ideas about the meaning of life; or they’d studied history because, well, they loved history. If you went into science, including social science, it was because you were interested in learning and discovering hard facts about the nature of the universe or the human animal; if you went into the humanities, it was because you were interested in exploring ideas, values, and questions of character and developing your aesthetic taste and critical judgment. The idea was to learn how to use language to formulate subtle perceptions about life, to capture the complex tensions of a historical moment, to convey your own innermost feelings or describe your most intimate relationships.

  All this had been jettisoned. The humanities had been, above all, human—but now, in the name of the dreadful project known as postmodernism, they were replaced by something dehumanized, artificial, mechanical. While old-fashioned analytical philosophy, which had viewed itself as a search for truth, struggled on, it became increasingly overshadowed by fashionable new philosophical approaches (often headquartered not in philosophy departments but in English and other disciplines) that preached that there was no such thing as objective truth. Meanwhile history was corrupted by a new hostility toward the West and toward master narratives centering on great, pivotal figures (too often male and white), and by a new tendency to reduce the rich drama of the human story to a series of dreary, repetitious lessons about groups, power, and oppression. As for English students, instead of learning to appreciate the genius of great authors, they were being told that there was no such thing as genius or greatness. Literary works were now simply fields on which to play language games and wage political battles that had little or no intrinsic connection to the works themselves. Graduate students in English who once would have learned to perform “close readings” of literary texts, which enhanced their understanding of the ways in which a skillful use of language and structure creates an aesthetic effect, now learned absolutely nothing about such matters. Instead they were trained to mimic their teachers’ vapid rhetoric about, as Daphne Patai puts it in the book Theory’s Empire, “subversion, demystification, transgression, violence, fissures, decentered subjects, fragmentation, dismantling master narratives, and so on.”

  These activities were all self-referential dead ends—closed systems that had nothing to do with anything beyond themselves. Though they pretended to be politically radical, they had as little conn
ection with the politics of the real world as with the aesthetic values of the works supposedly under consideration. The whole enterprise, briefly put, was intellectually barren. It posed as political, even revolutionary, but it was all just lingo, jargon, shop talk. As Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, has put it, the verbiage of the postmodern humanities is nothing more than “catechism learning,” a set of “axioms to be assimilated before one is inducted into the professoriate.” Once you’ve picked it up, you’re ready to go: you don’t need to do any in-depth research or critical thinking; all you need to do is to keep slinging the same rhetoric.

  What exactly is postmodernism? The Canadian poet David Solway has explained it just about as succinctly as is humanly possible. After complaining (justifiably) that the word “has come to mean just about anything we want it to mean”—that it has “become a cowcatcher term sweeping all query and objection before it,” a word that “punctuates the longueurs of flaccid thinking and insecure conceptualizing”—Solway sets out “to chart the etiology of [the] cognitive disease” known as postmodernism. He traces its roots to the anthropologist Franz Boas, who, in an effort to study exotic cultures without prejudice, found it useful to take the position that no culture is superior to any other. Thus was born the notion of cultural relativity, which also informs the works of other pioneering anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.

  What these thinkers, along with such pivotal figures as the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, have in common is that they rejected, or at least cast doubt on, “the universality of Western norms and principles.” This “caustic suspicion,” writes Solway, “has gradually but decisively penetrated into the zeitgeist of the West, culminating in the amorphous yet potent cultural amalgam of postmodernism”—the conviction that “[w]e live in a world without reliable truths or transcendent possibilities, without epiphanies, without absolute values, without teleology and without durable meanings.” What follows from this—and what makes postmodernism so decadent and so dangerous—is that it compels one (for example) to reject the universality of such values as individual liberty and to believe that “[t]here are no barbarians, only different forms of civilized man.”

  In retrospect, it eventually became clear to me that the period during which I had studied English had been a time of revolution in humanities education. In his 2007 book, Education’s End, Yale professor Anthony T. Kronman would describe the transformation I had experienced as the second of two major shifts in the history of American higher education. In the infancy of American colleges and universities, a period Kronman called the “age of piety,” professors had focused on the Greek and Roman classics and on instruction in the Christian faith, the goal being to provide a “moral and spiritual education” that would illuminate for students the meaning and purpose of human life. In the first great shift, which took place after the Civil War, this “age of piety” gave way to an “age of secular humanism,” when the larger questions about the meaning of human life that had formerly been at the center of all higher education became the special province of the humanities—namely, “literature, philosophy, history, classics, and the fine arts.”

  For Kronman, this period—during which higher education in America became democratic “to a greater degree than at any other time or place in human history”—was a golden age during which humanities departments were not simply focused on “the transmission of knowledge” but were also forums “for the exploration of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works of literary and philosophical imagination that we have inherited from the past.”

  Separate departments of philosophy first started to appear in the 1880s; English departments began to be founded soon afterward, followed by departments of German, French, and other foreign languages. While these developments were under way in the humanities, another major area of study, the social sciences, was taking shape alongside the natural sciences. While sharing the humanities’ concern about observing and analyzing human society, social scientists strove to approach the subject by means of analytical methods that would be as objective as possible, as opposed to the more subjective approaches found in the humanities.

  The second shift—the one I witnessed as a student of English—had its roots in the developments of the late 1960s. Mainly in response to student activism, the “age of secular humanism” began to give way to a third phase during which the humanities ceased to be concerned with larger questions about life. If during the “age of secular humanism” the humanities had sought to help students in their quest to understand the common condition of humankind, in this new phase the humanities questioned the very notion of human nature and replaced it with the assumption—influenced by such postmodernists as the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84)—that our thoughts about human behavior, our statements about the nature of man, and in fact all ideas of whatever kind are nothing more or less than assertions of power. (We will return to Foucault at greater length in the chapter on Queer Studies, which Foucault helped shape, and which, in the form of Queer Theory, has in turn infiltrated all the other “identity studies” to a greater or lesser degree.)

  At the same time, humanities professors, envious of the certitude that their colleagues in the natural and social sciences were able to attain as the result of research, began to impose upon the humanities a “research ideal” that was at odds with the traditional essence of the humanities—thereby, in Kronman’s words, “trad[ing] a valuable and distinctive authority for one based upon values they can never hope to realize to anything like the degree their colleagues in the natural and social sciences” could. As the traditional modes of contemplating the meaning of life were abandoned, moreover, they were replaced by New Left politics and by a relativistic, nihilistic mode of thought that denied the very reality of aesthetic merit and objective truth. The very values that the humanities had previously exalted were now disparaged as weapons in an ongoing struggle by straight white Western males to retain power, preserve oppression, and keep capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist systems in place.

  Once, the humanities had been concerned with the true, the good, and the beautiful; now they were preoccupied with an evil triumvirate of isms—colonialism, imperialism, capitalism—and with a three-headed monster of victimhood: class, race, and gender oppression. Once, the purpose of the humanities had been to introduce students to the glories of Western civilization, thought, and art—to enhance students’ respect, even reverence, for the cultural heritage of the West; now the humanities sought to unmask the West as a perpetrator of injustice around the globe. Once, the great poets, authors, philosophers, historians, and artists of the Western canon had been heroes whose portraits and statues adorned university campuses; now they were to be viewed with a jaundiced eye—for most of them were, after all, Dead White Heterosexual Males, and therefore, by definition, members of an oppressive Establishment.

  As the post-sixties era wore on, deconstruction proved to be the harbinger of a much larger and more amorphous creature called Theory, which addressed itself not only to literary works but to texts of all kinds as well as to every imaginable variety of cultural phenomenon, high or low—TV sitcoms, roller derby, line dancing, porn—and which, drawing on a range of ideas from sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and political philosophy, was fixated on the idea that texts were unstable. Yet despite its heady pedigree, it must be said that the use of the word theory to describe what humanities professors have been practicing for the last generation or so is wildly misleading: what these professors are doing is not theoretical in any remotely scientific sense; what they are doing, rather, is pulling handfuls of jargon out of an ideological grab bag and tossing them at whatever cultural or artistic phenomenon they are pretending to analyze.

  The point of this activity, which is not unlike slapping a political sticker on a signpost, is
not to tease out the secrets of artistic mastery but simply to “prove”—repetitively, endlessly—certain facile, reductive, and invariably left-wing points about the nature of power and oppression. In this new version of the humanities, all of Western civilization is not analyzed through the use of reason or judged according to aesthetic standards that have been developed over centuries; rather, it is viewed through prisms of race, class, and gender, and is hailed or condemned in accordance with certain political checklists.

  The result is what John M. Ellis, author of Against Deconstruction, calls the “theory cult,” whose members, he suggests, can be recognized “not by their analytical skill but by the standardized qualities of their attitudes,” and who in all their “work” go “through similar motions to come to similar conclusions.” “Theory,” Ellis contends, is not “about exploration but about conformity,” and its arcane language “identifies those who speak it as insiders and those who do not as old-fashioned outsiders who lack the required level of sophistication” even as it “serves as a protective device in that its remoteness from ordinary speech camouflages triviality or absurdity.” Ellis notes that the “titles of conference papers” by members of the theory cult “are full of verbal tricks and gyrations”—though, as we shall see in the course of this book, one might more correctly say that they offer endless variations on the same old tired verbal tricks and gyrations. As Patai and Wilfrido Corral point out in Theory’s Empire, the practitioners of Theory “have managed to adopt just about every defect in writing that George Orwell identified in his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language.’”