The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  At this writing Groth is teaching a course on “The Psychology of Men,” in which he and his students examine “theories of male psychological change, the myth of male aggressiveness, masculinities, male sexuality, homoeroticism and male homosexuality, males’ relationships with parents, women and children, and male narcissism, spirituality and psychopathology,” explore stereotypes about men’s “alleged promiscuity and emotional superficiality” and “the illusion of male power in society,” and study “manhood in a variety of cultures” and “the mythological elements of masculinity.” The reading list includes books with titles like The Masculine Self, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, and Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys; Groth also screens such films as Billy Elliot, Fight Club, and Mysterious Skin.

  He started teaching the course in 2003, and every time he’s taught it most of his students have been women. Why do they take it? “Because they want to understand men’s experience, about which we know next to nothing. Men’s behavior has been documented and has dominated the history books. But apart from a few standard explanations—testosterone, an irrational desire to dominate women sexually, hunger for power—the deeper story of what motivates men remains untold.” As for “the few men who take the course,” they tend to “sit quietly. They’re glad to see that there’s an interest in their lives.” He describes them as “struggling to save their self-respect” in a society riddled with male-bashing—such as the every-man-a-potential-rapist rhetoric to which almost all of them are subjected at “date rape seminars” during freshman orientation.

  5. “Raced People”: Whiteness Studies

  Just as Men’s Studies isn’t really about maleness but about patriarchal oppression, so Whiteness Studies isn’t really about whiteness but about racist oppression. As David Horowitz has put it: “Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil.” It is about “the social construction of whiteness as an ideology tied to social status.” To be white, in short, is, by definition, to enjoy a wide variety of privileges of which white people themselves are unaware even though those privileges are blindingly obvious to non-whites. Some readers, far from finding this line of argument fresh, illuminating, and revolutionary—which is what Whiteness Studies represents it as being—may instead be surprised that an entire discipline has been constructed upon a notion that has, after all, been a staple of the rhetoric of racial politics ever since the 1960s.

  Among the discipline’s founding texts are The Wages of Whiteness (1991) by David Roediger, a study of white “working-class racism”; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), in which Toni Morrison takes on what she considers the “more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States”; and White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993), in which Ruth Frankenberg argues that “race shapes white women’s lives,” that “white people and people of color lead racially structured lives,” and that “White people are ‘raced,’ just as men are gendered.” “Whiteness,” Frankenberg has said, “is a construct or identity almost impossible to separate from racial domination.” In other words, to be white is, in essence, to be by definition an oppressor. Noel Ignatiev has written that the “key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race—in other words, to abolish the privileges of the white skin.” Then there is the anthology White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (2002), edited by Paula Rothenberg.

  The subject has been taught at dozens of American universities, from Princeton to UCLA. And it is, in fact, a very American discipline, many of whose practitioners appear not to recognize that their self-assured postulates about race and identity carry little or no meaning outside of the distinctively American contexts in which they live and work. It is not clear, for example, how “abolish[ing] the privileges of the white skin” would have prevented the Cultural Revolution in China, genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, or any number of other mass-scale human atrocities that had nothing whatever to do with whiteness. Nor, for that matter, do the practitioners of Whiteness Studies even attempt, in most cases, to provide any explanation of how their works of “scholarship,” which consist largely of endlessly repetitive hand-wringing about white privilege, can help in any practical sense to alleviate the social and economic conditions of poor non-whites in the United States or elsewhere.

  In 2006, noting that Whiteness Studies had only ten years earlier been “a fringe campus fad” but was “now a vigorously promoted branch of critical race theory,” Canadian columnist Barbara Kay described Whiteness Studies as a “case of academic decadence,” “a new low in moral vacuity and civilizational self-loathing,” and “a particularly far out example of academic pusillanimity”—because it “is all, and only, about white self-hate.” According to Whiteness Studies, complained Kay, to be white is to be “branded, literally in the flesh, with evidence of a kind of original sin. You can try to mitigate your evilness, but you can’t eradicate it. The goal . . . is to entrench permanent race consciousness in everyone—eternal victimhood for nonwhites, eternal guilt for whites.” Kay quoted Jeff Hitchcock, cofounder and executive director of a Whiteness Studies think tank called the Center for White American Culture: “There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color. . . . We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today . . . which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it.”

  There have been Critical Whiteness Studies conferences, and there is also an annual White Privilege Conference, with its own online journal, Understanding & Dismantling Privilege, published at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The 2012 conference, in Albuquerque, was entitled “Intersectionality: Vision, Commitment, and Sustainable Partnerships.” The White Privilege Conference describes itself as providing “a challenging, collaborative and comprehensive experience” and as seeking “to empower and equip individuals to work for equity and justice through self and social transformation.” Its website proffers some of the movement’s favorite truisms, suggesting, for example, that if you’re white you’re specially privileged because you can “assume that if you work hard and follow the rules, you will get what you deserve” and “go out in public without fear of being harassed or constantly worried about physical safety.” The latter claim, of course, utterly upends the realities of interracial crime, which is far more black-on-white than white-on-black. This is one more identity-studies discipline, then, that has less to do with reality than with ideology.

  Teachers’ unions have reportedly been given federal grants in exchange for agreeing to compel their members to attend White Privilege Conferences—members who, in turn, can be expected to inflict the “ideas” they’ve acquired on their pupils, from grade school on up.

  Chapter 7

  Is There Hope?

  “The situation in our universities, I am confident, will soon right itself once the great silent majority of professors cry ‘enough’ and challenge what they know to be voguish blather.”

  So wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1998. Alas, he seems to have been mistaken. Since he penned those words, the “voguish blather” has made greater and greater inroads into the study of the humanities and social sciences—and in doing so has increasingly weakened the fabric of American civil society, the shared culture that has made America great.

  It has also replaced something that was, in a word, irreplaceable. There is no substitute for a real education in the humanities. To study some things is to prepare for a career; to study the humanities is to prepare for life.

  This sounds like a commonplace, a truism, an advertising slogan. It’s not. Th
e human race has been around for a couple of million years, human civilization a few thousand. As recently as two or three centuries ago, the idea of young people en masse in any country on earth being afforded the chance to devote several years of their lives to reading great books, discussing great ideas, and thinking about the meaning of life would have been inconceivable. All but the most privileged of people in the most prosperous of countries would have considered such an opportunity a luxury with a value beyond reckoning. Consider a letter that John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on May 12, 1780, when she was at home in Massachusetts tending the farm and he was in France in the service of the fledgling American Republic.

  “To take a Walk in the Gardens of the Palace of the Tuilleries,” John wrote to Abigail,

  and describe the Statues there, all in marble, in which the ancient Divinities and Heroes are represented with exquisite Art, would be a very pleasant Amusement, and instructive Entertainment, improving in History, Mythology, Poetry, as well as in Statuary. Another Walk in the Gardens of Versailles, would be usefull and agreable. . . .

  I could fill Volumes with Descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculptures, Tapestry, Porcelaine, &c. &c. &c.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. . . . I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

  We are Adams’s grandchildren. We stand on his shoulders, and on the shoulders of pioneers and soldiers, entrepreneurs and inventors, factory laborers and farmers, who, over the course of a few extraordinary generations, transformed a wilderness continent into the freest, most dynamic, and most prosperous nation in the history of the human race. One consequence of this freedom, dynamism, and prosperity is that by the late twentieth century virtually every young person in America had the opportunity to acquire a real higher education—to devote precious time not only to training in some practical science or skill, but also to the contemplation of things like painting and poetry, music and architecture.

  Unfortunately, very few young Americans nowadays appreciate just how remarkable a blessing this is. This ignorance is not their fault. The simple fact is that they live in an almost historyless society in which nobody has ever explained to them just how fortunate they are to live in the time and place that they do. Nobody has ever helped them to understand just how different their lives are from those of their great-great-grandparents, and why. Nobody has ever told them that only a few generations ago, the lives of most human beings in even the richest countries in the world were poor, nasty, brutish, and short; that most people were illiterate; that there were far more teenagers working themselves to exhaustion in factories or on farms than sitting in classrooms reading Shakespeare.

  Indeed, from the beginning of recorded history until a time that is still within living memory, only relatively few people anywhere in the world had the time and the means to sit for hours at a spell, as Socrates and his friends did in the agora in Athens 2,400 years ago, and converse about ideas. Only a few had the privilege of being able to read great books, experience great art and music, and discuss these things seriously with others. Such conversations have been going on ever since the time of Socrates, but to take part in them was the rarest of privileges. It is perhaps the ultimate measure of the success of the American experiment that, at some point in the mid- to late twentieth century, it became possible for almost everyone to participate in those conversations. It is also, alas, a measure of that experiment’s success that most young people today simply do not appreciate just how remarkable an opportunity this is.

  Even now, privileged though they are, many young people are told by their parents or friends or other presumably well-meaning individuals that the humanities are a luxury they cannot afford. Better to study only practical things, to focus laser-like on preparing for a career, than to waste any time on literature, philosophy, art history, or music appreciation. To take such a position is to fail to recognize that the serious study of such subjects is a practical matter. It is about learning to think analytically and critically. It is about experiencing wildly different products of the human mind and spirit and making comparisons, recognizing affinities, deciding what one likes and doesn’t like, and in the process, over time, refining one’s own taste. It is about encountering unfamiliar thoughts, weighing them against one another and against one’s own observations of the world, figuring out what one thinks of them, and, in the process, forming one’s own philosophy of life. It is about building an understanding of the history of humankind, and of human art and thought and culture, so that one develops, bit by bit, a radically heightened sense of how things got to be the way they are. It is about coming to see the world through increasingly sophisticated eyes, and hence experiencing it in a way far richer than one could ever have imagined at the start of things.

  What it’s all about, in short, is learning to think, and to think for oneself—to make the fullest and freest use of one’s mind. Indeed, it is ultimately about human freedom—the freedom of the individual intellect to do its own work of observing, analyzing, discerning, judging, and thus make its own worthy contribution to the preservation and advancement of human civilization. This is why a real education for all—not just literacy, not just vocational training—is the most American of objectives, and it is why this noblest of goals was met in America before it was met anywhere else. And it is why the replacement of a true education in the humanities by identity studies is a betrayal, in the profoundest sense, of the promise of America.

  The discussion that Socrates began millennia ago in Athens, and that has been going on ever since in classrooms and coffeehouses, in the pages of books and magazines and newspapers, and on computer screens, was given a name by the educator Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977). He called it “the Great Conversation.”

  Multiculturalism, social constructionism, and all the deplorable related “isms” that are part of the postmodern experiment have nothing whatsoever to do with “the great conversation.” They do not open the mind—they close it. The Great Conversation is about learning to appreciate, cherish, and pass on to others the glories of Western civilization; the ideologies that have captured—and degraded—the humanities today teach nothing but contempt for that civilization. The Great Conversation is about developing the individual, critical, questioning, adventurous mind; the identity studies and other “studies” that have proliferated in recent years are about propagandizing, making disciples, and excluding heretics.

  I can testify to the remarkable extent of the difference that the study of the humanities made in my life. It wasn’t the ideal education. It was disorderly. I have often wished that I could go back and redesign it from scratch. Ideally, I wish I had taken a series of Western civilization courses that took me from ancient times up to the present, in which I had read the important works of history, philosophy, biography, theology, and science, the great novels and plays and poetry, and all the important books about the art and architecture and music of every period, all in chronological order, so as to equip me with a broad, full, coherent picture of the great parade of human thought and culture.

  But few, if any, people get such educations.

  To an extent, I was lucky. I was always a self-directed reader, plunging at one point in my teens, for example, into books about Russia, at another point into all the “Inside” books (Inside USA, Inside Asia, etc.), published between the late 1930s and early 1970s, in which John Gunther presented richly detailed political and sociocultural portraits of almost every country in the world. But some people aren’t so self-directed, and need a nudge, a reading list, tests, deadlines.

  Not that I didn’t need direction, too. College and graduate school fo
rced me to read things that I probably would never have dipped into otherwise—the more obscure ancient epics, some of the less familiar Elizabethan and Renaissance plays—and that I’m now glad I read. My graduate school reading in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American literature was especially thorough, providing me with a wonderfully detailed picture of the subject. I wish my grasp of all history and all literature were as good. I have spent my life trying to fill in some of the many remaining gaps. This is what a humanities education in college should be for: it should be a way of launching young people on that journey, a way of getting them started on—and eager to pursue—a lifelong habit of curiosity about the greatest things that have been thought and written.

  This is why the identity studies and other postmodern academic phenomena I have written about in this book are so execrable. They are a perverse betrayal of a rich and beautiful legacy. They throw away a gift we should all be thrilled at the opportunity to enjoy. We have reached the top of the mountain, and they are taking our children by the hand and urging them to jump into the abyss. The people who “teach” these postmodern subjects talk about power, but what they have done as alleged educators is as despicable an abuse of power as one could imagine—because they have used their power to rob young people of their priceless legacy as heirs to the riches of human civilization.

  To experience all of this—to attend these people’s conferences, read their books, see them teach—can be a dispiriting experience. But there are glimmers of hope. It’s promising, for example, that at least some Women’s Studies students irritate their professors by expressing concern for the victims of honor killings. It’s promising that young women are taking courses in Male Studies in order to learn about their fathers.