Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  41

  CULTURE WARS

  In September 1988, at a conference at Chapel Hill, the campus of the University of North Carolina, academics gathered to consider the future of liberal education. Conferences are normally placid affairs, but not this one. Delegates held what a New York Times reporter said recalled the ‘Minute of Hatred’ in Orwell’s 1984, when citizens were required to stand and hurl abuse at pictures of a man known only as Goldstein, the ‘Great Enemy’ of the state. At Chapel Hill, ‘speaker after speaker’ denounced a small group of ‘cultural conservatives’ who, in the words of Stanley Fish, professor of English at Duke University, had mounted ‘dyspeptic attacks on the humanities.’ In the words of the Times reporter, these conservatives were ‘derided, scorned, laughed at.’ Though these individuals were not named (possibly for fear of slander), no one was in any doubt over who were the intended targets.1 The Great Enemy-in-Chief was Allan Bloom, co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago, where he was also a professor in the Committee on Social Thought.* More pertinently, Bloom was the author of a book published the year before, which had really set the cat among the pigeons in the academic world. Entitled The Closing of the American Mind, it had broken out of the scholarly ghetto for which it had been intended and had made Bloom a celebrity (and a millionaire).2 It had been reviewed, and praised, by Time, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and been welcomed or hated by such diverse figures as Conor Cruise O’Brien, Saul Bellow, and Arthur Schlesinger.

  Bloom’s thesis in the book was simple but breathtakingly ambitious, though he himself did not see it like that. Using his long experience as a teacher as his guide, he started from the observation that between the late 1950s and the mid- 1980s the character of students entering American universities had changed markedly, and the university had changed with them. He made no secret of the fact that he found almost all these changes for the worse. In the 1950s, he said, and thanks to the chaotic history of Europe in the first half of the century, American universities had been among the best in the world, with both homegrown talent and that imported by the exiles from totalitarianism. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he found that two decades of prosperity and abundance had created a generation of students who were adventurous yet serious, who had ideals and an intellectual longing ‘which made the university atmosphere electric.’3 But then, in the late 1960s, he began to notice a decline in reading on the part of students arriving at university, and among them when they were there. From here on, Bloom set about identifying and attacking the chief culprits in what he clearly thought was a serious decline in American civilisation. His venom was initially focused on rock music, which he regarded as barbarous, directed exclusively at children, dwelling on sex, hate, and ‘a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.’4 There is, he said, nothing noble, sublime, profound, or delicate in rock music: ‘I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.’ Exactly the same, he said, was true of drugs, but he also castigated feminism, the new psychologies, and the passionate concern of the young for equality in all things, but especially on matters having to do with race.5

  Having described the changed nature of the university student (in America, though elements were clearly recognisable elsewhere), in his second section he deliberately examined some of the large questions, the ‘big words that make us afraid,’ as James Joyce said: ‘the self,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘culture,’ ‘values,’ ‘our ignorance.’ His aim was to show that however much students have changed, and however much they think the world has changed around them, the big issues have not changed. He did this by showing that his beloved philosophers of the past – Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Locke in particular – still have the power to inform us, ‘to make us wise,’ and to move us. He showed that many of the ideas discovered, or rediscovered, by the social sciences, were in fact introduced by mainly German thinkers, who included Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger.6 His aim was to show that freedom, and reason, two givens that so many take for granted, were fought for, thought for; that true culture – as opposed to the drug culture, or street culture – has a depth, a reasoned, earned quality that points toward what is good., that there is a unity to knowledge ‘which goes by the name of wisdom.’ A serious life, he says, means being fully aware of the alternatives that face us in the great divisions we encounter: reason—revelation, freedom—necessity, good—evil, self—other, and so on: ‘That is what tragic literature is about.’ In the third and final part of the book he attacked the universities, for what he thought was their enormous dereliction of duty to be islands of reason and autonomy in an ever more politically correct world. ‘The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favour of individual human reason…. [The university] must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy – the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature. It must concentrate on philosophy, theology, the literary classics, and on those scientists like Newton, Descartes and Leibniz who have the most comprehensive scientific vision and of the relation of what they do to the order of the whole of things. These must help preserve what is most likely to be neglected in a democracy.’7 Bloom also had some harsh things to say about the 1960s (‘barbarians at the gate’), about university colleagues who caved in to student pressure, about the ‘new’ disciplines of social science (‘parts without a whole’), and above all about the M.B.A., the master’s degree in business administration, ‘a great disaster’ because students’ lives were never radically changed by it, as they should be in a proper education.

  In saying all this, Bloom naturally managed to annoy or irritate a great number of people. But the people he annoyed most were his colleagues in the humanities. Bloom’s main plea, echoing F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, was that the university should be above all the home of the humanities, by which he meant ‘that the study of high culture, particularly that of Greece, would provide the models for modern achievement.’8 He made it abundantly clear that he considered the ancient philosophers, novelists and poets – generally speaking the authors of the ‘great books’ – as the men from whom we have most to learn. Their survival is no accident; their thoughts are the fittest.

  Bloom unleashed a whirlwind. The conference at Chapel Hill articulated the opposing view, the view that Bloom was seeking to counter. The conference’s participants denounced what they said was a ‘narrow, out-dated interpretation of the humanities and of culture itself, one based, they frequently pointed out, on works written by “dead white European males.” … The message of the North Carolina conference was that American society has changed too much for this view to prevail any longer. Blacks, women, Latinos and homosexuals are demanding recognition for their canons.’ Professor Fish added, ‘Projects like those of… Bloom all look back to the recovery of the earlier vision of American culture, as opposed to the conception of a kind of ethnic carnival or festival of cultures or ways of life or customs.’9

  We have been here before. Allan Bloom’s book was much longer than T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Definition of Culture and was a more passionate and eloquent account, but the overlap in argument was plain. What was different was that the forty years in between had seen a vast change in the world, in the position of minorities, in universities themselves, in politics. But that change also meant that the response to Bloom’s work was very different from the response to Eliot’s, which had been muted, to say the least.

  Many people took issue with Allan Bloom, but in 1994 he received powerful support from his near-namesake at another American University, Harold Bloom of Yale. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom was also uncompromising.10 Dismissing feminism, Marxism, multiculturalism, neo-conservatism, Afrocentrism and the postmodern cultural materi
alists, at least as applied to great literature, Bloom asserted the view that ‘things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called “the learned world.” ‘In great style and at even greater length, he argued that there is such a thing as an aesthetic value in life, that it was his experience, ‘during a lifetime of reading,’ that the aesthetic side to life is an autonomous entity ‘irreducible’ to ideology or metaphysics: ‘Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness…. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones.’11

  After making it plain that he considers the current age ‘the worst of all times for literary criticism,’ he set about constructing, and justifying, his own Western canon, consisting of twenty-six authors whom he considers vital for anyone with an interest in reading, but with the following ‘health warning’: ‘Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.’12 For Bloom, the centre of the canon is Shakespeare, ‘the largest writer we ever will know,’ and throughout his book he returns time and again to the influences on Shakespeare and his influences on those who came after him. In particular Bloom dwells on Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, the great tragedies, but also on Falstaff, perhaps the greatest character ever invented because, through him, Shakespeare offers us the ‘psychology of mutability,’ ‘the depiction of self-change on the basis of self-overhearing.’13 For Bloom, what merits inclusion in the canon is a quality of weirdness, of strangeness, of monumental originality that ‘we can never altogether assimilate’ and yet at the same time ‘becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.’ After Shakespeare he includes in his list Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, Montaigne and Molière, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Jane Austen. He regards Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the centre of the American canon, Dickens’s Bleak House and Eliot’s Middlemarch as the canonical novels, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Joyce, Woolf and Kafka, Borges and Neruda, as worthy of inclusion. But Beckett, Joyce, and Proust are related back to Shakespeare, and in one chapter he argues that Shakespeare, ‘the major psychologist in the world’s history,’ tells us far more about Freud than Freud ever could about the Bard. In fact, in that chapter, Bloom is astute in his reading of several lesser known papers by Freud in which, Bloom shows, Freud (who read Shakespeare in English all his life) acknowledges his heavy debt.’14 In acknowledging Freud as a great stylist, Bloom dismisses the psychoanalytic view of the world as a form of shamanism, ‘an ancient, worldwide technique of healing’ and which, he concludes, may well constitute the final fate of psychoanalysis. In dismissing feminism, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism as ways to approach literature, because that assimilation must be personal rather than ideological, Bloom does not see himself as being ethnocentric. On the contrary, he specifically says that all great writers are subversive, and he points out that the culture of Dante or Cervantes is far more different from, say, the late-twentieth-century East Coast society than is, for example, twentieth-century Latin American society, or black North American society.

  The canon, he says, can never be written in stone, but in the act of achieving it, or trying to achieve it, a sense of competition exists in which people are thinking, judging, weighing one entity against another. People – readers – are ‘enlarging their solitude.’ ‘Without the Canon, we cease to think. You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable. Yet only strength can join itself to strength, as Nietzsche perpetually testified.’15 Bloom also coined the phrase ‘anxiety of influence,’ by which he meant that all writers are influenced by other great writers and that, therefore, later writers must know what earlier great writers have written. This does not make imaginative literature the same as scientific literature – i.e., cumulative, not in any direct sense anyway. But it does suggest that later works, in a rough way, develop out of earlier works. This is not evolution in a classically biological sense, but taken in conjunction with the struggle to construct the canon, it does imply that the development of imaginative literature is not entirely random either.

  The Blooms evoked a counter-attack. This took several forms, but responses mostly had one thing in common: whereas the Blooms had written very personal polemics, in a combative, ironic, and even elegiac style, the replies were more prosaic, written ‘more in sorrow than in anger,’ and used detailed scholarship to refute the charges.

  Lawrence Levine’s The Opening of the American Mind was published in 1996.16 Levine, a professor emeritus in history at the University of California at Berkeley, had earlier published a book, Highbrow Lowbrow, which had examined the history of Shakespeare in the United States and concluded that before the nineteenth century ‘high culture’ in America had been enjoyed by all classes and many different ethnic groups. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that, in regard to Shakespeare and Grand Opera in particular, a process of ‘sacralisation’ took place, when the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture was stressed. The Opening of the American Mind made a number of points. One, that fights over the canon, and the curriculum, have been going on for more than a hundred years, so the Blooms are nothing new. Such fights, Levine says, are inevitable as a nation changes and redefines itself. He argues that minority groups, ethnic groups, immigrant groups, don’t want to throw out the canon as described by, say, Allan and Harold Bloom, but they do want to add to it works that have been overlooked and that reflect their own experience. ‘17 And he says that in a country like America, with many immigrants, many different racial and ethnic groups, in a country lacking a central tradition (like France, say), that a narrow canon of the kind suggested by the Blooms is simply impractical, failing the needs of the many different kinds of people, with different experiences. He defends the universities for at least seeking to address America’s changing social structure rather than stick with a past that is not only imaginary but may never have existed. But Levine’s most original contribution was to show that, in fact, the idea of a canon of ‘Great Books’ and ‘Western Civilisation,’ at least in America, ‘enjoyed only a brief ascendancy.’ The idea emerged, he says, after World War I and declined after World War II. He further shows that the inclusion of ‘modern’ writers, like Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, ‘came only after prolonged battles as intense and divisive as those that rage today.’ Going through various accounts of university education in the early nineteenth century, for example, Levine found that James Freeman Clark, who received his A.B. from Harvard in 1829, complained, ‘No attempt was made to interest us in our studies. We were expected to wade through Homer as though the Iliad were a bog…. Nothing was said of the glory and grandeur, the tenderness and charm of this immortal epic. The melody of the hexameters was never suggested to us.’18 Charles Williams Eliot, who assumed the Harvard presidency in 1869, conducted a famous debate with the Princeton president, James McCosh, in the winter of 1885, in favour of diversity over uniformity. Eliot argued that a university ‘while not neglecting the ancient treasures of learning has to keep a watchful eye upon the new fields of discovery, and has to invite its students to walk in new-made as well as in long-trodden paths.’ Columbia University began its celebrated Great Books courses in 1921, ‘which married the Great Books idea with an Aristotelian scholasticism that stressed order and hierarchy.’ The problem then was to have American literature regarded as fit for inclusion in the canon. In the 1920s, for example, Lane Cooper, a professor of English at Cornell,
wrote to a colleague, ‘I have done my best to keep courses in American Literature from flourishing too widely,’ adding that such courses ‘have done harm by diverting … attention from better literatures…. There was no teaching of American literature as such in my day at Rutgers.’19 Levine himself cites World War II as hastening change, allotting an important role to Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds (1942), which identified the enormous body of imaginative writing and the remarkable ‘experience in national self-discovery’ that had characterised the depression decade and was intensified by ‘the sudden emergence of America as the repository of Western culture in a world overrun by Fascism.’20 Levine did not object to canons as such, merely to their immutability and the very tendency of immutability where canons exist at all. And he acknowledged that the American experience is different from anywhere else, America being a nation of immigrants without a national culture, however much certain scholars might pretend otherwise. This was a reference to the celebrated ‘hyphenated Americans’ – native American, Afro-American, Mexican-American, Italian-American. For Levine, therefore, the arguments over the canon, over history, over high as opposed to low culture, must always be sharper in the United States than elsewhere, precisely because these are arguments about identity.21

  The most fundamental attack on the ‘canon’ came in 1987 from a British academic trained in Chinese studies who was a professor of government at Cornell in America. Martin Bernal is the son of J. D. Bernal, who was himself a distinguished scholar of Irish birth, a Marxist physicist who won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953 and was author of the four-volume Science in History.