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Inhuman Humanities

By Christopher Orlet on 5.22.08 @ 12:02AM

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In the subsequent 40 years the radicals and their political agenda have triumphed unopposed on the college campus, so much so that today's student is compelled to conform to an intolerant progressive doctrine if he hopes to receive his sheepskin. Students are now told that there is a single right answer and, like the Sphinx, only he, the professor, possesses it.

Inevitably this atmosphere of conformity and groupthink results in a sterile learning environment, where dialogue and debate are limited for fear of uttering the wrong sentiment and facing disciplinary action.

A RADICAL FREE MARKETER might say that the Humanities deserve their fate since they proved unable to compete in both the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas. However it wasn't the marketplace that killed the Humanities, says Kronman. Rather, it was the one-two punch of political correctness and research specialization.

Of these, political correctness and its offspring diversity, multiculturalism and constructivism (which gave us such wonders as "rainforest math" and "African math") have done the most damage. With more women than men on college campuses, and near majorities of foreign students, to say nothing of the distinctive viewpoints, experiences and traditions they bring, political correctness is seen as an "instrument of corrective justice" -- payback for the sins of all of the Dead White Males that created the racist, patriarchic and imperial West.

Not only are the ideas and institutions of the West and the works that embody them no more valuable than those of other non-Western civilizations, but professors find it difficult to teach Western Civilization courses when they loathe its chief representatives. Lost in this political quagmire is the question of how we can hope to understand or appreciate or compare and contrast ourselves to other cultures if we are wholly ignorant of our own?

The final blow to the Humanities has come in the form of the modern research ideal, an idea that honors and rewards original scholarship, specialization, and incremental thinking, and whereby academics "choose an inch or two of the garden to cultivate," and which the Greeks and the renaissance scholars knew was the antithesis of true learning.

Kronman reminds us that specialization is anathema to the broad study of the "great conversation" that has been going on throughout the history of Western Civilization. When he focuses on original discoveries, Kronman argues, "a scholar does not aim to stand where his ancestors did. His goal is not to join but supersede them and his success is measured not by the proximity of his thoughts to theirs, but by the distance between them -- by how far he has progressed beyond his ancestors' inferior state of knowledge," all of which leads him to pretentious philosophical departures like deconstruction, where one misses the big picture by focusing on the minutiae. As Pauline Kael's reminded, "Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole."

Despite the obvious doom and gloom Kronman sees reason for optimism. Political correctness has had a 40-year run and at long last seems to be on the wane. A few universities are even dusting off their Great Books courses.

And then there is obstinate human nature. The instinct to find an ultimate meaning remains as powerful as ever, it has just been directed away from its proper home in the universities toward fundamentalist religion, New Age spiritualism, and Barack Obama's campaign.

It's time to bring the eternal questions home. Can I get a "Yes we can?"

Christopher Orlet is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator online.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Education, Barack Obama, Business, Religion, Environment, Books, Law, Africa