In his new book,
Bruce Bawer has proposed an answer to vexing questions: Why has our culture
become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public
debate coarsened? Bawer locates the source of these misfortunes in the changes
that have taken place in American higher education over the last
generation—above all, the emergence of multicultural “identity studies.” The
academy, he observes, is “the font of the perfidious multicultural idea and the
setting in which it is implanted into the minds of American youth.”
In what must be
reckoned a martyrdom operation, Bawer has spent countless hours not only
reading the collective oeuvre of the leading luminaries in
Black, Women’s, Gender, Queer, Fat, and Chicano Studies, but also traveling
America to attend their conferences. At a gathering of the Cultural Studies
Association at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, Bawer encounters
the young Michele, who’s “like, a grad student at UC Davis?” She’s “sort of
reviving a Gramschian-style Marxism,” involving the idea that global warming is
“sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?” Bawer claims
that his heart goes out to her. (His heart is bigger than mine.)
This inability of
many young Americans to express a simple or even
grammatically coherent thought, in Bawer’s view, owes to a variety of academic
fads that in the early 1980s captured the American university. One was
postmodernism, of course, which traced its roots to the great anthropologists,
but from which, alas, was derived a form of crude cultural relativism that achieved
the ignominious trifecta of insipidity, incoherence, and blithe ignorance of a
philosophical literature treating the idea of relativism from the Sophists to,
at the very least, G. E. Moore. From this followed the conclusion that values,
such as individual liberty, were not universal, and as the Canadian poet David
Solway put it, that we must perforce believe that “[t]here are no barbarians,
only different forms of civilized men.”
Then arrived the
minor idea of hegemony, conceived by the minor Marxist intellect Antonio
Gramsci, who argued that modern liberal democracies are no freer than the most
ruthless of totalitarianisms. The oppression was merely unseen. That this idea
is absurd—engineers don’t waste energy worrying about plane crashes so subtle
that passengers neither notice them nor complain of them—was no obstacle to its
advancement. Bawer notes as well the Leninist Paulo
Freire, who gave us the common jargon of the contemporary
humanities—dialogue, communication, solidarity—and the idea that the point of
education is to recognize one’s own oppression so as better to resist it. The
Marxist post-colonialist Frantz Fanon completes the intellectual trio.
The chief
objective of an education in the humanities today, Bawer argues—with abundant
anecdotal evidence to support the claim—is to appreciate that life is all about
hegemonic power and to use “theory” to uncover its workings. Depending upon
their sex, skin color, or sexual orientation, students are asked to accept as
axiomatic that they are either the unconscious instrument of such power or the
repository of its collective grievance and victimhood.
It’s common these
days—perhaps it has always been—for reviewers to read the first and last
chapters of a book and deliver a superficial judgment upon it. Bawer—we’ve
never met but have exchanged e-mails, and I consider him a friend—may take
comfort in knowing that I’ve read his book several times and thought about it deeply.
It is an outstanding work.
Yet I’m not
persuaded by his ultimate argument that our cultural rot emanates fundamentally
from the universities. In the first place, these very universities
also—still—produce the world’s deepest study of the humanities. Is it fair to
associate, say, the Southern Oregon University Center for Shakespeare Studies with the
aforementioned stammering bimbo, Michele? Does the syllabus of Miami
University’s “Dostoevsky as a
Social Philosopher” suggest any preoccupation with Frantz Fanon? This is
perhaps not Bawer’s point, but given his conclusion—that parents have been
categorically deceived in placing their faith in higher education—it is not
unreasonable to point out that many American universities still provide an
outstanding introduction to the traditional canon.
Our universities,
to be sure, inspire more than their portion of cant and self-indulgent
fatuousness. But these maladies are neither limited to the universities nor
necessarily the source of our larger laments. In fact, perhaps the phenomena he
describes are merely a symptom.
I have other
suspicions—none that I can prove—about the answers to Bawer’s questions. The
structure and economics of the post–Cold War media environment, for example,
give cause for alarm. Indeed, the results of the destruction of the traditional
cartel media have shaken my faith in market freedom: Americans don’t strike me
as better-informed than they were in the Cold War era. The profound crisis of
national confidence engendered by America’s failure to improve the world in the
wake of September 11 is perhaps also part of the picture. Then there are
Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which have inadvertently created an electorate
able, should it choose—and apparently it does—to read only the news that
confirms its political instincts. This, too, has contributed to polarization
and ignorance.
Might the blame
for our cultural coarsening be shared, say, with the advent of television and
the Internet, the growing national obsession with crude, violent music and
sports or the decline of censorship? It is dismaying for a civil libertarian to
contemplate these hypotheses. Yet it’s dismaying, too, to imagine that
intellectuals might rule them out simply because they’re unpleasant to
contemplate.
I don’t know what
precisely the problem is, only that there is a problem. But having observed
this condition from abroad—as Bawer has—I can think of only one place that
would allow me to study the issue at leisure, in peace, and in depth: the
universities.
None of this, of
course, makes me yearn to spend time among the Fat Studiers. But they remain
the outliers; they are a trend; and they are unlikely to produce much of value.
Reading the works on the comparative
literature syllabus at the California State University, Long Beach,
on the other hand, will surely do those students quite a bit of good.
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